Mary Hollingsworth: The Medici

Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the 15th century, the Medici gained political power in Florence, ruling the city during its cultural heyday and becoming its hereditary dukes. Among their number were no fewer than three popes, and a powerful and influential queen of France. Their patronage of the arts facilitated an explosion of Florentine art and architecture. Michelangelo, Donatello, Fra Angelico and Leonardo da Vinci are among the artists with which they were associated. Thus runs the 'received view' of the Medici dukes of Florence. Mary Hollingsworth argues that this sanitized version – that they were wise rulers and enlightened patrons of the arts, fathers of the Renaissance – is a fiction devised by later generations who reinvented their past to create a myth that now has the status of historical fact. In truth, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the infamous Borgias, tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own and which they beggared in their lust for power.