Benozzo Gozzoli, The Procession of the Magi (detail), 1459 X 1460

Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Cappella dei Magi, M02-042

This image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cappella_dei_magi,_lorenzo_il_magnifico.jpg

The Medici came from nowhere… at least as far as the crowned heads of Europe were concerned. They were Johnny-come-latelies from the Tuscan countryside, and yet they soon ruled the city-state of Florence – de facto in the C15, and very much in facto afterwards. How did they do it? Many a parvenu family has married its way up to greatness, but few have  participated in – let alone presided over – quite so vigorous a social and cultural flowering as did the Medici in Florence.

Just how these thrifty bankers became the greatest patrons of art, literature, and scholarship will be the central theme of this course. The cast of characters will be dazzling: Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Michelangelo… and that’s just the artists. The scholars and poets are no less impressive – Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo Bruni…. Many of these geniuses were also members of Lorenzo Medici’s Platonic Academy – a revival of the great philosophical original in ancient Athens. With so much talent and so much ambition gathered together, there were bound to be winners and losers, insiders and outsiders. Not everybody loved the Medici. We shall also find out more about the infamous Pazzi conspiracy, and the dire warnings of a certain Dominican friar named Savonarola…

Buckle in for a celebration of political and social wheeling and dealing, exquisite art and literature, egos, vanities - and bonfires!

RJW F2617 Online course (via Zoom)

7 weeks, Monday 4 May - Monday 22 June (incl., with a half-term break on 25 May).

£80 (individual registration); £144 (for two people sharing one screen).