La finzione della vita, la verità del mito: una lettura della Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) di William Roscoe

In 1795, publisher John M’Creery printed in Liverpool The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici called The Magnificent. A huge editorial success, it was written by William Roscoe, a quite gifted figure, who dedicated himself equally to his legal profession and passion for literature, philanthropy and art collecting. This essay aims at providing a close reading of his celebrated Medicean biography, pointing out the fundamental role it played in the creation of the Florentine Renaissance myth. Deconstructing Roscoe’s idealization of Lorenzo’s personality will not only allow to highlight a transitional stage in the European historiographical tradition, between the end of the Ancien Régime and the birth of liberal states, but also to observe from within the tricks employed in writing a biography, an ambiguous genre always suspended between history and fiction.