Review: Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State by Alick M. McLean

Abstract

Alick M. McLean Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009, 250 pp., 35 color and 98 b/w illus. $65, ISBN 9780300137149 With this well-produced book, Alick McLean provides a much-needed study of the urban development and architectural history of the key institutional buildings of one of Tuscany's lesser-known city-states. Between 1351 and 1992 Prato was under the administrative control of its nearby neighbor, Florence; this is perhaps the main reason why this interesting small city has been so easily overlooked as a marginal dependent in the hinterland of that paradigmatic central Italian city. The author's strategy for dealing with the overbearing presence of Florence is to make a strength out of a weakness. In the preface, McLean speaks of the “typicalness” of Prato (viii), identifying it as broadly representative of a swath of similarly diminutive city-states of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and suggesting that the in-depth study of one will offer a comparative frame for a better understanding of the others. Another ambition of the book is to trace a long history of Prato's urban development from the first documentary references at the end of the tenth century to its subjection to Florence in 1351. While the latter objective is carefully achieved through the chronological sequencing of chapters that chronicle the phases of development in relation to changing institutional arrangements, the former is rather forgotten, as McLean seems rather to overlook comparisons to other “centri minori” in favor of a predominance of Florentine referencing. Set within the fertile Arno valley and upon the …