House of Medici

Within about 40 years the Medici Bank was able to procure so much wealth and profit that it was economically equal with the Florentine treasury. Risks were taken to obtain as much profit as possible. Loans were given out to princes, kings, and even the hard working merchant. Everything was done for the money. The Medici Bank and family were the icons of Florence and the model standard when it came to wealth and power, they became the silent rulers of their hometown after the realization that…

This first report is on pages up to 115 out of 479, or Part I. Youth and Humility, of Catherine de’ Medici by Jean Heritier. Catherine de’ Medici was born in Florence, Italy on April 13th 1519. Her family was the ruling power in Florence at the time because of their successful banking business. Both of her parents died within a month of her birth, and at age nine she was sent to live in a convent until she was ready to marry. When she was 14, her great-uncle Pope Clement VII arranged to marry…

London branch of the Medici Bank would be helpful. “A merchant would borrow 1000 florins (Florence’s currency) from Giovanni’s Florentine branch where the exchange rate is 40 pence (England’s currency) per florin. With that money, the merchant buys goods in Italy that he knows are in high demand in London. Upon arriving in London, he sells his goods and receives English pence. He is now prepared to pay back his debt of 40,000 pence, pocketing any excess he made as profit. The Medici branch in…

table support (Marble Trapezophoros). It was used as one end of the table to support the heavy upper. It was used in the late republican period which was around the 1st century B.C. this relates to our daily lives because everyone has a table in there house to eat around and share a meal with your family. This shows that traditions being pasted down. As I continued my findings, a nude sculpture of Aphrodite caught my eyes. The time period it from is the Roman, Imperial between 1st and 2nd…

While Gombrich and Dempsey discussed the Primavera in relation to the Villa Castello, Smith has argued that the Medici inventories and other recent scholarship has found no real proof that the Primavera, The Birth of Venus and Minerva and the Centaur were displayed there. Instead, he claims, that original location of these works was in fact Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s house in Florence. In going back to the original sources and analysing further this information, Smith has attempted to provide…

outcome of the art that was now being made during the Renaissance. No family exemplifies this better than the Medici's of Florence. Essentially a wealthy Florentine banking family, their house and family contributed greatly to this Age of Enlightenment. Other that being admirers of the arts, what benefit could the Medici family gain from such patronage? Commissioning grand works of art held multiple benefits for the patron, it could enhance their family's status from a spiritual, and nobility…

from society which had an impact on the art that was created. One artist in particular who dealt with these ideologies was Alessandro Botticelli. Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance who worked under the advocacy of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In his years of working as an artist he has created two paintings which reflects the embodiment of womanly beauty known as Birth of Venus, c. 1484-86 and Primavera, c.1482. Botticelli was a master ahead of his time. He exceptionally captured…

The Big Move After what felt like a lifetime of planning, our family was finally making the big move from New York to Texas. The house we lived in was my childhood home and my husband and I shared it for fifteen years together. This was not going to be an easy task. Our first hurdle was preparing for this huge adventure. Secondly, we needed to drive both cars down. That meant that we would not have the other person to take over driving when our eyelids became as heavy as weights over our…

always go to relax and get the stress of my mind, and that would be my humble abode, my home. Because I walked to school on a regular basis, I always knew where to go, even during the renovations. I mean, I could never miss the area, a light blue house right across the street from a Kraft factory. The front yard had a very large pine tree in the front yard, the bottom half full of life and the top bared to nothing but twigs and death. The front porch was white…

This selection was written to describe the conditions of tenement houses, overcrowded slums that filled New York City during the late 1900’s. The first sentence of this selection states, “The first tenement New York knew bore the mark of Cain from its birth, though a generation passed before the writing was deciphered.” The author means that tenement houses were “cursed,” or were terrible creations from the very beginning, but this was ignored and not tended to…