Patrons And Artists In The Italian Renaissance

Clerical patronage - Guild patronage - Civic patronage - Princely and private patronage - Letters of artists & patrons.

An analysis of Italian Renaissance art from the perspective of the patrons who made 'conspicuous commissions', this text builds on three concepts from the economics of information - signaling, signposting, and stretching - to develop a systematic methodology for assessing the meaning of patronage.

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.

"Art, Power, and Patronage in Renaissance Italy has a freshness and breadth of approach that sets the art in its context, exploring why it was created and who commissioned the palaces, cathedrals, paintings, and sculptures. For, as the authors claim, Italian Renaissance artists were no more solitary geniuses than are most architects and commercial artists today." "This book covers not only the foremost artistic centers of Rome and Florence. Here too are Venice and the Veneto, Assisi, Siena, Milan, Pavia, Genoa, Padua, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples - each city revealing unique political and social structures that influenced its artistic styles." "The book includes genealogies of influential families, listings of popes and doges, plans of cities, a time chart, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index."--BOOK JACKET.

The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This is the first comprehensive study of patrons in the Italian quattrocento. It will be of great interest to art historians and their students and to lovers of Renaissance art and civilization. At the start of the fifteenth century the patron, not the artist, was seen as the creator and he carefully controlled both subject and medium. In a competitive and voilent age, image and ostentation were essential statements of power. Buildings, bronze or tapestry were much more eloquent statements than the cheaper marble or fresco. The artistic quality that concerns us was less important than perceived cost. The arts in any case were just part of a pattern of conspicuous expenditure which would have included for instance holy relics, manuscripts and jewels - all of which had the added advantage that they were portable and could be used as collateral for bank loans. Since Christian teaching frowned on wealth and power, money had also to be spent on religious endowments made in expiation. But here too the patron was in control, and used the arts and other means to express religious belief, not aesthetic sensibility. Thus artists in the Early Renaissance were employed as craftsmen. Only late in the century did their relations with patrons start to adopt a pattern we might recognize today. This book, which also discusses the important differences between mercantile republics like Florence and Venice, the princely states such as Naples and Milan, and the papal court in Rome, is essential for a full understanding of why the works of this seminal period take the forms they do. --inside cover.