Book review: Isabella De' Medici
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5:00AM
Friday April 04, 2008
By Peter Conrad
Isabella De' Medici: The glorious life and tragic end of a renassance princess
By Caroline P Murphy
Faber
The spendthrift hedonism, venality and corporate skulduggery of our own times are all on view in this biography of Isabella de' Medici, a stubbornly independent princess whose private vices bestowed public benefits on 16th-century Florence.
Like the party girls who became royal consorts in Britain in the 1980s, Isabella lived for pleasure. But instead of frittering away her funds on clothes, gym subscriptions and colonic irrigations, she acted as a patron and muse for poets and painters, and even convened seminars at which grammarians debated the niceties of the Tuscan dialect.
Like Princess Diana or Fergie, Isabella also laundered her image by showily playing Lady Bountiful. To persuade the citizenry that she was more than an adulterous floozy, she perambulated through Florence at night rattling a collecting box for charity. The nocturnal sortie was as shrewd a "public-relations exercise", in Murphy's telling phrase, as Diana's visits to Aids hospices or her tiptoeing forays into African minefields.
