Main entry:

Levey, Michael.

Title & Author:

Florence : a portrait / by Michael Levey.

Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, [1996]
© 1996

Description:

xxix, 498 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 26 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 477-485) and index.
Prologue: Seriously Seeking Florence -- 1. 'St. John's Sheep-fold': The City Emergent -- 2. Fire, Flood, Plague, War and Art: The City Renascent -- 3. The City and Its Citizens in Perspective -- 4. Public Competition among the Artists -- 5. Artists in Collaboration -- 6. 'To Florence and God the wrong was done' -- 7. The Republic under First Medici Sway -- 8. Lorenzo de' Medici and 'the most beautiful city' -- 9. 'The Troubles of Italy' -- 10. Triumphal Entries and Fatal Exits -- 11. 'A young man on a marvellous horse' -- 12. The Princely City -- 13. Putting on the Style -- 14. The Enlightened City and the New Troubles of Italy -- Epilogue: Florence as Cradle and Capital -- Medici Family Tree.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

In Dante, exiled from Florence in 1321, Levey finds an inspired guide to the city's thirteenth-century appearance, people, culture, and constitution, and a wrathful commentator on the politics that had fouled "l'ovil di San Giovanni," the "St. John's sheepfold" of his youth. Florence conjures this time of momentous activity, epitomized by the building of the Palazzo of the Priors, the crowning castle of the Palazzo Vecchio, whose tawny-yellow, crenelated tower trumpets Florence's colossal civic pride. Against the bloody background of struggles for power between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, Levey shows us Florence nonetheless becoming a commercial power in which the crafts and guilds made way for the great Renaissance blossoming of la citta del fiore.
He leads us from the medievalism of The Divine Comedy to the robust world of the Decameron, through plague and flood and fire to art triumphant in the buildings of Brunelleschi and the sculpture of Donatello. His book shows us Florence not just in its ascendancy and at its height, but also in its less familiar years and guises, from the sixteenth century through nineteenth, as limited democracy gave way to oligarchy, then autocracy, and the last strokes of decoration and decay created the city we know today.

ISBN:

0674306570
9780674306578

Subject:

Art, Italian Italy Florence.
Art Italy.
Art italien Italie Florence.
Art, Italian
Civilization
Travel
Florence (Italy) Description and travel.
Florence (Italy) Civilization.
Florence (Italy)
Florence (Italie) Descriptions et voyages.
Italy Florence

Holdings:

Location: Library main 115384
Call No.: ID DG734.23.L48; ID:96-B2779
Status: Available