Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence »

F. W. Kent is a professor of history and Australian Professorial Fellow at Monash University and the founding director of Monash University Centre in Prato. He is the author of Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence: The Family Life of the Capponi, Ginori, and Rucellai.

Historian F. W. Kent offers a new look at Lorenzo de Medici's relationship to the arts, aesthetics, collecting, and building -- especially in the context of his role as the political boss (maestro della bottega) of republican Florence and a leading player in Renaissance Italian diplomacy. Paying careful attention to the events of Lorenzo's short but dramatic life, Kent creates a radically new chronology that reveals Lorenzo's activities as an art patron as being more extensive and creative than previously thought. Richly illustrated with photographs of Medici landmarks by Ralph Lieberman, Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence offers a masterful portrait of Lorenzo as a man whose achievements might have rivaled those of his grandfather Cosimo had he not died so young.