Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Transcriptions and Translations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Families, Neighbors, and Friends
• 1 Family Self-Fashioning
• 2 Private Wealth and Public Benefit: The Nasi and Del Pugliese Palaces
• 3 Family, Church, Community: The Appearance of Power in Santo Spirito
• 4 Patronage and the Art of Friendship: Piero del Pugliese's Patronage of Filippino Lippi
• Part II The Individual, the Family, and the Church
• 5 Patronage Rights and Wrongs: Building Identity at Santa Maria a Lecceto
• 6 Framing Patronage: Beauty and Order at the Church of the Innocenti
• 7 Differing Visions: Image and Audience in the Florentine Church
• Part III Identity and Change
• 8 Painted Prayers: Savonarola and the Audience of Images
• Conclusions and Questions
• Appendix
• Nasi Family Tree
• Del Pugliese Family Tree
• Unpublished Documents
• Poems Written
• About the Portrait of Piero del Pugliese by Filippino Lippi
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This ambitious study of patronage in Renaissance Florence by Burke (Univ. of Edinburgh) makes valuable and original contributions to several fields of inquiry. Ostensibly focused on the dynamics of patronage of the Nasi and Del Pugliese families, both from the quarter of Santo Spirito, the book is really a broader discussion of the relationship between material culture and social identity. Burke's judicious use of documents, strong emphasis on historiography, and fine attention to recent scholarship in both art history and social history give this book true interdisciplinary appeal. Particularly valuable are the previously unpublished documents in the appendixes and the extensive bibliography. The rich, wide-ranging text weaves in artists such as Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, themes such as family palaces and the influence of Savonarola on art, and sites of patronage such as Santo Spirito and the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence as well as S. Maria a Leccetto and the Chapel of Sant'Andrea in Sommaia. Such varied themes lead to many unanticipated gems of insight, while the text's academic and discursive nature makes it most suitable for researchers rather than the general reader. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. A. V. Coonin Rhodes College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jill Burke is AHRB Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Art History Department, University of Edinburgh. In 2000-2001, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.