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  • Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence
  • Rudolph M. Bell
Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence. By Dale Kent (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2009) 268 pp. $29.95

The three closely related essays in this lovely volume combine graceful erudition with a potentially compelling feast of images created by, or portraying, the very friends we come to know in the written text. Kent dedicates the volume to "all my friends," a fitting tribute to the legion of people with whom she has worked over the years, none of whom, presumably, and to the best of my knowledge, have behaved in the troubling ways explored in her third essay, which features murder and shocking duplicity.

The opening essay explores the contours of friendship and its meanings for fifteenth-century Florentine humanists, who invariably started from, and ultimately returned to, the complexities raised in Cicero's De Amicitia, which had come to overshadow the earlier centrality of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics in such discourses. Among the many characters presented are architect Leon Battista Alberti, Cosimo de' Medici, and his son Piero, together with herald Anselmo Calderoni and banker Giovanni Rucellai. A brief appendix of dramatis personae contains eighty-four names, more than sometimes encountered in the survey samples done for research studies on friendship (or peer groups) that pour forth from sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and life coaches in our own day. Kent elegantly introduces her wide sample of characters but make no mistake about method. Hers is a leisurely, absolutely nonquantitative stroll through the curiosities, the unique expressions, the quodlibetals, and even the absurdly illogical musings of her highly literate, elite [End Page 602] population—comprised almost entirely of men, since humanists uniformly deemed women to be incapable of true friendship, notwithstanding the notable exception of Vittoria Colonna.

The second essay, equally delightful, makes the widely useful generalization that friends met with each other eye to eye, or rather more intimately and illicitly, and that they did so in specific places in and around Florence. As with the first essay, Kent eschews the language of social science on the loci of meetings (church, piazza, tavern, theater, dining room, or bedroom), and the theoretical probing of Jürgen Habermas on public space, to offer instead an expertly guided tour of the city's hot night spots, its picnic retreats, and its cool dark church corners, where male friends might do as they desired.

The third essay absolutely blows out of the water both the initial essay's rhetoric on the meaning of friendship and the next chapter's survey of behavior when amici met. As Kent aptly puts the matter, "Could friends be trusted? The answer was no, or hardly ever" (157). As any exploration of Renaissance Florentine friendship surely must do, this essay recounts the assassination of Giuliano de' Medici on Sunday, April 26, 1478, in the cathedral church of Santa Maria del Fiore no less. His killers included members of the illustrious Pazzi family, who had been bound for many decades by marriage and, above all, by male friendship with the Medici clan. But friendship based on patronage cannot be true, and the lure of a papal-backed power grab proved irresistible. The conspirators also killed one of Giuliano's defenders, and they certainly meant to kill his brother Lorenzo as well. But Lorenzo slowly recovered from his multiple wounds, eventually to become Lorenzo the Magnificent, a benign ruler who eventually forgave even the surviving Pazzi family men.

Forty illustrations enrich the text, but on this score, I wish to enter a quibble. In their black-and-white format, often so condensed as to mar appreciation of the details, the visuals serve at best as pointers to proper representations of the brilliant originals. Might it be better for publishers that cannot afford proper reproductions to include instead a dvd, or a password-protected link to some entry page on the publishers' own website, or even a list of public urls so that readers can actually see more of what needs to be seen?

Rudolph M. Bell
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
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