Guardians of Republicanism: The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance

[...]Niccolo''s nephew Bartolomeo (Francesco's brother's grandson, not Francesco's brother, as inadvertently stated [148, 150]) was a Medici partisan, one of the thugs who threatened Piero Soderini into exile in 1512, commissioner-general of Pope Clement's armies during the siege of 1529-30 against the last republic, and one of the Twelve Reformers who terminated the republic in 1532. Yet the underlying ambivalence of Valori collective memory is reflected in writings commissioned or influenced by Baccio from the court historian Scipione Ammirato, who expunged republicanism from the Valori past and turned Francesco and Bartolomeo into cautionary tales against the dangers of populism and personal ambition, and from the neo-Savonarolan Dominican Silvano Razzi, whose life of Francesco defended his alliance with Savonarola as proof of republican loyalties (chapter 6). Jurdjevic further takes issue with what he calls the ''emerging consensus that Renaissance republicanism, particularly as articulated and conceptualized by humanists, was static, conservative, and essentially concerned with protecting and reinforcing the status quo'' and with those who believe ''that the republican theorists of the Renaissance idealized citizenship in terms of obedience and loyalty'' and ''benevolent paternalism'' (171). (Because Jurdjevic associates the present reviewer with this opinion, I need to clarify that it is early fifteenth-century civic humanism, not ''Renaissance republicanism'' or ''republican theorists,'' that I have interpreted in these terms.) I can agree with Jurdjevic that the history of the Valori shows that ''a humanist-inflected political language appealed as much to those hungering for political change as it did to those shoring up support for existing regimes'' (173).