FIRST AMONG EQUALS

Massaccesi offers a historical novel about the life of Italian banker and politician Cosimo de’ Medici.

As the book opens in the year 1460, an aging Cosimo sits with his young grandson Lorenzo. He recounts the story of how their ancestor saved the life of Charlemagne by practicing bloodletting. This, Cosimo confides, is how the Medici family gained their surname (which translates as “medical doctors”) and their coat of arms, which depicts red bloodletting cups. Cosimo uses the story as a way of bestowing knowledge on his grandson, who will, in time, grow up to be the powerful statesman known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. The novel then skips back in time to Cosimo’s own formative years, describing his privileged upbringing in the center of Florence, Italy, along with his younger brother, also named Lorenzo. The novel charts Cosimo’s rise from a serious and studious adolescent to a shrewd financier who inherited and expanded his father’s bank and established himself as a de facto leader of Renaissance Florence. It also addresses the political machinations of the era, including scholar Francesco Filelfo’s poisonous political attacks on Cosimo. Unlike other books included in The Mentoris Project, a series promoting the achievements of great Italians and Italian-Americans, this study doesn’t sugarcoat its subject’s life story; for example, it explicitly addresses the fact that Cosimo’s third son, Carlo, was “born out of a relationship with a Circassian slave.” At the outset of the novel, however, the author hurriedly introduces a lengthy list of historical figures, resulting in contrived sentences that break the narrative spell, such as “Piero, the first son of Cosimo—Lorenzo’s father—appeared on the threshold,” as well as textbooklike blocks of text: “Giuliano, who later died during the Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici family in 1478, was not Lorenzo’s only sibling. Apart from Piero’s illegitimate son Giovanni, Lorenzo and Giuliano had three sisters: Bianca, Maria, and Lucrezia.” Vivid depictions of Renaissance Florence are also sadly lacking, so Cosimo’s world never truly comes alive.

A clear and precise, if somewhat unadorned, life story of the founder of a political dynasty.