"Rich and engaging. This account of Florentine art tells the story of who commissioned these works, who made them, where they were seen, and how they were experienced and understood by their viewers. Includes a useful timeline, glossary, and series of artists' biographies."--Patricia L. Reilly, Swarthmore College "An extraordinarily useful book, not only for teachers, but also for historically minded travelers interested in an illustrated guide to the art of Renaissance Florence."--Evelyn Lincoln, Brown University "Clear and compelling. The well-chosen illustrations include ground plans and diagrams of key architectural monuments and sculpture. The updated, judicious bibliography is a resource for anyone tackling the vast scholarship on the art of Renaissance Florence."--Cristelle Baskins, editor of The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance

In this vivid account Scott Nethersole examines the remarkable period of cultural, artistic, and intellectual blossoming in Florence from 1400 to 1520—the period traditionally known as the Early and High Renaissance. He looks at the city and its art with fresh eyes, presenting the well-known within a wider context of cultural reference. Key works of art—from painting, sculpture, and architecture to illuminated manuscripts—by artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi are showcased alongside the unexpected and less familiar.

"Publisdhed in conjuntion with the exhibition: Magnificenza! the Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (In Italy, L'Ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l'arte a Firenze, 1538-1631) ..."--Title page verso.

The creativity of the human mind was brilliantly displayed during the Florentine Renaissance when artists, mathematicians, astronomers, apothecaries, architects, and others embraced the interconnectedness of their disciplines. Artists used mathematical perspective in painting and scientific techniques to create new materials; hospitals used art to invigorate the soul; apothecaries prepared and dispensed, often from the same plants, both medicinals for patients and pigments for painters; utilitarian glassware and maps became objects to be admired for their beauty; art enhanced depictions of scientific observations; and innovations in construction made buildings canvases for artistic grandeur. An exploration of these and other intersections of art and science deepens our appreciation of the magnificent contributions of the extraordinary Florentines.

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.

This lovely book provides an introduction to the activities of the leading artists active in Florence during one decade of the quattrocento. It illustrates their special contributions and highlights their differences, common sources and ambitions, and responses to each other. It also explain how their art was made within the framework established by the religious, political, and social needs of powerful Florentine families. This was an era when Lorenzo de'Medici and his allies were working to consolidate their dominance in Florence, and cultivation of the visual arts were an essential part of the way in which they asserted their influence. Competition and collaboration was encouraged between artists, as was innovation in subject and technique. The book concentrates on the art of Andrea Verrocchio, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. Their paintings are presented within the context of the other arts practiced in the same or in neighboring workshops, and a number of works in other media are included: sculpture and objects in marble, bronze, and clay; manuscript illumination; medals; engravings and drawings. Among the drawings discussed are some by the young Leonardo, who worked with Verrocchio and was responsive to the art of the Pollaiuolo brothers during this period.

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.

For courses in Renaissance Art. This text offers an incisive and original account of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine art in its social, cultural, political, geographic, economic and religious settings. Ranging in scope from monumental and public artworks to the intimacy of the domestic interior, it explores artistic patronage and the working conditions of artists in a way that is fully accessible to the inexperienced reader.

Franklin's unprecedented examination of Vasari's work as a painter in relation to his vastly better-known writings fully illuminates these dual strands in Florentine art and offers us a clearer understanding of sixteenth-century painting in Florence than ever before." "The volume focuses on twelve painters: Perugino, Leonardo de Vinci, Piero di Cosimo, Michelangelo, Fra Bartolomeo, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio, Rosso Fiorentino, Jacopo da Pontormo, Francesco Salviati and Giorgio Vasari."--BOOK JACKET.

This study is the first to examine the relationship between art and violence in 15th-century Florence, exposing the underbelly of a period more often celebrated for enlightened and progressive ideas. Renaissance Florentines were constantly subjected to the sight of violence, whether in carefully staged rituals of execution or images of the suffering inflicted on Christ. There was nothing new in this culture of pain, unlike the aesthetic of violence that developed towards the end of the 15th century. It emerged in the work of artists such as Piero di Cosimo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and the young Michelangelo. Inspired by the art of antiquity, they painted, engraved, and sculpted images of deadly battles, ultimately normalizing representations of brutal violence. Drawing on work in social and literary history, as well as art history, Scott Nethersole sheds light on the relationship between these Renaissance images, violence, and ideas of artistic invention and authorship.