Perhaps no one understood the concept of art as propaganda better than the Medici.
WSJ: Museum Exhibit Review: Gems of the Medici at the Bowers Museum
When city-states became nations, very few people understood the implications, but the Medici did.
For example, the Medici family that controlled Renaissance Florence manipulated progressive tax rates to ruin their rivals.
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Although the Medici family came back to power in Florence, never again would Italy dominate European finance.
Most of the Medici bank's lending was to royalty, to finance military campaigns or lavish princely lifestyles.
In the fifteenth century, the Medici family of bankers and merchants rose in Templar-like fashion, amassing vast wealth and influence.
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After Cosimo's death in 1464, the Medici bank went downhill, though his descendants became ever more entrenched in power in Florence.
Though the Medici bank's experience was not much better, its partners felt that shouldering such risks was necessary to get other business.
Paul Robertson, who leads the Medici Quartet, reports growing demand from doctors and businessmen for his lectures on music and the mind.
Frans Johansson, the bestselling author of the Medici Effect and his new book, The Click Moment, proved to be an entertaining and inspiring speaker.
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He does so, partly to record that the decline and eventual collapse of the Medici bank had little impact on the banking system as a whole.
For example, he has a revisionist view of the Medici, stubbornly refusing to eulogise Cosimo or Lorenzo de' Medici, the conventional heroes of popular histories of Renaissance Florence.
Florence was a wealthy medieval city that became the birthplace of the Renaissance, fostered by patrons like the Medici family and flowered by artists such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli and Brunelleschi.
So successful was the bank that under Cosimo de' Medici, who ruled it with an iron rod, the Medici were for a long while put in charge of papal finances.
During the Renaissance, intaglios, like the carnelian-and-gold "Bust of Girolamo Savonarola, " the Medici critic notorious for the "burning of the books, the bonfires of the vanities, " embellished clothing and decorative objects.
WSJ: Museum Exhibit Review: Gems of the Medici at the Bowers Museum
You don't talk about that bit in Botticelli's Primavera where the Medici prince reaches up for the orange or that bit in the Birth of Venus where her neck would look wrong if her shoulders weren't wrong too.
Portraits of the Medici and their associates announce what Burckhardt called "the modern idea of fame, " a concept further explored, later on, in medals, busts, drawings and paintings of assorted (mostly male) notables, from clerics to humanist poets to merchants.
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While most international curators often arrange their collections according to style, artist, medium or location, the collection of art in the Vasari corridor is unique in that it hangs chronologically, often in the same spot where various members of the Medici family had originally displayed it.
In the background of the exhibition are the Medici, the wool-traders turned bankers who held sway over the Florentine republic in its golden age under Lorenzo the Magnificent, and who produced popes and queens and Tuscan grand dukes until the last of the dynasty died in 1737.
Through his unexecuted project for the facade, a little known study for the tombs of Medici popes Clement VII and Leo X, and studies for the Laurentian Library, Michelangelo transformed himself from a painter and sculptor into an architect.
But even if it hadn't originally been part of Bertelli's grand plan to eliminate his wife's two biggest competitors, the departure of both Lang and Sander from the fashion conversation allowed Miuccia Prada to effectively become the Catherine de Medici of luxury minimalism.
Isabelle Adjani plays Margot, the suspiciously close sister of the King of France (Jean-Hugues Anglade), the daughter of Catherine de Medici (an iron-willed Virna Lisi), and the unwilling wife of Henri of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil).
Dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, the book draws on examples from history, of Alexander the Great and of the German city states, to teach its readers some eternal lessons.
Evidence suggests that the item was looted in Italy and passed through the hands of Giacomo Medici, an Italian antiquities dealer convicted in 2004 for receiving stolen goods, illegally exporting goods and conspiring to traffic.
It's the only place in the world where you can sit in Lorenzo de' Medici's chair, watch the sun set over the Fiesole hill and talk about seagulls.
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Cosimo I de' Medici, then the second duke of Florence, purchased the Palazzo Pitti in 1549, and up until the completion of Versailles in Paris in the early 18th Century, Palazzo Pitti was considered the most opulent palace in Europe.
When it was discovered in late 1553 near Arezzo, southeast of Florence, along with some smaller bronzes, it was quickly claimed by Cosimo I de' Medici, then the Duke of Florence, later the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the founder of the Uffizi.
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"Bust of Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent, " on loan from the Silver Museum, is a 16th-century agate-and-gold cameo celebrating his role as an art patron.
WSJ: Museum Exhibit Review: Gems of the Medici at the Bowers Museum
Other defendants named in the suit include European banks Unicredit and Bank Medici.
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