Foreword and Acknowledgments

Rubin, Patricia Lee

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Foreword and Acknowledgments

Patricia Lee Rubin

Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Book IX of Benedetto Varchi's History of Florence contains a “digression” from the ordered narration of political events. In it he describes the city and its customs as they were in the recent past – still a living memory, but one to be recorded for posterity. This is perhaps the first social history of Florence, although the association of the greatness of the city with the condition of its citizens and the grandeur of its monuments had a tradition in the social commentary of its …

Author

Patricia Lee Rubin

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00066.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14409

Foreword and Acknowledgments

Book IX of Benedetto Varchi's History of Florence contains a “digression” from the ordered narration of political events.1 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. Arbib, II, pp. 56–130, p. 56: “mi pare non meno utile che necessario, di dover fare in questo luogo una, come dicevano gli antichi nostri, incidenza, cioè digressione.” In it he describes the city and its customs as they were in the recent past — still a living memory, but one to be recorded for posterity. This is perhaps the first social history of Florence, although the association of the greatness of the city with the condition of its citizens and the grandeur of its monuments had a tradition in the social commentary of its chroniclers, which can be traced at least as far as the fourteenth-century Cronica by Giovanni Villani.

Varchi’s careful observation of the way things were is an interlude in his account of the dramatic events of 1527–9: from the Medici expulsion to the siege of the city by the imperial forces. This pause marks the transition from republic to duchy. The city capitulated in August 1530 and Alessandro de’ Medici returned as its ruler. Varchi’s passage has a pendant in the history of the arts in an addition that Giorgio Vasari made to the second, 1568, edition of his Lives of the Artists. In the Life of the early fifteenth-century painter Dello Delli, Vasari similarly digressed on the subject of past habits. He tells how the citizens of Dello’s times “used to have in their apartments great wooden chests,” which were painted, as “were also the daybeds, the spalliere, and the surrounding moldings.”2 Vasari, Le vite, ed. Bettarini and Barocchi, III, pp. 37–8: “usandosi in que’ tempi per le camere de’ cittadini cassoni grandi di legname … niuno era che i detti cassoni non facesse dipignere . . . e che è più, si dipignevano in cotal maniera non solamente i cassoni, ma i lettucci, le spalliere, le cornici che ricignevano intorno.” Described as relics, they were still to be found “in all the most noble houses of Florence” despite their outdated look, for there were some who “out of attachment to those old-fashioned customs, which are truly magnificent and most honorable, have not displaced such things in favor of modern ornaments and usages.”3 Ibid., p. 38: “Delle quali cose se ne veggiono . . . in tutte le più nobili case di Firenze ancora alcune reliquie. E ci sono alcuni che attenendosi a quelle usanze vecchie, magnifiche veramente et orrevolissime, non hanno sì fatte cose levate per dar luogo agl’ornamenti et usanze moderne.” Vasari’s careful recollection of these “old-fashioned” decorations, like Varchi’s recording of outmoded clothes, is consciously and conscientiously antiquarian. Both authors evoke a past and create a tradition to be valued but also to be accepted as superseded, separating old (republican) Florence from the modern ducal state of their ruler and patron, Cosimo I.

Varchi acknowledged that these things might seem too familiar or too trivial to be recorded, and that they did not in themselves bring glory to the writer. But he deemed knowledge of these details to be necessary to the understanding of the rest of his history. He noted that with time they would become unknown and that “nothing is so small in a great republic” as to be unworthy of notice.4 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. Arbib, 11, p. 56: “niuna cosa è tanto piccola in una repubblica grande, della quale, solo che possa ad alcuna cosa o giovare, o dilettare, non si debbia conto tenere.”

The history of things taken for granted is indeed difficult to retrieve, particularly as the chief purpose of historical writing, as Varchi implies, has often been defined as the story of states and statesmen. Florentine historiography favors such research, however, with its tendency to connect manners with civic memory. Florentine history has also favored such research because its public and private archives have been extensively preserved. Owing to a respect for records, institutionalized in a central state archive by Duke Leopold II in 1852, the material for the reconstruction of the social constitution of Florence is relatively abundant and remarkably intact.

Duke Leopold’s express wish of encouraging historical studies has been fulfilled. The documentary resources of the Archivio di Stato have been thoroughly mined, although they are far from exhausted. One component of the fascination of Florence as a historical subject is the accessibility of its past, which has allowed it to be revisited and reinterpreted according to the varied aims and interests of its historians. For some the development of its political, institutional, and social structures from the establishment of the commune in the late thirteenth century to that of the duchy in the sixteenth marks the beginning of the modern state, its bureaucracy, and its family organization. For others these are seen as representative of a distant culture, whose relevance is not in providing direct precedents but in demonstrating both continuities and discontinuities in social behavior. The study of the Florentine past allows for the observation, if not the explanation, of political processes and transformations, and for posing questions relating to the nature of historical categorization. What is medieval, late medieval, Renaissance, or modern in a state, its politics, its economy, and its social composition?

It is not my purpose to trace the genealogy of Florentine studies, nor to expose the ideological underpinnings of the resulting research. Insight into these matters can be found in the articles by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (“La nuova storia sociale di Firenze,” Studi storici [1985]), Edward Muir (“The Italian Renaissance in America,” The American Historical Review [1995]), John Najemy (“Linguaggi storiografici sulla Firenze rinascimentale,” Rivista storica italiana [1985]), Randolph Starn (“Florentine Renaissance Studies,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance [1970]), in Gene Brucker’s introduction to his book on The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence and his chapter on “Florence Redux” in his anthology, Living on the Edge in Leonardo’s Florence, and in William Connell’s introduction to the essays dedicated to Brucker, Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence. My own substantial debts to individual authors are declared, if hardly repaid, below and in the Bibliographic Notes to each chapter. I confess at the outset that an unabashed element of exploitation lies at the heart of the project, as one of my principal aims is to take advantage of the rich findings of recent historical scholarship in order to enrich the art-historical understanding of the period.

In so doing I proudly admit to being one among a number of art historians interested in examining the ways that form, style, and subject matter might be related to specific social, political, and institutional contexts. Works such as Diane Zervas’s book The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello, Megan Holmes’s Fra Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter, William Hood’s Fra Angelico at San Marco, and Adrian Randolph’s Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-century Florence, for instance, demonstrate the subtle interplay of forces behind what Hood has called the “finely shaded visual codes” characteristic of fifteenth-century Florence.5 Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, p. ix. How such codes operated in the private sphere has been suggested, for example, by Cristelle Baskins, Anne Barriault, Kent Lydecker, and Jacqueline Musacchio in their respective studies: Cassone Painting, Humanism and Gender in Early Modern Italy; “Spalliera” Paintings of Renaissance Tuscany; “The Domestic Setting of the Arts in Renaissance Florence”; and The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy. These writers, along with Luke Syson and Dora Thornton in their book Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, have also profitably challenged the restrictive boundaries of “fine” and “decorative” as categories for the arts, showing the major importance of objects traditionally classed as “minor.” The citations in the Bibliographic Notes not only support or enlarge the points made in each chapter, but indicate how the issues addressed are of vital concern to the discipline of art history.

This book is about the social dynamics of the visual. Dealing with ways of looking, it also shows how different modes of viewing can influence the way things look. Its central conviction is that images served to articulate the identities of fifteenth-century Florentines as instruments of social definition and of cultural expression. The extraordinary volume of exceptionally high-quality objects demanded by Florentines can be explained by the fact that they were required to satisfy important needs and to manifest important bonds and attitudes. That they should be beautiful and decorative was essential, not incidental, to their meaning.

Because of their beauty, the paintings and sculptures of fifteenth-century Florence are now appreciated as works of art. Although justified, the terms of such admiration are anachronistic and their distorting power should be recognized. “Art” as such did not exist in the fifteenth century. The “arts” — or arti — were the guilds. Art or arte was understood as the skill or the range of skills or techniques exercised by masters of different professions. Painters, sculptors, and builders were craftsmen operating within the guild system as artisans. Their production, however highly prized it might have been for qualities of invention and design, was functional and was most appreciated for its suitability to its purpose. The person paying for the work or “having it made” was as likely to be considered its “maker” as was the craftsman responsible for its manufacture. To discuss things as works of art is to set them in a value system that removes them from the circumstances of their crafting and their original placement. It mistakes why they were requested and how they were handled and viewed. It imposes a misleading modernity on artisans and artifacts. It also tends to set both in a fixed scheme of stylistic development, which can obscure the variety and the nuances of forms in the period.

This is not to deny transformations over time. One of the striking features of the fifteenth century is the amount of change in the visual arts. One of the reasons for studying the century is to note how and why such changes occur. What forces stimulated and what conventions controlled the ambitions of the craftsmen we now call artists? What were the elements of continuity? In his Life of the painter Pietro Perugino, Giorgio Vasari long ago provided a vivid description of what were then seen as the special features of Florence that inspired its craftsmen to perfect their skills. He recalled a ruthlessly competitive atmosphere fuelled by constant criticism, a high regard for quality, a limited marketplace, and personal ambition.6 Vasari, Le vite, ed. Bettarini and Barocchi, III, pp. 597–8. He remarked on the independent nature of Florentines, which made them intolerant of mediocrity while concerned for the honor connected with good and beautiful works irrespective of their makers. This explanation merits further attention. What factors allowed for this independence? How were expressions of individual interest balanced against the maintenance of corporate or civic stability? How was the individual defined or allowed to be defined within the containing structures of state and family? Whose honor was being advanced and what were the criteria to determine beauty and goodness?

Predictably, in gross terms, the majority of works were produced for the rich and powerful: those who had the means to pay for them and to command or to negotiate their positioning in significant spaces. Equally predictably there is a close connection between imagery and ideology. Images and objects could project and, it was hoped, in their permanence, protect the ideals of the Florentine patriciate. At times this was an intimate self-mirroring, as in the portraits, painted furniture, devotional objects, and precious items that decorated domestic settings, where they could be seen as a form of internal coding of class consciousness. At other times these interests could be represented more publicly: for example as ecclesiastical endowments of altars, chapels, and funerary monuments. They could also be expressed corporately or officially in commissions from the Florentine state, guilds, or confraternities. The cultural messages of such commissions could be addressed to a much wider audience, however, publicizing or reinforcing the values held to be the sources of social order and civic honor.

The dominant members of Florentine society dominated the imagery of that society, but they did not completely monopolize it either as owners or as spectators. While the history of the visual arts in the period can plausibly be written as a history of the elite, it need not be written entirely from its point of view. Even within the elite that viewpoint was variable and could depend upon age, status, and gender. But such a history should not neglect the (active and passive) ways that the less affluent and less influential might have engaged with images. It should recognize the mechanisms of their inclusion and the meanings of their exclusion. It should observe the way that even the most exalted among the imaginary population of Florence, the Virgin Mary herself as depicted on devotional panels or altarpieces, for instance, could become the daily companion of the most humble resident of the city. Nor should it forget that the artisans who gave form to the aspirations of the ruling group did not belong to that group: and that those forms were informed by a social dynamic between unequal partners.

What follows is not a social history of the arts in fifteenth-century Florence, but a series of essays whose purpose is to locate the visual arts in the society of that time and place. They embrace definitions of seeing as well as a discussion of the things made to be seen. Although much is surveyed, neither a single story nor a complete one is attempted. My approach has been to balance the analysis of some general trends and major categories of images and modes of viewing against detailed studies of selected cases. A delicate equilibrium — or tension — between protagonists and patterns, characters and conventions is one that emerges from the period itself. Here underlying mechanisms are examined along with specific instances of their operation and their results. My intention is not to produce an exhaustive reading of the imagery of a century; it is to provide keys to further and future readings.

The first section of this book, “Moral Imperatives and Material Considerations,” looks at some of the notions of expenditure and exchange that influenced developments in the visual arts as well as the status of those arts. The opening chapter gives an overview of the social organization of the city and the interaction of images and identities with objects and occasions. The second deals with the theory and practice of display in the early fifteenth century. Conventional patterns of expenditure are described, as are some of the factors that altered or enhanced those patterns. These include emerging notions of honorable expenditure that both sustained traditions and encouraged an expansion in the investments made to live well and to be remembered decently. Humanist writings addressed to wealthy and influential citizens justified personal or private “splendor” in terms of civic good, allowing the realm of the material to be moral. They also connected style to substance — a formalism with notable parallels in the visual arts.

The first two chapters outline the mechanisms and motivations of commissions and their ethical justification in emerging civic or civil theories of virtuous display. The third gauges the social placement of the artisans responsible for manufacturing the new splendor. A key question in the study of the period is how social and cultural hierarchies were linked. Despite the growing respect for the visual arts, with a tendency to qualify them as learned rather than as simply mechanical, very few artists made any significant change in their place in the class structure. The gain for painters and sculptors generally did not consist of amassing large fortunes or exercising power or political influence, it was in acquiring prestige. The skilled craftsman could be classed as a famous figure, a person of reputation whose reputation as well as works could serve the city.

The process of honoring and some of its motivations and consequences are the subjects of the chapter on “The Economy of Honor,” which takes a single episode as a key to a more general situation. It starts with a description of the bronze roundel showing the Virgin and Child that the sculptor Donatello gave the physician Giovanni di Antonio di Chellino in payment for his medical services. The transaction is registered in an entry in the doctor’s record book where Donatello’s fame as a sculptor is also remarked. It is a revealing episode that typifies an economy that was not solely monetary, in which prestige, friendship, and obligation were fundamental elements of exchange. It is also an episode that sheds light on the ways that the position of an artist could be defined by his actions as well as his works, and on how a knowing manipulation of social conventions could suggest new terms for that definition.

The images of fifteenth-century Florence had a powerful connection with the imagination of fifteenth-century Florentines. This is not only a matter of fantastic inventiveness as we might understand it (though the art of the time was richly imaginative in that sense as well), but of a form of collective consciousness. In contemporary terms to “put” or “have something before the eyes” — to activate vision — was to activate the process of recollection and reflection. The section of the book on “The Eye and the Beholder” reviews the attitudes that conditioned visual awareness in Florence. The chapters in this and the following section are based on the idea that the roles and relationships articulated by the visual arts can be profitably interpreted through an analysis of the understanding and organization of vision as a conceptual and a compositional matter.

The chapter on “Seeing and Being Seen” surveys the ideas about sight and visual experience that were prevalent in the period and indicates some of the ways that the links made between visibility and identity had an impact on the composition of images as repositories of social memory. It engages directly with Michael Baxandall’s influential study of cognitive style. The proposals about the categories and cultural components of viewing made in his book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy are reconsidered and reworked both to expand their frame of reference and to narrow their application. Painting and Experience introduces the “period eye” without pretending to discern all that occurs in its field of vision. The book is explicitly about painting and not about the visual arts in general. A survey, it necessarily stresses the common features of experience rather than detailing the contingencies of particular cases, or setting them within the frame of local demands or expectations. In the fifteenth century, Italy was a geographical not a political designation. As a result of being so broadly placed, Baxandall’s treatment of the period does not take into account the way that specific configurations of power might be figured or how the recognition of political and social hierarchies might have influenced pictorial order. By contrast my focus is on works and episodes that typify the dynamics of display in a given city-state. The aim here is to explore the attitudes and assumptions that form the context for the acute visual sensitivity that characterizes the artistic production of the city. I do this in Chapter 4 by describing the social, political, and legal practices that relied on close observation, eyewitness testimony, and the memory of images.

The following chapter on “The Eye of the Beholder” treats vision as a cultural construction. It centers on a reading of the famous verses in Canto x of Dante’s Purgatory that tell of the poet’s reactions to a series of sculpted examples of humility. From an analysis of Dante’s text and subsequent commentaries, it is possible to chart some of the stages in the evolution of the discerning viewer and to distinguish critical notions of aesthetic pleasure and artistic authority.

The discriminating I / eye, projecting imaginative experience and reacting to visual encounters, both precedes and supersedes the technical schematization of spatial construction. However important and intriguing it was to many fifteenth-century artists, perspective was merely one compositional device, and it remained complementary to composition. The strategies employed to manipulate space and to capture and fix the viewer’s attention were many and varied. They could depend on the type of work as well as the talent of the artist. In their multiplicity they not only created a flexible medium of exchange between the beholder and the object beheld, but they also supplied alternative means of contact between the artist and his public. This chapter analyzes that economy of vision in fifteenth-century Florence.

The chapters in the third part of the book are about “Seeing and Being” and take examples of sacred and secular painting to show how, in given situations, artists composed images that involved their viewers in forms of looking that bound perception to behavior and to expressions of identity (artistic, institutional, and familial).

One pious woman recalled from a sermon: “Examine yourself and you will know for what end God created you: not for riches or for the pomp of this world, but that you should go and enjoy that blessed glory [of the next].”7 From the spiritual diary of Margherita di Tommaso Soderini, quoting from a sermon given by the Augustinian preacher, fra Mariano da Genazzano: “Ciercha te medesimo e chonocierai a che fine Idio t’à creato: non per le richeze né pelle ponpe del mondo, ma che tu vada a fruire quella beata Gloria” (Zafarana, “Per la storia religiosa di Firenze nel Quattrocento,” Studi medievali [1968], p. 1019). This commonplace of Christian thought also contains a fundamental belief about identity: the Christian “self” is a soul, whose earthly existence is transient and subject to God’s will. For Florentine citizens, however, God’s grace not only provided relief from tribulations of the spirit and trials of the flesh, but could be invoked as protection for their daily business, undertaken “in the name of God” or according to the “will of God and the Virgin Mary,” as stated on the opening pages of record books. Bargains were struck: one merchant vowed to give a florin in alms each time he failed to keep the holy days as holidays and pledged twenty soldi and twenty Paternosters and Ave Marias for each Friday he failed to “abstain from the enjoyment of all carnal pleasures.”8 From the diary of Gregorio Dati (January 1, 1404), in Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence, ed. Brucker, p. 124. Mindful of God’s favor in conceding his family worldly goods, Filippo Strozzi began his series of projects in Florence “with His things” — endowing and decorating churches and chapels — so that “one day we can come to ours.”9 Writing to his brother on April 22, 1477: “Avendomi choncieduto Iddio de’ beni tenporali, liene voglio essere ricordevole. E principiando dalle chose sua, potreno venire uno dì alle nostre”; quoted from Borsook, “Documenti relativi alle cappelle di Lecceto e delle Selve di Filippo Strozzi,” Antichità viva (1970), doc. 18, p. 15. The celebration of “His things” did not mean neglecting “ours.” In commissioned works, the choice and arrangement of subject matter, the inclusion of patron saints and portraits, the selection of an artist, were all means to fuse the particular with the general.

The chapter on “Vision and Belief” considers the ways in which fifteenth-century artists responded to the task of envisioning the sacred and how they engaged the beholders of their works both in the admiration of their skills and in carefully inflected modes of contemplation. Images of sacred subjects constructed a relationship with the sacred. Looking at them properly stimulated that relationship. The conventions governing the design of religious works referred to a theology of vision that united corporeal sight with spiritual understanding. This chapter explains the theory and practices of religious viewing. It evaluates the dynamic between compositional tradition and stylistic innovation. An analysis of altarpieces painted for known places shows how formal nuances responded to functional demands.

The final chapter of the book, “Happy Endings,” which focuses on Botticelli’s panel of the Wedding Feast of Nastagio degli Onesti, analyzes the way in which specific visual forms could serve secular purposes In this painting the order of a successfully celebrated marriage is demonstrated forcefully and literally through the perspective ordering of the composition. It recalls both the story of a wedding, from Boccaccio, and an actual wedding alliance (between the Pucci and the Bini families) that had been brokered by Lorenzo de’ Medici. The respective arms of all three families are placed prominently above the piers of the loggia setting of the feast. A study of this panel makes it possible to explore the intersection between real and idealized interests as well as to investigate in detail the way in which images communicate social roles. In it Antonio Pucci and his friends (who are portrayed at the table) could see themselves as creating and sustaining the order of the city. As depicted they remain as proof of its enduring prosperity and honor. The logic of the painting’s composition argues their case by literally insisting on a viewpoint that impresses their triumphalist point of view on visual and historical memory.

These essays encompass many topics and they refer to a long tradition of scholarship as well as to new directions in art-historical research, particularly with regard to questions of vision, visuality, and the gendered beholder. Each chapter has a Bibliographic Note intended to direct readers to the relevant sources and to introduce some primary areas of study. The Bibliographic Notes are necessarily hostages to fortune, given the extent, complexity, and vitality of the literature, which is constantly growing. I present them as starting points for investigation, with aplogies for any inadvertent omission of citations venerable or new. Notes in the text are generally restricted to direct citation of sources and documents.

This book would be inconceivable were it not for the attention that post-war historians have given to the social organization of Florence and to the ways that Florentine social behavior related to the city’s political, economic, and institutional structures. In the introduction to The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, Gene Brucker characterized the study of Florentine history as a “large-scale enterprise.”10 Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, p. 3. Hardly collective and rarely collaborative, this enterprise has nonetheless been highly productive, returning to memory the once familiar details of daily experience and recovering for history the broader patterns of their significance.

Indeed an interest in patterns or networks is one linking feature of recent studies. The various histories of Florence, those of its institutions, of its government, of its economy, of its families, of its rituals, most often describe their protagonists in terms of interlocking alliances or rivalries of family, faction, and friends. The “spiritual individual” of Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has undergone an identity crisis in the century since his birth (or rebirth) in the 1860s. He has returned behind the “veil … woven of faith” and regained consciousness of himself as “a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation,” no longer dramatically separated from his predecessor in the Middle Ages.11 Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 81 (the opening of Part II, “The Development of the Individual”). Following current analyses, the modernity of Renaissance man, or woman, does not seem to depend so much on the “development of free personality” as on the way that subjective consciousness consists of juggling potentially conflicting demands and expectations.12 Ibid.

The issue is not whether this is a matter of historical continuity or a consequence of the human condition, but how, given the composite nature of identity, images might have acted as role models for fifteenth-century Florentines — as neighbors and kinsmen or kinswomen, daughters, mothers, and wives, or sons, fathers, and husbands. My interest in this process owes much to the delineation of those roles (and others) found in the numerous studies by Christiane Klapisch-Zuber cited in the bibliography, Samuel K. Cohn’s The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence, Dale and F. W. Kent’s Neighbours and Neighbourhood in Renaissance Florence, Richard Trexler’s Public Life in Renaissance Florence and Dependence in Context in Renaissance Florence, Ronald Weissman’s study of confraternities (Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence), and Richard Goldthwaite’s and F. W. Kent’s fundamental, if contrasting, works on the family (Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence and Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence).

The research undertaken for the present book has tended to support Kent’s view that the fifteenth century did not see the development of “the isolated nuclear-conjugal unit (newly seceded from a completely corporate clan)” and that “it was possible for Renaissance Florentines … to see household and lineage not as opposite ends in a tug of war … but as two complementary family institutions … each owed an appropriate loyalty.”13 F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, pp. 13–14. The material consequences of those loyalties — chapel endowments, palace decorations, and marriage furnishings — are inspected here, as are the ways that they might integrate individual interests with clan identity. They are not, however, read as straightforward documents of family history, but as idealized manifestations — as potent symbols of the enduring ideology of the family.

The obsession with lineage in marriage negotiations, the reliance on family and family ties in business practice, the abiding loyalty to traditional clan territories in the city and the country, and the multi-generational habitation of family houses all combine to challenge Goldthwaite’s hypothesis that the isolated nuclear unit was a distinctive feature of Florentine society and therefore one of its claims to stand at the origins of modern social organization. There is evidence, however, that among the members of the elite there was an increasing concentration on marking out their private spaces and affirming their public status through display, and this book is much indebted to Goldthwaite’s analysis of the developing culture of consumption and its impact on the “world of goods.”14 Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art, p. 2; see also Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence.

That preservation of the lineage was one of the chief concerns and greatest successes of the families of the Florentine governing class is proven by Anthony Molho’s study Marriage Alliance in Late Medieval Florence, in which he demonstrates the remarkable resilience of the elite in maintaining its identity over time. Molho adds a quantitative dimension to the consideration of family definition — both Kent’s and Goldthwaite’s works are case studies. Referring to Lauro Martines’s pioneering work The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, he also confronts the problem of deciding the weight to give the various components that constituted class consciousness and marked the class divisions in Florence: the fluctuating factors of family antiquity, economic power, political honors, and prestigious marriage alliances that created reputation and that could influence status. The results of his analysis extend the conclusions made by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber in their study of the declarations made for the 1427 tax assessment, the catasto (Les Toscans et leurs families), regarding the concentration of wealth among a restricted group in Florence. While showing the tenacity of those holding wealth and prestige in maintaining their predominance over time, Molho’s criteria also reveal the unfixed boundaries of Florentine class divisions. Although hierarchical, Florentine society was far from fixed in a rigid scheme. It was possible for a man like Puccio di Puccio Pucci to use his loyal friendship with Cosimo de’ Medici to emerge from the ranks of the minor guildsmen and set his family on a course leading to major wealth and great influence — as is demonstrated in Chapter 7. The tensions inherent in the ambiguities of the city’s social definition had the potential to be very disruptive in the real life of the city, but they were also extremely productive in the realm of its imagery, which could be used to try to fix or consolidate desired orders and relationships.

Given the argument that one function of images is to promote or proclaim power, these essays have relied upon the studies of the government and governing class made respectively by Nicolai Rubinstein (The Government of Florence under the Medici), Gene Brucker (The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence), Dale Kent (“The Florentine Reggimento in the Fifteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly [1975] and The Rise of the Medici), and Paula Clarke (The Soderini and the Medici: Power and Patronage in Fifteenth-century Florence). These authors identify the individuals who held power and trace the networks of association — faction, family, and friends — that created and threatened political power over the century and that underlay the transformations of the Florentine government from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. As will be seen, the visual arts were woven into these webs of affiliation, which provided alliances of interest offering support for given artisans or promoting given forms of expression. They were deeply implicated in the systems of patronage that were an intrinsic feature of Florentine society.

A related assumption is that “art patronage,” like “art” itself, did not exist as such in the period, and that the label creates a false category of activity that masks or misrepresents a variety of transactions and interactions, which might range from simple payment for a good or a service to an actual client–patron relationship. The former was a regular activity of trade, even if the work that resulted or that was involved implicated values that were not only monetary, such as the mutual honor of the craftsman and his customer. The latter was an enduring tie, which could influence an entire career and include a number of commissions, direct and indirect, but which did not relate to any one specific task. So it might be said that Cosimo de’ Medici was Donatello’s patron, not only offering him the chance to display his skill on behalf of the Medici family, but using his influence, his bank, and his connections to promote or defend the sculptor’s interests over four decades of association. Conversely it should not be said that Cosimo de’ Medici was a patron of the arts, despite the enormous expenditures he made to build and decorate the new family palace, the villas in the Mugello and at Careggi, his parish church of San Lorenzo, and his endowments to San Marco, Santa Croce, Bosco ai Frati, and elsewhere. His investments in all of these projects and others cannot and should not be reduced to undifferentiated results of “art patronage.” Moreover, although stemming from Cosimo’s decisions, these commissions were not necessarily personal or individual. They as often affirmed or expressed Medici family identity as Cosimo’s, and even within Cosimo’s identity there was a repertory of roles being played out: leading citizen, responsible head of family, devout Christian.

Even without “art” or “art patronage” as such, there are still many reasons for an art historian to find fifteenth-century Florence a desirable subject of study. In my case it has been chosen because of the ample materials it offers to examine the relation between social and visual forms and to look in some detail at the ways that images come to have significance in determined situations and objects exist within economies of meaning. This choice was easily made given the obvious attractions of frequenting a past time and place that made beauty a defining and definitive social value, and of frequently returning to a place where the legacy of that past still lives in its monuments, libraries, and archives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am a devoted and deeply indebted visitor to Florence; this book owes much to the individuals and institutions who safeguard and who so generously share the city’s collected and collective memories. My work is based on sources found in the Archivio di Stato and depends on the resources of the Kunsthistorisches Institut, with thanks to the staff of both. I am also indebted to Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, Alessandro Cecchi, Antonio Natali, and Cristina Acidini Luchinat for granting me unique access to the art works in their care and for giving me the benefit of their expertise about those works. I am grateful to the members of the Pucci family for permitting me to study the family archive in a way that deepened my regard for the family’s legacy, which lives in their names: Marchesa Cristina Pucci, Marchese Giannozzo Pucci, Marchese Puccio Pucci, and Marchese Alessandro Pucci, who was sadly killed in a car accident in 2000. Like all students of Florentine history, I am a de facto pupil of the late Nicolai Rubinstein, the esteemed teacher and honorary citizen of Florence who willingly dispensed his vast knowledge of its archive and its political institutions. I was also aided by conversations with his former apprentices in the art of history, now leaders in the field of Florentine studies: Alison Brown, Dale Kent, F. W. Kent, and Kate Lowe.

Not only does the substance of this book rely upon the gifts gathered in the exceptional community of Villa I Tatti, its very existence is a result of the outpouring of care from the Villa that saw me through emergency surgery in 1999. There are no words adequate to the task of thanking those dear friends among the staff, the Fellows, and the associates of I Tatti who helped me in so many ways at that time and throughout this project, above all the former director, Walter Kaiser, who not only saved, but who has repeatedly enhanced my life. My fond and abiding appreciation embraces all those who are the living heart of I Tatti, but I want explicitly to acknowledge Rosa Molinaro Focosi, Nelda Ferace, Alexa Mason, and Michael Rocke. Fiorella Superbi and Giovanni Pagliarulo performed their usual magic with photographs. William Hood, who saw me through my convalescent winter, has always inspired me as an art historian. Chapter 4 was largely written while I was Paul Hills’s guest at the Villino; his intellectual companionship at that and all other times has been invaluable. Other I Tatti friends who deserve particular mention for many and various forms of advice are: Lawrin Armstrong, Rolf Bagemihl, Eve Borsook, Maurizio Campanelli, Giovanni Ciappelli, Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Hubert and Teri Damisch, Georges Didi-Huberman, Nicholas Eckstein, Lorenzo Fabbri, Carlo Falciani, Silvia Fiaschi, Allen Grieco, Margaret Haines, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Amanda Lillie, Philippe Morel, Michèle Mulchahey, Jonathan Nelson, Robert Nelson, John Padgett, and Brenda Preyer. The final chapter of the book was drafted while I was Visiting Professor at I Tatti in the autumn of 2004. I want to express my gratitude to Joseph and Françoise Connors for that appointment and for their hospitality, and to the vintage group of Fellows who made my stay so happy and productive.

Studying Florence is an international affair. In Paris I have been welcomed in the Louvre by Dominique Thiébaut and hosted in the “petit palais” by Marcello and Teresa Lombardi. In Brooklyn, Kevin Stayton and his colleague, Elizabeth Easton, opened the collection and its archive to me. In Washington, I was aided by David Allen Brown and Nicholas Penny at the National Gallery of Art. In London, I have happily consulted the Warburg Institute Library, which offers a mine of information about the topics treated here. Former and present colleagues at the Courtauld Institute of Art have often solved specific problems and assisted me through thoughtful discussion. I am especially obliged to Howard Burns, Joanna Cannon, Peter Carey, Susie Nash, and Deborah Swallow. The Witt and Conway libraries are among the Institute’s great assets, and I am very appreciative of the way their photographic holdings were made freely available to me. I have been privileged to teach gifted students, who have in turn taught me and who have willingly shared their research, notably Jill Burke, Caroline Campbell, Peter Dent, Megan Holmes, Sally Korman, and Kevin Murphy. I have also received special assistance and specialist guidance from Antonia Boström, Jane Bridgeman, Doris Carl, Jonathan Davies, Werner Jacobsen, Thomas Kuehn, Antoni Malinowski, Victor Meyer, Peta Motture, Michelle O’ Malley, Nick Williams, Carl Strehlke, Paul Taylor, Evelyn Welch, and Paul Williamson.

Teresa Castro was very helpful in the preliminary search for the images that are the visual basis for my arguments. Uschi Payne subsequently took heroic measures to find and to obtain the best illustrations at reasonable costs. Without her efforts the book quite simply could not have been published and my admiration and gratitude for her work are boundless. Research grants from the British Academy and a private foundation contributed substantially to funding the photographic costs. Laura Blom, Stephen Butler, James Harris, Robert Maniura, Scott Nethersole, and Natalia Swiderska all gave indispensable assistance in preparing the manuscript. Virginia Thomas created the index with good humor and exemplary skill. Her involvement with this project was made possible by a grant from the Courtauld Institute of Art Research Committee.

My gifted sister, Andrea Kellner, guaranteed both the sense and style of this book through her careful reading of the manuscript. Gillian Malpass tended to the conception, execution, and production of this book with her justly celebrated talent and grace. I am amazed by her energy, honored by her commitment, and touched by her unfailing patience. Thanks are also due to her associates at Yale University Press: Emily Angus, Bernard Dodd, and Jacquie Meredith. Being willing learners, Darcy and Treacy Beyer instructed me in many things, above all, the true meaning of charity as caring generosity. Their support of this book has been unstinting and inspiring. Work on a project of this sort, if not always a labor of love, is a labor heartily dependent on love, and I thank my fortune for the abundant and cherished support of my family and my constant friends, most happily for me, Deborah Loeb Brice, Caroline Elam, Charles Robertson, Barbara Santocchini, Luke Syson, and Alison Wright.

1 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. Arbib, II, pp. 56–130, p. 56: “mi pare non meno utile che necessario, di dover fare in questo luogo una, come dicevano gli antichi nostri, incidenza, cioè digressione.” »

2 Vasari, Le vite, ed. Bettarini and Barocchi, III, pp. 37–8: “usandosi in que’ tempi per le camere de’ cittadini cassoni grandi di legname … niuno era che i detti cassoni non facesse dipignere . . . e che è più, si dipignevano in cotal maniera non solamente i cassoni, ma i lettucci, le spalliere, le cornici che ricignevano intorno.” »

3 Ibid., p. 38: “Delle quali cose se ne veggiono . . . in tutte le più nobili case di Firenze ancora alcune reliquie. E ci sono alcuni che attenendosi a quelle usanze vecchie, magnifiche veramente et orrevolissime, non hanno sì fatte cose levate per dar luogo agl’ornamenti et usanze moderne.” »

4 Varchi, Storia fiorentina, ed. Arbib, 11, p. 56: “niuna cosa è tanto piccola in una repubblica grande, della quale, solo che possa ad alcuna cosa o giovare, o dilettare, non si debbia conto tenere.” »

5 Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco, p. ix. »

6 Vasari, Le vite, ed. Bettarini and Barocchi, III, pp. 597–8. »

7 From the spiritual diary of Margherita di Tommaso Soderini, quoting from a sermon given by the Augustinian preacher, fra Mariano da Genazzano: “Ciercha te medesimo e chonocierai a che fine Idio t’à creato: non per le richeze né pelle ponpe del mondo, ma che tu vada a fruire quella beata Gloria” (Zafarana, “Per la storia religiosa di Firenze nel Quattrocento,” Studi medievali [1968], p. 1019). »

8 From the diary of Gregorio Dati (January 1, 1404), in Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence, ed. Brucker, p. 124. »

9 Writing to his brother on April 22, 1477: “Avendomi choncieduto Iddio de’ beni tenporali, liene voglio essere ricordevole. E principiando dalle chose sua, potreno venire uno dì alle nostre”; quoted from Borsook, “Documenti relativi alle cappelle di Lecceto e delle Selve di Filippo Strozzi,” Antichità viva (1970), doc. 18, p. 15. »

10 Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, p. 3. »

11 Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 81 (the opening of Part II, “The Development of the Individual”). »

12 Ibid. »

13 F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage in Renaissance Florence, pp. 13–14. »

14 Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art, p. 2; see also Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence. »

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