Honor Clerk

How to avoid bankers in your nativity scene

Evil figures may lurk in your arty Christmas cards, as Alexander Lee's The Ugly Renaissance shows

The Florentine banking aristocracy worship the Christ-child in Botticelli’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’.On either side the scene is stacked with Medici sons, grandsons and associates. Credit: The Bridgeman Art Library 
issue 19 October 2013

  • The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Disease and Excess in an Age of Beauty

    Alexander Lee

    Hutchinson, pp. 592

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