title: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, And Art In Fifteenth-century Florence (Enterprise)
author:  Tim Parks 
description: Starred Review. The Renaissance, so often seen as a clean break with the medieval past, was really an age of creative ambivalence and paradox. In this marvelously fresh addition to the Enterprise series, Parks, author of the Booker-listed <i>Europa</i> and a literary observer of modern Italian life, turns to Florence and to a particularly compelling contradiction. The spirit of capitalist enterprise that fostered cultural originality and underpinned patronage was accompanied by a Christian conviction that money was a source of evil and that usury was a damnable spiritual offense. In the space where this cultural conflict plays out, sometimes as stylized as one of Lorenzo Il Magnifico's tournaments, sometimes as life-threateningly fiery as Savonarola's sermons against worldly vanities, we find a world both akin to our own and almost incomprehensibly distant. Parks is a clear-eyed guide to the ambiguities of Florentine culture, equally attentive to the intricacies of international exchange rates, the spiritual neurosis about unearned income, the shocking bawdiness of Lorenzo's carnival songs and the realpolitik of 15th-century power. His prose is swift and economical, cutting to the chase. Like the Medici-commissioned funerary monument for the anti-Pope John XXIII, the effect is startlingly vibrant, resembling "those moments in Dante's <i>Inferno</i> when one of the damned ceases merely to represent this or that sin and becomes a man or woman with a complex story, someone we are interested in, sympathetic towards." <i>(May) </i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: **Annotation**
  
  Before they achieved renown as patrons of the arts and de facto rulers of
  Florence, the Medici family earned their fortune in banking. But even at the
  height of the Renaissance, charging interest of any kind meant running afoul
  of the Catholic Church’s ban on usury. Tim Parks reveals how the legendary
  Medicis—Cosimo and Lorenzo “the Magnificent” in particular—used the
  diplomatic, military, and even metaphysical tools at hand, along with a
  healthy dose of intrigue and wit, to further their fortunes as well as their
  family’s standing.
  
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  Medici Money
  
  ‘Lucky for Italy that Tim Parks decided to live there and write about his new
  home. His acute sense of people and history now comes to a grand fruition in
  his tome on the Medici, a gift to anyone who has been dazzled by Florence.
  Splendid reading.’ Frances Mayes, author of _Under the Tuscan Sun_
  
  ‘Witty and penetrating … Parks deftly un