Changing Patrons
Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

By Jill Burke

May | 2004 | 7 x 10
296 pages | 63 illustrations

Art History, Art and Art History, Art Other

Hardback: $58.00 SH
ISBN: 978-0-271-02362-5

ÓProbing, concise and grounded in extensive research, Jill Burke´s Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence is a major study in the current vein. . . . Drawing continually on archival documents, Burke does a masterly job of tracking the ascent of her two families, particularly as seen in the fortunes of heir palazzi and religious commissions. Seldom have the ties between social identities and art of display objects been so convincingly shownî —Lauro Martines, Times Literary Supplement

"No one writing about Florentine and Italian art history will be able to ignore this elegant and probing book." —F. W. Kent, Director, Monash University at Prato

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. 

Contents

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

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. .