Art Patronage Family And Gender In Renaissance Florence

This book examines a Renaissance Florentine family's art patronage, even for women, inspired by literature, music, love, loss, and religion.

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de? Medici?s impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman?s contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family?s domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi?s Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi?s painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de? Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women?s agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

"Sixteen essays by an international group of scholars that examine the role of noble women as patrons of architecture and music in early modern Italy and that explore the behavior of woman art patrons and artists involved in the creation of art and architecture"--

Louise Bourdua examines how Franciscan church decoration developed between 1250 and 1400 by focusing on three important churches. She argues that local Franciscan friars were more interested in their personal conception of artistic programs than following models of decoration issued officially from the mother church at Assisi. Lay patrons also had considerable input into the decoration programs. Bourdua demonstrates how archival documentation and art can be combined to extend our understanding of the Franciscan art programs.

Art, Memory and Family in Renaissance Florence examines the relationship between the production of objects and the production of memory and history in fifteenth-century Florence. Recent studies of Florence by cultural, social, political and economic historians have resulted in a considerable knowledge of family life in this period and the significance of family, kin and neighborhood in the social and political life of the city. Investigating the means and modes of formulating and recording those relationships, the essays gathered in this study consider the interconnections among society, art and memory.

Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. This collection examines the role it played in the Italian Renaissance, focusing particularly upon Florence. Traditionally viewed simply as the context for the extraordinary artistic creativity of the Renaissance, patronage has more recently been examined by historians as a comprehensive system of patron-client structures which permeated society and social relations. The scattered research so far done on this broader concept of patronage is drawn together and extended in thi.

Randolph shows how "engaging" political symbols were grounded in a revolutionary way in amorous discourses that drew on metaphors of affection, desire, courtship, betrothal, marriage, homo- and hetero-eroticism, and procreation."--BOOK JACKET.