Perhaps no one understood the concept of art as propaganda better than the Medici.
WSJ: Museum Exhibit Review: Gems of the Medici at the Bowers Museum
When city-states became nations, very few people understood the implications, but the Medici did.
The connection might perhaps be reduced to a single word, whether patronage, or atonement, or Medici.
For example, the Medici family that controlled Renaissance Florence manipulated progressive tax rates to ruin their rivals.
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Although the Medici family came back to power in Florence, never again would Italy dominate European finance.
Most of the Medici bank's lending was to royalty, to finance military campaigns or lavish princely lifestyles.
The collection was added to by subsequent generations of Medici, and artists have been known to donate portraits as well.
Picard says she established Bank Medici in Austria as a mechanism for shoveling investor money into the Ponzi scheme.
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Other defendants named in the suit include European banks Unicredit and Bank Medici.
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In the fifteenth century, the Medici family of bankers and merchants rose in Templar-like fashion, amassing vast wealth and influence.
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After Cosimo's death in 1464, the Medici bank went downhill, though his descendants became ever more entrenched in power in Florence.
Though the Medici bank's experience was not much better, its partners felt that shouldering such risks was necessary to get other business.
Paul Robertson, who leads the Medici Quartet, reports growing demand from doctors and businessmen for his lectures on music and the mind.
Frans Johansson, the bestselling author of the Medici Effect and his new book, The Click Moment, proved to be an entertaining and inspiring speaker.
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He does so, partly to record that the decline and eventual collapse of the Medici bank had little impact on the banking system as a whole.
"Bust of Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent, " on loan from the Silver Museum, is a 16th-century agate-and-gold cameo celebrating his role as an art patron.
WSJ: Museum Exhibit Review: Gems of the Medici at the Bowers Museum
It's the only place in the world where you can sit in Lorenzo de' Medici's chair, watch the sun set over the Fiesole hill and talk about seagulls.
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" The Christian Science Monitor called Scull a "modern Medici.
But Lopez has also been somewhat of a Mexican Medici.
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For example, he has a revisionist view of the Medici, stubbornly refusing to eulogise Cosimo or Lorenzo de' Medici, the conventional heroes of popular histories of Renaissance Florence.
Dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici, the book draws on examples from history, of Alexander the Great and of the German city states, to teach its readers some eternal lessons.
Florence was a wealthy medieval city that became the birthplace of the Renaissance, fostered by patrons like the Medici family and flowered by artists such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Botticelli and Brunelleschi.
And that's no mean feat in the city of Guelphs and Ghibellines, Niccolo Machiavelli and Lorenzo de' Medici, a place where the present is often weighed against a glorious and bloody past.
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So successful was the bank that under Cosimo de' Medici, who ruled it with an iron rod, the Medici were for a long while put in charge of papal finances.
During the Renaissance, intaglios, like the carnelian-and-gold "Bust of Girolamo Savonarola, " the Medici critic notorious for the "burning of the books, the bonfires of the vanities, " embellished clothing and decorative objects.
WSJ: Museum Exhibit Review: Gems of the Medici at the Bowers Museum
Evidence suggests that the item was looted in Italy and passed through the hands of Giacomo Medici, an Italian antiquities dealer convicted in 2004 for receiving stolen goods, illegally exporting goods and conspiring to traffic.
That took place some years after her death when France's Henry IV ordered them for his wife, Maria de' Medici, Caterina's distant cousin who was to become the last Florentine queen of France.
Fra Angelico's best-known work is his series of frescoes at San Marco in Florence, the Dominican convent from which he ventured forth under the aegis of his patron and friend, Cosimo de' Medici.
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Isabelle Adjani plays Margot, the suspiciously close sister of the King of France (Jean-Hugues Anglade), the daughter of Catherine de Medici (an iron-willed Virna Lisi), and the unwilling wife of Henri of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil).
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