Description
Book SynopsisHidden in Plain Sight: Covert Criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence offers the first systematic study of an important and heretofore insufficiently-studied phenomenon in Renaissance Europe. Through a close examination of a wide variety of visual and textual materials, James O. Ward illuminates the means by which Florentine citizensamong them several of the most famous artists and writers of the time, such as Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Vasarimanaged, in an increasingly authoritarian political and cultural climate, to express their disaffection with the prevailing political and cultural status quo in relatively safe ways, while at the same time maintaining contact with those rulers whom they criticized, upon whom they often depended for their livelihoods. Ward's volume thus offers new and provocative interpretations of some of the most famous works of Italian Renaissance visual and textual culturefor example, Michelangelo's New Sacristy in F
Trade Review
"This book will be of great interest to students in political theory and the history of political thought. The so-called lettura obliqua of Machiavelli’s masterpiece has a long history; however, this is the first time that this reading has been proposed in a radically new way, taking into account how Machiavelli’s friends would have read the Prince soon after its completion. The way Ward deals with the tradition of innuendo is something entirely new and will spark a lively debate among scholars of Machiavelli."—Paolo Carta, Professor of the History of Political Thought, The University of Trento
Table of Contents
List of Figures – Acknowledgements – Preface – Introduction – Reading Machiavelli Rhetorically: The Prince as Covert Criticism of the Renaissance Prince – Florentia capta: Michelangelo’s Sagrestia Nuova as Covert Critique of Medici Rule – The Compagnia della Cazzuola as Locus of Opposition to Medici Rule – An Academy of Misers: The Compagnie della Lesina and Antilesina as Loci of Opposition to Medici and Imperial Rule in mid-Cinquecento Italy – Index.
