THE FLORENTINES

Novelist and historian Strathern returns to Renaissance Florence to survey the graces and disgraces of the city and its people.

If Vanity Fair magazine had existed during the Renaissance, every issue might have brought tales of Florentine A-listers and their power plays, artistic triumphs, sexual exploits, and financial chicanery. Strathern aims to show how such Florentines paved the way for a global humanism focused on people’s lives on Earth instead of on the medieval view that existence was only preparation for an afterlife. The author begins with Dante’s boldness in writing in a Tuscan dialect, rather than Latin, and ends with Galileo’s trial for heresy, which spared him the fate of an earlier heliocentrist who was burned at the stake—“naked, upside down, and with his mouth gagged so that he could not make public his beliefs.” Between the two events, Strathern gives a no-frills, nuts-and-bolts account of the era in which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Michelangelo created David, Brunelleschi designed the world’s largest brick-and-mortar dome, and Savonarola planned his “bonfire of the vanities.” Never far from the action were Lorenzo the Magnificent and other Medici bankers whose patronage of artists vastly enriched the city’s glories. This story will be broadly familiar to readers of Strathern’s The Medici and Death in Florence. The author slightly overstates Florence’s impact on the world when epochal upheavals were also occurring elsewhere: the Reformation, Columbus’ voyages, Gutenberg’s printing press. But Strathern is an intellectually agile writer who covers four centuries briskly—an approach well suited to first-time visitors to Florence, if not to scholars—and serves up occasional surprises. Other authors have argued that Leonardo and Michelangelo were gay, but Strathern adds context by noting that Florentines had a “relaxed” view of homosexuality evident in their startling proverb: “If you crave joys fumble some boys.”

A book that will have greater appeal to educated travelers to Florence than to specialists in the city.