A shark that is not alone swimming in those waters..., 26 Oct 2008
Written by an economist who had access to the most important actors (collectors, dealers, auctioneers, curators, art fair directors...)while doing his research, this book is an in-depth study of the way the market for contemporary art functions, the part played by auction houses, dealers, big collectors, museums, the sometimes incestuous relationships that exist between all of them, how art is priced, how auctions are organized (on and off the scene), how gallery shows are sold (or pre-sold), the importance of art-branding in creating an artist's reputation (the brand being the gallery, the auction house, the artist himself, a museum, or even a collector if he is important enough), and, most importantly, how these art brands are created. One insighful conclusion is that the art market, and the market for contemporary art in particular, is as much brand-driven as any other high-end luxury market. Through case studies (the dealers Larry Gagosian or Jay Joplin, the artists Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, the collector Charles Saatchi...)and broader considerations on the overall economics of art, the author manages to write a book which is at the same time well informed (with some spelling approximations, e.g. "Joe Bernardo" for the Portuguese collector Jose Berardo), to the point and easy to read. Of the more than twenty books on the topic available on Amazon's, this one is the best in my opinion (and I've read quite a few...).

A shark that is not alone swimming in those waters..., 26 Oct 2008
Written by an economist who had access to the most important actors (collectors, dealers, auctioneers, curators, art fair directors...)while doing his research, this book is an in-depth study of the way the market for contemporary art functions, the part played by auction houses, dealers, big collectors, museums, the sometimes incestuous relationships that exist between all of them, how art is priced, how auctions are organized (on and off the scene), how gallery shows are sold (or pre-sold), the importance of art-branding in creating an artist's reputation (the brand being the gallery, the auction house, the artist himself, a museum, or even a collector if he is important enough), and, most importantly, how these art brands are created. One insighful conclusion is that the art market, and the market for contemporary art in particular, is as much brand-driven as any other high-end luxury market. Through case studies (the dealers Larry Gagosian or Jay Joplin, the artists Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, the collector Charles Saatchi...)and broader considerations on the overall economics of art, the author manages to write a book which is at the same time well informed (with some spelling approximations, e.g. "Joe Bernardo" for the Portuguese collector Jose Berardo), to the point and easy to read. Of the more than twenty books on the topic available on Amazon's, this one is the best in my opinion (and I've read quite a few...).

Fascinating But Not For Beginners, 10 Jan 2008
I think this book is brilliant, yet I am not 100% sure why it is in the Very Short Introduction series. It isn't really an introduction to contemporary art. If you don't know much about art, and you don't know much about contemporary artists, you aren't going to be very much the wiser after reading this book, at least at a basic level. It deals only sketchily with the work of artists, using them to illustrate points rather than to tell you much about them or the artists themselves. It doesn't really set out to tell you what art is either, in any easily identifiable way.
Having said that, it gets five stars in my book because it illustrates a fascinating view of art that I have never really been aware of before. Stallabras talks about contemporary art in relation to world politics, commerce, consumerism and the worlds of big business and finance. He talks about how art has changed and been shaped by the demands that these external pressure points have put upon it, and what that means for the way we 'read' art and art works. He talks about how it affects our understanding of where art fits in the current world order and what that means for artists.
It is an incredibly interesting book, from which I have learned a great deal. It really made me think and made me look at things like how exhibitions are staged and what museums are for in a radically different light. It is well worth the money and the time to read it, but you do have to have some prior knowledge of art beforehand to get the best out of it.

A shark that is not alone swimming in those waters..., 26 Oct 2008
Written by an economist who had access to the most important actors (collectors, dealers, auctioneers, curators, art fair directors...)while doing his research, this book is an in-depth study of the way the market for contemporary art functions, the part played by auction houses, dealers, big collectors, museums, the sometimes incestuous relationships that exist between all of them, how art is priced, how auctions are organized (on and off the scene), how gallery shows are sold (or pre-sold), the importance of art-branding in creating an artist's reputation (the brand being the gallery, the auction house, the artist himself, a museum, or even a collector if he is important enough), and, most importantly, how these art brands are created. One insighful conclusion is that the art market, and the market for contemporary art in particular, is as much brand-driven as any other high-end luxury market. Through case studies (the dealers Larry Gagosian or Jay Joplin, the artists Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, the collector Charles Saatchi...)and broader considerations on the overall economics of art, the author manages to write a book which is at the same time well informed (with some spelling approximations, e.g. "Joe Bernardo" for the Portuguese collector Jose Berardo), to the point and easy to read. Of the more than twenty books on the topic available on Amazon's, this one is the best in my opinion (and I've read quite a few...).

Fascinating But Not For Beginners, 10 Jan 2008
I think this book is brilliant, yet I am not 100% sure why it is in the Very Short Introduction series. It isn't really an introduction to contemporary art. If you don't know much about art, and you don't know much about contemporary artists, you aren't going to be very much the wiser after reading this book, at least at a basic level. It deals only sketchily with the work of artists, using them to illustrate points rather than to tell you much about them or the artists themselves. It doesn't really set out to tell you what art is either, in any easily identifiable way.
Having said that, it gets five stars in my book because it illustrates a fascinating view of art that I have never really been aware of before. Stallabras talks about contemporary art in relation to world politics, commerce, consumerism and the worlds of big business and finance. He talks about how art has changed and been shaped by the demands that these external pressure points have put upon it, and what that means for the way we 'read' art and art works. He talks about how it affects our understanding of where art fits in the current world order and what that means for artists.
It is an incredibly interesting book, from which I have learned a great deal. It really made me think and made me look at things like how exhibitions are staged and what museums are for in a radically different light. It is well worth the money and the time to read it, but you do have to have some prior knowledge of art beforehand to get the best out of it.

Addiction indeed - and not only to Art!, 09 Jan 2006
What a self-indulgent, rackety and restless life this woman has led, and she makes no bones about it! As a young woman she was part of a bohemian set in Paris, promiscuous, often drunk, dancing the night through, almost like a caricature of a flapper. She was quite neurotic, often had hysterical weeping fits, and her relationships were usually stormy and quarrelsome, punctuated by long sulks when she wouldn't speak to her husbands. The first of these, Laurence Vail, was as neurotic as she was and very violent, as often as not in public places. But she was obviously not easy to live with either, and tactful restraint in behaviour or utterance was never one of her qualities, even with men on whom she was dependent. (The book, too, is "frank" and completely lacking in reticence.)

Her immense wealth enabled her to travel constantly all across Europe (we always learn in which motor-car), and much of this book is an account of every journey she made. What she chooses to record seems quite undiscriminating, often jejune and sometimes positively verges on the Pooterish, not least because of its uninspired style.

She knew nothing about art or music until John Holms, her partner after her first divorce, began to teach her about it, and one always suspects that it was artists rather than art that really attracted her. She admits that even when in 1938 she decided to open an art gallery in London, at the time "I couldn't distinguish one thing in art from another" and acted on the advice of Marcel Duchamp who "taught me the difference between Abstract and Surrealist art"! (p.161). And "in spite of the fact that I was opening a modern art gallery in London, I much preferred old masters" (p.163). These of course were no longer sexually available, while living artists were. She slept with an amazing number of them (as well as with, for example, Samuel Beckett and the kinky Roland Penrose), so there must have been some powerful allure about her into her forties and beyond, which does not come across in the book.

She soon began to collect not only artists but also their works, making it a principle to buy at least one work of art from every show she gave (p.166), but in the whole book there is no genuine appraisal of any work of art - only an account of her perpetual acquisitiveness. However, one has to admit that her investments were excellent in commercial terms. She bought and gave the first showings to a number of modern artists whose work would become immensely more valuable in time, and she especially prides herself on having made Jackson Pollock famous.

She was living in occupied and then in Vichy France during the early years of the German occupation, getting out not long before the United States entered the war; but she never sets down any reflections on the war as such, not then nor after Pearl Harbour, commenting only on how bureaucratic matters (visas, currency transfers, restrictions on the movements in the United States of her second husband, Max Ernst, as "an enemy alien") affected her own activities. While France was in torment, she can write, "During the summer [of 1940] I got rather bored and started having my hair dyed a different color every few weeks to amuse myself. First it was chestnut ... but then I got the wild idea of having it bleached bright orange... As a result of all the time I spent in the beauty parlor, I conceived a sort of weakness for the little hairdresser who worked so hard on my beauty. From re-reading D.H.Lawrence I also got a romantic idea that I should have a man who belonged to a lower class" (p.221/2) and we are led to assume that she had a fling with him. "Soon this got boring, and I needed a change". (p.222). She was as promiscuous in her forties as she had been in her twenties.

The bulk of this book - 324 out of 385 pages - was first published in 1946 when she was 48 years old. One part of the rest she published first in 1960 when she was 62 and the other part in 1977 when she was nearly eighty. Those parts show her in a much more sober light, when she has become the grande dame of Venice. By that time she has no taste for what was then the avant garde: "I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell, as the result of the financial attitude. People blame me for what is painted today because I had encouraged and helped this new movement to be born. In the early 1940s there was a pure pioneering spirit in America. A new art had to be born - Abstract Expressionism. I fostered it. I do not regret it. It produced Pollock or rather Pollock produced it. This alone justifies my effort. As to the others, I don't know what got into them. Some people say that I got stuck. Maybe it is true.... Today is the age of collecting, not of creating." H'm!

So at the end we have a rare moment of reflection. For the rest, this is basically a shallow, tedious and excessively long book written by a spoilt, wealthy and rather silly woman; and it would not have been worth persevering with if the incidents she records did not throw some light on the weird personalities and behaviour of some very famous people in the artistic world, most of whom were psychologically as mixed-up and temperamental as she was. One feels there must have been more to her than that, and perhaps the recent biographies written about her by Anton Gill or Mary Dearborn reveal another side of her; but after having read her own book, I have no interest in reading any more about her.

A shark that is not alone swimming in those waters..., 26 Oct 2008
Written by an economist who had access to the most important actors (collectors, dealers, auctioneers, curators, art fair directors...)while doing his research, this book is an in-depth study of the way the market for contemporary art functions, the part played by auction houses, dealers, big collectors, museums, the sometimes incestuous relationships that exist between all of them, how art is priced, how auctions are organized (on and off the scene), how gallery shows are sold (or pre-sold), the importance of art-branding in creating an artist's reputation (the brand being the gallery, the auction house, the artist himself, a museum, or even a collector if he is important enough), and, most importantly, how these art brands are created. One insighful conclusion is that the art market, and the market for contemporary art in particular, is as much brand-driven as any other high-end luxury market. Through case studies (the dealers Larry Gagosian or Jay Joplin, the artists Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, the collector Charles Saatchi...)and broader considerations on the overall economics of art, the author manages to write a book which is at the same time well informed (with some spelling approximations, e.g. "Joe Bernardo" for the Portuguese collector Jose Berardo), to the point and easy to read. Of the more than twenty books on the topic available on Amazon's, this one is the best in my opinion (and I've read quite a few...).

Fascinating But Not For Beginners, 10 Jan 2008
I think this book is brilliant, yet I am not 100% sure why it is in the Very Short Introduction series. It isn't really an introduction to contemporary art. If you don't know much about art, and you don't know much about contemporary artists, you aren't going to be very much the wiser after reading this book, at least at a basic level. It deals only sketchily with the work of artists, using them to illustrate points rather than to tell you much about them or the artists themselves. It doesn't really set out to tell you what art is either, in any easily identifiable way.
Having said that, it gets five stars in my book because it illustrates a fascinating view of art that I have never really been aware of before. Stallabras talks about contemporary art in relation to world politics, commerce, consumerism and the worlds of big business and finance. He talks about how art has changed and been shaped by the demands that these external pressure points have put upon it, and what that means for the way we 'read' art and art works. He talks about how it affects our understanding of where art fits in the current world order and what that means for artists.
It is an incredibly interesting book, from which I have learned a great deal. It really made me think and made me look at things like how exhibitions are staged and what museums are for in a radically different light. It is well worth the money and the time to read it, but you do have to have some prior knowledge of art beforehand to get the best out of it.

Addiction indeed - and not only to Art!, 09 Jan 2006
What a self-indulgent, rackety and restless life this woman has led, and she makes no bones about it! As a young woman she was part of a bohemian set in Paris, promiscuous, often drunk, dancing the night through, almost like a caricature of a flapper. She was quite neurotic, often had hysterical weeping fits, and her relationships were usually stormy and quarrelsome, punctuated by long sulks when she wouldn't speak to her husbands. The first of these, Laurence Vail, was as neurotic as she was and very violent, as often as not in public places. But she was obviously not easy to live with either, and tactful restraint in behaviour or utterance was never one of her qualities, even with men on whom she was dependent. (The book, too, is "frank" and completely lacking in reticence.)

Her immense wealth enabled her to travel constantly all across Europe (we always learn in which motor-car), and much of this book is an account of every journey she made. What she chooses to record seems quite undiscriminating, often jejune and sometimes positively verges on the Pooterish, not least because of its uninspired style.

She knew nothing about art or music until John Holms, her partner after her first divorce, began to teach her about it, and one always suspects that it was artists rather than art that really attracted her. She admits that even when in 1938 she decided to open an art gallery in London, at the time "I couldn't distinguish one thing in art from another" and acted on the advice of Marcel Duchamp who "taught me the difference between Abstract and Surrealist art"! (p.161). And "in spite of the fact that I was opening a modern art gallery in London, I much preferred old masters" (p.163). These of course were no longer sexually available, while living artists were. She slept with an amazing number of them (as well as with, for example, Samuel Beckett and the kinky Roland Penrose), so there must have been some powerful allure about her into her forties and beyond, which does not come across in the book.

She soon began to collect not only artists but also their works, making it a principle to buy at least one work of art from every show she gave (p.166), but in the whole book there is no genuine appraisal of any work of art - only an account of her perpetual acquisitiveness. However, one has to admit that her investments were excellent in commercial terms. She bought and gave the first showings to a number of modern artists whose work would become immensely more valuable in time, and she especially prides herself on having made Jackson Pollock famous.

She was living in occupied and then in Vichy France during the early years of the German occupation, getting out not long before the United States entered the war; but she never sets down any reflections on the war as such, not then nor after Pearl Harbour, commenting only on how bureaucratic matters (visas, currency transfers, restrictions on the movements in the United States of her second husband, Max Ernst, as "an enemy alien") affected her own activities. While France was in torment, she can write, "During the summer [of 1940] I got rather bored and started having my hair dyed a different color every few weeks to amuse myself. First it was chestnut ... but then I got the wild idea of having it bleached bright orange... As a result of all the time I spent in the beauty parlor, I conceived a sort of weakness for the little hairdresser who worked so hard on my beauty. From re-reading D.H.Lawrence I also got a romantic idea that I should have a man who belonged to a lower class" (p.221/2) and we are led to assume that she had a fling with him. "Soon this got boring, and I needed a change". (p.222). She was as promiscuous in her forties as she had been in her twenties.

The bulk of this book - 324 out of 385 pages - was first published in 1946 when she was 48 years old. One part of the rest she published first in 1960 when she was 62 and the other part in 1977 when she was nearly eighty. Those parts show her in a much more sober light, when she has become the grande dame of Venice. By that time she has no taste for what was then the avant garde: "I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell, as the result of the financial attitude. People blame me for what is painted today because I had encouraged and helped this new movement to be born. In the early 1940s there was a pure pioneering spirit in America. A new art had to be born - Abstract Expressionism. I fostered it. I do not regret it. It produced Pollock or rather Pollock produced it. This alone justifies my effort. As to the others, I don't know what got into them. Some people say that I got stuck. Maybe it is true.... Today is the age of collecting, not of creating." H'm!

So at the end we have a rare moment of reflection. For the rest, this is basically a shallow, tedious and excessively long book written by a spoilt, wealthy and rather silly woman; and it would not have been worth persevering with if the incidents she records did not throw some light on the weird personalities and behaviour of some very famous people in the artistic world, most of whom were psychologically as mixed-up and temperamental as she was. One feels there must have been more to her than that, and perhaps the recent biographies written about her by Anton Gill or Mary Dearborn reveal another side of her; but after having read her own book, I have no interest in reading any more about her.


An Essay on Modern Art, 07 Dec 2007
If you would like to read the life of Peggy Guggenheim then do not buy this book. It is an essay on modern art during the life of Peggy Guggenheim.
It is a very well researched book but it fails to give the life of Peggy Guggenheim. It is filled with too much details on arts and artists and their interconnections and influence on the 19th century modern art that at the end of the book I feel as if I know very little about the life of the collector.
I'm sure that an arts student or someone who has the basics to understand who's who the book is talking about would enjoy it.
I didn't. It took me three months to read and believe me I read it for the simple reason that I wanted to finish the book.

A shark that is not alone swimming in those waters..., 26 Oct 2008
Written by an economist who had access to the most important actors (collectors, dealers, auctioneers, curators, art fair directors...)while doing his research, this book is an in-depth study of the way the market for contemporary art functions, the part played by auction houses, dealers, big collectors, museums, the sometimes incestuous relationships that exist between all of them, how art is priced, how auctions are organized (on and off the scene), how gallery shows are sold (or pre-sold), the importance of art-branding in creating an artist's reputation (the brand being the gallery, the auction house, the artist himself, a museum, or even a collector if he is important enough), and, most importantly, how these art brands are created. One insighful conclusion is that the art market, and the market for contemporary art in particular, is as much brand-driven as any other high-end luxury market. Through case studies (the dealers Larry Gagosian or Jay Joplin, the artists Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin, Jeff Koons, the auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's, the collector Charles Saatchi...)and broader considerations on the overall economics of art, the author manages to write a book which is at the same time well informed (with some spelling approximations, e.g. "Joe Bernardo" for the Portuguese collector Jose Berardo), to the point and easy to read. Of the more than twenty books on the topic available on Amazon's, this one is the best in my opinion (and I've read quite a few...).

Fascinating But Not For Beginners, 10 Jan 2008
I think this book is brilliant, yet I am not 100% sure why it is in the Very Short Introduction series. It isn't really an introduction to contemporary art. If you don't know much about art, and you don't know much about contemporary artists, you aren't going to be very much the wiser after reading this book, at least at a basic level. It deals only sketchily with the work of artists, using them to illustrate points rather than to tell you much about them or the artists themselves. It doesn't really set out to tell you what art is either, in any easily identifiable way.
Having said that, it gets five stars in my book because it illustrates a fascinating view of art that I have never really been aware of before. Stallabras talks about contemporary art in relation to world politics, commerce, consumerism and the worlds of big business and finance. He talks about how art has changed and been shaped by the demands that these external pressure points have put upon it, and what that means for the way we 'read' art and art works. He talks about how it affects our understanding of where art fits in the current world order and what that means for artists.
It is an incredibly interesting book, from which I have learned a great deal. It really made me think and made me look at things like how exhibitions are staged and what museums are for in a radically different light. It is well worth the money and the time to read it, but you do have to have some prior knowledge of art beforehand to get the best out of it.

Addiction indeed - and not only to Art!, 09 Jan 2006
What a self-indulgent, rackety and restless life this woman has led, and she makes no bones about it! As a young woman she was part of a bohemian set in Paris, promiscuous, often drunk, dancing the night through, almost like a caricature of a flapper. She was quite neurotic, often had hysterical weeping fits, and her relationships were usually stormy and quarrelsome, punctuated by long sulks when she wouldn't speak to her husbands. The first of these, Laurence Vail, was as neurotic as she was and very violent, as often as not in public places. But she was obviously not easy to live with either, and tactful restraint in behaviour or utterance was never one of her qualities, even with men on whom she was dependent. (The book, too, is "frank" and completely lacking in reticence.)

Her immense wealth enabled her to travel constantly all across Europe (we always learn in which motor-car), and much of this book is an account of every journey she made. What she chooses to record seems quite undiscriminating, often jejune and sometimes positively verges on the Pooterish, not least because of its uninspired style.

She knew nothing about art or music until John Holms, her partner after her first divorce, began to teach her about it, and one always suspects that it was artists rather than art that really attracted her. She admits that even when in 1938 she decided to open an art gallery in London, at the time "I couldn't distinguish one thing in art from another" and acted on the advice of Marcel Duchamp who "taught me the difference between Abstract and Surrealist art"! (p.161). And "in spite of the fact that I was opening a modern art gallery in London, I much preferred old masters" (p.163). These of course were no longer sexually available, while living artists were. She slept with an amazing number of them (as well as with, for example, Samuel Beckett and the kinky Roland Penrose), so there must have been some powerful allure about her into her forties and beyond, which does not come across in the book.

She soon began to collect not only artists but also their works, making it a principle to buy at least one work of art from every show she gave (p.166), but in the whole book there is no genuine appraisal of any work of art - only an account of her perpetual acquisitiveness. However, one has to admit that her investments were excellent in commercial terms. She bought and gave the first showings to a number of modern artists whose work would become immensely more valuable in time, and she especially prides herself on having made Jackson Pollock famous.

She was living in occupied and then in Vichy France during the early years of the German occupation, getting out not long before the United States entered the war; but she never sets down any reflections on the war as such, not then nor after Pearl Harbour, commenting only on how bureaucratic matters (visas, currency transfers, restrictions on the movements in the United States of her second husband, Max Ernst, as "an enemy alien") affected her own activities. While France was in torment, she can write, "During the summer [of 1940] I got rather bored and started having my hair dyed a different color every few weeks to amuse myself. First it was chestnut ... but then I got the wild idea of having it bleached bright orange... As a result of all the time I spent in the beauty parlor, I conceived a sort of weakness for the little hairdresser who worked so hard on my beauty. From re-reading D.H.Lawrence I also got a romantic idea that I should have a man who belonged to a lower class" (p.221/2) and we are led to assume that she had a fling with him. "Soon this got boring, and I needed a change". (p.222). She was as promiscuous in her forties as she had been in her twenties.

The bulk of this book - 324 out of 385 pages - was first published in 1946 when she was 48 years old. One part of the rest she published first in 1960 when she was 62 and the other part in 1977 when she was nearly eighty. Those parts show her in a much more sober light, when she has become the grande dame of Venice. By that time she has no taste for what was then the avant garde: "I do not like art today. I think it has gone to hell, as the result of the financial attitude. People blame me for what is painted today because I had encouraged and helped this new movement to be born. In the early 1940s there was a pure pioneering spirit in America. A new art had to be born - Abstract Expressionism. I fostered it. I do not regret it. It produced Pollock or rather Pollock produced it. This alone justifies my effort. As to the others, I don't know what got into them. Some people say that I got stuck. Maybe it is true.... Today is the age of collecting, not of creating." H'm!

So at the end we have a rare moment of reflection. For the rest, this is basically a shallow, tedious and excessively long book written by a spoilt, wealthy and rather silly woman; and it would not have been worth persevering with if the incidents she records did not throw some light on the weird personalities and behaviour of some very famous people in the artistic world, most of whom were psychologically as mixed-up and temperamental as she was. One feels there must have been more to her than that, and perhaps the recent biographies written about her by Anton Gill or Mary Dearborn reveal another side of her; but after having read her own book, I have no interest in reading any more about her.


An Essay on Modern Art, 07 Dec 2007
If you would like to read the life of Peggy Guggenheim then do not buy this book. It is an essay on modern art during the life of Peggy Guggenheim.
It is a very well researched book but it fails to give the life of Peggy Guggenheim. It is filled with too much details on arts and artists and their interconnections and influence on the 19th century modern art that at the end of the book I feel as if I know very little about the life of the collector.
I'm sure that an arts student or someone who has the basics to understand who's who the book is talking about would enjoy it.
I didn't. It took me three months to read and believe me I read it for the simple reason that I wanted to finish the book.

A remarkable work of scholarship, 27 Aug 2008
This is a long, dense read which rewards all effort. It re-establishes Cosimo and his contemporaries in the context of their own times, showing the daily reality of Christian life with particular reference to popular culture. Too often viewed as rich, powerful, self-serving merchants, Cosimo and other patrons are shown to be men concerned with spiritual life, who kept commonplace books filled with quotations from Christian authors, who sought advice from wise and holy men. Kent's portrait of the city and its people is fresh and surprising. Although Cosimo eludes us as a character - he knew how to be private - he emerges from this study as worthy of the title "Pater Patriae". Throughout the work, Kent quietly and deftly puts previous biographers and historians in their place, showing what a mistake it is to view the past through the lens of our own ideologies. The common view of Cosimo as a cynical manipulator of government to his own ends, and hiding it with a cloak of religious imagery, is shown to be the product of the Risorgimento and Marxism. To dismiss his patronage of religious buildings and art as buying a ticket to heaven is a mistake. He sincerely felt the need to give his wealth back to God and the cynical view that this is hogwash reflects more on the dismissers than the dismissed. Kent's approach is rational and wise. She neither romanticises nor exaggerates. She just allows the man to emerge from a painstaking depiction of his background. A first-rate contribution to studies of the period which, it is to be hoped, puts the record straight once and for all.

the most thought provoking guide to cosimo and his age, 27 Oct 2003
This book is a truly remarkable and magnificent piece of scholarship that places Cosimo d'Medici clearly within the culture of his age. I continually dip into it nearly three years after my partner bought it for me for christmas after it first came out. It is not always easy, but always rewarding. I particularly find that the stress on seeing the man in his own time and in his own terms and that of his compatriots is a necessary counter to the view of ideology simply being a mirror to cynical self interest. But apart from the sociological analysis, there are the descriptions of Florentine society and culture: the confraternities and festivals, the intellectual and cultural perspectives of the general population, the artists, philosophers and the religious orders. The illustrations are beautifully reproduced, and discussions of the symbolism and reasons for the commissions of the paintings, sculpture and architecture give a detailed and deep insight into the life of the times. A must for anyone truly interested in this historical period.