Florentine Decays
As characters the Medici were scarcely very 'edifying : they began as unscrupulous bankers; they matured as tyrants; and they ended in paralysing debauchery. Their immortal reputation lies entirely in the one field that has so often derived benefit from the banker, the tyrant and the profligate—the lavish patronage that they extended to the arts for the whole three centuries that the dynastj, lasted. Mr. Harold Acton; who first told the story of the last members of the family in 1932, has now reissued his book with only minor changes—a few additions and the re- moval of some of his most purple passages.
Mr. Acton's historical method will be familiar to many since the publication of The Bourbons of Naples: a ruthless concentration on the sub-
jects graf his biography to the exclusion of wider horizons; a greater interest in their private than their public lives; and a total absence of footnotes. But with all this goes a knowledge of the period that is unparalleled in its intimacy; a style of often dazzling brilliance and wit; and a deadpan Gibbonian approach that is more suitably applied to the somewhat ludicrous and stagnating Florence of the late seventeenth century than the resurgent Naples of the eighteenth century.
When Mr. Acton begins in the middle of the seventeenth century Florence is still one of the intellectual capitals of Europe : it is often for- gotten that the Accademia del Cimento, with its motto of Provando e Riprovando, preceded our own Royal Society by some years. When the book ends less than a century later Florence has sunk into a provincial backwater fit only for the gossip of a Horace Mann. The temptation to moralise is almost (but, as Mr. Acton proves, not totally) irresistible. The reasons why a great civilisation dries up and withers away are absorbing and could be alarmingly relevant. It is a pity that Mr. Acton does not occasionally stand back from his canvas and raise them. The odd hint is all we get. Priests and monks swarm, meddle, intrigue—they do nothing else in these pages; heirs fail because princes are distracted by handsome pages and princesses suffer from an exaggerated addiction to outdoor exercise; scientists, Jews, philosophers and heretics are persecuted. The end was "squalid enough. Still there were compensations. Bigoted and debauched as the Florentine Court became, some of the best painters in Italy went on working for it. FRANCIS HASKELL
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