FLORENCE:
A PORTRAIT
By Michael Levey

Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in the world in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and a remarkable history rife with monumental triumphs and violent events. These facets come to sparkling life in Michael Levey's portrait of the city, a book that rediscovers the familiar and at the same time reveals the mystery of the fascinating people, details, and moments of a world captured in time.

From the turmoil of the Middle Ages, the incessant clash of factions and feuds, the dim bits of fresco and anonymous crucifixes, Florence only slowly emerged as the civilized, learned, and cultured republic of Renaissance lore. This book relives the drama and confusion of these early days leading to the arrival of Florence as one of the world's great cities, announced to all in 1300 when Pope Boniface VIII added to the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire a fifth, Florentines, "who seem to rule the world."

In Dante, exiled from Florence in 1302, Levey finds an inspired guide to the city's thirteenth-century appearance, people, culture, and constitution, and a wrathful commentator on the politics that had fouled "l'ovil di San Giovanni," the "St. John's sheepfold" of his youth. Florence conjures this time of momentous activity, epitomized by the building of the Palazzo of the Priors, the crowning castle of the Palazzo Vecchio, whose tawny-yellow crenelated tower trumpets Florence's colossal civic pride. Against the bloody background of struggles for power between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, Levey shows us Florence nonetheless becoming a commercial power in which the crafts and guilds made way for the great Renaissance blossoming of la citta del fiore. He leads us from the medievalism of the Divine Comedy to the robust world of the Decameron, through plague and flood and fire to art triumphant in the buildings of Brunelleschi and the sculpture of donatello_ His book shows us Florence not just in its ascendancy and at its height but also in its less familiar years and guises, from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth, as limited democracy gave way to oligarchy, then autocracy, and the last strokes of decoration and decay created the city we know today.

At once intimate and grand, learned and engaging, this luminescent portrait gives us Florence in all its magnificence and madness, from the glory of the great Duomo to the finest detail of a cameo or a poem.

Sir Michael Levey was Director of the National Gallery, London, from 1973 to 1986. His many books include Early Renaissance, The World of Ottoman Art, and Giambattista Tiepolo.