Our French compatriots in Renaissance studies have produced many excellent translations and editions of classic, though sometimes overlooked, examples of sixteenth-century Italian genius. Béatrice Charlet-Mesdjian’s book is yet another example. It is attractively presented with a number of plates that add immeasurably to Tito Vespasiano (T. V.) Strozzi’s original Latin poetry and prose, and to Charlet-Mesdjian’s elegant French translations that appear on facing pages to the carefully edited Latin. While its readership will be necessarily limited to those who know Latin and/or French, I have no doubt that scholars who specialize in Renaissance Latinate courtly poetry will find this edition to be of serious interest, not only because Strozzi was a very fine poet indeed, but also because the editor provides extensive commentary on his works. As a fellow Strozzi family specialist, it gives me great pleasure to be able to recommend this book without reservation. In time, I hope that an anglophone scholar might set his or her hand to making more of T. V. Strozzi’s works available in English, because I imagine that his poetry would also be of real interest to colleagues whose specialties are focused on theory and criticism. Charlet-Mesdjian’s book certainly opens windows onto the vistas over which those disciplines tower.

Frustratingly, however, for those of us who study the Strozzi family’s many economic and cultural contributions to the Renaissance, it is a fact that they simply aren’t that well known outside of a rather compact scholarly circle. While the bibliography dedicated to the Strozzi consists of works written by influential academic minds (my own notwithstanding), it is miniscule when one compares it with the mountain of scholarship focused on other Renaissance nobility. This discrepancy exposes what I believe to be a long-standing and ever-increasing problem with our field, a problem that might be traced to the often intentional shadow-seeking obscurity that seems to be linked, in the Strozzi’s case, with their 1434 exile from Florence at the hands of the Medici. As scholars of the Renaissance, we have often fallen under the sway of the princes and the geniuses who dominated our era, neglecting individuals whose contributions were as essential, but not as crystalline.

Charlet-Mesdjian’s book underscores my growing unease. For example, in the years before, but especially following their expulsion, the Strozzi scattered across the Italian Peninsula and eventually to their bank branches in the Low Countries and Northern Europe. The wealth they acquired was stupendous, equaling that of the Medicis, though it was spent, with the exception of the family’s grand palace and chapel in Florence, more carefully and less ostentatiously. The Strozzi exile of 1434 made the Strozzi men, with one or perhaps two exceptions, prefer to be courtiers and advisers rather than would-be princes. Put another way, the Strozzi men almost always remained close to those who wielded power, but they rarely directly wielded power themselves.

T. V. Strozzi survived and thrived in the storm-tossed seas of the court of Ferrara, leaving a legacy far more monochromatic than his D’Este masters. Yet, Strozzi, and families like his, were the ones who helped their governments function smoothly; they provided the real noble legitimacy and the refined gentlemanly cunning that was necessary for the survival of their princes, bridging the gaps between the court, the nobility, and the people. This wasn’t flashy work, and it remains less attractive to contemporary historians. If our discipline is to survive the present global political crisis it needs to focus not only on the heroes who have defined the Renaissance since the time of Vasari, but also on the community of lesser humanists, artists, and politicians who helped to create the environment that allowed for Italy’s many cultures to blossom, even as the peninsula was ransacked and humiliated by foreign oppressors.

In this paradigm, T. V. Strozzi is very important. He was an exile, yet he worked his way with grace, courtesy, and keen intelligence into the D’Este court where he was promoted to the highest levels. For entertainment, he turned to writing verse and prose. Charlet-Mesdjian thus presents Strozzi’s Book of Satires and Against the Wicked Wolf: lighthearted works that also manage to possess an appropriate Florentine seriousness, each prefaced with excellent historical summaries and ample notes. Following Charlet-Mesdjian’s lead, let’s look in the shadows.