Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800

A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes

Eric Cochrane

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226115955
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The city of Florence has long been admired as the home of the brilliant artistic and literary achievement of the early Renaissance. But most histories of Florence go no further than the first decades of the sixteenth century. They thus give the impression that Florentine culture suddenly died with the generation of Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Andrea del Sarto.Eric Cochrane shows that the Florentines maintained their creativity long after they had lost their position as the cultural leaders of Europe. When their political philosophy and historiography ran dry, they turned to the practical problems of civil administration. When their artists finally yielded to outside influence, they turned to music and the natural sciences. Even during the darkest days of the great economic depression of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they succeeded in preserving—almost alone in Europe—the blessings of external peace and domestic tranquility.

Index

NOTE. The index includes all persons and places mentioned in the text, but not those mentioned in the Bibliographical Note alone. It includes only those subjects that are relatively circumscribed in scope—e.g., “Medicine,” but not “Science.” It omits such headings as “Florence,” “Tuscany,” “Rome,” “Italy,” “Latin,” and “Italian Language” that appear frequently throughout the volume. It gives the numbers even of those pages (outside the Bibliographical Note) where a person, place, or subject is referred to without being specifically named. Whenever a particular person who is mentioned elsewhere in the text by name is indicated only by his title or office, the corresponding number is given under his name in the Index—e.g., “Francis I” instead of “King of France.” In accordance with Italian custom, Italian rulers of Italian or foreign states are listed under their family names, and Italian women are usually listed under their maiden, rather than their married, names. Foreign or foreign-born rulers of Italian as well as of non-Italian states are listed under their given names—e.g., “Carlo di Borbone (King of Naples),” but “Medici, Maria de’ (Queen of France).” First names not given in the text are given in parentheses in the Index. Local place names in cities other than Florence are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface: To the Benevolent Reader
• Frontispiece
• Prologue: The siege
• Book I. Florence in the 1540s: How Cosimo de’ Medici turned a worn-out republic into a well-run monarchy
• Book II. Florence in the 1590s: How Scipione Ammirato solved just about all the problems of his age
• Book III. Florence in the 1630s: How Galileo Galilei turned the universe inside out
• Book IV. Florence in the 1680s: How Lorenzo Magalotti looked in vain for a vocation and finally settled down to sniffing perfumes
• Book V. Florence in the 1740s: How Giovanni Lami discovered the past and tried to alter the future
• Book VI. Florence in the 1780s: How Francesco Maria Gianni spent twenty-five years building a model state only to see it torn down in a single morning
• A Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Index
• About the Author