Florence: A Portrait

Florence: A Portrait

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. The usual tourist group's stay in Florence begins with the Duomo, runs through the paintings in the Uffizi, includes a visit to Michaelangelo's "David" and ends with a parade through a handful of churches. But the visitor who first reads Sir Michael Levey's portrait of the city will find rewards off that well-worn track. The city, a self-styled "new Athens" supported a wealth of artists, sculptors, humanists, and scholars, not to mention more than its share of wealthy individuals, who taken together, helped turn Florence into one of the world's great provincial outposts. Layering telling details, little-known facts and carefully explained social and intellectual history, Levey weaves a dense tale of this charming city, from the Middle Ages to the Quattrocento, through the Renaissance and on up to the early years of this century. "It is deliberately not purely an historical account, nor is it offered as an outline of Florentine art through the ages, and still less is it a guide-book." Well, what is it, then? Written by a past director of the National Gallery in London, this book is almost a personal tour of Florence, providing unusual insights and detail. Written for "the intelligent, interested, general reader" in a scholarly yet sometimes cumbersome style, it meanders through history and art providing the reader with an intimate view of Florentine personalities and environs. As a general overview of Florence's history with an art twist, this source would be an interesting addition to both academic and public libraries, but it is not an essential purchase.?Jennifer L.S. Moldwin, Detroit Inst. of Arts Lib. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. 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]. A lucid, well-informed, and wide-ranging text. Is Florence the sublime city of Western culture? Few who visit there would deny it. Levey's book is not a lyrical travelogue by any means, but 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 a frozen-in-time, outdoor art museum. With numerous illustrations providing visual signposts, Levey interprets the long path of Florentine history, intimately intertwined with the history of the great Medici family, as a conjunction of cultural magnificence and fractious civic government (the latter often erupting into street violence). For general readers whose interest in European history and art is intense, a book worthy of the time it demands. Brad Hooper 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 New York Times Book 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. (George Steiner New Yorker ) 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. (Dan Hofstadter Wall Street Journal ) [A] lucid, well-informed, and wide-ranging text. (Charles Hope New York Review of Books ) 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 autho