Florence: A Portrait.

Frick, Carole Collier

Michael Levey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 50 c. pls., 100 pls., + xxix + 474 pp. $35. ISNB: 0-6743-0657-0.

Michael Levey, Director of the National Gallery in London from 1973 to 1986, has produced another formidable book in art history, this one on Florence from its beginnings in the thirteenth century, when it emerged as Saint John the Baptist's "sheep fold," with its wool trade struggling against endemic internecine conflict between Guelph and Ghibelline citizens. From the paving of the streets and the establishment of the gold florin in 1252, Levey embarks upon a narrative enhanced by excellent photographs of this city on the Arno, as it proceeds through its Renaissance history and beyond, ending only with the late nineteenth-century Cook's Tours to the city and the exotic Piazza Demidoff.

The bulk of the book is given over to the period between 1294 and 1527, however, establishing once again the hegemony of Florence as the locus for Renaissance art. Levey sets out to demonstrate how the physical aspect of the city of Florence changed over time, through not only individual, guild, civic and religious patronage of the arts and architecture, but also the vicissitudes of communal survival and the demands of the personal pride of leaders as varied as Lorenzo "Il Magnifico," Savonarola, and the Grand Duke Cosimo I.

While telling the specialist reader little that is new, Levey masterfully weaves a variety of Florentine written sources (records of the Pratica, diarists, chroniclers, writers, and historians) with his keen insights on the key artistic monuments of the city to produce an intimate commentary on the intricacies of the way in which personality, power, and just plain fate combined to create the look of the Renaissance. For example, he juxtaposes the competition between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi for the Baptistry Doors and the competing choir lofts of Donatello and della Robbia for the Cathedral, with the cooperation between Masaccio and Masolino in the frescoes for the Brancacci Chapel. Levey's fluid expertise on the architecture and art combine with his use of the excellent twentieth-century historical scholarship now available on Florence, allowing him to integrate not only the circumstances under which well-known public places came to be built, but also how other projects were either neglected (such as the facade of San Lorenzo), proposed, but not carried out (Brunelleschi's suggestion that Santo Spirito be reoriented to face the Arno), or aborted (in the case of the decoration of the Hall of Great Council, begun by no less than Leonardo and Michelangelo, only to be abandoned).

Levey thus examines the enduring legacies in paint, stone, and marble which can still be seen today. In addition, he describes the tantalizingly ephemeral festive decorations devised for the triumphal entries of kings, dukes and popes, as well as a succession of foreign-born Medici brides. Using the Descrizione appended to Vasari's Lives of 1568, Levey provides details of these temporary, disposable vistas created to further embellish Dei's mantric "Florentia bella." Joanna of Austria's 1565 entry is especially interesting, as entire untidy streets were masked by decorative arches within which illusory, well-ordered venues were painted on canvas "like a promise of what architecture had yet to contribute permanently to the appearance and layout of the city" (356).

While the discussions of the lives of early movers and shakers such as Cosimo "II Vecchio" and Niccolo Niccoli are excellent here, the point-of-view throughout this book is relentlessly upper-class male, which made this reader wish for more substantive inclusion in a portrait of this length of those who labored to build this enduring monument to Renaissance history (of which there is very little), and also of the women of the city. Admittedly, Levey does discuss Eleonora of Toledo, but certainly, the name of Alessandra Strozzi should be here, and more than a few lines on Lucrezia Tornabuoni, given the book's emphasis on urban ambience. After all, Sacchetti had noted that the Florentine women were, above all others, the consummate artists of their day.

CAROLE COLLIER FRICK Southern Illinois University