The picture drawn in the preceding pages has highlighted the numerous and thorny problems that characterized the history of Florence in the last decades of the fourteenth and the first decades of the fifteenth centuries. Some readers, accustomed to the celebratory and rosy accounts of the Florentine Renaissance may indeed take exception at the tone and contents of this description. One could argue with some justification that important elements of early fifteenth-century culture are missing from the present account: Where are the almost obligatory references to the age’s much vaunted individualism? Where to the history of capitalism, which as we all know, had one of its early homes in Florence? Where to the artistic genius and the social infrastructures that nourished and made Florence blossom in such astounding outbursts of creativity and originality?
