Word: medici
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James Russell Lowell to England and Hawthorne as consul in Liverpool. The Robber Barons, who were the modern Medici, imported European treasures by the boatload, but Henry Adams found America "mortgaged to the railways." Henry James fled to Europe, and in 1913 Ezra Pound gloomily wrote of America's artists: "O helpless few in my country, 0 remnant enslaved...
Scholar's Prince. What called Fra Angelico away from San Domenico was the triumphant return from political exile on Oct. 6, 1434 of Cosimo de' Medici, the wealthiest banker of his day, munificent benefactor and art patron whose scholarly passions and political adroitness made Florence the foremost city of the Renaissance. Cosimo's rule created for Florence an interval of peace and poise in which a man could aspire to make a balanced masterpiece of his life. As the outward expression of this, Cosimo set to work on a program to make Florence the wonder of Europe...
...Dominicans lived in huts and damp cells. But as the ground floor was readied, Fra Angelico and his assistants went to work, painting a series of Crucifixions in the cloister, the main refectory and the chapter house. For Cosimo's cell, largest in the monastery, where the Medici prince liked to retire for contemplation, Fra Angelico repeated once again the Coming of the Magi at Cosimo's request, "to have this example of Eastern kings laying down their crowns at the manger of Bethlehem always before his eyes as a reminder for his own guidance as a ruler...
...Feverish Age. The abruptness which marked the end of the Renaissance's Golden Age shocked even the men who lived through it. When the art-loving Medici Pope. Leo X, bowed his head in sorrow at Raphael's death on Good Friday, 1520, he was unknowingly mourning the death of Renaissance Man. Within seven years, Rome, the symbol of Europe's stability, lay smoking and sacked by German and Spanish troops...
Clearing the Name. The names of Amerigo's contemporaries in Florence read like a glory roll: Lorenzo de' Medici, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci. Good Florentine that he was, he had no trouble mixing an interest in art and ideas with the art of business. While he was in Seville, Spain, as an agent for Florentine interests, he came to know Columbus and King Ferdinand, who gave him the chance to go on voyages that resulted in the first useful maps of the New World's continental coastline...