Exercising power to which no one in Florence was constitutionally entitled, the Medici of the fifteenth century were obliged to be great propagandists, to present themselves as special, gifted, worthy. Perhaps this is one reason why there is such an extraordinary amount of literature about them. There are those historians who buy into the Medici’s flattering vision of themselves, those who react and reject, and those who try to sort out the wood from the trees. Nothing breeds interest like an ongoing argument.
Most modern readers will come to the subject through the more popular books, such as Christopher Hibbert’s The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici, or J. R. Hale’s Florence and the Medici: The Pattern of Control. Hibbert’s book invests enthusiastically in the Medici myth and is the kind of thing tourists are reading while visiting the Uffizi gallery and generally falling in love with Renaissance Florence. In fact, it can be found stacked up in many of the city’s museum bookshops. It’s fun but not always accurate. Just as readable, but less colorful and more credible, Hale pays the price for his sobriety by not being so widely available.
The more academic the book, the more likely it is to be resisting the myth and looking for an ugly truth. Lauro Martines’s Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy, gives really excellent background to the Medici story, but Martines is not one to allow special pleading and condemns the banking family as the ruin of Florentine republicanism. He has recently tried to popularize this view in the highly readable April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici, where he argues that all in all it would have been a good thing if the Pazzi family had managed to murder Lorenzo il Magnifico in the duomo in 1478. Martines is a moralist who likes to be out on a limb but is nonetheless interesting for that.
Il Magnifico tends to form a subject all on his own, and here the popular books presently in print are Cecilia Ady’s Lorenzo de’ Medici and Antonio Altomonte’s Il Magnifico. Both are in the business of glorification but well worth reading as long as you keep a pinch of salt about you. Jack Lang’s more recent biography, Il Magnifico, is less attractive and even less believable. Once France’s minister for education, Lang seems determined not to consult the vast amount of American scholarship that has been done on the Medici since World War II; as a result, a lot of what he says about the Medici bank’s fortunes under Lorenzo doesn’t add up.
Which brings us to the heavier stuff. The Florentines were committed bureaucrats and the city’s archives still house the tax returns of the fifteenth century, the minutes of thousands of government committee meetings, lists upon lists of those eligible for office at different levels in the different quarters and districts, and so on. The City Council of Florence has recently put all these archives up on the Web for general public inspection, but alas, what you see is facsimiles of the originals. Even if you are familiar with the Italian and Latin of the time, the handwriting is more or less illegible and the material can’t be searched by just typing in a name and calling up all the places it occurs. No, to tackle the archives would require several lifetimes of total dedication. So you’re obliged to go to the scholars.
Nicolai Rubinstein’s book The Government of Florence Under the Medici is as essential as it is infuriating. Rubinstein brings together decades of meticulous scholarship and is admirably impartial as he analyzes how exactly the Medici manipulated the Florentine constitution. Unfortunately, he leaves certain crucial explanations of the workings of that constitution until deep into the book. Often whole chapters begin to make sense only when you discover a footnote on page two hundred and something with the vital piece of information. This is only for the seriously committed.
The same goes for Raymond de Roover’s The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494. Of all the books you can read on the Medici, Roover’s has the most extraordinary facts, but they are hidden away among balance sheets, reflections on accounting practices, considerations of trade patterns, and so on. Curiously, there is almost no overlap between these two monumental works, as if the Medici had split their political and commercial lives quite drastically, something that is hard to believe.
More recently, the historian Dale Kent has added a third dimension to this Medici duality with her meticulously researched book Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. This gives an exhaustive account of all the artworks and buildings that Cosimo may or may not have commissioned, the nature of his involvement, and the context in which it all took place. Kent lets herself get drawn into a lot of sterile argument with other academics about the nature of Cosimo’s intentions, but the book is absolutely fascinating, assuming you have oceans of time on your hands.
Enough. There are scores of relevant books, literally hundreds of collections of learned articles—on Florentine dress, on the changing nature of exile in the 1500s, the sumptuary laws, the voyages of the trading galleys. As you proceed, you realize how many of the texts contradict each other, even on matters of bare fact, and how elusive any definitive vision of the Medicis must be. At this point, my advice is to stop worrying too much about “the truth” and to go back to what material from the time is still available and readable. Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories is a joy, and Francesco Guicciardini’s various historical accounts likewise. Both were written in the early sixteenth century. Then there are Lorenzo il Magnifico’s clever poems, Savonarola’s solemn sermons, Ficino’s bizarre Platonist reflections. The web of ideas soon grows thick indeed. What you are looking at is the birth throes of our modern mindset.
In conclusion, if you want to check out someone who had the talent and imagination to give a profound sense to all this material, consult Jakob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt wrote his book in the 1850s, and historians today like to consider it outdated and mistaken. But for scope, brilliance, and a readiness to reflect deeply on the meaning of it all, Burckhardt puts most of those who have followed him to shame.