Between history and art history: Roscoe’s Medici Lives

Abstract

The identification of Italian Renaissance was thought to begin with Jacob Burckhardt's Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italian first published in 1860, at one stage. The Renaissance circulated earlier, emerging from the culture of the Grand Tour rather than disappearing between Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century and re-emerging with Michelet in the nineteenth, and that Florence and the Medici were identified as central to the phenomenon. William Roscoe was aware of the reshaping of Florentine political history which took place when the Medici had attained 'supreme command', which he dated to the fifteenth century. Lorenzo is represented as a statesman on the Florentine stage. Earlier in his biography, Roscoe accepts that Lorenzo took a tough line towards the city of Volterra, which had rebelled against Florentine rule in 1472, and he acknowledges the negative opinion of his hero found in the chronicle of Raffaello da Volterra. Even in terms of political history alone, Roscoe is of considerable historiographical interest.