Conspiracy, intrigue and faction fighting as the future of Europe hangs in the balance: Mary Hollingsworth tells the extraordinary story of the papal conclave in 1559 - the longest and bitterest of the sixteenth century.
Tasked with choosing a pontiff to replace a previous incumbent (Paul IV) whose reign was marked by repression and brutality, and faced with the growing challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the conclave faced a critically important decision for the future of the Roman Catholic Church, and was faction-ridden even by the standards of such polarised gatherings. France and Spain, both looking to extend their power in Italy and beyond, had very different ideas of who the new pope should be, as did the Italian cardinals.
Making meticulous use of the detailed accounts left by Ippolito d'Este, one of the participating cardinals (and the son of Lucrezia Borgia), Mary Hollingsworth relates the intrigue and double-dealing of the different parties trying to secure the required number of votes over the four months of this lengthiest of sixteenth-century papal elections.
A beautifully illustrated history of the Renaissance told through the lives of its most influential patrons.
From the late Middle Ages, the independent Italian city-states were taken over by powerful families who installed themselves as dynastic rulers. Inspired by the humanists, the princes of 15th- and 16th-century Italy immersed themselves in the culture of antiquity, commissioning palaces, villas and churches inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome, and offering patronage to artists and writers.
Many of thse princes were related by blood or marriage, creating a web of alliances that held society together but whose tensions sometimes threatened to tear it apart; thus were their lives dominated as much by the waging of war as the nurture of the artistic talent.
In a narrative that is as rigorous and closely researched as it is accessible and informative, Mary Hollingsworth sets the princes' aesthetic achievements in the context of the volatile, ever-shifting politics of a tumultuous period of history.
Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the fifteenth century, the Medici gained massive political power in Florence, raising the city to a peak of cultural achievement and becoming its hereditary dukes. Among their number were no fewer than three popes and a powerful and influential queen of France. Their influence brought about an explosion of Florentine art and architecture. Michelangelo, Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Leonardo were among the artists with whom they were socialized and patronized. Thus runs the "accepted view" of the Medici. However, Mary Hollingsworth argues that the idea that the Medici were enlightened rulers of the Renaissance is a fiction that has now acquired the status of historical fact. In truth, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the Borgias-tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own. In this dynamic new history, Hollingsworth argues that past narratives have focused on a sanitized and fictitious view of the Medici-wise rulers, enlightened patrons of the arts, and fathers of the Renaissance-but that in fact their past was reinvented in the sixteenth century, mythologized by later generations of Medici who used this as a central prop for their legacy.
