Lauro Martines
Biography
Lauro Martines was born in Chicago on November 22, 1927 and served in the US Army from 1945 to 1947. He was educated in the Humanities at Harvard and received his Ph.D from there in 1960. He would go on to become a leading historian of Renaissance Florence, but his decision to specialize in that field of study (he tells us) resulted from a chance encounter. On a visit to Florence his friend Gene Brucker, then beginning his career as a historian of Florence at UC Berkeley, introduced him to the city’s vast archives. After several months of study there Lauro decided he would devote his career to the history of Florence during the Renaissance.
Lauro joined the History Department at UCLA in 1966 after teaching at Reed College and would remain our colleague until he retired in 1992. He taught lecture-courses on Renaissance Italy and England, together with graduate and undergraduate seminars on various topics.
Lauro’s two studies of the Florentine Renaissance broke new ground. In The Social World of the Florentine Humanists 1390-1460 (1963; reprint 2011), and Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (1968), he explored a fundamental historical problem: the relationship between power and culture. This question would also form the theme of his general study of Renaissance Italy, Power and Imagination (1979). In these works, grounded in painstaking archival research, he studied the intellectuals who lent such distinction to the culture of Renaissance Florence not as isolated figures but in their social and political context. For Lauro, they were not simply philosophers and philologists operating in the rarefied realm of high culture, or in the study and practice of the law. He showed that they were active participants in the conflicted political life of their city, through the critical period as the ruling oligarchy contracted and the Medici family established their ascendancy.
Florence’s political life was turbulent. In a pair of studies published after his retirement Lauro examined two crucial episodes in the conflict between families and factions. The first of these was April Blood. Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (2003), which described the failed conspiracy mounted against the Medici by their powerful rivals, the Pazzi family, in 1478. He followed it with Scourge and Fire. Savonarola and Renaissance Florence (2006), a study of the fall of the charismatic friar who led a religious revival in Florence and dominated the city for four years between 1494 and 1498.
Lauro’s interests however extended into other areas and periods beyond Renaissance Florence. In 1973 he co-edited, with his wife Julia O’Faolain, Not in God’s Image, a historical anthology of feminist texts. And he returned to the literary studies in which he was originally trained, first in Society and History in English Renaissance Verse (1985). In a subsequent work, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance (2001), he would combine literary analysis with his deep knowledge of the society and culture of Renaissance Italy. He used a variety of literary texts to explore how people experienced extreme emotions–anger, desire, hatred. He followed this work with another literary study, An Italian Renaissance Sextet: Six Tales in their Historical Context (2004) where he analyzes short works by different authors for the range of feelings they depict and their connection to the social mores by which they lived.
Lauro’s last two works represent a complete departure from everything he had written before, attesting to the unflagging creativity and tireless curiosity that had distinguished his entire career. Furies: War in Europe, 1450-1700 (2013) chronicles the savagery of warfare in post-Reformation Europe as monarchies contended for supremacy and state institutions grew more powerful in response to the imperatives of war. In complete contrast, his very last work is a novel, Chronicle of a Good-Looking Family (2022), in which he recounts the vicissitudes of an imagined family in the Florence he had first known in the middle of the last century.
Geoffrey Symcox
July 2026
