Order #483877 Topic: [Revision] Arts Patronage in the Renaissance Era

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The Luxury Economy and Art Patronage

Poverty and Wealth

Florence’s changing economy had demographic consequences. Its reducedfifteenth-century population was of course in large part the consequence of recurrent epidemics, but another cause of persistent demographic stagnation lies in the contraction of the woolen cloth industry. After the expansion of the 1360s and early 1370s, annual production slipped to 20,000 bolts in 1380, 12,000 –14,000 in the 1390s, and under 10,000 in the 1420s. In 1380 the guild had 283 registered firms, but only 132 were reported in the 1427 Catasto. In 1379 a third of household heads with occupations specified in the estimo worked in some phase of woolen manufactures, and 31% still did in 1404; but by 1427 only 18% were so employed. Because total population also declined from 55,000 in 1379 to only 38,000 in 1427, the loss of jobs was even greater than these percentages suggest.1 Among the causes of the decline were increasing competition and the difficulty of securing sufficient supplies of English wool, partly because of interruptions in trade, but also because cloth manufactures were expanding in England and elsewhere. After mid-century the industry recovered, as producers abandoned their former concentration on luxury cloths and converted to lower quality, cheaper cloths from Mediterranean wool, for which they found profitable markets especially in the Ottoman Empire.2

1 Franceschi, Oltre il “Tumulto,” pp. 3 –31, 94 –104. 2 H. Hoshino, L’Arte della Lana in Firenze nel Basso Medioevo: il commercio della Lana e il mercato dei panni fiorentini nei secoli XIII–XV (Florence, 1980), pp. 194 – 211, 227–9, 231–303.

A History of Florence 1200–1575 John M. Najemy

Copyright © 2006 by John M. Najemy

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Benedetto Dei counted 270 wool shops in 1472.3 Investors continued to come from both the elite (e.g., Albizzi, Altoviti, Capponi, Corbinelli, Velluti, Rucellai) and the popolo, and woolens continued to be exported throughout the Medi- terranean, but not in the same quantities as in the 1360s and far fewer than before 1340.

Although woolworkers still outnumbered silkworkers 4:1 in 1427, silk had begun its slow rise. An independent association of producers of silk cloth had existed in the thirteenth century before joining the cloth retailers of Por Santa Maria, but they were mainly artisans, not merchant entrepreneurs, and remained a small and weak minority in the guild until the early fifteenth century. In 1427, 33 firms were producing silk cloth for export, 50 in 1461, and 44 in 1480; total value of production went from 230,000 florins in the 1430s to 300,000 in the early 1460s and 400,000 in 1490.4 Even with the tripling of raw silk produced in the Florentine dominions between 1440 and the mid-sixteenth century,5 silk had to be imported to meet the needs of manu- facturers, who were now increasingly merchant-entrepreneurs producing for export to foreign markets. Among the earliest were merchants from the popolo: Francesco Della Luna, Benedetto Ghini, Parente di Michele Parenti (Marco’s father), and Andrea Banchi, who sold his silks all over Italy and beyond, in Geneva and Constantinople.6 By mid-century elite families and merchant- bankers began investing in silk production and using their international con- nections to good advantage to market their products. In the 1430s the Medici formed a partnership in a silk company, and by the 1460s several Pitti and an Antinori also did so. But the industry remained mostly in the hands of new families, some of which, like the Serristori and Cambini, accumulated big fortunes in a combination of banking, trade, and silk exports. As with woolens, silk cloth was manufactured in a series of decentralized stages by artisans working in their homes or shops. But because the steps were fewer than for wool, and especially because initial cleaning and combing were not needed as with raw wool, manufacturing silk cloth did not require a large force of unskilled workers. Thus the rise of this new textile industry could not replenish the population loss caused by the decline of wool production. Because silk cloth

3 Cronica, ed. Barducci, p. 82. 4 B. Dini, “La ricchezza documentaria per l’arte della seta e l’economia fiorentina

nel Quattrocento,” in Dini, Manifattura, commercio e banca nella Firenze medievale (Florence, 2001), p. 29. 5 S. Tognetti, Un’industria di lusso al servizio del grande commercio: il mercato dei drappi serici e della seta nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Florence, 2002), p. 32. 6 F. Edler de Roover, “Andrea Banchi, Florentine Silk Manufacturer and Merchant

in the Fifteenth Century,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 3 (1966): 224 –85.

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required fewer workers (and despite the fact that many were highly skilled and well paid artisans), the proportion in production costs of labor to mater- ials was the inverse of that in woolen cloth production: in woolens, labor represented 60 – 65% of costs and raw wool and other materials 35 – 40%, whereas in the silk industry, despite higher remuneration per worker, labor accounted for 30 –35% and the expensive raw silk and other materials 65 – 70%.7 Silk was a luxury product in which success depended on quality, and in turn on the refined skills of dyers, loom warpers, weavers, and the goldbeaters who produced the gold thread woven into brocades.

With the relative decline of the labor-intensive wool industry and the rise of silk and other forms of skilled artisan labor, Florence’s economy underwent a major shift. Unlike the fourteenth century, in which a huge amount of wealth was paid out in wages to a large working class, in the fifteenth century, although skilled artisans were in great demand and enjoyed rising incomes, the declin- ing demand for unskilled labor meant stagnating wages for what was still the bulk of the working population. Despite the demographic contraction (which ought to have raised wages in a structurally unchanged economy, and initially did so after 1348), wages and piece-rates held steady or even declined in both the building and woolen cloth industries in the fifteenth century.8 Fortunately for workers, long-term price trends also remained remarkably steady until the end of the century. But short-term price fluctuations or periods of unemploy- ment could throw households into chronic indebtedness, which further de- pressed real wages. For unskilled workers to afford basic necessities they needed steady and low prices, modest indirect taxes, and a favorable ratio of house- hold size to incomes. An unskilled worker employed full time earned enough to support himself and one other person, but families of three or four with a single income could not make ends meet even with stable prices. Living costs in families of four or more also exceeded the incomes of skilled workers with higher earnings. Of 909 household heads identified in the 1427 Catasto as workers in the wool industry, 53% were deemed miserabiles, too poor to pay any tax, and they included 57% of wage-earners, 64% of unskilled Ciompi, and 43% of artisans (but fully 78% of weavers and spinners who worked at home).9 Stagnant wages in the building and woolen cloth industries almost certainly depressed other workers’ incomes as well, and when prices began their slow steady rise toward the end of the century the erosion of real wages created endemic poverty within the working class.

7 Tognetti, Un’industria di lusso, pp. 19 –21. 8 R. A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 318 –19; Franceschi, Oltre il “Tumulto,” pp. 235 –59. 9 Franceschi, Oltre il “Tumulto,” pp. 273 – 4.

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Serious impoverishment prevailed in the subject territories. Heavy direct taxation of the dominion was gradually transferring wealth from the contado and district communities to feed the city’s public debt (whose interest-bearing shares were owned almost entirely by Florentine citizens). Except for a few cities like Prato, which continued to be a major center of woolen cloth manu- factures, and Pescia, where the silk industry flourished, protectionist measures were destroying the ability of producers in the territories to compete with Florentine industries. Most of the smaller cities lost wealth and population in the fifteenth century, as the spread of sharecropping (or mezzadria) slowed demand and economic growth in rural areas. Wealthy Florentines bought land from former freeholders, whose incomes had shrunk because of low prices and high taxes, and entered into sharecropping arrangements that gave half of each farm’s annual production to the owner and half to the sharecropper, leaving the latter little incentive to specialize and produce surpluses for sale. Weakened productivity kept sharecroppers in depressed economic conditions, when, here too, lower population ought to have had the reverse effect. All these factors reduced incomes and demand in rural areas.10

Weak consumer demand in the bulk of the city and dominion population also drove the development of luxury industries. With handsome profits more likely in luxury goods than in labor-intensive industries that produced for the lower classes, investors naturally turned toward the former. Growing invest- ment in luxury products also shaped elite tastes and increased demand for these products. Here was the paradox of Florence’s fifteenth-century economy: on the one hand, ever greater displays of opulence and conspicuous consump- tion among the wealthy; on the other, working and rural classes unable to spend much beyond subsistence. Renaissance Florence’s brilliant material culture did not have deep economic foundations: it did not spread wealth significantly beyond the skilled artisans who produced for the elite and the merchant-bankers who sold these products throughout Europe and the Mediter- ranean. Hence the severely unbalanced distribution of wealth: the wealthiest 100 Florentine households, each with at least 8,600 florins of net taxable wealth (1% of the city’s 9,946 households and less than two-tenths of 1% of all households in the city and dominion), controlled 26.5% of the city’s wealth and 17% of that of city and dominion combined. The 202 households with 5,000 or more florins owned 36% of the city’s wealth, and the 339 house- holds with 3,000 or more florins controlled 45%. More than half the city’s wealth was in the hands of about 6% of households.11 Because large elite

10 S. Epstein, “Cities, Regions and the Late Medieval Crisis: Sicily and Tuscany

Compared,” Past and Present 130 (1991): 3 –50 (19 –20, 37– 41, 44). 11 Based on the data in Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans, p. 94, and Martines, Social World, pp. 365 –78.

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lineages often had several among the richest households, wealth was con- centrated in a considerably smaller number of lineages than households. In the Catasto of 1458 the highest assessment of tax owed, that of Cosimo de’ Medici (and his nephew Pierfrancesco), was in a league of its own at 576 florins. Two other assessments exceeded 100 florins: 132 for the heirs of Giovanni de’ Benci, the Medici bank’s former general manager, and Giovanni Rucellai’s 102. Eight more households were assessed between 50 and 98 florins (including Jacopo Pazzi and Gino Capponi). Of the remaining 7,625 house- holds that owed any tax (excluding the miserabiles), 49% owed less than 5 soldi (when 1 florin was worth 108 soldi) and 64% owed 10 soldi or less. If an estimated 3,000 households of miserabiles are added to the total, 63% of city households owed from zero to 5 soldi and 74% from zero to 10.12

Despite its uneven distribution, this was still an economy that offered oppor- tunities for new wealth. Some large new fortunes were made in the fifteenth century, mainly by merchant families who enjoyed Medici favor. Niccolò Cambini, son of a minor guildsman and linen-cloth dealer, began working in the Naples branch of the Medici bank and his brother Andrea apprenticed with Florentine merchants in Lisbon. In 1420 they formed a merchant- banking partnership with Adovardo Giachinotti and members of the elite Guadagni, who were allies of the Albizzi. Fortunately for the Cambini brothers, the Guadagni partnership ended some years later, and they astutely joined the ranks of the Medici party under whose protection their business flourished. They were also neighbors of the Medici, and in the early 1440s Niccolò acquired a family chapel in San Lorenzo, a sign both of his success and of Medici favor. Like other merchant-banks, the Cambini accepted deposits (on which they returned 7 – 8% interest) and used the capital to export Florentine woolen and silk cloths to Rome and elsewhere in Italy and throughout the western Mediterranean, in particular the Iberian peninsula where Lisbon became the center of their operations. They also imported raw materials, including silk, wool, dyes, leather, and furs for the Florentine textile and clothing industries. By 1458, after Niccolò’s death, his sons jointly declared gross assets of almost 9,000 florins, thus ranking them among the 62 wealthi- est households, and purchased a family palazzo for 3,600 florins. Cambini fortunes increased in the 1460s, as they expanded their silk business, extended trading operations to the eastern Mediterranean, accepted still more deposits, and began making profitable but risky loans. In 1467 Francesco di Niccolò Cambini was appointed one of eight Officials of the Bank and thus became a trusted creditor of the commune together with Giovanni Rucellai and Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici banking empire. It was the pinnacle of Cambini success. But the risks finally caught up with them: bankruptcy struck

12 De Roover, Medici Bank, pp. 29 –31.

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in 1482, and, after lengthy legal proceedings, they sold off property, including the palace acquired thirty years earlier, to satisfy creditors.13 The Della Casa similarly rose from humble origins to wealth and status with a banking operation under Medici protection. Two sons of the notary Lodovico della Casa, Antonio and Ruggieri, also began with the Medici, the former as an employee, partner, and then director of the Rome branch in 1435 – 8, the latter as director of the Geneva branch for many years until 1447. In 1439 Antonio founded his own company with Jacopo Donati and entered the profitable business of papal banking. He soon created two more companies, including one in Geneva where he sold Florentine silks.14 Another brother, Giovanni, now famous as the lover of Lusanna,15 directed the family’s Rome company after Antonio’s death in 1454 and married the daughter of an elite Medici ally, Marietta di Piero Rucellai. In the 1458 Catasto he and a fourth brother, Jacopo, declared gross assets of almost 8,700 florins.16 Although the Spinelli had been on the outer edges of the elite since the 1320s under the Alberti umbrella, in the fifteenth century Tommaso Spinelli took his branch of the family to new economic heights in papal banking and silks.17 And the Riccardi rose from obscurity to make, lose, and regain notable wealth.18

Perhaps the greatest success story among fifteenth-century “new” families is that of the Serristori, who not only made a huge fortune but also used it and Medici connections to enter the city’s social elite. They descended, as their name implies, from a notary, ser Ristoro di ser Jacopo, who emigrated to Florence in the mid-fourteenth century from Figline in the upper Valdarno. While practicing the notarial profession, ser Ristoro bought property (much of it in Figline), invested in a wool shop in which he set up two of his sons, and left a considerable fortune to a third son, Giovanni, whom he sent to law school in Bologna and who alone among the brothers survived the plague of 1400. Messer Giovanni went into the merchant-banking business, and when he died in 1414, without male heirs, his nephews divided the estate whose business investments alone were worth 37,000 florins. Relations with the Medici must already have been well established, because one of two mediators they appointed to arbitrate the settlement was Cosimo’s cousin Averardo, whose

13 Tognetti, Il Banco Cambini. 14 F. Arcelli, Il banchiere del papa: Antonio della Casa mercante e banchiere a Roma (1438 –1440) (Catanzaro, 2001); De Roover, Medici Bank, pp. 211, 216, 284 – 5. 15 Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna. 16 Molho, Marriage Alliance, p. 387. 17 P. Jacks and W. Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (University Park, Penn., 2001). 18 P. Malanima, I Riccardi di Firenze. Una famiglia e un patrimonio nella Toscana dei Medici (Florence, 1977).

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daughter Costanza was already the wife of one of the nephews, Antonio di Salvestro di ser Ristoro (the patronymic had still not been definitively con- verted to a surname). Under Antonio the family business prospered. In 1427 he declared gross assets of almost 35,000 florins and net taxable wealth of over 28,000 (second highest in Santa Croce and fourteenth overall). Almost half his fortune was in Monte shares, a quarter in a merchant-banking opera- tion, and a quarter in real estate, mostly in Figline. In 1430 –2 Antonio served three times among the Officials of the Bank and made loans to the commune totaling over 26,000 florins. In 1433 Cosimo, anticipating the political storm that was about to break, deposited the assets of the local branch of his bank into Antonio’s company for protection during the exile. Having gained Cosimo’s trust, Antonio went on to serve on many balìe and as an accoppiatore. Although he declared significantly reduced taxable assets in 1431 and 1433, the com- pany accumulated ever larger working capital from deposits with which it exported textiles and imported wool, dyes, silver, and everything from soap to sugar to alum. Antonio’s sons married into the elite Capponi, Pazzi, and Strozzi families. In the 1450s they divided his estate but went into the silk business together and built a huge company whose capital investments rose from 6,400 florins in 1470 to 24,000 fiorini larghi (the new florin that was worth 20% more than the old, hence 29,000 old florins). Between 1471 and 1492 the Serristori manufactured and sold 40,000 kilos of silk cloth with sales of 355,000 fiorini larghi and total net profits over twenty-one years of 57,688 florins. They went on to be one of the pillars of the nobility under the principate.19

Despite these examples of new wealth, the old elite still controlled the lion’s share. Of twenty-eight households with 20,000 or more florins of taxable wealth in 1427, half came from very old elite families (including the Alberti, Barbadori, Bardi, Medici, Panciatichi, Pazzi, Peruzzi, Strozzi, and Tornabuoni), and only six from really new families (including the Serristori).20 In 1458 the old elite was even more prominently represented among the very wealthy, with seventeen of the twenty-four households declaring 10,000 or more florins of assets (e.g., Alessandri, Baroncelli, Canigiani, Capponi, Medici, Pazzi, Pitti, Rucellai, and Salviati), and two others that had joined the elite on Medici coattails (Benci and Dietisalvi-Neroni).21 The indefatigable list-maker Benedetto Dei begins his roster of richest Florentines in 1472 with three Medici, two Rucellai, three Pitti, four Pazzi, and nine Capponi before includ- ing six members of the “new” Martelli. Besides the many new families, the

19 S. Tognetti, Da Figline a Firenze. Ascesa economica e politica della famiglia Serristori (secoli XIV–XVI) (Figline, 2003). 20 Using Martines’s tables in Social World. 21 Using Molho’s tables in Marriage Alliance.

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rest of the list includes (in this order) one or more Canigiani, Tornabuoni, Soderini, Gianfigliazzi, Nerli, Guicciardini, Salviati, Portinari, Ridolfi, Antinori, Velluti, Frescobaldi, Albizzi, Vettori, Adimari, Cavalcanti, Corsini, Corbinelli, Peruzzi, Castellani, and Alessandri.22 Giovanni Rucellai famously advised his sons to continue his merchant-banking business only if they attended to it personally, to keep up the appearance of “merchants” while in fact conduct- ing themselves as “shopkeepers,” and to avoid the risks of deposit banking and investing other people’s money.23 While this no doubt reflected his cau- tious awareness of the precariousness of wealth after setbacks toward the end of his life, he had nonetheless accumulated one of the city’s great fortunes with the usual combination of economic ventures (and without any help from the Medici). As he reminisced in 1473, “In the trading and banking business I have been very fortunate, through God’s grace, and careful and diligent. I began in this profession as a boy, indeed as an infant, and I have acquired great credit and trust. I founded several banking companies with various part- ners and had operations in many places outside Florence, including Venice, Genoa, Naples, and Pisa. I was a partner in seven woolshops in Florence at different times and with different partners. And in these businesses I made a lot of money.”24 Even political disaster did not dampen the entrepreneurial spirit of elite families. The Alberti commercial and banking empire prospered in exile. And Filippo Strozzi (1428 – 91) began the process of converting his father Matteo’s modest estate into the greatest fortune of the age while he was still an exile in Naples. Introduced by relatives to international commerce and banking, and financed in part by his mother Alessandra’s dowry and the sale of family property, he began businesses in Palermo and Naples. After he returned to Florence, the Strozzi bank, still based in Naples, made fabulous profits that increased Filippo’s fortune from 32,000 fiorini larghi in 1471 to 112,000 in 1483 and 116,000 by his death in 1491 (and this does not include Monte holdings): 86 percent of his income of 90,000 florins between 1471 and 1483 came from the Naples company. So vast was Strozzi’s wealth that, even with the huge expenditures on the palazzo he began building in 1489, he hardly knew what to do with it all: after his death, over 52,000 florins in cash was found in sacks stored in his house!25

22 Cronica, ed. Barducci, pp. 85 – 6. 23 Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 1, “Il Zibaldone Quaresimale”, ed. A. Perosa (London, 1960), p. 19. 24 Ibid., pp. 120 –1; F. W. Kent, “The Making of a Renaissance Patron of the Arts,”

in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2, A Florentine Patrician and His Palace (London, 1981), pp. 18 –20, 32 – 6, 79 –80, 88 – 91. 25 R. A. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth in Renaissance Florence: A Study of Four Families (Princeton, 1968), pp. 52 –73.

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26 A. Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Work (New York, 1983); E. Welch, Art and Society in Italy 1350 –1500 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 103–29; H. McNeal Caplow, “Sculptors’ Partnerships in Michelozzo’s Florence,” Studies in the Renaissance 21 (1974): 145 –75. 27 Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence, pp. 57–74. 28 An overview: R. A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300 – 1600 (Baltimore, 1993), pp. 176 –255.

Public and Private Patronage

Florence’s vibrant artistic culture was shaped by its luxury economy. Artistic production reflected the social, economic, and contractual contexts of interac- tions between producers and consumers, who came from different classes, as well as the religious and aesthetic dimensions of consumer demand. Artists were mostly artisans formed by the guild traditions in which highly specialized skills were learned, perfected, practiced, and transmitted through training and apprenticeships. Like other cities with strong guild and artisan traditions, Florence had long been noted for the quality of its dyed cloth, furs, clothes, jewelry, furniture, woodworking, sculpting, and myriad products whose value lay in both high-quality materials and the talents of artisan-artists who crafted prized and admired objects from those materials. Skilled sculptors, painters, and master builders that we call artists and architects worked in shops they owned or rented, hired assistants, trained apprentices, signed contracts that stipulated, usually in meticulous detail, what they were to do, how much they were to be paid, what materials to use and who paid for them, and by when the work was to be completed. Surviving contracts show that artists were, and needed to be, good businessmen and negotiators who knew how to keep careful accounts, calculate costs, and make ends meet. Most of their paintings and sculptures were produced on commission; works produced without specific commissions and offered to the market were generally popular and less expensive products, such as terracotta reliefs, birth trays, and small devo- tional paintings. But big, expensive, and artistically innovative works were always the result of commissions, whether from institutions or individual patrons who paid for works produced in conformity with their wishes. This had long been the legal and economic framework of artistic production, and it did not substantially change after 1400.26

New factors nonetheless emerged from Florence’s luxury economy and chang- ing class relations to affect the production of art in the fifteenth century. The same socio-economic context that turned the silk industry into a showcase for the talents of skilled weavers and goldbeaters and the clothing industry into the same for tailors,27 and made them both arenas of conspicuous consump- tion, also shaped the demand for art and thus the status of artists.28 Growing

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demand for luxury goods that enhanced the prestige of consumers was a crucial factor behind perhaps the biggest difference between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century art patronage: a gradual shift from a balance between public (or institutional) and private (or individual) patrons to a preponderance of private patronage. After about 1400 the transformation of class relations height- ened individual patrons’ desire to display their (and their families’) status, honor, and “social identity.”29 With the elite having assimilated the civic and economic ethos of the popolo and, after 1434, lost political power to the Medici, and with families from the popolo continuing to make new fortunes in trade and banking, many in the elite felt the need for new cultural spaces in which to exhibit their superior social status. Conspicuous consumption of artworks, luxury clothing, great private palaces, but also of literary culture and humanism, met this need. Families of new wealth emulated the elite and also invested in culture to advertise their social rise and aspirations, making cultural patronage an arena of competition and mimetic rivalry both among elite families and between the classes. Although this patronage was private in the sense that wealthy individuals hired and paid artists and builders, the fact that so much of it was placed conspicuously on display to promote the patrons’ “greatness” made it at the same time very public.

Contrasts between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries should not however be overdrawn. Fourteenth-century private individuals and families also paid for a good deal of art, chiefly in churches, where citizens vied to establish their families’ rights in chapels and sacristies in which they buried their dead and preserved family memory with artworks that included vestments, chalices, altarpieces, frescoes, tomb sculptures, and sculpted coats of arms. But fourteenth-century chapel patronage was conditioned less by the patrons’ aesthetic and religious preferences than by the devotional and theological tradi- tions of churches and religious orders. Here too, of course, “private” chapels were quite public in that they were meant to be seen by neighbors and visitors and thus to publicize family piety and wealth. Everyone knew that this or that splendidly decorated chapel belonged to a notable family, but, except for the occasional coat of arms (often not allowed) or tomb, there was little or nothing that identified the family, much less the individual, who endowed a fourteenth-century chapel or paid for its wall paintings. But by the fifteenth century, family patronage in ecclesiastical settings increasingly reflected the devotional and /or aesthetic choices of individuals who paid for this art, hired the artists of their choice, and, while putting the honor of their lineages on display, now also increasingly left their own distinctive imprint on what they commissioned.

29 J. Burke, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park, Penn., 2004).

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Civic and public art flourished in the fourteenth century and into the first third of the fifteenth and then declined, in part because the biggest projects were by then completed. It continued thereafter in less monumental mani- festations, such as the artistic commissions of confraternities. Like “private” patronage, the concept of “public” patronage requires care. Supervision of civic and ecclesiastical building projects was typically entrusted to citizen works committees, called “opere,” vested with responsibility for spending funds assigned to them, keeping accounts, and selecting, hiring, and paying builders, sculptors, woodworkers, painters, and others artisans. They decided on specific building plans and sculptural programs and were thus involved in aesthetic and engineering decisions as well as administrative matters. Opere typically consisted of four, six, or eight “operai” appointed, or elected by scrutiny and sortition, for four- or six-month terms, and then replaced by new committees. With so many projects and short terms of office, scores of citizens served on opere at any given time, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, over the course of decades and generations. Although laymen without specialized training in the techniques of sculpture or the complex engineering of large-scale building, many developed recognized expertise and were regularly reappointed or elected to different opere.30 They also served as judges in competitions for commissions. Public projects were not supervised by faceless government bureaucracies. Citizens assumed myriad responsibilities in a system of collective participatory patronage in which they significantly contributed, alongside builders and sculp- tors, to the creation of works of art.

The construction, decoration, and renovation of the palace of the priors always remained under communal supervision. Because the original structure was complete by 1315, operai were subsequently appointed by the Signoria only as needed until around 1470 when the Medici regime made the “palace operai” a permanent office.31 For other projects the government assigned responsibility to the guilds or Parte Guelfa, which in turn elected the operai. At the cathedral, construction began under joint communal– ecclesiastical supervision, then briefly rotated among the five major commercial guilds, and in 1331 was definitively entrusted to the Wool guild. From as early as the twelfth century, the Calimala supervised the baptistery works and the church of San Miniato al Monte; it also acquired responsibility for two hospitals, and later the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. Por Santa Maria administered works projects at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova from the thirteenth century and subsequently had responsibility for the convent of San Marco and

30 D. F. Zervas, “Orsanmichele and its Operai, 1336 –1436,” in Opera: carattere e ruolo delle fabbriche cittadine fino all’inizio dell’età moderna, ed. M. Haines and L. Riccetti (Florence, 1996), pp. 315 – 43. 31 Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, pp. 118 –21.

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the construction of the Innocenti Hospital. In the 1330s it was also assigned the rebuilding of Orsanmichele, the communal granary that became a site of popular devotion to a miracle-working image of the Virgin. After Orsanmichele became an oratory, the image and the great tabernacle built by Orcagna to house it came under the care of the captains of the confraternity of Orsanmi- chele. The popular government of 1378 – 82 authorized the minor guilds to have images of their patron saints painted on the interior piers of the oratory. In the fifteenth century the bankers’ guild administered two hospitals, and the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai had responsibility for a hospital, a church, and a convent.32 Many confraternities controlled chapels or oratories in which they commissioned works of art.33 Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, so called because it was for a long time in the Rucellai family chapel at Santa Maria Novella, was actually commissioned by a laudesi confraternity, the Compagnia di Santa Maria. Corporate supervision and patronage pervaded every corner of Florence’s ecclesiastical and civic architecture and sculpture.

Particularly intriguing is the history of citizen participation in the well docu- mented administration of the cathedral project by the Wool guild’s operai.34

For a generation after the guild’s assumption of responsibility, attention shifted from the cathedral to the bell tower under the supervision of Giotto, who was appointed “magister et gubernator” of the combined works in 1334. In the mid-1350s, with the bell tower nearly finished, the operai oversaw crucial debates regarding the cathedral. An original plan, which had guided the early construction, was challenged by the proponents of a different design calling for three huge bays in the nave instead of five smaller ones and requiring major readjustments in what had already gone up; the operai presented both proposals to a meeting of a hundred citizens and held thirty-eight other meetings with experts and advisers. A decade later yet another plan was put forward, and the operai requested advice from a large committee of goldsmiths, painters,

32 M. Haines, “L’Arte della Lana e l’Opera del Duomo a Firenze con un accenno a

Ghiberti tra due istituzioni,” in Opera, ed. Haines and Riccetti, pp. 267–94 (267–71). 33 M. Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market, trans. A. Luchs (Princeton, 1981; original Ger- man edition, 1938); D. Cole Ahl, “‘In corpo di compagnia’: Art and Devotion in the

Compagnia della Purificazione e di San Zanobi of Florence,” in Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image, ed. B. Wisch and D. Cole Ahl (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 46 –73. 34 For what follows, chiefly M. Haines, “Brunelleschi and Bureaucracy: The Tradition

of Public Patronage at the Florentine Cathedral,” I Tatti Studies 3 (1989): 89 –125; also H. Saalman, “Santa Maria del Fiore: 1294 –1418,” Art Bulletin 46 (1964): 471–500; L. Fabbri, “L’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore nel quindicesimo secolo: tra Repubblica

fiorentina e Arte della Lana,” in La cattedrale e la città; saggi sul Duomo di Firenze, 3 vols., ed. T. Verdon and A. Innocenti (Florence, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 319 –39.

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and masons, led by the builder Neri di Fioravante. Their proposal (known as the plan of the “maestri e dipintori”) was for a dramatic enlargement of the church with the addition of a fourth nave bay, a huge increase in the size of the crossing and thus of the space eventually to be covered by a dome, and the addition of a drum to elevate the dome to what seemed to many an impossible height. A large meeting of eighty citizens (including Salvestro de’ Medici and Uguccione de’ Ricci), together with the operai, guild consuls, master builders, and various experts, discussed the audacious plan and recommended that another committee of eight be appointed to evaluate its feasibility and safety. These eight, all laymen, included a Salviati, a Peruzzi, a Rucellai, a Bardi, an Albizzi, and Uguccione de’ Ricci. Discussions continued throughout the next year concerning the drum and the projected cupola, and the construction site was kept open on Sundays to allow any and all citizens to inspect two large models of the rival plans. Although the operai and guild consuls had already decided for the plan of the “maestri e dipintori,” they went to great lengths to mold public opinion in support of an idea that was risky and in a sense incomplete, because no one had any idea how to build a dome large enough to cover the immense space created by the plan, or whether the walls and piers could even bear its weight. On October 26 –27, 1367, more than four hundred citizens filed in to have a look: elite, popolo, minor guildsmen, and artisans. Whether there really was near unanimity (only one person, Jacopo Alberti, is recorded as expressing doubts about the new plan), or whether the notary ignored a few more dissenting voices, the operai succeeded in winning wide- spread approval for an enlarged cathedral. Only after still more meetings of experts and prominent citizens did they definitively commit the opera, and communal funds, to the astonishingly bold plan.35

Early fifteenth-century public patronage displays both continuity and change in the relationship between artist-artisans and corporate patrons. As in the deliberations over the cathedral design in the 1360s, so also (if Lorenzo Ghiberti’s later account in the autobiographical section of his Commentarii is accurate) in the famous competition announced in 1401 by the Calimala for the baptistery’s second set of bronze doors, in which contenders were required to cast panels depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, the decision-making process involved large numbers of citizens: Ghiberti claims he was declared the winner by a jury of thirty-four, whose judgment was confirmed by the baptistery operai, Calimala consuls, and then the entire guild.36 But Antonio Manetti’s

35 C. Guasti, Santa Maria del Fiore: la costruzione della chiesa e del campanile (Florence, 1887; reprint edn. 1974), pp. 171–2, 199 –205, 206 –7, 218 –20. 36 Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. L. Bartoli (Florence, 1998), p. 93; R. Krautheimer, with T. Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, 1956; third printing 1982), pp. 31– 43.

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(still later) Life of Brunelleschi asserts that the decision was actually for a joint commission, which, although unlikely, is not altogether implausible in view of what happened when Ghiberti and Brunelleschi faced off again over how to build the cupola. In 1418 the Cathedral Opera announced an open competi- tion for design-models, with a 200-florin prize for the winner, and created a separate committee of overseers for the project. Brunelleschi astonished every- one by proposing that a dome could be built without centering or supporting scaffolding, a plan favored by some but derided by others as the height of folly (see Plate 2). Again meetings and extensive consultations followed, and the public was invited to view the Brunelleschi model. In the end, the consuls, operai, and cupola officials approved his bold plan, but they nonetheless appointed Brunelleschi and Ghiberti as co-supervisors of the project in a gesture of compromise perhaps intended to co-opt potential opposition.37

The third great locus of civic patronage of these years was Orsanmichele (see Plate 6), where responsibility was shared among the confraternity, the

37 Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi, ed. H. Saalman, trans. C. Enggass (University Park, Penn., 1970), pp. 78 – 83.

Plate 6 Orsanmichele, rebuilt from 1330s (Brogi/Art Resource, NY)

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guilds, and the Parte Guelfa. In 1339 Por Santa Maria petitioned the Signoria to require each of the twelve major guilds to commission paintings or statues of their patron saints in the external piers of the granary whose reconstruction the guild was then overseeing. At the time only the Wool guild complied with a statue of St. Stephen by Andrea Pisano, and subsequently a few other guilds did so as well. But for a long time little happened until, in 1399, the Medici, Speziali, e Merciai commissioned a statue of the Virgin and Child; two years later the guild of Jurists and Notaries initiated discussions for the replacement (completed in 1406) of its old statue of St. Luke. Perhaps encouraged by these signs of reviving interest, in the same year the Signoria required all the other guilds with assigned niches in the external piers to commission statues of their saints and have them in place within ten years or risk having the niche reas- signed. Over the next twenty years a dozen monumental sculptures were erected at Orsanmichele, including three each by Nanni di Banco, Ghiberti, and Donatello. Nanni di Banco, who had been producing large sculptures for the cathedral, sculpted St. Philip for the guild of shoemakers, the Four Crowned Saints for the stonemasons and carpenters; and St. Eligius for the blacksmiths, all in marble.38 The Calimala turned of course to Ghiberti and commissioned a bronze St. John the Baptist, and the Cambio and Lana also engaged him to cast bronze statues of, respectively, St. Matthew and (a new) St. Stephen. And Donatello, who had also worked on the sculptural program for the cathedral façade, did the St. George for the guild of armorers and the St. Mark for the guild of linen manufacturers and used-cloth dealers, both in marble. The Parte Guelfa had the most prominent niche at Orsanmichele, at the center of the east side of the building overlooking the ceremonial route of via Calzaiuoli that connected the cathedral complex to the north and the palace and piazza of the priors to the south. For that prestigious location they commissioned Donatello to do a bronze statue of St. Louis of Toulouse, brother of Robert of Naples and a Franciscan Spiritual revered in the Guelf tradition. Orsanmichele’s sculptures were the result of a remarkable collaboration of guilds, government, confraternity, and Parte Guelfa, and every work emerged from discussion and debate among the members of these civic bodies.39 A register of deliberations kept by the Arte del Cambio detailing every decision involved in the com- mission of the St. Matthew from Ghiberti, and listing the names of guild members who served as operai and on the various sub-committees related to

38 M. Bergstein, The Sculpture of Nanni di Banco (Princeton, 2000), pp. 47–57, 114 –31, 136 – 47. 39 D. F. Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1987); Zervas, Orsanmichele Documents/Documenti 1336 –1452 (Ferrara, 1996); Orsanmichele a Firenze/Orsanmichele, Florence, ed. Zervas (Ferrara, 1996), pp. 181– 207.

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the project, is eloquent testimony to the participatory dimension of corporate patronage.40

But in these same decades traditions of corporate patronage were being challenged by both artists and patrons. Neither Ghiberti nor Brunelleschi was in the mold of the relatively self-effacing supervisors of building projects of the fourteenth century. Legends grew up around the competition for the bap- tistery door project, as memory of the event was shaped by Ghiberti’s own recol- lections and by Manetti’s partisan biography of Brunelleschi. This alone tells us that artisan-artists were redefining their relationship to patrons and the public (or having it redefined for them). Their own self-fashioning and the “thirst” for artist-heroes – a demand, even among corporate patrons, for the “best” artists – raised Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Donatello from artisan status and gave them greater autonomy. Ghiberti worked almost exclusively for corporate patrons: the Calimala (for the two sets of baptistery doors); the Lana, through their cathedral operai (among other things, for the St. Zenobius shrine in the east tribune of the cathedral); and both these guilds and the Cambio at Orsanmichele. While working on the second set of baptistery doors, he signed a contract in 1432 with the cathedral operai for the Zenobius shrine but did so little on it for the next five years that they terminated the agreement. Instead of turning to someone else, however, two years later they again asked Ghiberti to undertake the project, and this time he completed it. Brunelleschi’s reputation as a rebel against convention may have been exag- gerated by Manetti, but it was not completely invented. Manetti says that he simply walked away from the joint commission awarded for the baptistery doors and that years later his outbursts in heated meetings about the cupola caused him to be carried out of the room more than once. In 1420 he was unhappy about the co-supervisory collaboration with Ghiberti for the cupola but was not about to turn his back on that project. Manetti recounts that he pretended to be ill, forced Ghiberti to carry out on his own a technical proce- dure that he allegedly mishandled, and gradually forced his rival to retreat from the role of equal supervisor. True or not (as with the elaborate trick Brunelleschi allegedly played on the woodworker Grasso to rob him of his identity, as recounted in the Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo, also written by Manetti), this was the kind of reputation Brunelleschi not only acquired but apparently encouraged about himself.

Competition for prized artists was beginning to undercut the traditions of collective supervision, consensus, and corporate control of both projects and artisan-artists. Even artists whose careers unfolded primarily within the framework of corporate and civic patronage began to be drawn in different directions by private patrons. The always busy Ghiberti found time to make

40 ASF, Arte del Cambio, 18; A. Doren, Das Aktenbuch für Ghibertis Matthäusstatue an Or. S. Michele zu Florenz (Berlin, 1906).

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a bronze reliquary for the Medici. In the case of Brunelleschi, 1419 –20 was a particularly significant moment in this transition. Within the space of two years, in addition to the cupola, he also accepted the commission from Por Santa Maria to design the Innocenti Hospital and commissions for three private chapels: one from Giovanni de’ Medici to redesign the sacristy at San Lorenzo (where Giovanni and his wife are buried), and two others from elite members of the Wool guild, Tommaso Barbadori, who served on the Opera del Duomo in 1418, and Schiatta Ridolfi, a consul of the guild in the same year. According to Manetti, Brunelleschi was trying to convince the operai and consuls that he could build a dome without centering, and knowing that Ridolfi wanted to rebuild a family chapel with a dome in the church of San Jacopo sopr’Arno he offered to demonstrate on a smaller scale that it was possible. The Barbadori chapel in Santa Felicita and the sacristy in San Lorenzo also have domes,41 and the three projects demonstrate that the fame Brunelleschi already enjoyed as the ingenious designer of the controversial project for the cupola was stimulating the private demand for art that was becoming a symbol of status for elite families.

Family Commemoration and Self-Fashioning

Endowments of family chapels, often as burial sites, went back to the end of the thirteenth century.42 Evidence from testamentary bequests suggests that they became more numerous after the Black Death, and particularly after the 1363 plague, and by the early fifteenth century sometimes involved sizeable investments: compared with the average 200-florin bequest for fourteenth- century chapels throughout central Italy, after 1400 some Florentines were leaving as much as 500 or 1,000 florins for chapels in which they sought long- term patronage rights. Spending for chapel decorations also increased. Some fourteenth-century bequests for large narrative cycles reached 250 –300 florins, but more common and smaller devotional paintings, usually for chapels but sometimes for domestic use, were much less expensive. Following the plagues, more testators wanted images of themselves included in the paintings they commissioned. After about 1400, bequests for art became larger, if not neces- sarily more numerous, than those of a generation earlier: the average bequest for all artworks (including paintings) increased fourfold, from 70 to 270 florins, as commissions became more imposing and more conspicuously linked to family commemoration.43

41 R. King, Brunelleschi’s Dome (London, 2000), pp. 45– 6; Manetti, Life of Brunelleschi, ed. Saalman, pp. 68 – 9, 82 – 9, 98 – 9. 42 Dameron, Florence and Its Church, pp. 184 – 9. 43 S. K. Cohn, Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 214 –22, 245, 254 –70.

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Plate 7 Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, altarpiece by Orcagna (Andrea di

Cione) and frescoes by Nardo di Cione, mid-1350s (Studio Fotografico Quattrone,

Florence)

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Neighborhood churches were a focus of competition to enhance family prestige by endowing and decorating chapels. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella had chapels endowed by the Rucellai, Bardi, Guidalotti, and Strozzi, while patronage rights in the choir behind the main altar were claimed by the Ricci and Tornaquinci.44 In the 1350s Tommaso Strozzi commissioned for the elevated chapel in the left tran- sept (see Plate 7) the magnificent altarpiece by Orcagna in which Christ gives the keys to Peter and the laws to Thomas Aquinas. On the surrounding walls Orcagna’s brother Nardo di Cione painted images of the Last Judgment, Hell, and Paradise, in which a man and a woman, possibly (but not clearly identi- fied as) the donor and his wife, are twice depicted being welcomed among the blessed. Strozzi probably intended to honor Aquinas, the Dominican theologian (d. 1274) canonized in 1323 whose name he shared, but any repre- sentation of Aquinas certainly required the approval of the Dominicans. Sums were also left for the decoration of sacristies, chapter-houses (meeting rooms), and cloisters in which it was not possible to establish patronage rights as in chapels. In 1355 Buonamico di Lapo Guidalotti left money to the Dominican friars for “ornamenting and painting” the chapter-house (now called the Span- ish chapel), which Andrea Bonaiuti decorated a decade later with monumental frescoes including the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, an elaborate represen- tation of the history of philosophy and theology and Aquinas’s doctrinal victories over heresiarchs like Arius and Averroes. Even more obviously than the Strozzi altarpiece, this was the result of an iconographical program devised by one or more Dominican theologians and motivated by pride in their new saint. In 1348 Turino Baldesi left over 300 florins to Santa Maria Novella for the depiction (executed by Paolo Uccello almost a century later in the Chiostro Verde) of the “entire” Old Testament “from beginning to end,” with program and precise location left up to the Dominican preacher and theologian Jacopo Passavanti.45 In all these examples, the works brought the patrons glory as well as greater assurance of salvation, but it was the Dominicans who decided what got painted where.

Santa Croce, the Franciscan basilica on the other side of town, was perhaps the city’s most crowded site of family commemoration. The Peruzzi, Baroncelli, Cavalcanti, Tolosini, Cerchi, Velluti, Castellani, Rinuccini, Ricasoli, Alberti, Machiavelli, and several other families all had chapels here, and at least two branches of the Bardi had a total of four. An entire chapter in the early history

44 E. Borsook, The Companion Guide to Florence, 5th edn. (London, 1988), pp. 129 – 49. 45 D. Norman, “The Art of Knowledge: Two Artistic Schemes in Florence,” in Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280 –1400, Vol. II: Case Studies, ed. D. Norman (London, 1995), pp. 176–87, 217–41; Cohn, Cult of Remembrance, p. 245.

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of Florentine wall painting took place in these chapels between 1310 and 1330. Giotto or his assistants painted the (now largely lost) scenes from the life of the Virgin in the Tolosini chapel to the left of the choir, and Giotto himself painted most of the scenes of the life of Francis in the chapel founded by the banker Ridolfo de’ Bardi to the right of the choir and the lives of John the Evangelist and the Baptist in the Peruzzi chapel next to the Bardi chapel. In the 1330s Taddeo Gaddi decorated the sumptuous Baroncelli chapel at the southern end of the transept with stories of the life of the Virgin, while at its northern end Maso di Banco painted the life of St. Sylvester in the Bardi di Vernio chapel. Around 1380 – 90 Agnolo Gaddi painted the legend of the True Cross (for which Santa Croce was named) in the choir, where the Alberti had patronage rights. Whatever influence patrons had in the production of these works was contained within the doctrinal requirements of the order. As with the Orcagna altarpiece and the chapter-house frescoes at Santa Maria Novella, the history, theology, and representational traditions of the order dominated the choice, placement, and interpretation of themes and protagonists. The Franciscan order was deeply divided between the Spirituals, with their insistence on the literal observance of the rule of poverty, and the Conventuals, who accepted a nominal poverty by which they used, but did not legally own, buildings, books, and other goods. Francis’s memory and image were con- tested terrain, and the disputes culminated, in the very years in which Giotto was painting the Bardi chapel, in papal condemnation of the Spirituals’ doc- trine of apostolic poverty. A great merchant family like the Bardi would not in any event have wished to promote the uncompromising views of the Spirituals, for whom salvation depended on renunciation of all wealth and material goods, and the Francis of the Bardi chapel is indeed the obedient son of the church described in Bonaventure’s official biography.46 Fourteenth-century painters were no doubt selected for their skills and styles, but these in turn were shaped by the nature of the commissions and the religious ideologies behind them. Powerful families spent considerable sums to build and decorate chapels, but in the fourteenth century the paintings they commissioned said more about the religious orders than about the families.

Salvation and family commemoration remained the overriding motives, but fifteenth-century patrons were more involved in, and exerted more influence over, what they paid for. Among the first of these new patrons was the im- mensely wealthy Palla Strozzi. From at least the last quarter of the fourteenth

46 R. Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: Saint Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel (University Park, Penn., 1988), pp. 9 –10, 51–77; C. Harrison, “Giotto and the ‘Rise

of Painting’,” in Siena, Florence and Padua, Volume I: Interpretative Essays, ed. Norman, pp. 73 – 95; Norman, “Those Who Pay, Those Who Pray and Those Who

Paint: Two Funerary Chapels,” ibid., vol. 2, pp. 169 – 93.

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century, the Strozzi held patronage rights in a chapel in the church of Santa Trinita, as did the Gianfigliazzi, Davizzi, Bartolini-Salimbeni, Ardinghelli, Scali, Spini, Davanzati, and, among so many elite names, the Compagni, in whose chapel Dino is buried. But one chapel was evidently not enough for the Strozzi. Fulfilling the terms of a bequest made decades earlier by his father Nofri for a new sacristy with adjoining chapel, Palla assumed direct control of the project after Nofri’s death in 1418, hired his own builders, and introduced significant modifications. He is a good example of a private patron who already had considerable experience in artistic matters from his participation in civic and corporate projects. He had served on the Calimala committee that supervised Ghiberti’s first set of baptistery doors and later sought the sculptor’s advice on various projects (paying him for “several designs and services”), possibly including the Santa Trinita sacristy. Strozzi was also on the committee that decided the placement in the baptistery of Donatello’s and Michelozzo’s tomb for Pope Cossa, John XXIII. As a private patron his most notable commission was to the painter Gentile da Fabriano in 1423 for the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi) for the Santa Trinita sacristy. Palla, who was the first of the really big fifteenth-century spenders, included the “building and decoration” of the chapel and sacristy among the expenses, together with his father’s funeral, various dowries, and business losses, that cost him the huge sum of 30,000 florins between 1418 and 1422.47

Across the river, in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine, some chapels were endowed by the district’s popular confraternities, others by elite families (Soderini, Brancacci, Serragli), by the emerging Lanfredini, and by families of the popolo (Ferrucci, Tinghi).48 In 1465 the Del Pugliese, a family of new wealth and rising status, took over a transept chapel.49 Most famous among the Carmine’s chapels is the one partially decorated by Masaccio and endowed by the Brancacci. In 1367 Piero Brancacci left money for a family chapel whose construction was begun by his son Antonio in the 1380s. In 1389 another family member bequeathed funds for its decoration, but only

47 R. Jones, “Palla Strozzi e la sagrestia di Santa Trinita,” Rivista d’arte 37 (1984): 9 –106 (91); H. Gregory, “Palla Strozzi’s Patronage and Pre-Medicean Florence,” in

Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. F. W. Kent and P. Simons with J. C. Eade (Oxford, 1987), pp. 201–20; J. R. Sale, “Palla Strozzi and Lorenzo Ghiberti:

New Documents,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 22 (1978): 355–8; D. Davisson, “The Iconology of the S. Trinita Sacristy, 1418–1435: A Study of

the Private and Public Functions of Religious Art in the Early Quattrocento,” Art Bulletin 58 (1975): 315 –33. 48 N. Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon: Neighbourhood Life and Social Change in Renaissance Florence (Florence, 1995), p. 155. 49 Burke, Changing Patrons, p. 29.

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in the 1420s did Masaccio and Masolino begin painting scenes from the life of the apostle Peter, patron saint of the chapel’s founder. By this time Felice Brancacci, from a different branch of the family, had inherited the chapel rights, but it is unknown whether he or others chose the painters. In his 1430 testament Felice stipulated that, if his son died without an heir, all members of the Brancacci clan would inherit the chapel, and in a revised testament of 1432 he obligated his heirs to complete its decoration should he die before doing so. As it happened, Felice, exiled after the Medici victory of 1434, never had the chance, and the chapel was completed only in the 1480s when Filippino Lippi painted the sections left unfinished by Masaccio and Masolino.50

The main site of chapel patronage for the Oltrarno’s elite families was Santo Spirito, whose new church was designed by Brunelleschi and built between the 1430s and 1490s. Control of building and chapel allocation was shared by the Augustinian friars, the citizen overseers of the opera, and the commune, which actually owned the church and provided much of the financing. Chapel assignment reflected the Oltrarno political and social hierarchy. Traditionally powerful Santo Spirito families that had had chapels in the old church received the prestigious new ones behind the main altar and in the transept: the Frescobaldi got three, the Corbinelli four, the Biliotti, Capponi, and newly prominent Nasi at least one each. Luca Pitti was made an operaio and given a chapel in 1458 without having to pay for its rights (presumably because of his central role in rescuing the regime that year). Families of lower status received nave chapels. More than in other Florentine churches, chapel decoration in Santo Spirito adhered to a general plan, which required altarpieces and stained- glass windows rather than wall paintings.51

San Lorenzo is in a category all its own because it was the Medici parish church and the first major site of their patronage. In the old church, torn down beginning in the 1420s and replaced according to a design by Brunelleschi, chaplaincies had been founded by moderately prominent families (Anchioni, Marignolli, later the Rondinelli and Ginori) and by artisans, notaries, and priests. Chaplaincies usually involved not the building of actual chapels but the appointment of a priest-chaplain to say masses for the soul of the testator. In 1336 –7, for example, Chele di Aldobrandino bequeathed property outside the walls whose revenue was to pay for daily masses for the souls of Chele and his family at some altar in San Lorenzo that the prior and chapter were to

50 A. Molho, “The Brancacci Chapel: Studies in its Iconography and History,” Jour- nal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977): 50 – 98. D. C. Ahl, “Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel,” in The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, ed. Ahl (Cam- bridge, 2002), pp. 138 –57. 51 Burke, Changing Patrons, pp. 63 – 83.

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make available.52 Given the relatively small size of the old church and the existence by 1422 of nineteen chaplaincies, it is likely that some altars were sites of two or more.53 Most were suppressed with the founding of the new and larger church, whose more numerous chapels were reallocated to the district’s elite families. Operai appointed for three years in 1416 included members of the Rondinelli, Della Stufa, Guasconi, Dietisalvi-Neroni, and Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, who served again in 1423 and 1426, as did his sons Lorenzo and Cosimo in 1432 and 1433. Giovanni asserted patronage rights in the new church in both a transept chapel and the old sacristy and quickly completed their construction. Work on San Lorenzo slowed in the 1430s, no doubt because of political turbulence and perhaps a lack of funds, and when it resumed around 1440 a meeting of leading members of the gonfalone and parish decided to transfer patronage rights over the choir to Cosimo in return for his assumption of the costs of the church’s construction. It was unprecedented for an individual to assume financial responsibility for the building of an entire, and very large, church. Patronage on such a colossal scale brought with it great influence, and Cosimo was behind major changes in the roster of chapel patrons, as some families were pushed out and Medici allies (like the Dietisalvi-Neroni) and political clients (like the Cambini) in- vited in. Cosimo also determined that he himself would be buried in a floor tomb at the center of the crossing before the main altar. Patronage, piety, and political self-aggrandizement could not have been more completely fused.

The range of Cosimo’s patronage was unlike anything even the wealthiest patrons had hitherto attempted, or dared attempt.54 He (and his brother Lorenzo, since they commissioned jointly) extended their patronage to nearly every famous artist in the city, to artistic media and types of projects previ- ously supported only by institutional patrons, to a long list of churches far beyond their neighborhood in and outside the city, and to several religious orders, plastering the Medici palle and images of their growing gaggle of patron saints anywhere and everywhere they could and associating the family with important sites in the city’s processional, religious, and civic life. For example, ancient patronage rights over their former parish church of San Tommaso gave them a special interest in St. Thomas. Cosimo rebuilt the church and influenced the government to institute an officially supported ritual observance in the saint’s honor. A generation later Piero was instrumental

52 W. M. Bowsky, La chiesa di San Lorenzo a Firenze nel Medioevo (Florence, 1999), pp. 139 – 42. 53 For what follows: C. Elam, “Cosimo de’ Medici and San Lorenzo,” in Cosimo “il Vecchio,” ed. Ames-Lewis, pp. 157 – 80. 54 For splendid illustrations, see D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance.

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in having Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse removed from the niche at Orsanmichele that faced onto the processional route of via Calzaiuoli to make room for Andrea del Verrocchio’s bronze Doubting Thomas and Christ, thus identifying the prestigious site with the family’s political power and patron- age.55 Bronze had been restricted to civic projects because of its immense cost, and Medici use of it conveyed their political pretensions and advertised their great wealth. Cosimo and Lorenzo had already commissioned the bronze reliquary chest from Ghiberti for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (a private commission for a public place). More grandiose were the bronze doors they asked Donatello to design for the San Lorenzo sacristy in which their parents’ quasi-regal tomb of marble, porphyry, and bronze was placed. Beyond San Lorenzo, Cosimo’s architectural projects included the rebuilding or renovation of several ecclesiastical institutions: San Marco, where he in- stalled the Observant Dominicans and built the library that housed the great collection of manuscripts donated by Niccolò Niccoli; the Observant Franciscan convent of Bosco ai Frati in the Mugello near the family’s country estates; the Badia in Fiesole; and a novitiate chapel at Santa Croce. Along the way he commissioned tabernacles by Michelozzo at San Miniato and Santissima Annunziata, large altarpieces and frescoes by Fra Angelico, paintings by Filippo Lippi, and a long list of other works that only seem “lesser” by comparison with the magnitude of the larger projects.56

Political messages in Medici-commissioned art became bolder. In the 1450s Cosimo had Benozzo Gozzoli paint the Procession of the Magi in the chapel of the family palace, with portraits of himself, his son Piero, and a representation (not an actual portrait) of the young Lorenzo di Piero, all with the Magi on their way to adore the child Christ. Although patrons had previously included images of themselves as participants in, or witnesses to, sacred dramas, never before had an entire family integrated itself so explicitly into sacred history. Dynastic implications are evident in the parallel between the three generations of kings and three generations of Medici, and in the presence of the Medici symbols on the caparison of the horse of the youngest king, Caspar, whose feast day coincides with Lorenzo’s birthday (January 1).57 Whether Cosimo

55 K. J. P. Lowe, “A Matter of Piety or of Family Tradition and Custom: The

Religious Patronage of Piero de’ Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni,” in Piero de’ Medici, ed. Beyer and Boucher, pp. 55 – 69; J. Paoletti, “ ‘. . . ha fatto Piero con voluntà del

padre . . .’: Piero de’ Medici and Corporate Commissions of Art,” ibid., pp. 221–50. 56 J. Paoletti, “Fraternal Piety and Family Power: The Artistic Patronage of Cosimo

and Lorenzo de’ Medici,” and C. Robinson, “Cosimo de’ Medici and the Franciscan

Observants at Bosco ai Frati,” both in Cosimo “Il Vecchio,” ed. Ames-Lewis, pp. 181– 219. 57 R. Hatfield, “Cosimo de’ Medici and the Chapel of His Palace,” in Cosimo “il Vecchio,” ed. Ames-Lewis, pp. 221– 44 (238).

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commissioned or acquired Donatello’s bronze David, he placed it prominently in the private/public courtyard of his palace. David had already begun the transition from prophet and precursor of Christ to a symbol of fortitude in defense of the patria. Years earlier Donatello had carved a marble David to go atop one of the buttresses of the north tribune of the cathedral, and the commune purchased it from the Cathedral Opera in 1416 and moved it to the palace of the priors. Cosimo’s appropriation of David was an audacious state- ment of his and his family’s self-identification with the civic virtues with which the biblical hero was associated; and the placement in Palazzo Medici estab- lished in effect a rival site of these virtues. But David was also a king, and the unprecedented youth of the Medici David also alludes, under the guise of civic virtue, to Lorenzo and the family’s dynastic ambitions.58

Medici patronage, continued by Lorenzo with the same ubiquity if not magnitude,59 set a standard that could never be matched by other families, and their political dominance may have dissuaded potential competitors from even trying. Compared to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there was a dearth of chapel decoration for several decades after the consolidation of the Medici regime. Other families may have been cautious about advertising their prestige too loudly, perhaps fearing that it might be seen as an attempt to rival the Medici. Certainly families not in good Medici graces shied away from patronage that conveyed public self-fashioning. But families or individuals seeking such favor used art to flatter the Medici. In the early 1470s, the exchange broker Guasparre Dal Lama, a (perhaps would-be) Medici client of modest social status, built a chapel in Santa Maria Novella and commissioned Botticelli to paint the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi) as its altarpiece. He used the painting to show off his ties to the Medici by having himself and several of them included in the picture, once again, if not in actual portraits, as types reflecting traditional Medici identification with the Magi.60

Dal Lama had no family behind him, and the painting was a gesture of hom- age with no overtones of competition. Similarly, Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici bank, commissioned a fresco cycle at Santa Trinita, whose ostensible content is the life of St. Francis, but which is also a com- memoration of his dependence on the Medici. In 1479 Sassetti negotiated the transfer of rights in the chapel at the north end of the transept from the

58 A. W. B. Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth- Century Florence (New Haven, 2002), pp. 139 – 92; S. B. McHam, “Donatello’s Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence,” Art Bulletin 83 (2001): 32 – 47. 59 F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore, 2004). 60 R. Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration”: A Study in Pictorial Content (Princeton, 1976).

332 The Luxury Economy and Art Patronage

Plate 8 Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita, frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio, early

1480s (Scala /Art Resource, NY)

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Petriboni-Fastelli family to his own and engaged Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes that were finished by 1485 (see Plate 8). The patron, his family, his Medici boss, and several in-laws are all prominently represented, especially on the altar wall, which first commands the visitor’s attention. On the lowest level, surrounding the altarpiece, are portraits of the kneeling donors, Francesco and his wife Nera Corsi. No doubt because the death of their eldest son some years earlier had been followed by the birth of another who was given, in good Florentine tradition, the same name, Sassetti replaced Ghirlandaio’s sug- gested depiction in the middle register of a story normally included in Francis cycles with the less common episode of St. Francis Resuscitating the Roman Notary’s Son, set, not in Rome, but in the piazza outside Santa Trinita, where the miracle is witnessed by Sassetti’s daughters and his prominent neighbors, including Neri Capponi, whose grandson married one of the daughters. Above it is depicted the Confirmation of the Rule by Pope Honorius III, set, once again, not in Rome but in Florence in the piazza of the priors, with the loggia and palace in the background and, in the foreground on the right, portraits of Sassetti, his son Federigo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Antonio Pucci, whose son married another of Sassetti’s daughters, and on the left Sassetti’s other sons, all welcoming the arrival of Lorenzo’s children with their teachers (including the poet Poliziano) from a lower level.61 Sassetti was a “new man” who had risen with the fortunes of the Medici bank (ironically precarious at the very moment he had the chapel decorated) to become its general manager for thirty years. The first Sassetti prior, and the only one before 1500, was his brother Bartolomeo in 1453. Francesco’s only major office was a term on the Sixteen in 1483. A creature of the Medici and utterly dependent on them, he never lost their trust and favor. The frescoes celebrate his ties to the Medici, implicitly expressing the hope, through the depiction of his and Lorenzo’s children, that the link would persist into future generations. The family repre- sented is limited to Francesco’s wife, sons, daughters, and, through the latter, his powerful in-laws.

Equally Medicean, but far more prestigious and ancient than the Sassetti, the Tornabuoni had patronage rights to the choir at Santa Maria Novella that went back to a thirteenth-century Tornaquinci who donated the land on which the original Dominican church was built. Giovanni Tornabuoni was manager of the Medici bank’s Rome branch, but his link to the family was not limited to business; his sister Lucrezia was Piero’s wife and Lorenzo’s mother. After some uncertainty owing to an old Sassetti claim to the high altar, in 1486 the Dominicans gave Tornabuoni and his entire consorteria full rights over both the choir and the altar. Indeed, he had already signed a contract with

61 E. Borsook and J. Offerhaus, Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita, Florence: History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel (Doornspijk, 1981).

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Ghirlandaio for the depiction of scenes from the life of the Virgin (to whom Santa Maria Novella is dedicated) and that of John the Baptist (his patron saint) “as an act of piety and love of God, to the exaltation of his house and family and the enhancement of the said church and chapel.” In addition to specifying scenes and stories and their location, the contract also stipulated that Ghirlandaio “shall begin to paint one or other of the above-mentioned stories and paintings only after first doing a drawing of the said story which he must show to Giovanni; and the [painter] may afterwards start this story, but painting and embellishing it with any additions and in whatever form and manner the said Giovanni may have declared.”62 Quite unlike fourteenth- century fresco cycles that reflect the founders, saints, and ideals of the religious orders that approved them more than the patrons who paid for them, the paintings in the Tornabuoni chapel had their patron’s approval in every detail. But they are also different from those in the Sassetti chapel at Santa Trinita. Whereas the latter showcase the ties of a parvenu to the city’s most powerful family, the Tornabuoni frescoes are a lavish representation and commemora- tion of an extended kin-group without overt reference to the Medici. The Annunciation to Zacharias, in which the angel foretells the birth of the Bap- tist, is set in a space at once classical, civic, and sacred and is witnessed by many identifiable family members, including Giovanni himself and the elders of the consorteria’s other three branches (Tornaquinci, Popoleschi, and Giachinotti).63 Even if the Medici are not directly present, however, such family commemoration would not have been possible without Giovanni Tornabuoni’s many links to them.

Wealthy patrons who had the favor of the Medici could indulge some self-fashioning as long as competition was not overt. No doubt because of his family’s long association with Santa Maria Novella, where many Strozzi were buried, in 1486 Filippo Strozzi bought from the Boni family the rights to the chapel to the right of the choir and made it his private burial place, in which he commissioned a sculpted tomb from Benedetto da Maiano and frescoes by Filippino Lippi of the lives of St. Philip and John the Evangelist, in which the Raising of Drusiana may have been intended as an allegory of his own return from the metaphorical death of exile. The contrast with the first Strozzi chapel, even across the obvious continuity of family burial traditions and chapel patronage, is illuminating. Although in the earlier one the donor and his fam- ily are apparently honored, it is Orcagna’s severe, lawgiving Christ and the intimidating density of souls in the realms of the afterlife that dominate. In

62 Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, ed. D. S. Chambers (Columbia, S.C., 1971), pp. 173 –5. 63 P. Simons, “Patronage in the Tornaquinci Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence,”

in Patronage, Art, and Society, ed. Kent and Simons, pp. 221–50.

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Filippo’s chapel he himself is the center of attention in a visual fusion of the liturgical and the funereal surrounded by paintings whose subject matter he chose and stipulated in a contract with the painter.64 Such self-glorification was not possible without Lorenzo’s at least tacit permission.

Palace building was the ultimate in conspicuous consumption and advertise- ment of a patron’s status and means, an immensely expensive and highly visible item of material culture. Older palaces, like Palazzo Spini in piazza Santa Trinita or the Mozzi palace at the Oltrarno end of the Rubaconte bridge (today’s Ponte alle Grazie), were imposing urban fortresses intended as much for defense as prestige. Some, like the Peruzzi palaces near Santa Croce, faced inward around ancient family enclaves. Beginning in the fourteenth century, palaces were increasingly built facing major streets with more attention to decorative and structural features that set one apart from another, but they were still part of the continuous urban fabric, often with rented ground- floor commercial spaces. Fifteenth-century private palaces transformed entire neighborhoods. They were larger and occupied more ground area, and, wherever possible, their owners bought and cleared surrounding spaces to allow them to be seen from a greater distance and thus to dominate a piazza or street. Ground-floor shops disappeared, and now the lower levels sported imposing rustication, consisting of large rough-hewn blocks of stone, and often included stone benches for the many clients that every great builder and political patron hoped to see conspicuously congregating and waiting for a chance to see him.65

The new trend was inaugurated around 1410 –20 by Niccolò da Uzzano who built a large palace with a rusticated façade in via de’ Bardi. But it was Cosimo de’ Medici who set the standard for all subsequent palace-building with a grand family townhouse that marked an epoch in elite domestic archi- tecture (see Plate 5). According to a perhaps apocryphal story reported by Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo expressed a desire for a new palace to Brunelleschi, who produced a model for a freestanding structure that would have faced, and perhaps overwhelmed, the piazza of San Lorenzo. Vasari claims that, when Cosimo decided against it “because it seemed too sumptuous and grand, and to avoid envy more than expense,” an angry Brunelleschi smashed his model and Cosimo later regretted that he did not accept it. Traditionally attributed to Michelozzo, the palace that Cosimo had built between the mid- 1440s and mid-1450s combines Tuscan Romanesque elements with antique

64 D. Friedman, “The Burial Chapel of Filippo Strozzi in Santa Maria Novella in

Florence,” L’arte 3 (1970): 109 –31; Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, pp. 69 –72; Welch, Art and Society, pp. 11–15. 65 Y. Elet, “Seats of Power: The Outdoor Benches of Early Modern Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61 (2002): 444 – 69.

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Plate 9 Palazzo Rucellai, facade by Leon Battista Alberti, 1450s (Scala/Art Resouce,

NY)

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features. But its rusticated façade and biforate windows certainly alluded to the palace of the priors and to an appropriation or sharing of the public authority that inhered in that quasi-sacred civic building (as the bronze David also did). Located at the point where the via Larga bends slightly to the right, Palazzo Medici presents itself in oblique and elongated view from the piazza of the baptistery and cathedral, thus creating a visual and symbolic link between the city’s spiritual center and the home of its most powerful citizen and family.66

In palace-building Medici grandeur generated emulation, if not in specific architectural and design features, certainly in proclaiming the “magnificence,” or virtuous liberality, of their builders and the pride of families within their ancestral neighborhoods.67 Benedetto Dei listed twenty palace projects in his lifetime (among thirty-three major building projects),68 and between the mid- 1440s, when Cosimo began building, and the mid-1460s, at least ten palaces were constructed. It was almost as if others had been waiting for Cosimo to take the lead and not risk upstaging him. Giovanni Rucellai assembled several properties in the family’s traditional site and built a palace on the Vigna Nuova, with its exquisite façade designed by Alberti (see Plate 9) and a loggia across the street.69 Members of both elite families, including the Pazzi, Dietisalvi- Neroni, and Gianfigliazzi, and relatively newer families like the Spinelli,70

Boni (today Palazzo Antinori), Gondi, Nasi (today Palazzo Torrigiani), and Del Pugliese71 joined the fashionable ranks of palace-builders. Most palaces were more modest than Palazzo Medici, but Luca Pitti’s palace across the river rivaled it (although the original structure was not nearly the size of the build- ing subsequently enlarged as the residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany and the king of Italy). By far the largest and most ambitious of the palaces, “more grandiose than that of [the Medici],” as one foreign observer suggested, was the Strozzi palace begun by Filippo in 1489 (see Plate 10). Whereas the “aver- age” upper-class palazzo cost between 1,500 and 2,500 florins, Filippo and his heirs spent an astounding 40,000 florins on a palace that lacked ground floor shops or any commercial space. Although equivalent in height to a modern

66 B. Preyer, “L’archittetura del palazzo mediceo,” in Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, ed. G. Cherubini and G. Fanelli (Florence, 1990), pp. 58 –75. 67 F. W. Kent, “Palaces, Politics and Society in Fifteenth-Century Florence,” I Tatti Studies 2 (1987): 41–70. 68 Cronica, ed. Barducci, p. 86. 69 B. Preyer, “The Rucellai Palace,” in Giovanni Rucellai e il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2, pp. 155 –225; B. Preyer, “The Rucellai Loggia,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 21 (1977): 183 – 98. 70 Jacks and Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence, pp. 91–142. 71 Burke, Changing Patrons, pp. 35 – 61.

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ten-storey building, it consists of only three floors and a dozen (albeit large) rooms intended for just the immediate families of two brothers.72

Palaces represented investment in family immortality and personal fame. Filippo Strozzi died in 1491 before his great palace was completed and thus never had the opportunity to express the sentiments he would no doubt have felt over this immense monument to his and his family’s memory. But other great Florentine builders did express such feelings. Giovanni Rucellai was not the only Florentine to write in his ricordanze that “there are two principal things men do in this world: the first is to procreate, the second to build.” Yet some conservative impulse in Rucellai toward modesty in spending, signaled by his reminder to himself in the very next sentence that “St. Bernard says one must build more out of necessity than desire, because building makes desire grow stronger rather than weaker,” needed to be overcome for him to praise his own building without reservation. Perhaps he was reflecting some of the

72 R. Goldthwaite, “The Florentine Palace as Domestic Architecture,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 977 –1012.

Plate 10 Palazzo Strozzi, begun 1489 (Alinari /Art Resource, NY)

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Plate 11 Santa Maria Novella, facade by Leon Battista Alberti, completed by 1470

(Erich Lessing /Art Resource, NY)

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old moralistic condemnation of conspicuous building, expressed a century earlier by Giovanni Villani (12.94) who remarked that, although the innumer- able country villas surrounding the city were a magnificent sight, their builders committed a serious error and sin in spending so uncontrollably and were considered insane for doing so. In one such mood Rucellai advised his sons to be “wise about spending,” to avoid excess, and to practice thrift and prudent management. Big spenders, he warned, are ultimately avaricious because they can never acquire enough wealth by means fair or foul to satisfy their desires. Underscoring the distinction between “necessary” and “voluntary” expendi- tures, he advised waiting and reflecting before indulging in the latter to see if the “desire would pass in the meantime.” But in other moods Rucellai over- came such scruples. As he reviewed his extensive building, “done for the honor of God, the honor of the city, and the memory of me,” he said he agreed with the “common saying, which is true,” that “making and spending money are among the great pleasures men take in this world,” adding that it would be difficult to say “which is greater.” “For fifty years I have done nothing but make and spend money; I have taken the greatest and sweetest pleasure in doing so, and I think the greater sweetness has been in spending than in earning.” Much of that spending was for artworks and buildings, and in him we see, for the first time, the self-conscious collector of works known by the names and reputations of those who made them. Rucellai notes with satisfaction in the Zibaldone that “we have in our house many works of sculpture, painting, and intarsia by the best masters that have existed for a long time, not only in Florence but in Italy,” and he gives their names: Domenico Veneziano, Filippo Lippi, Giuliano da Maiano, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Maso Finiguerra, Verrocchio, Vittorio Ghiberti, Andrea del Castagno, Paolo Uccello, and Desiderio da Settignano. It is a remarkable list, and indicative of his awareness of the leading artists of the age. But when it came to building, Rucellai made himself the author, perhaps not surprisingly given his compari- son of building and procreation. Besides the family palace, his main projects included the family burial chapel in the nearby parish church of San Pancrazio, with the marble replica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the glorious façade of Santa Maria Novella. Although both were designed by Leon Battista Alberti, the great architect’s name is absent, not only on the works themselves, but even in Rucellai’s voluminous Zibaldone. Instead, both the sepulchre and the façade prominently feature the Rucellai arms and the name of Giovanni himself. The façade’s inscription of his name and the year 1470 proclaims that he, not Alberti, not the friars, not the church, was its maker73 (Plate 11).

73 Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 1, ed. Perosa, pp. 15 –17, 121, 20 –7; F. W. Kent, “The Making of a Renaissance Patron,” ibid., vol. 2, pp. 13, 52.