Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
The Black Prince of Florence - The Life of Alessandro De' Medici
The Black Prince of Florence - The Life of Alessandro De' Medici
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Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description
1531 - wedi blynyddoedd o ryfela creulon a chynllwynio gwleidyddol mae mab anghyfreithlon Dug Medici yn marchogaeth i ddinas Fflorens. Ymhen blwyddyn, mae'n rheoli'r ddinas fel ei Thywysog.
Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description
1531 - after years of brutal war and political intrigue, the bastard son of a Medici Duke and a 'half-negro' maidservant rides into Florence. Within a year, he rules the city as its Prince.
Manylion y cynnyrch / Product details
- ISBN 13
- 9780099586944
- Gwales Code
- gwales.com.9780099586944
- Gwerthwr / Vendor
- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru
- Long Title
- The Black Prince of Florence - The Life of Alessandro De' Medici
- Awdur / Author
- Fletcher, Catherine
- Current Price ex VAT
- £10.99
- Current Price inc VAT
- £10.99
- Availability Status (EN)
- Available
- Availability Status (CY)
- Ar gael
- Dyddiad cyhoeddi / Publication Date
- 2017-10-03
- Cyhoeddwr / Publisher
- Vintage
- Media Type (EN)
- Paperback / softback
- Media Type (CY)
- Clawr meddal
- Pages
- 352 pages
- Size
- 1 × 1 mm
- Language Code
- English
- Categori / Category
- CY: Atgofion a Hunangofiannau (yn Saesneg) | EN: Autobiographies and Reminiscences (in English)
- Is-gategori / Subcategory
- CY: Atgofion a Hunangofiannau - Gwryw (yn Saesneg) | EN: Autobiographies and Reminiscences - Male (in English)
Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review
This is a biography which reads like an exciting and colourful novel. Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Florence and son-in-law of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, is not perhaps the most obvious candidate for a biography – certainly when compared, for example, with his great-grandfather Lorenzo ‘The Magnificent’, patron of Botticelli and Michelangelo, or his half-sister Catherine de’ Medici, Queen Regent of France. This biography, however, uses Alessandro’s short life (he lived from 1511/12 to 1537) to present a vivid and compelling picture of Italy, especially Florence, in the first part of the sixteenth century: its vibrant artistic and social life, its lavish feasts and entertainments, and its gorgeous and expensive fashions as well as its vendettas, murders, intrigues, factions, seductions, hostage-takings and double-crossings. It was a world in which public opinion assumed that any sudden death not obviously caused by an enemy’s sword or stiletto was the result of poison. Alessandro was born outside marriage. His father was a Medici duke, his mother a servant or slave of mixed race, and the author uses his parentage to investigate attitudes to race, illegitimacy and family connections in Italy during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; the book’s analysis of racial attitudes is particularly acute. Alessandro’s (very) extended family included two popes, three cardinals and four dukes, who were all expected to grant their relatives titles and rich benefices, and hierarchy within the family was important. One of Alessandro’s most assiduous enemies was a cousin who was also the son of a Medici duke and had also been born outside marriage, but who felt that because – unlike Alessandro’s – his mother was a gentlewoman, he should take precedence when papal favours and promotion were being handed out. (Inevitably, his unexpected death was attributed to poison; equally inevitably, Alessandro was blamed.) The bulk of Alessandro’s own papers have disappeared (or possibly were deliberately disappeared after his death), and many surviving accounts of his life are hostile, written by his enemies after his assassination (inevitably, by another Medici cousin). His assassin wrote a self-justifying account of the murder which has been the basis of later damning assessments of Alessandro’s character and governance of Florence. With justification, the author describes Alessandro as assassinated twice, ‘first with a sword, then with a pen’. However, she draws on records and accounts written during his lifetime (for example, by secretaries and diplomats) to build a picture of an attractive personality – intelligent, witty, generous – who also had the necessary steely resolve and ruthlessness to survive as long as he did in the vipers’ nest of sixteenth-century Italian politics. (His assassination was only possible because of a rare lapse of caution: he thought he was going to an assignation with a beautiful woman whose husband was out of town, and had left off the doublet lined with fine chain mail he usually wore). The book includes reproductions of several portraits of Alessandro which it convincingly locates in their artistic and cultural contexts; it also helpfully contains a map, a list of characters, and family trees to enable readers to distinguish the several Lorenzos, Cosimos, Giovannis and Pieros in the different generations of Medici (fortunately, there was only one Alessandro). Through her carefully-researched and attractively-written investigation of the life of an almost forgotten historical figure, Catherine Fletcher has not only rescued Alessandro de’ Medici from the ‘unreliable narrators by the dozen’ (as she describes them) who have dominated previous accounts of him, but has drawn a new, vivid and impressively-detailed picture of the world in which he lived.
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