With this well-produced book, Alick McLean provides a much-needed study of the urban development and architectural history of the key institutional buildings of one of Tuscany's lesser-known city-states. Between 1351 and 1992 Prato was under the administrative control of its nearby neighbor, Florence; this is perhaps the main reason why this interesting small city has been so easily overlooked as a marginal dependent in the hinterland of that paradigmatic central Italian city. The author's strategy for dealing with the overbearing presence of Florence is to make a strength out of a weakness. In the preface, McLean speaks of the “typicalness” of Prato (viii), identifying it as broadly representative of a swath of similarly diminutive city-states of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and suggesting that the in-depth study of one will offer a comparative frame for a better understanding of the others. Another ambition of the book is to trace a...
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June 2011
Book Review|
June 01 2011
Review: Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State by Alick M. McLean
Alick M.
McLean
Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State
. New Haven and London
: Yale University Press
, 2009
, 250
pp., 35 color and 98 b/w illus. $65, ISBN
9780300137149
Fabrizio Nevola
Fabrizio Nevola
University of Bath
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2011) 70 (2): 261–262.
Citation
Fabrizio Nevola; Review: Prato: Architecture, Piety, and Political Identity in a Tuscan City-State by Alick M. McLean. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2011; 70 (2): 261–262. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2011.70.2.261
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