Review by Booklist Review
Parks displays a keen observance of people's complexities and malleable motives in this account of the fabled Medici dynasty of Renaissance Florence spanning 1397-1494. The Medicis rise in banking and dissipate as succeeding generations neglect the ledger book and devote themselves to art and politics; indeed, one of the last Medicis, Lorenzo, dubbed the Magnificent, should have been called the Bankrupt. Parks effects a worldly, shoulder-shrugging tone to his descriptions of passing subterfuges as the Medicis maneuver through the snake-pit of fifteenth-century Italy. Their prime problem was the church's prohibition of usury, but the Medicis' acumen in circumventing sin created a second dilemma--warding off political poaching of their fortune, which they surmounted by taking over the Florentine republic through chicanery. As rulers, they inherit a third difficulty: Florence's survival in international politics. But the Medicis come to grief in a French invasion. Is there anything new under the sun when money mixes with politics and religion? Parks' marvelously entertaining history suggests there might be. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The Renaissance, so often seen as a clean break with the medieval past, was really an age of creative ambivalence and paradox. In this marvelously fresh addition to the Enterprise series, Parks, author of the Booker-listed Europa and a literary observer of modern Italian life, turns to Florence and to a particularly compelling contradiction. The spirit of capitalist enterprise that fostered cultural originality and underpinned patronage was accompanied by a Christian conviction that money was a source of evil and that usury was a damnable spiritual offense. In the space where this cultural conflict plays out, sometimes as stylized as one of Lorenzo Il Magnifico's tournaments, sometimes as life-threateningly fiery as Savonarola's sermons against worldly vanities, we find a world both akin to our own and almost incomprehensibly distant. Parks is a clear-eyed guide to the ambiguities of Florentine culture, equally attentive to the intricacies of international exchange rates, the spiritual neurosis about unearned income, the shocking bawdiness of Lorenzo's carnival songs and the realpolitik of 15th-century power. His prose is swift and economical, cutting to the chase. Like the Medici-commissioned funerary monument for the anti-Pope John XXIII, the effect is startlingly vibrant, resembling "those moments in Dante's Inferno when one of the damned ceases merely to represent this or that sin and becomes a man or woman with a complex story, someone we are interested in, sympathetic towards." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Parks (Italian Neighbors), an English writer who resides in Italy, exploits his interest in the intersections of wealth, art, religion, and politics by penning a history of the House of Medici for Norton's "Enterprise" business series. As he notes, the Medici were late entrants into the world of banking, but they used their resources to rise to the height of political power in republican Florence. The Medici bank was never the largest or the wealthiest of the early European banks. What set it apart was how the family that founded it used its riches to extend patronage not only to political supporters but also to artists and scholars. In addition, they bought favor and position from a powerful Catholic Church that prohibited usury and thus frowned on banking. While many of the Medici had a genuine interest in learning and the arts, they clearly recognized the propaganda value in supporting them. Parks has written an informative book that will appeal to both general readers and specialists. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Robert J. Andrews, Duluth P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The prolific Parks (Judge Savage, 2003, etc.), a Britisher now at home in Italy, offers a Renaissance splendor that is often scanted in the artistic glory of the era. The wealth of the Medicis supplied the plates and pallets of painters like Donatello and Fra Fillipo Lippi in a symbiotic relationship of art and craftiness. In Parks's portrait of doughty, gouty Cosimo (1389-1464), the emphasis is on the craftiness--on the way Cosimo ran his family, Florence and, as well, a mighty international banking system. When usury was a sin, depositary accounts entailed gifts, not interest. For nearly a century, the Medici banks were proficient in letters of credit, currency arbitrage, commodity exchange and other metaphysical financial practices, all without sin. The Church was a major client. Here's the story of the Medicis--doctors of finance and statecraft, governance and religion, trade, warfare, intrigue and despotism as contending Dukes duked it out in Tuscany. Condottieri (hired armies) were the enforcers, ducats and florins the means and ends. Cosimo was succeeded by his fat son, Piero the Gouty (1416-69), who was followed by homely, captivating Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92). Lorenzo may have been more interested in poetry and politics than in negotiable instruments and capital markets, yet one son became pope (and two weren't strong enough for the family business). The dynasty couldn't last, of course. Its power waned with bank failures, ill health and, particularly, with the advent of Girolamo Savoranola, the fundamentalist who challenged the humanist Medicis. Parks's narrative of the conflation of state power and the power of business, frequently told in the present tense, often in sentence fragments, flows like money. Financial history never had it so good. A bright literary exercise, the third in the new series Enterprise ("the business book as literature"). (14 illus., not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
