Synopses & Reviews
Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's Florence renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.
Review
It would be a brave person to offer yet another interpretation [of Florence], but few could be better qualified to do so than Michael Levey. As a distinguished art historian and former Director of the National Gallery, he has the right sort of familiarity with Florentine art to lend authority to his observations; as an amateur musicologist and novelist, he is certainly aware of broader cultural issues and has an eye for the telling vignette that brings his subject to life. Enthusiastically hybrid, his Florence: A Portrait is both a guide, history and personal appreciation of a city which has now become a shrine of cultural faith more than a living entity...One could go on...pointing out striking passages or perceptive comments [in the book], but anyone who knows Levey's earlier writings can readily understand why his personal view of Florence would be worth reading. Like any successful travel-writer, he has the ability to project a sympathetic and congenial personality, one able to respond interestingly to the variety of Florence...Michael Levey has produced a handsome tribute. Charles Hope - New York Review of Books
Review
Dealing with oft-told tales, [Levey] manages to be fresh and compelling. Intellectual context is a constant concern of his, and in untangling the threads of Florentine politics and weaving them together with the strands of cultural history he achieves a welcome clarity...In painting his Florence portrait, like those Florentine portrait painters of the Renaissance, Sir Michael never fails to add the small, illuminating detail...[An] invaluable [book]. William Weaver
Review
Levey's portrayal [of Florence] is that of an eminent art historian elegantly at home in painting, sculpture, and architecture...The book has...a masterly survey of post-Renaissance Florence, of the treasures produced during the city's long decline. Levey is one of our most penetrating connoisseurs of Mannerism and the baroque...[A] loving, erudite tour. New York Times Book Review
Review
Michael Levey, the eminent British art historian, is among the most learned and eloquent of [Florence's] adoptive citizens...[He] is never less than highly companionable. Though this is not a guidebook, he is a natural guide, with all the wit and volubility...of a practiced cicerone. George Steiner - New Yorker
Review
[A] lucid, well-informed, and wide-ranging text. Dan Hofstadter - Wall Street Journal
Review
Levey's book is...a big, muscled analysis, edifying but erudite, of Florence's political and artistic history from earliest times through the nineteenth century. He supplies Florence with a living, breathing corporality in place of its rather mummified tourist image of frozen-in-time, outdoor art museum...A book worthy of the time it demands. Bruce Boucher - Times Literary Supplement
Review
Levey, former director of London's National Gallery and a prolific art historian, explores the long history of the fabled city-state of Florence...A fine achievement. Exceptionally detailed reporting about a fascinating city. Booklist
Review
[T]his book is almost a personal tour of Florence, providing unusual insights and detail...[I]t meanders through history and art providing the reader with an intimate view of Florentine personalities and environs. Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
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.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 477-485) and index.
About the Author
Michael Levey was Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1973 to 1986. His many books include Early Renaissance, The World of Ottoman Art, and Giambattista Tiepolo.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Selective Chronology
Maps
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
Books for Further Reading
Index