'The Family Medici' vividly and clearly tells the story of one clan's merciless self-aggrandizement

Renaissance scholar Mary Hollingsworth's new book The Family Medici promises in its subtitle “the hidden history of the Medici Dynasty,” which is part publisher-jargon (every book-season is so full of “hidden” histories that the unsuspecting shopper might legitimately wonder what pre-2018 historians did all day long) but also in a strange way part archival – even traditional.

For centuries – indeed, since the Medici first rose to prominence in Florence and started building their enormous, gaudy palazzo in with their boorish habits and their pretensions to dictatorship. And the crux of all this anti-Medici pamphleteering, then as now, was something called “the Medici myth”: the illusion, carefully created and fostered by the Medici themselves, that they were as interested in philanthropy as they were in mercenary arms deals or end-runs around representative government, and the head of their household, be it Cosimo or Piero or Lorenzo the self-dubbed Magnificent, was merely , just a humble citizen trying to raise his family and conduct some business, and never you mind any sordid rumors to the contrary.