Changing Patrons Social Identity and The Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

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Changing patrons
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Changing patrons
Social Identity and the Visual Arts in

Renaissance Florence
jill burke

the pennsylvania state universit y press • universit y park, pennsylvania

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Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burke, Jill, 1971–

Changing patrons : social identity and the visual arts in Renaissance Florence/Jill Burke.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-271-02362-7 (alk. paper)
1. Art patronage—Italy—Florence.
2. Artists and patrons—Italy—Florence.
3. Art, Italian—Italy—Florence.
4. Art, Renaissance—Italy—Florence.
I. Title.
N5273.B87 2004
707'.9'4551—dc22
2003022850
Copyright © 2004 the pennsylvania state universit y

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper.
Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
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contents
list of illustrations vii

acknowled gments xii
a note on transcriptions and transl ations xiv
abbreviations xv
introduction 1
part i: Families, Neighbors, and Friends

chapter 1 Family Self-Fashioning 17
chapter 2 Private Wealth and Public Benefit: The Nasi and Del
Pugliese Palaces 35
chapter 3 Family, Church, Community: The Appearance of Power
in Santo Spirito 63
chapter 4 Patronage and the Art of Friendship: Piero del Pugliese’s
Patronage of Filippino Lippi 85
part ii: The Individual, the Family, and the Church

chapter 5 Patronage Rights and Wrongs: Building Identity at Santa
Maria a Lecceto 101
chapter 6 Framing Patronage: Beauty and Order in the Church of the
Innocenti 119
chapter 7 Differing Visions: Image and Audience in the Florentine
Church 139
part iii: Identity and Change

chapter 8 Painted Prayers: Savonarola and the Audience of Images 155
conclusions and questions 189

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vi contents
appendix
Nasi Family Tree 195
Del Pugliese Family Tree 196
Unpublished Documents 197
Poems Written About the Portrait of Piero del Pugliese by
Filippino Lippi 222
notes 225
biblio graphy 255
index 275
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list of illustrations
Figure 1. Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of Bernardo Nasi, Florence,

Bargello Museum, inv. 6686, recto and verso. (photo: Soprintendenza
per i beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 2. Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of Bernardo Nasi, formerly Henry
Oppenheimer Collection, recto. (photo: author)
Figure 3. Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of Bernardo Nasi, formerly Henry
Oppenheimer Collection, verso. (photo: author)
Figure 4. Antonio Rossellino, attributed, Portrait Bust of Piero del Pugliese, formerly
Berlin, Kaiser Fredrichs Museum. (photo: Conway Library,
Courtauld Institute of Art, London)
Figure 5. Former palace of Piero di Lutozzo Nasi, Via San Niccolò, Florence.
(photo: author)
Figure 6. Upper stories of facade of former palace of Piero di Lutozzo Nasi, Via
San Niccolò, Florence. (photo: author)
Figure 7. Detail of sgraffito decoration on the facade of former palace of Piero di
Lutozzo Nasi, Via San Niccolò, Florence. (photo: author)
Figure 8. Detail of sgraffito decoration in the courtyard of the Medici-Riccardi
Palace, Florence. (photo: author)
Figure 9. Detail of sgraffito decoration on the facade of the palace of the Arte
della Seta, Florence. (photo: author)
Figure 10. Former palace of Francesco di Lutozzo Nasi, now called Palazzo Mozzi,
Piazza de’ Mozzi, Florence. (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut,
Florence)
Figure 11. Site of former palace of Bernardo, Bartolommeo, and Filippo di
Lutozzo Nasi, now Palazzo Torrigiani, Piazza de’ Mozzi, Florence.
(photo: author)
Figure 12. View of Piazza de’ Mozzi from the north bank of the Arno. (photo:
author)
Figure 13. Former palace of Piero and Francesco del Pugliese, Via de’ Serragli,
Florence. (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Figure 14. Detail of Del Pugliese arms on facade of former palace. (photo: author)
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viii list of illustrations
Figure 15. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Taking of an Inventory, Oratory of

San Martino dei Buonuomini, Florence. (photo: Soprintendenza per
i beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 16. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of Saint John the Baptist, Tornabuoni
Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. (photo: Soprintendenza per i
beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 17. Plan of church of Santo Spirito, Florence. (adapted from Capretti, The
Building Complex of Santo Spirito)
Figure 18. Exterior of east wall of Santo Spirito, Florence, showing windows and
coats of arms. (photo: author)
Figure 19. Chapels in the left transept of Santo Spirito, Florence. (photo:
Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Figure 20. Raffaellino del Garbo, The Pietà with Saints John the Baptist, John the
Evangelist, Mary Magdalen, and James, Munich, Alte Pinakothek.
(photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek,
Munich)
Figure 21. Piero di Cosimo, The Visitation with Saints Nicholas and Anthony Abbot,
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress
Collection. (photograph © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of
Art, Washington, D.C.)
Figure 22. Raphael, Madonna del Baldacchino, Florence, Palazzo Pitti. (photo:
Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 23. Filippino Lippi, Double Portrait of Piero del Pugliese and Filippino Lippi,
Denver Art Museum, The Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Collection. (photo: Denver Art Museum 2003)
Figure 24. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi, Madrid,
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. (photo: Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)
Figure 25. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Old Man and Boy, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
(photo: H. Lewandowski © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art
Resource, N.Y.)
Figure 26. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro, New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Jules Bache Collection. (all
rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Figure 27. Church of SS. Filippo e Giacomo (formerly Santa Maria) a Lecceto,
Lastra a Signa. (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Figure 28. Cappella maggiore of church of SS. Filippo e Giacomo (formerly Santa
Maria) a Lecceto, Lastra a Signa. (photo: Kunsthistorisches Institut,
Florence)
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list of illustrations ix
Figure 29. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Annunciation to the Shepherds,

Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen. (photo: Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam)
Figure 30. Piero di Cosimo, Virgin and Child with Saints Nicholas, John the Baptist,
Peter, and Dominic, Saint Louis Art Museum. (photo: The Saint Louis
Art Museum)
Figure 31. Filippino Lippi, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard (fig. 40),
Florence, Badia, detail of donor. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni
artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 32. Interior of church of Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence. (photo:
Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence)
Figure 33. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Magi, Florence, Museo del
Ospedale degli Innocenti. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici
e storici, Florence)
Figure 34. Neri di Bicci, Coronation of the Virgin, Florence, Museo del Ospedale degli
Innocenti. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 35. Piero di Cosimo, Virgin and Child with Saints Peter, Elizabeth of Hungary,
Catherine of Alexandria, and John the Evangelist, Florence, Museo del
Ospedale degli Innocenti. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici
e storici, Florence)
Figure 36. Andrea della Robbia, Annunciation, Florence, Ospedale degli Innocenti.
(photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 37. Bartolommeo di Giovanni, predella for Innocenti Adoration of the Magi,
Florence, Museo del Ospedale degli Innocenti. (photo:
Figure 38. Bartolommeo di Giovanni, Saint Antoninus Consecrating the Innocenti
Church, Florence, Museo del Ospedale degli Innocenti. (photo:
Figure 39. Filippino Lippi, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, Florence,
Badia. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 40. Piero Perugino, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, Munich, Alte
Pinakothek. (photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte
Pinakothek, Munich)
Figure 41. Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint
Bernard, Florence, Accademia. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni
artistici e storici, Florence)
Figure 42. Filippino Lippi, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, Florence, Badia,
detail of books. (photo: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence)
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x list of illustrations
Figure 43. Unknown Florentine, Vita Sancti Bernardi, BNF, Conventi Soppressi
B.1.2578, fol. 7r. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici,
Florence)
Figure 44. Pietro Perugino, Annunciation, Fano, Santa Maria Nuova. (photo:
Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)
Figure 45. Filippino Lippi, Crucifixion with Virgin Mary and Saint Francis, formerly
Berlin, Kaiser Friedrichs Museum. (photo: Witt Library, Courtauld
Institute, London)
Figure 46. Filippino Lippi, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalen, Florence,
Accademia. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici,
Florence)
Figure 47. Chapel of Sant’Andrea/San Michele, Sommaia. (photo:
Figure 48. Anonymous, Saint Michael with Saints John the Baptist, Paul, Christopher,
and Sebastian, formerly Sommaia, chapel of Sant’Andrea/San
Michele. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici,
Florence)
Figure 49. Paolo Schiavo, attributed, Virgin and Child with Saints Ignatius, Boniface,
Francis, and Raphael, formerly Sommaia, chapel of Sant’Andrea/San
Michele. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e storici,
Florence)
Figure 50. Fra Angelico, Last Judgment Triptych, Rome, Corsini Gallery. (photo:
Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale
Romano)
Figure 51. Sandro Botticelli, Saint Jerome, St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage
Museum. (photo: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)
Figure 52. Sandro Botticelli, Saint Vincent Ferrer, St. Petersburg, The State
Hermitage Museum. (photo: The State Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg)
Figure 53. Pesellino, Madonna and Child with Six Saints, New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness.
(photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Figure 54. Filippino Lippi, Adoration of the Magi, London, National Gallery. (photo:
The National Gallery, London)
Figure 55. Donatello, The Virgin and Child, London, Victoria and Albert Museum.
(photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
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list of illustrations xi
Figure 56. Fra Bartolommeo, The Presentation at the Temple, and The Adoration of the
Child, Florence, Uffizi. (photo: Soprintendenza per i beni artistici e
storici, Florence)
Figure 57. Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula and Filippino Lippi, Sommaia
Triptych, Venice, Pinacoteca Manfrediana. (photo: Curia Patriarcale,
Venice)
Figure 58. Filippino Lippi, Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well and Noli me
Tangere, Venice, Pinacoteca Manfrediana, detail of fig. 58. (photo:
Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.)
Figure 59. Sandro Botticelli, The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Altman. (photo-
graph © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Figure 60. Death Showing a Man Heaven and Hell, illustration to Savonarola, Predica
dell’arte del ben morire, Florence: Bartolomeo de’ Libri, 1494. (photo:
Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence)
Figure 61. Man Lying on His Deathbed, illustration to Savonarola, Predica dell’arte del
ben morire, Florence: Bartolomeo de’ Libri, 1494. (photo: Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Florence)
Figure 62. Man on the Point of Death, illustration to Savonarola, Predica dell’arte del
ben morire, Florence: Bartolomeo de’ Libri, 1494. (photo: Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Florence)
Figure 63. Raphael, Madonna del Cardellino, Florence, Uffizi. (photo:
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acknowled gments
i f i r st be c a m e acquainted with the Nasi and Del Pugliese families in 1995,

when I started research for a doctoral degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art in
London. Since that time, I have benefited immensely from the generosity of many
people, and I am very happy to be given the opportunity to express my gratitude here.
My thanks, first, to Patricia Rubin, who was a wonderful dissertation supervisor.
As well as wielding her ready pen with stern but always constructive criticism, her
intellectual generosity, support, and sense of humor helped me through the doctoral
process and beyond. London provided a congenial and stimulating environment for
research, and I had great conversations and help from many people, including Alixe
Bovey, Alison Brown, Caroline Campbell, Donal Cooper, Jennifer Fletcher, Kate
Lowe, Robert Maniura, Kevin Murphy, Susie Nash, Fabrizio Nevola, and Rupert
Shepherd. Sally Korman and Alastair Dunning were always on hand to cheer me up
and share ideas.
The research community in Florence was equally welcoming and generous. I can-
not thank Bill Kent enough for being so kind to me as a newcomer to the archives,
and for his consistent and committed support and friendship ever since. Other peo-
ple made my time in the archives a pleasure—especially Crispin de Courcey Bailey,
Marybeth Benbenek, Sally Cornelison, Nick Eckstein, Caroline Fisher, Cecelia
Hewlett, Amanda Lillie, and Jonathan Nelson. Thanks also to Sergio Tognetti, Roni
Weinstein, Dorit Lerer, Gauvin Bailey, Peta Gillyat, Peter Howard, and Robert
Maniura (again) who through their support and friendship helped me finish this
manuscript during my year as a fellow at I Tatti. Various people have read the numer-
ous drafts of this manuscript and made useful criticisms. Thanks especially to
my thesis examiners, Alison Wright and Caroline Elam, and the readers for
Pennsylvania State University Press who suggested many improvements to the origi-
nal version.
The research and writing of this book would not have been possible without
financial assistance from the British Academy (for a major state studentship and
travel scholarship for my doctorate), and postdoctoral fellowships from the Dutch
Institute in Florence and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance
Studies, Villa I Tatti. I would also like to thank the staff of the archives and libraries
I have spent many hours in during the course of my research, especially the libraries
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acknowled gments xiii
of the Warburg Institute and Courtauld Institute in London, and in Florence the
Kunsthistorisches Institut, the manuscript room of the Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale, the Archivio di Stato, the Archivio Arcivescovado, the archive of the
Innocenti hospital, and the Berenson Library at I Tatti.
My parents, Mark and Barbara Burke, have been supportive in hundreds of ways
since I embarked on this project and helped me in making the decision to do research
in the first place. Thanks also to my sister, Lucy, and her family, Alan, Hannah, and
Danny
I first met my husband, David Rosenthal, in the Florentine State Archives one
sunny winter Saturday. Without his brilliance, obstinacy, and encouragement, this
book would not exist. Without doubt, the best thing to have ever come out of a
chance meeting at the Archivio di Stato is our son, Joe.
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a note on transcriptions
and transl ations
all quotations appear in English in the text and in their original language
in the notes. I have attempted to translate as closely to the original meaning and
idiom as possible.
I have expanded all common abbreviations in transcriptions for fluency of read-
ing and separated elided words. I have retained original spelling throughout and used
square brackets to indicate modern spellings where the sense of certain words could
be in question. I have also added modern punctuation and capitalization.
01.Burke.00i-xvi.FINALqu 4/1/04 9:48 AM Page xv
abbreviations
AAF Archivio Arcivescovile, Florence

AIF Archivio del ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence
ASF Archivio di Stato, Florence
BNF Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence
CRS Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo
Francese
C. Strozzi Carte Strozziane
Dec. Rep. Decima della Republica
JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
MKIF Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz
Lecceto Carte Strozziane, Ser. V, 1185, folder entitled “Varie
Notizie e Ricordi Spettanti alla Chiesa di S Maria
di Lecceto”
NA Notarile Antecosimiano
Seta Arte della Seta
Sig. Leg. Signori, Dieci di Balìa, Otto di Pratica: Legazioni e
Commissarie, Missive e Responsive
Vasari-Bettarini/Barocchi Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ Più Eccellenti Pittori, Scultori ed
Architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, edited by
R. Bettarini and P. Barocchi. Florence: Sansoni, 1976.
VP Visite Pastorali
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02.Burke.001-014.FINALqu 4/1/04 9:53 AM Page 1
introduction
this project began as a study of art patrons. I chose two Florentine families
to concentrate on, the Nasi and Del Pugliese, and after some initial research in
London, went to the Florentine archives to find out what I could to help interpret the
paintings, sculpture, and buildings that they paid for during the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. This archival work made me rethink my whole project. If, as his-
torians, we ideally read documents until they start talking, I found that the docu-
ments were not talking about the kind of art I was then interested in.1 Church
documents talked about patronage rights, coats of arms, and liturgical duties.
Notarial documents talked about land transactions and business deals; wills con-
tained many instructions about bequests to family members and churches and very
few references to paintings; inventories listed used handkerchiefs and old sheets in
loving detail but were reticent in their descriptions of cassoni and domestic religious
painting and sculpture. I started to feel as if I were looking for a needle in a haystack.
It was then that I started to look at the haystack—to find that it was just as reward-
ing a subject for study.
So what is this book about? It still looks at the Nasi and Del Pugliese families and
uses archival research to illuminate their purchase and commission of a variety of
display objects over the latter part of the fifteenth century. Yet it is no more “just”
about two Florentine families than Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms is
“just” about an eccentric miller from a village in Friuli.2
Applying methodology taken from the study of mentalities, anthropology, and
social history to both visual and verbal sources, this study considers the range of
social personae open to the Florentine patrician at this time and how these could be
created and expressed through the visual arts. Through these means, it seeks to reach
more general conclusions about the role played by nonverbal culture in the formation
of social identity and status in Florence during the Renaissance. Along the way, I
consider how the role of “art patron” was, in itself, an identity that was created during
this period.
The case studies that form the basis for my analysis are largely founded on origi-
nal archival research into the history of the two families. It also engages with the
scholarship of many historians and art historians who have been researching the his-
tory of Renaissance Florence for many years. My particular debts are mentioned in
2 introduction
the notes to the text. Here, I would like to discuss some of the literature, about both
art patronage and society in Renaissance Italy, that suggested possible avenues of
investigation.
Terminology and Chronology

Threaded through this book is the involvement that both families had with
“Renaissance” culture. The archival work of social historians from the late 1960s
on—such as Gene Brucker, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Dale Kent, F. W. Kent,
Anthony Molho, Richard Trexler, and Ronald Weissman—did much to revolution-
ize our view of the Florentine Renaissance. Moving away from previously influential
Burckhardtian concepts, which characterized this period as a stark watershed
between the medieval and modern worlds, the historiography tended to stress the
continuity of social forms previously considered “medieval.”3 Neighborhood, friend-
ship, and extended kinship ties were deemed not only to survive through the
Renaissance but to be of key importance to our understanding of Florence and its
cultural products. The building and decoration of family chapels could thus be seen
as a form of “ancestor worship,” and the grand family palace a focus for pride for the
extended clan—even for those who did not reside in it.4 Similarly, the idea that soci-
ety became “secularized” owing to an increased interest in classical culture was ques-
tioned. The importance of Christian ritual and religious confraternities in shaping
the tenor of everyday life, not just in Florence but in all of Europe during the four-
teenth to sixteenth centuries, is now clear.
This model of continuity has been rightly influential and tenacious. Indeed, the
use of the word “Renaissance” in describing the period as a whole has itself been ques-
tioned, the logic being that the term would be more accurately used to refer solely to
an influential set of cultural values stressing the revival of ancient culture, and fash-
ionable among the elite.5 Notably, the tendency to go straight from “Late Medieval” to
“Early Modern” is something that historians have taken up far more widely than art
historians. This, in itself, speaks to a sense of disjunction between the two disciplines
that remains a site of intellectual negotiation. The primary sources of traditional
Renaissance art history—paintings, sculpture, and architecture—often seemed to
argue against the findings of the social historians: the rise of independent panel and
sculpted portraiture could be seen to suggest the importance of the individual, the
widespread adoption of stylistic classical motifs, and new subject matter taken from
ancient Roman and Greek sources could be interpreted as posing a strong challenge
to the Christian spirituality of the Middle Ages.
The challenge for scholars is to gain an insight into the period under question
through these differences, rather than put them down to disciplinary conflict. The
introduction 3
sense that the “Renaissance” happened in visual culture has to be linked to a changing
social world and indeed is now usefully being employed to nuance and complicate the
picture painted by social historians of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the selection
of essays in a volume recently edited by Patricia Rubin and Giovanni Ciappelli brings
together new work by Renaissance scholars to reconsider the relationship between
family identity and visual culture during the quattrocento.6 Some scholars have con-
centrated on broadening their scope of inquiry to include objects—the “minor” or
“low” arts such as clothing, pottery, or furniture—that are not in the traditional
purview of art historians. Art historians such as Evelyn Welch have pointed out that
the new forms of painted and sculpted object available for purchase in the fifteenth
century represent only a small fraction of the “empire of things” newly available to the
consumer. Culture can be expressed and refracted through spoons, sleeves, and
salvers as much as it is through altarpieces or public statuary.7 Through considering
such objects, Luke Syson and Dora Thornton have recently questioned the domi-
nant model of historical continuity by arguing that the late fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries saw the creation of new—or newly interpreted—behavioral models
derived from contemporary interpretations of classical texts. Stories illustrating these
texts were broadly diffused through such varied objects as crockery, cutlery, clothing,
and jewelry boxes.8
From the other side of the disciplinary divide, Dale Kent, through research on
hundreds of fifteenth-century Florentine zibaldone and accounts of public perform-
ance, has shown that an appreciation of products of the new learning was not con-
fined to a small literary elite; she argues that many Florentines of a much lower social
status took part in and, concomitantly, created a “common culture.” This culture
allowed a broad audience to appreciate the new style of artworks commissioned by
their social superiors.9 The present trend in the historiography, therefore, seems to be
toward a reemergence of the Renaissance as a meaningful idea to a large section of
the population.
Because my inquiry focuses on the people who purchased and owned display
objects as opposed to those who made them, I was forced to consider how their pro-
duction of art related to social mores. In this work, I hope to contribute to this reeval-
uation of the relationship between consumer and producer, and between the visual
arts and social change. First, though, it is important to consider the concept of “art
patronage” and how it has affected our interpretation of the artworks produced dur-
ing the fifteenth century.
Patronage and Art

The study of patronage in its various guises remains a vibrant area of research. It is
4 introduction
now virtually undisputed that social patronage (clientelismo), intersecting with the
social trinity of family, friends, and neighbors, fueled the engine of the Florentine
social and political machine during the fifteenth century. In this usage “patronage” is
defined as a long-term relationship between patron and client, where the patron holds
the lion’s share of power or resources. Patronage has a moral and social rather than a
legal basis, and the patron is expected to provide favors, mediation, and possible access
to wider friendship and patronage networks for the client in return for loyalty.10
The interest in a patronage system by social historians has been matched by the
emphasis on placing “art” in “context,” which by the end of the twentieth century
became the norm in Anglo-American art historical scholarship. Studying the person
(or people) who commissioned an artwork seems a relatively straightforward way of
supplying the context in which that object was made. Renaissance survey courses
now typically include the study of art patronage in some form. An Open University
course book for its interdisciplinary Renaissance unit, for example, makes claims for
the importance of studying patronage as the patron “would naturally pay close atten-
tion to the development of any commissioned work and expect to participate in the
creative process as an active collaborator.”11 Even a more traditional art historical sur-
vey, Frederick Hartt’s History of Italian Renaissance Art, now includes the name of the
patron in the captions to illustrations because “although some patrons are today no
more than a name, even the name serves as a reminder of the formative and essential
role that the patron so often played in the creation of a Renaissance work of art.”12
In the mid-1980s Gary Ianziti pointed out that the idea of art patronage fits
uncomfortably with the notion of patronage as a social system favored as an explana-
tory model by many historians.13 Of course, artists and the people who bought their
work could be involved in a patron-client relationship in the strict sense of the word.
I discuss one such relationship—that between the wool merchant Piero del Pugliese
and the painter Filippino Lippi—later in this study. There are also a number of
reconstructions of the patronage networks surrounding some artists that have pro-
vided a useful insight into their social world.14 However, as I discuss throughout this
book, it seems likely that most of the huge range of painted and sculpted objects that
were made in the “Renaissance” were not the fruits of such a close and lasting rapport
any more than most other consumable goods, and many “patrons” would better be
described as “purchasers.”
The terminology used by scholars here is crucial. To separate the concepts of
social and art patronage, the use of the modern Italian terms clientelismo and mece-
natismo (patronage of the arts) has been suggested. This, unfortunately, is an unsatis-
factory solution, largely because these words were not used in the Renaissance and do
not accurately reflect a contemporary understanding of either process.15 Indeed, the
introduction 5
fact of chronological change and the wish to avoid anachronism are at the heart of
the problem. It is now generally accepted by art historians that the notion of “artist”
was being developed through the quattrocento, as painters and sculptors experienced
a rise in status from artisans to auteurs. By the early sixteenth century, it seems that
Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo could gain an aura of being almost outside
normal social delineation by virtue of their particular visionary powers. The notion
of the “art patron” and his or her place in society are greatly dependent on the notion
of the “artist” and of “art,” the latter a term that had no equivalent in fifteenth-century
Italy. The term “art patronage” implies a relationship, not between purchaser and
practitioner, but between enlightened individual and the development of visual art.
In this essentially more modern usage, it is “art,” an abstract concept, that is being
“patronized,” not the person who makes the “art.” I approached my material with the
assumption that “art patronage” as we understand it today was not a notion that was
widely current in the period. Rather, it was part of the changes inherent in the devel-
opment of “Renaissance” culture that created and eventually codified our ideas of
what “art patronage” means.
A number of scholars have pointed out that the motivations behind the purchase
of the visual arts is a process with a historical dynamic of its own. Martin
Wackernagel, in his groundbreaking Der Lebensraum des Künstlers in der florentinischen
Renaissance, noted the transition from the “donor” of the later quattrocento to the
“patron” of the High Renaissance, when collecting paintings with passion for their
aesthetic value became more widespread.16 E. H. Gombrich stated his debt to
Wackernagel in his essay “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art,” suggesting that “a
deliberate patronage of ‘art’ . . . is impossible without the idea of ‘art.’”17 Tracing the
development through analysis of the patronage of Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici,
Gombrich suggests that the “donor” is transformed to “connoisseur” in a mental shift
that is perhaps implicitly modeled on the second and third ages of Giorgio Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists. More recently, R. S. Lopez has suggested that the ethos of art
patronage in the Middle Ages was collective, whereas in the Renaissance it was char-
acterized by a “direct relationship between donor and the men of culture, and most of
all is used to celebrate the patron.”18
Although my conclusions may differ, the main thrust of these scholars’ arguments—
that the notion of “art patronage,” like the notion of “art,” is historically specific and
operates within a distinct set of cultural values—was crucial to my approach. For these
reasons, I have endeavored throughout to be careful in my use of language. I some-
times use the word “artwork” to describe painted and sculpted objects, but I do not
employ the abstract concept of “artist” or “art” to indicate painters or sculptors and the
objects they made. Concomitantly, I only use the word “patron” in its anthropological
6 introduction
sense, that is, when it applies to a long-term relationship of mutual benefit between
two parties, rather than simply the purchaser of a painting or sculpture. It is worth
the occasional awkwardness of expression to put distance between ourselves and
these problematic concepts.
The Patron as Artist

The concept that the creation of an artwork involved two main figures, the patron
and the artist, has affected our understanding of the visual arts for around a century.
Aby Warburg claimed in 1902:“It is one of the cardinal facts of early Renaissance civ-
ilization in Florence that works of art owed their making to the mutual understand-
ing between patrons and artists. They were, from the outset, the results of a
negotiation between client and executant.”19
The idea that the patron not only provided money for a display object but also
actively contributed to its form has become an assumption crucial to many analytical
approaches to Renaissance art over the last century. The logical conclusion from
Warburg’s assertion is that finding biographical details about the patron allows for a
partial reconstruction of the circumstances in which works of art were made. The
underlying reason for this reconstruction is that it allows the scholar to understand
the meaning of these works. This approach concentrates on a “re-creation” of the art-
work through the art historian’s narrative, with the work itself always the point of
culmination.20
This idea has been used in various ways. The most obvious has been in mono-
graphic studies of individual patrons or artists. For Florence of the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries there have been many studies of the “art patronage” of Cosimo,
Piero, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, for example, as well as their wealthy contemporaries
such as Filippo Strozzi and Giovanni Rucellai.21 In most of these studies, taste, polit-
ical opinion, and social position are used to analyze the painting, sculpture, and
buildings that were made under a given patron’s aegis. At the same time, mono-
graphic studies of painters, sculptors, and architects often now concentrate on those
who purchased their work as a means to better understand the work they produced.
Indeed, in some cases, for example in Jonathan Nelson’s work on Filippino Lippi’s
later paintings and Andrew Blume’s analysis of the religious paintings of Sandro
Botticelli, the taste of the patron is sometimes accorded more importance in visual
analysis than the style of the painter, the maker of the works adapting his style to suit
the person who paid for them.22 This approach has an illustrious precedent in
Gombrich’s analysis of the architectural “style” of Cosimo de’ Medici. Gombrich’s
argument is that in an era before the notion of the autonomous artist was widely
accepted, Cosimo did not act as a “patron” for his buildings, with his ideas mediated
introduction 7
through the artist; instead, his character was directly expressed in them: “It is hardly
fanciful to feel something of Cosimo’s spirit in the buildings he founded, something
of his reticence and lucidity, his seriousness and his restraint . . . the work of art is the
donor’s.”23
Thus an individual personality is seen to be somehow revealed and embodied by
the objects he (and this type of patronage study is generally predicated on a single
male subject) paid for. The idea of generation, almost in a biological sense, is repli-
cated in a way reminiscent of Filarete’s dictum that the patron is the father of the
building and the architect the mother.24 The actual maker of these objects is a vessel
for the impulses poured into him by a patron and (implicitly) by the society that
shaped this patron’s wishes.
The mechanics of this relationship—how the patron could influence an object’s
final appearance—have benefited from attention from art historians over recent
years. Michelle O’Malley in her detailed study of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Italian contracts, for example, has provided an important analysis of the financial and
legalistic framework of this contractual transaction through the use of quantification
of a broad range of source material.25 Other kinds of evidence have also been used in
attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of the creation of a work, notably the ricor-
danze (record books) and account books of artists. Anabel Thomas, for example, has
reconstructed the world of the Florentine artist’s workshop using the ricordanze of the
painter Neri di Bicci, and Ellen Callman has made extensive use of the account
books of Apollonio di Giovanni.26
Some scholars have had methodological difficulties in any use of the “patron-
as-artist” approach. Charles Hope, for example, in the name of “common sense,”
questioned the viability of making any connection between the patron and the art-
work beyond the basic choice of subject matter.27 Similarly, Creighton Gilbert, in his
recent article on the Renaissance patron, through collecting as many examples of
“Renaissance art patronage” as he could, resolves that “patrons usually indicated
themes in a general way . . . but would seem chiefly to have sensibly thought the pro-
fessionals could handle the details better. . . . At the opposite end, patrons sometimes
had their own ideas.”28
As these conclusions would indicate, it seems to be difficult, if not impossible, to
provide a one-size-fits-all model for the relationship between maker and purchaser
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The focus has often been on ascertaining the
respective influences of artist and patron on the final form of an object. The artwork
remains the culmination of analysis as scholars attempt to reconstruct the circum-
stances that led to its creation, in order to unlock its “meaning.” This meaning is
implicitly understood to be reconstructable, singular, and unified. In other words,
8 introduction
only one individual is implied as the audience for the work, and that is the person
who paid for it. The possibility of multiple interpretations is underplayed in favor of
one that fits well with the historical details of the patron or, depending on the case in
question, the artist or adviser. In this way, the complexities involved in the represen-
tation of patronal identity are reduced to a series of biographical ingredients, which
when mixed together with some artist’s biography thrown in, result in the finished
work.
An important recent consideration of these issues has been Dale Kent’s Cosimo de’
Medici and the Florentine Renaissance. The subtitle of this book, The Patron’s Oeuvre, may
suggest at first sight a straightforward consideration of the purchaser of an object,
rather than its maker, as the creative force behind it. This would be to underplay con-
siderably the sophistication of Kent’s approach, which, as I have mentioned, also con-
siders the common culture of the Florentine patron, artist, and audience (to use her
terms) as well as tracing networks of friendship and clientage between the Medici
and the painters, sculptors, and architects who were in their employ. The concept of
oeuvre, however, unfortunately poses a great many methodological problems to the
study of Renaissance visual culture. In fact, Kent herself demonstrates difficulties
with the use of the term in her discussion of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano
series. Long considered a Medici commission, documentation brought to light just as
Kent’s book was about to be published suggests convincingly that the paintings orig-
inally belonged to the Bartolini family.29 The dispute in itself questions her claim
that, unlike an artist’s oeuvre,“the body of [the patron’s] work is at least a given, con-
sisting by definition of commissions which can be documentably attributed directly
or indirectly to his initiative.” For the Nasi and Del Pugliese—along with the vast
majority of Florentine families—we often do not have enough evidence to link
extant works with suggestive, but scant, documentation, let alone the majority of
painted and sculpted objects that have been destroyed in the five hundred years since
their creation, or those for which there are no documentary traces at all.
Identity, Society, and Meaning

The notion of “social identity” is particularly important to my analysis of the visual
and verbal sources I consider in the following chapters. This connects the idea of
“self-fashioning,” a concept that has relatively recently been taken up by Renaissance
art historians, with a renewed interest in the role of the audience of images, and
a consideration of the way that objects can function as mediators between the self
and society. This broadens the notion of “consumer” as an analytic tool. The idea of
economic consumption, generally confined to those who paid for goods, can be
expanded to visual consumption, those who were intended to see and use them.
introduction 9
An important basis for my approach is the belief that all the objects that I
examine—be they portrait medals, paintings, or building facades—can reveal some-
thing about the culture in which they were made as they could only produce meaning
in reference to a broader mental framework. Thus, I often examine texts that are not
directly related to the objects in question in the hope that creative juxtaposition of
primary visual and verbal source material can help us understand more about
Renaissance culture. In this way I am methodologically borrowing from a tradition
of cultural history that, once again, can be partly traced back to Aby Warburg.30
That said, cultural values are difficult to define, not least because they are subject
to change and are not necessarily shared by an entire society. Indeed, one of the issues
that constantly presented itself during my research was the way in which images in
this period seemed to cater to different types of audience, defining as well as reflect-
ing differing social roles. Meaning is not monolithic and, clearly, is located in the eye
of the beholder. An important part of my analysis has been to consider the intended
audience, on the assumption that the vast majority of the artworks commissioned
during this period were meant to be seen by a number of people who took no part in
the commissioning process. It almost goes without saying that the constituencies
that made up an audience or the reception of the work by individual onlookers can-
not be exactly re-created. However, to paraphrase Michael Baxandall, people do not
stop running one-hundred-meter races because they will never run them in no time
at all: there are better and worse understandings of the contemporary meanings of
images.31 In particular, the representative objects that I analyze in the following pages
were created in reference to visual conventions. These conventions came from both
an artistic tradition and a broader realm of social mores, such as dress, gesture, and
role-playing in prayer and public festival, let alone a more general sense of everyday
performance of civic identities on the public stage.32 With the help of texts contem-
porary with these paintings, I attempt to offer an interpretation of the meanings
these objects could convey. I also, when possible, address the possibility of the exis-
tence of different audiences—the “elite” as opposed to the “poor”; men as opposed to
women—who may have reacted (or may have been expected to react) differently to
the works. Thus I often invert the traditional approach to art patronage: instead of
looking at how the patron may have influenced the creation of the work, I look
at how the audience of the work was meant to perceive the social identity of the
purchaser.
Throughout, it has seemed most profitable to work on the assumption that the
relation of the represented person (or society) to the representation involves a com-
plex, two-way process: visual objects transmit cultural values rather than simply
mimicking them; and they act to organize and structure their social environment.33
10 introduction
Painting, therefore, has an affect on the way (social) patronage is understood as well
as vice versa. For these reasons I base my analysis on the idea that the appearance of
buildings and their ornamentation not only was central to the way that power was
manifested but also actively organized power relations at official governmental and
informal local and patronal levels. To borrow from one of Michel Foucault’s more
general dicta, power—which in Florence was often constituted in the relationships of
patronage networks—is not simply imposed from above but is accepted throughout
society because it “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowl-
edge, produces discourses.”34 Pleasure and pride were invoked through the beauty of
the visual arts in Renaissance Florence, not only for those who paid for these objects
but for a much broader constituency, the audience of images. Paintings, sculptures,
and buildings were effective because they provided for a felt need in devotional and
social practice, which could differ depending on their audience. Because their beauty
was a key part of their power to affect the onlooker’s emotions, beauty was consid-
ered a virtue rather than merely an aesthetic delectation. In this way, knowledge was
shown and imparted: paintings and sculptures paid for by the elite were used to teach
correct modes of social behavior to those who were deemed unable to judge this for
themselves, notably in this period, women, children, and the unlettered poor.35
Moreover, the understanding of newly fashionable classical texts needed to interpret
many images could confirm the informed onlooker’s possession of the cultural capital
so important for notions of social status, thus legitimizing social difference.36
Discourse was centered on justifications for spending money on the beautification of
the city as opposed to giving it in alms. Social and political change affected the way
that this spending was perceived and justified.
Florence, Patronage, and the Medici

The city of Florence has, over the last century, acted as a kind of laboratory for
patronage studies, one commentator even suggesting that the study of Medicean
patronage was “practically an industry.”37 It is true that the Medici offer a particularly
compelling research subject for Renaissance scholars: evidence about their activities
is abundant, and Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo were all undoubtedly important in fur-
thering the new learning and reviving classicizing visual styles. Sixteenth-century
sources, particularly Vasari, emphasize Lorenzo’s role as a patron of the new culture,
and it seems likely that Vasari’s interpretation had roots in fifteenth-century rhetoric
and, to some extent, behavior.38 However, because the Medici family tended to be at
the vanguard of new cultural fashions, it is problematic to see them as somehow
emblematic of Florentine culture as a whole. Indeed, it has been argued that the con-
centration on the Medici family and their immediate circle could distort our notions
introduction 11
of the visual arts in the fifteenth century. Very few Florentines, even among the patri-
ciate, had the money of Cosimo de’ Medici or the education of Giovanni Rucellai to
draw on when considering building a house or decorating a chapel. Others, even
among the elite, may have had more prosaic or unfashionable motivations.39
Florence as a whole has also benefited from more scholarly attention than many
other Italian cities. Rather than being discouraging, the array of secondary material
on the Florentine Renaissance was crucial for my research because it permitted com-
parisons between my findings in the archive and a broader historical picture. Indeed,
much of the following study relies on a synthesis of other scholars’ research in which
to place my own readings of particular visual and verbal artifacts. I hope that the
notes will make my debts clear.
Another motive for choosing Florence as the focus for my investigations was its
importance as a center for the production of the visual arts in the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, many of the objects and buildings that made the city renowned
for its beauty still surviving. Developments in artistic form that were to be influential
all over Europe were initiated by Florentines throughout the period, and these prac-
titioners of the visual arts were financially supported by their wealthy compatriots.
The link between the social and political structure of this city and the visual arts in
particular is likely to provide information that has broader implications for the study
of patronage elsewhere in Europe and may, indeed, have produced a model of sup-
port for visual artists that was followed elsewhere.
I originally chose the Nasi and Del Pugliese families for a variety of reasons.
Neither of them had been extensively studied previously.40 They both commissioned
a variety of artworks in the period I was initially interested in (from the 1470s to the
1510s), and, from my initial research, it seemed that there would be enough extant
archival material concerning each family to provide a detailed study. Both living in
the quarter of Santo Spirito (though in different gonfaloni [administrative districts],
Drago Verde and Scala), they were relatively “new” families: their participation in
Florentine government was recent, as was their wealth. It seemed that there could be
rich documentation here for a consideration of how visual material was used strate-
gically to confirm and maintain their newfound elite status. The Del Pugliese’s
involvement with renowned artists—such as Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Piero di
Cosimo—also made them an alluring subject of research.
I make no claims as to the “typicality” of either family, though I hope that most of
my arguments would be equally valid for a great many other Florentine patricians in
this period. My choice of themes was largely suggested to me by the visual and verbal
sources that the families left behind. While I hope that being led by the evidence has
had some advantages in terms of looking at subjects afresh, it is important to point
12 introduction
out that this method has also led to some omissions. There is no substantial evi-
dence, for example, of Nasi and Del Pugliese women commissioning or purchasing
art objects, but they are discussed in the text as an important perceived audience for
some of the goods bought by their husbands and fathers. There is now a great deal of
literature on Renaissance women “art patrons,” and the omission of them here by no
means denies the fact that women could and did take part in the production of
Renaissance visual culture—though my lack of archival findings perhaps reflects the
dominant position of men as purchasers of display objects.41 It is likely that much of
the analysis about social identity here, and particularly the creation of the “art patron,”
could be considered in relationship to changing gender roles, though any conclusions
about this would be beyond the scope of my study.42 Similarly, although members of
both families certainly belonged to their local religious confraternities, there was no
material to suggest that they acted through these bodies to build or furnish meeting-
houses or chapels; thus, my main treatment of corporate artistic decision making has
been through my examination of the opera (works committee) of Santo Spirito in
Chapter 3. Once again, this is not intended to underplay the importance of confra-
ternities in Florentine religious and cultural life.43
More specifically, I do not deal with some works said to belong to the Del
Pugliese family, but for which there is presently no known contemporary evidence.
The most important example of this is Piero di Cosimo’s Early History of Man series,
meant for the palace of Francesco del Pugliese, and Fra Bartolommeo’s now
destroyed Saint George and the Dragon fresco, also made for this palace.44 Constraints of
time also meant I concentrated on the property and purchases both families made in
the city of Florence, with the exception of Francesco del Pugliese’s villa in Sommaia
(Chapter 8). The Florentine countryside (contado) has recently become a vibrant area
of research, and the activities of private family building in the contado have been dis-
cussed elsewhere.45
The first part of this book is concerned with structures of social identity. The first
chapter examines the Florentine family. As well as introducing the Nasi and Del
Pugliese lineages, it considers the different structures of these kin units, and how
their identity and social status were manifested through the purchase of material
goods such as portrait medals and family chapels. I also examine the importance of
locating family identity within the context of civic history and civic space. This
theme is expanded in the second chapter, which focuses on the family palace, a field
that has much benefited from attention of social and architectural historians alike
over the past two decades. After considering the families’ strategies for the conquest
of local space (and power structures) through palace purchase and construction, I
examine the disposition of space and display objects within the home, using three
introduction 13
unpublished Nasi family inventories, suggesting how public values could govern the
organization of supposedly private palaces. Chapter 3 concentrates on the church of
Santo Spirito, as the Nasi family played an important role in the opera of this
Augustinian foundation as well as owning a family chapel there. At first I examine
how patricians could express local identity and allegiances in the building of chapels
as they did in the building of palaces, proposing that chapel allocation and the com-
position of the opera of this convent served to perpetuate local and communal power
relationships. A change in these relationships after 1494 had direct consequences for
the personnel of the opera and on the interior decoration of the church. I suggest how
this decoration can be read as a public manifestation of political influence and rela-
tionships among the quarter’s elite. Chapter 4 examines friendship, tracing the begin-
nings of the notion of “art patronage” in Laurentian Florence. After a general
consideration of the relationships between artists and the patriciate during this
period, I take as the center of my analysis a double portrait by Filippino Lippi of
himself and Piero del Pugliese and suggest that the concept of amicizia, consecrated
in its purest form as a meeting of two minds, supplied a rhetorical trope in which the
patron-artist relationship could operate, ennobling the actions of each party and
modulating status differentiation.
A vast proportion of the total production of painters, sculptors, and architects in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries went toward the decoration and construction of
churches and chapels. The next three chapters of this study concentrate on display
culture in ecclesiastical space and other religious settings. Concerned with the rela-
tionship between the church and the patricians who invested in it, Chapter 5 explains
the legal concept of “patronage rights” and its moral implications. I suggest that these
rights are a fundamental basis for understanding the motives and results of chapel
and church decoration in this period and look in detail at Piero del Pugliese’s invest-
ment in the Dominican hermitage of Santa Maria a Lecceto. In particular, I consider
how idealized roles for church patrons and donors affected the design of two altar-
pieces that were originally placed in the church. In the next chapter I examine who
had control over the decoration of chapel spaces within churches, and how matters
such as appearance, dedication, and decoration were negotiated. Developing a theme
first mooted in Chapter 3, I suggest that the aesthetic of harmony and order in
Brunelleschian churches had a more than metaphorical relationship with percep-
tions and ideals of an ordered society in late quattrocento Florence. I use as a case
study the redecoration of the church of the Spedale degli Innocenti, which included
the construction of a chapel paid for by Piero del Pugliese at the end of the 1480s.
Both the Nasi and Del Pugliese families commissioned images of the Apparition
of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, by Piero Perugino and Filippino Lippi, respectively.
14 introduction
Chapter 7 examines the reasons why these images, produced within fifteen years of
each other, have such different appearances. I consider the audience of these works,
the monks who said mass in front of them, and the role of religious imagery in pro-
viding exemplars for differing onlookers.
The final chapter is concerned with the first major rupture in the accommoda-
tions made between church and political elite that were so prominent in the
Laurentian period. Savonarola effectively separated the spending of money on “lux-
ury goods” from the ideal of charity, taking away the prime justification used earlier
in the fifteenth century, notably in the doctrine of magnificence. I also examine how
the rhetorical style of his sermons can provide art historians with an indication of the
workings of image-led devotional practice in this period and suggest how the paint-
ings that his followers, such as Francesco del Pugliese, commissioned were perhaps
intended to provoke responses in their viewers analogous to those produced by the
friar’s sermons.
part i
Families, Neighbors, and Friends

chapter 1
Family Self-Fashioning
It seems to me that just as the city is made up of many families, so, itself is almost like a
very large family; and, equally, the family is a kind of small city. And if I am not in error, the
existence of one as of the other originated from the congregation and conjunction of many joined
and held together by some necessity and utility.
—Alberti, De Iciarchia

L
eon Battista Alberti’s suggestion that the city and the family are one and the
same thing is particularly pertinent in Florence’s case, where urban topogra-
phy is closely bound up with familial presence. Administratively, the city was
divided into four quarters and sixteen gonfaloni, ecclesiastically into parishes. That
these neighborhood units exerted a considerable pull on Florentine loyalties is
beyond question, but within and crossing these boundaries were the great families
who claimed areas of the city as their own, leaving a permanent imprint through the
names of streets dominated by their grand palaces. Florentine patrician families
occupied—or sought to occupy—a permanent physical location within the city’s
fabric. Although perhaps “medieval” family enclaves, such as the Piazza Peruzzi, no
longer retained the same importance by the quattrocento, individuals with the same
surname still most often clustered in their traditional gonfalone and often on the same
street, sometimes sacrificing the appearance of their new palaces by tenaciously
building in old family areas.1 This chapter and the next consider how the Nasi and
Del Pugliese families, both relative newcomers to the Florentine civic stage,
attempted to create a public identity for their lineages through material objects and
buildings, thus confirming and making permanent their newfound social status.
That family was a key component of identity in Renaissance Florence is not
under dispute. Exactly what constituted “family” is more difficult to assess. A simple
formulation from a sumptuary law of 1356 was of those “who are continually resident
in the same house . . . sharing bread and wine,” in other words, people who live and
eat together.2 Although this household group probably formed the basic unit of fam-
ily, in reality lines of kinship extended far beyond a common table to relationships of
blood and marriage that could take in a very large number of people, living and dead.
The now classic debate in late twentieth-century Renaissance scholarship has been
18 changing patrons
between those who believe that small family groups, the protonuclear family, were
replacing the extended lineage in the fifteenth century and others who believe that
the broader kin group retained its importance.3 This is a complex question, not least
because of the conflicting nature of some evidence and the characteristics of family
structure that undergoes generational change. Indeed, in recent years, the clash
between these two seemingly opposing points of view has been softened precisely
because these difficulties of finding an exact definition of family have been recog-
nized.4 Moreover, as other scholars have noted, a distinction needs to be drawn
between the ideology of lineage—which certainly remained important—and the
practice of familial relationships.5
As has also been pointed out in recent years, the study of family life in Florence is
largely restricted to elite males. This is partly due to the availability of source material
about this group, and also because whatever definition of family is decided on, it
tends to reflect the obsession with patrilineage that was the norm in Renaissance
Florence. Genealogies were constructed along male lines, female children serving as
the means of a link between men: either horizontally, in the joining of two patriarchal
families through marriage, or vertically, through the birth of male children to carry
on the kinship line.6
Even within this group of elite males, however, different levels of status were
delineated.7 The Florentine governmental system meant that, unlike the case in other
Italian cities, being a member of the ruling class was an uncertain privilege. It was not
until the formation of the Great Council in 1494 that qualification for government
was permanently circumscribed through the eligibility of a father or grandfather for
office, family being officially made the basic governmental unit. Before this time, the
listing of important houses of the city was done on a more individual, haphazard
basis in the work of chroniclers like Benedetto Dei or poets such as Ugolino Verino.8
Recent studies have shown that membership in this elite was conferred on those with
a combination of economic wealth and antiquity of political participation.9 This
seemingly simple formula, of course, hardly does justice to the exertions made by
Florentine citizens to reflect and maintain their social standing through material and
visual means. For status to be conferred by the wider civic world, it had to be visible.
Claiming an area of Florence by building or buying a palace, patronizing the local
church, or providing wine on festive occasions were tangible statements of belonging
to an elite group. Indeed, as I shall argue, this expected behavior justified and main-
tained status differentiation.
The Nasi and Del Pugliese were not old Florentine families. Both of them rose
to increased prominence during the fifteenth century, gaining wealth like many of
their compatriots through networks of international trade. Their increased fortunes
family self-fashioning 19
coincided with the de facto rule of the Medici family over Florence and, in the case of
the Nasi, were directly related to Medici favor. How did this change in status affect
their family identity and vice versa? This chapter introduces some of the individuals
within the two families and discusses how the lineages were structured into house-
holds. I then look at how both families used the purchase and commission of objects to
reflect and enforce family identity, both to themselves and to the broader civic world.
Ennobling the Lineage: The Nasi
In France they declare that amongst its citizens

They counted the Nasi in ancient times,
Not far from the Rhone they resided;
Insignia and monuments of their clan
In the temples and ancient tombs there
Are marked; and through their fame it is known
That they used to live in Gaul.
—Verino, De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae
That Ugolino Verino chose to declare the Nasi family’s origins as French is signifi-
cant. Members of the lineage worked hard to prove that they had foreign (implicitly
noble) roots, and the perpetuation of this idea in a poem dedicated to the greatness
of the city of Florence and her families would suggest that they met with some suc-
cess. There is absolutely no indication in more prosaic documentation, however, that
there is any truth in these romantic origins. The first secure mention of the Nasi line
in Florentine documents is found in the matriculation books of the Arte della Seta in
1297, when a Luto di Giunta Nasi appears.10 This would suggest that the family was a
relative latecomer to the Florentine political scene and probably originated, like so
many other merchant families, from the contado, becoming politically active after
being successful commercially.11 As noted, duration of membership in the most
important government councils, the Tre Maggiori (comprising the Signoria, Dodici
Buonuomini, and Sedici Gonfalonieri di Compagnia), was a key indicator of status
for Florentine families, and the first time a member of the Nasi clan sat on the
Signoria as a prior was in 1375, a date that placed them in the middling-to-low ranks
of the Florentine ruling group.12
The branch of the family that will appear in this study are the sons of Lutozzo di
Jacopo, the richer and larger side of the lineage. Lutozzo had six sons from three mar-
riages. Though their primary source of identity may have been the patrilineage, as
was often the case in fifteenth-century Florence, they arranged themselves into
20 changing patrons
households depending on their mother. Piero (1421–91) and Lorenzo (b. 1423) were
both the sons of Nera di Mariotto Banchi; Francesco (b. 1429) was the only son of
Ginevra di Piero del Palagio; and Lutozzo’s third wife, Francesca di Jacopo Cattani,
had three sons—Bernardo (1443–1509), Bartolommeo (1445–87), and Filippo
(1447–c. 1512). The family’s rise to political and social prominence over the fifteenth
century was prodigious. A long list of appointments in the Tre Maggiori and other
communal offices testifies to the lineage’s increasing political importance. The pater-
familias, Lutozzo, had obviously been on the winning side in Cosimo de’ Medici’s
expulsion and triumphant return in 1434: he was granted the right to bear arms by
the balìa (emergency council) created that year.13 After this, a member of the family
appeared on every Medicean balìa of the century.14 This political success was
prompted and matched by financial gain throughout the quattrocento. After begin-
ning as silk merchants, the Nasi became a family of bankers. Francesco Nasi started
off in company with Guglielmo de’ Pazzi in Geneva, before transferring to Lyons
with the Medici and other Florentine banks in the mid-1460s.15 Bartolommeo Nasi
and his brothers, Bernardo and Filippo, were also in business in this city. By the later
part of the quattrocento, Lyons had become a key location for banking activity
throughout Europe and was home to several Florentine companies at this time.16
Their business weathered the political changes of the 1490s and was sufficiently suc-
cessful by 1506 to be able to cede a loan of fifty thousand ducats to the king of
France.17
Lutozzo’s eldest son, Piero, started his political career in 1451, being one of the
Dodici Buonuomini when he had just turned thirty.18 He was the Gonfaloniere di
Giustizia in December 1469, when Piero de’ Medici died, and was presumably one of
the “leading men of the city and the regime” who favored power being passed
smoothly into Lorenzo’s hands.19 Piero di Lutozzo’s first ambassadorial position
came in 1469, when he was sent to Urbino, and he became the resident ambassador in
Naples between 1480 and 1483, and again in 1491. He was to die there, rather sud-
denly in November of that year, probably of a heart attack.20 As the quantity and tone
of existing letters between him and Lorenzo testify, Piero Nasi became one of the
group of Florentine patricians specially favored by Il Magnifico: he was a member of
the balìe of 1471 and 1480 and subsequently in the Laurentian Council of Seventy.21
The fraternal household of Piero and Lorenzo Nasi also had a more intimate link
with Lorenzo de’ Medici. According to Francesco Guicciardini, Bartolommea di
Lorenzo Nasi was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s mistress for many years, despite her mar-
riage to Donato Benci and despite the fact that she was “neither young nor beautiful”:
Bartolommea was about thirty-three years old when Lorenzo died in 1492.22
Lorenzo and Piero’s half brother, Francesco, was the highly able manager of the
Naples branch of the Medici bank from 1475 to 1489, after his initial stint in Geneva
and Lyons. Neapolitan opposition to Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1478–79 led to the seiz-
ing of Medici assets during the Pazzi conspiracy war, but Francesco salvaged the
bank. The Medici were so pleased with his management of their affairs that in 1487 a
company was set up under his name.23 Francesco, like his brother Piero, also repre-
sented the Florentine republic abroad, being the ambassador to the French king in
1474.24 His son, Alessandro, aged twenty-two, was sent as a Florentine representative
along with Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pierantonio Carnesecchi to the wedding
of Isabella of Calabria and Gian Galeazzo Sforza in 1488.During the period after the
Medici expulsion, Alessandro was to capitalize on this early ambassadorial experi-
ence, becoming the Florentine resident to the French court for several years. He—or
the Nasi bank’s money—eventually became sufficiently valued there for King Louis
XII to grant him the right to place three golden lilies on the Nasi coat of arms.25 His
success as an ambassador may have been celebrated by his son in a pair of paintings,
attributed to Francesco Granacci, of Charles VIII’s triumphal entries into Florence
and Rome.26 Though this particular commission goes beyond the chronological
scope of this study, it does suggest that the Nasi’s position as ambassadors played an
important part in the creation of family identity and, as I shall delineate, had a direct
effect on the manipulation of the Nasi genealogy in the fifteenth century.
In 1580 a Fra Gabriello Nasi wrote a chronicle of his lineage. Largely dependent
on two ricordanze he had found that had been written by his ancestors Piero and
Francesco di Lutozzo Nasi, he gives an account of the clan’s origins. The Nasi were the
“successors and true heirs of a most noble and most ancient progenitor,” Guido, count
of Saxony, a “valorous knight” of the tenth century.27 By the thirteenth century one of
his descendants had come to Florence to live in the ward of San Piero Scheraggio,
where the clan owned a tomb in a chapel adorned with the arms of Count Guido.28 In
his record of 1488, Piero noted the dates of the wills of Luto di Giunta Guidi and his
son Nasi, and then traced his descent from these noble ancestors:
Guido di <. . . . .> had a son who had the name Giunta; Giunta di Guido, [had] one who had
the name Luti; Luti di Giunta had Naso and Simone; Naso di Luti made Lutozzo and Nicolo
who were friars of Saint Augustine. Of Simone di Luto four sons remained, of whom lived
Jacopo, Francesco, and Agostino di Simone di Luti Of them remained four boys: Sandro, Filippo,
Giunta, Simone: from whom there is no one. So that of this family there are no others today than
[those who descend from] Jacopo, Francesco, and Agostino di Lutozzo di Nasi, of Luti di Giunta
di Guido.29
22 changing patrons
We learn more about the Nasi ancestors from Fra Gabriello. Because of the
heroic ventures of Guido di Naso di Simone Guidi, who won many glorious victories
for the commune, he received from the Council of the Popolo the arms of the dis-
trict,“a white wheel on a blue field,” which was adopted into the Nasi insignia of three
white wheels on blue. In addition to using these documents, Fra Gabriello, like
Ugolino Verino, was guided in his account by the Nasi coats of arms that he saw
around the city and the contado, and he even provides signed attestations as to their
authenticity and antiquity.30 Both the Nasi and the Del Palagio families traced their
descent from Count Guido and most probably fabricated the story of their glorious
ancestry between them at the time of the linking of the two families through the
marriage of Ginevra di Piero del Palagio (Francesco’s mother) to Lutozzo di Jacopo
Nasi about 1426.31
The creation of this glorious martial history is significant. Many Florentine fami-
lies had histories similar to that of the Nasi. Having been successful in business and
then politically prominent in the commune, they did not feel the need to create a
noble military past for themselves. The reasoning behind these imaginative genealog-
ical fabrications, however, is probably due to members of the family becoming
ambassadors.
In some ways the Nasi would seem to be an obvious choice for embassies abroad.
As I have mentioned, they had business in many countries in Europe and frequently
captained the commune’s galleys that transported goods for sale all over Europe and
the Mediterranean.32 Florentine perceptions of the kind of people ambassadors
should be, however, did not favor this pragmatic link of business and politics. It went
without saying that ambassadors had to be rich and from old families, but how they
earned their money was a matter for scrutiny. In a sermon on this subject of 1436, it
was claimed that as well as being eloquent and well educated it was crucial that the
ambassador should not undertake business while on his missions, “nor do anything
for his own profit or gain, or for his friends or relatives.”33 Perhaps for this reason, it
was customary to choose ambassadors from old families, originally those of mag-
nates, who were perceived to have little interest in business and to know how to com-
port themselves in front of foreign dignitaries.34
As Richard Trexler has pointed out, ambassadors were very much subject to the
public gaze, as they made ceremonial exits from and entrances into the city, dressed
in suitably rich garb.35 Piero Nasi, for example, on his arrival in Naples in April 1491,
described how “all the city” came to see him and his entourage disembark from their
galley and lined the streets on the way to their residence.36 His description of this
reception in a letter to the Signoria could also have been intended to be reassuring
about the city’s status abroad. For the Florentines, living in a republic with no fixed
rulers or courts to impress foreign potentates, it was perhaps especially important

that their representatives should not be seen as out of place in the courts of princes
and kings, either in their appearance or their demeanor. Eloquent and magnificently
dressed, with clothes that they had to be sufficiently wealthy to afford themselves,
these ambassadors served both as a symbol of the greatness of the city to foreigners
and as a didactic example to its citizens.37 How much more suitable to this hallowed
task, therefore, was a family with martial and noble roots away from Florence than
one that had simply made a great deal of money through business acumen. By tracing
their origins to the valorous Guido of Saxony, the Nasi could be seen as honorable
representatives of Florence as the family’s history set them apart from its citizens
with more mundane mercantile origins.
The donning of this familial identity affected the way individuals represented
themselves visually and materially. Perhaps the most extreme example of this is
Francesco Nasi’s purchase of the Palazzo Mozzi in the 1460s (fig. 10). I talk in more
detail about the family’s palaces in the next chapter, but it is worth noting here that
this medieval palace was formerly owned by a great magnate lineage and had an
important role in the history of Florentine diplomacy. According to Giovanni Villani,
a short-lived peace was brokered by Pope Gregory X between the Florentine Guelfs
and Ghibellines in 1273 in the Piazza de’ Mozzi, at the foot of the Ponte Rubaconte
(now called Ponte alle Grazie). The pope was staying in the Palazzo Mozzi at this
time and founded the now destroyed church of San Gregorio in memory of the
event.38 By purchasing this palace, Francesco was linking the past of both place and
magnate family to his present activities as an ambassador, naturalizing his elevated
position and justifying his holding of this role.
Other rather smaller visual statements should be seen in relation to the Nasi’s
ambassadorial duties. According to Fra Gabriello, a bust of Piero di Lutozzo stood in
the royal palace in Naples ever since his time as an ambassador there in the early
1480s. This bust is lost, and no reference to it can be found in the surviving letters.
Indeed, given that Piero died while an ambassador to King Ferdinand, it may even
have been a posthumous memorial.
Two portrait medals of Bernardo di Lutozzo Nasi, dating from the early sixteenth
century, present a parallel to the self-consciously classicizing commemoration of
his older brother (figs. 1–3).39 The front of both medals shows a profile relief of
Bernardo, staring to the left, wearing a hat with upturned flaps. Their inscriptions
and reverses differ. On the back of the smaller medal, now in the Bargello in Florence,
is an engraving of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, the lithe figure forming a
probably unintentional contrast with the portly Bernardo on the obverse.40 Around
this image is the inscription “nuntius pacis” (messenger of peace), while around
24 changing patrons
Image not available
Figure 1 (a and b). Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of Bernardo Nasi, Florence, Bargello Museum,
inv. 6686, recto and verso
Bernardo is written “b.n.v.p. m.q.m.” As G. F. Hill pointed out, the first part of
these initials stand for “bernardvs nasivs virtu te preditvs ” (Bernardo
Nasi, gifted with virtue), as revealed by the inscription on the larger medal. What the
“m.q.m.” stands for has so far eluded interpretation. The other side of the larger
medal (fig. 3) does suggest, however, a means of interpreting the significance of the
commission for the Nasi family. It depicts three men seated on stools on a stage. At
the center, his legs apart and firmly planted on the ground, is a figure who wears the
belted tunic of a Florentine citizen. To either side are seated knights in full armor.
Behind them are soldiers’ tents topped with fleur-de-lys, the symbol adopted by both
the Commune of Florence and the king of France, and on the left flies a flag with the
sign of the cross, the insignia of the Florentine popolo. Around the scene is written
“venit . vidit . et . vicit.” (He came, he saw, and he conquered). This phrase
puts into the third person the “veni, vidi, vici” that Suetonius tells us was written
on one of the wagons of Caesar’s Pontic triumph, celebrating his remarkably swift
victory against Pompey.41 Here it presumably refers to Bernardo Nasi. It seems
reasonable to assume that it is Bernardo who is depicted as the Florentine citizen at
the center of the group of men. His right hand raised, he appears to explain a point
to the military man on his right, while the other raises his hand to contribute to the
discussion.
There are several moments in Bernardo’s ambassadorial and military career that
could be linked to this representation. He was one of the commissaries, along with
Gino Capponi, in Pisa at the time of the revolt there in November 1494 and over the
Image not available Image not available
Figure 2. Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of Figure 3. Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of
Bernardo Nasi, formerly Henry Oppenheimer Col- Bernardo Nasi, formerly Henry Oppenheimer Col-
lection, recto lection, verso
next couple of years was the head of military forces in several towns subject to the
Florentine republic, which had used the confusion caused by the expulsion of the
Medici to rebel.42 On the basis of the insignia in the background it has been sug-
gested that this is a depiction of Bernardo mediating between the French king,
Charles VIII, and Piero de’ Medici in 1494.43 It seems unlikely that he actually did
this: one would think that a meeting in such august company would be mentioned by
the family chroniclers cited by Fra Gabriello, and I have found no trace of this story.
It seems to me that this representation goes beyond the recording of the particular
and is rich in associations for civic, family, and individual histories. Examining both
medals together, it is clear that Bernardo Nasi is depicted as Mercury, messenger of
peace, echoing the role of Pope Gregory X who played the part of peaceful arbiter
when staying in Bernardo’s brother’s house more than two centuries earlier. An
embodiment of the ideals of the Florentine republic, Bernardo not only deserves his
place on the (literally represented) diplomatic stage along with his chivalric contem-
poraries but occupies a central location, winning a victory of words through his virtue
and eloquence. Just as he is an example to the city, the city embodied in him—present
in the medal in the signs of the commune and popolo—is an example to other powers.
Read in the context of the family chronicles mentioned earlier, here we can see
how the image of Bernardo was used to locate him both within the history of the city
and as a contributor to that history. The allusion to classical portraits here, in the
form of representation—the portrait medallion—and in its inscription, is particu-
larly potent. Julius Caesar, the legendary founder of Florence, lives on in his words of
26 changing patrons
victory, his legacy transmuted through new republican values.44 Here the victory lies
in the control of a dialogue that can bring about an era of peace created by the efforts
of the city’s premier citizens. In family chronicle, Verino’s poem, and the portrait
medal, a web of relationships links the individual accomplishments of members of
the Nasi family to aspects of an honorable past—to the military feats of glorious
ancestors through a fabricated family tree or to the exploits of a great classical leader,
Julius Caesar. A series of historical precedents is called on to make sense of and jus-
tify the family’s position in contemporary life. Ugolino Verino saw Alessandro Nasi’s
success as ambassador to France and placed the origins of the family there, relating
the clan to the country of Charlemagne, who brought about Florence’s rebirth after
the entrance of the barbarians.45 As I shall relate below, this ideal was also borne out
by the Nasi acquiring palaces during the fifteenth century. The family, conscious of
their martial present, created a glorious military past for themselves, far more suit-
able for their position as ambassadors of the state than their more likely roots as suc-
cessful merchants who had entered Florence from the contado. Nasi family memory
was created to make sense of their present position in society, naturalizing their roles
as ambassadors to foreign potentates for family and city alike.
Creating a Paterfamilias: The Del Pugliese
From our contado descended

The Pugliese to live within the walls
Of Florence: Celebrated merchants
In the most prestigious Wool Guild.
—Verino, De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae
Ugolino Verino’s characterization of the Del Pugliese is both less fanciful and more
accurate than his comment on the Nasi. The Del Pugliese family were, indeed, cloth
merchants who had become very successful in the international trade in wool and silk
during the fifteenth century. The earliest notice we have of the Del Pugliese name
dates from the mid-thirteenth century, when a Messer Ridolfo del Pugliese is said to
be one of the original founders of the church of Santo Spirito, though whether this
man bears any relation to the Del Pugliese studied here is uncertain, as I have been
unable to find any other references to this line for the next hundred years.46 By the fif-
teenth century, there were two branches of the family living in Florence. They were
descended from the sons of a Francesco di Pugliese who died in 1375, leaving a tomb
in Santa Maria del Carmine complete with his date of death and profession:“merca-
toris.”47 Since Florentines generally preferred to be buried in a local church, it is likely
that the family lived in the gonfalone of Drago Verde in the quarter of Santo Spirito
from at least the mid-fourteenth century onward.
The first Del Pugliese to serve on the Tre Maggiori was Francesco’s grandson,
Giovanni di Iacopo, who became one of the Dodici Buonuomini in March 1442.48
There was no Del Pugliese in the Signoria until more than twenty years later, when
Giovanni’s nephew, Filippo di Francesco di Iacopo, became a prior.49 The Del
Pugliese were clearly keen to involve themselves in the public life of their district as
their wealth increased over the quattrocento. Nicholas Eckstein has pointed out in
his work on the district of Drago Verde that the family’s presence at gonfalone meet-
ings grew exponentially during the course of the century: after only one attendance at
these meetings between 1423 and 1434, during 1438–48 the family attended twelve
times.50 Moreover, eight members of the family were appointed as Gonfalonieri di
Compagnia for Drago between 1454 and 1496.51 Eckstein suggests that this upturn in
family fortunes “would have been impossible without Medicean support and
approval.”52 As Lorenzo il Magnifico increased his political control over the city as a
whole, and over the Oltrarno in particular in the 1480s, this idea cannot be dis-
counted. However, there is little that directly connects the Del Pugliese with the
leading Florentine family. Although they appeared in the Medicean balìa of 1466,
they were not involved in the later balìe of the fifteenth century, and, so far as I have
been able to discern, there were no links of trade or politics between the two fami-
lies.53 Indeed, the Del Pugliese’s political involvement on a communal level during the
Medici-dominated republic is relatively limited. Three seats in the Signoria between
1463 and 1494 are respectable but could hardly have made a great impact on govern-
ment. Rather, as compared with the Nasi, their rise in fortunes should be examined
within the role of local politics, a process compatible with, rather than dependent on,
Lorenzo’s aims.
The Del Pugliese became important locally, almost certainly, because they grew
sufficiently wealthy to be a potential source of local patronage. In 1427 Jacopo and
Buonaccorso di Filippo del Pugliese declared a fiscal wealth of 6,032 florins.54 While
this may not have matched the vast wealth of some of the heads of grand Drago
Verde lineages, such as Francesco di Tommaso Soderini (15,857 florins) or Nannozzo
di Giovanni Serragli (22,857 florins), it certainly put the family among the richest ten
or so of the district and was not much less than the declaration given by Lutozzo di
Jacopo Nasi of 6,629 florins.55 To put this amount of money in perspective, it is worth
noting that the Nasi’s manservant earned 60 florins a year in 1469, and their (female)
cook just 10.56
Del Pugliese wealth was founded on their work in the textile trade, buying and
selling cloth and raw materials for processing. Like the Nasi’s banking interests, it
28 changing patrons
was an international business, which involved contacts with Flanders in particular,

although the family seems to have had no permanent presence outside Florence.57
They were not, as Ugolino Verino’s verse may suggest, just interested in wool but also
dealt in silk and were members of both the Arte della Lana and the Arte della Seta.
This diversity of interests probably helped them survive the decline in the wool
industry in Florence that occurred during the fifteenth century. The declarations of
wealth of the major branch in the catasti (tax surveys) of 1469 and 1480 (3,947 and
2,271 florins respectively) appear as if the family was becoming increasingly impover-
ished, but this can largely be explained by the rise in value of the florin by about 75
percent over this period, and an apparent lowering in wealth is noticeable in all decla-
rations over the century.58 The pattern of continuing acquisition of botteghe (work-
shops), often from the younger branch of the family, would suggest that business was
buoyant.59 Things appeared to be going well at any rate: in 1472 Benedetto Dei
counted Piero del Pugliese among the richest men in Florence.60
In 1480 the main and cadet branches consisted of one household each. Piero di
Francesco lived with his wife, his four children, and the two children of his brother
Filippo (who had died in 1467) in his newly built palace on the Via de’ Serragli. His
second cousin, Buonaccorso di Filippo, lived with his wife and ten children in rented
accommodation on the Via del Fondaccio, actually along the road in the gonfalone of
Ferza, though he chose to declare his income in Drago Verde. By 1495 he had moved
his household even farther away from his traditional lineage area, renting a house in
the parish of San Procolo, across the Arno in the quarter of Santa Croce.61 The dif-
ference in habitation choices for the two branches is significant. There was consider-
able financial disparity between Piero’s household and his poorer relatives. Notably,
the cadet branch was also consistently less represented politically than the major side
of the family throughout the fifteenth century, despite having a larger number of
male sons. A difference in social status between the two branches seems to have been
established by the mid-quattrocento.
The sources give some indications as to how this disparity in fortunes was mani-
fested. For example, in Filippo di Piero’s will of 1527, he gives the use of his palace to
his daughter for life after his widow dies. However, if she did not want to live in the
house, she was to rent it to the cadet side of the family for no more than eighteen
florins a year, and she was strictly prohibited from renting his property to anyone
outside the Del Pugliese lineage. His goods would only actually be ceded to that side
of the family on the death of his brother, Niccolò, and all of his male children and
their descendants, both legitimate and illegitimate.62 Thus, although it was consid-
ered important to keep the palace in the family, the terms of the relationship main-
tain a distance between the two sides of the lineage. It should be noted that although
eighteen florins would have been a very reasonable rent for Filippo’s half of the Del
Pugliese palace, it was still far from nominal.63 Similarly, all the Del Pugliese shared
one tomb, that of their common ancestor, Francesco, in the Carmine. However, when
Piero and his brother, Filippo, attained the patronage rights to a chapel in the church
not far from this tomb in 1465, they did so in their name and that of their descen-
dants, rather than in the name of the lineage as a whole. Although a sense of sharing
a surname was clearly important, in practical terms it seems that the side of the fam-
ily that was rising in social status wanted to keep its good fortune to itself.
It was not only through attendance at gonfalone meetings that the main branch of
the Del Pugliese family sought to integrate itself in the local community. After the
systematic buying of land on which to build its palace (for which, see the next chap-
ter), Piero and his brother, Filippo, managed to gain the patronage rights to a chapel
in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Obtaining a chapel in the Carmine was a
declaration of social arrival. This large mendicant church, dominating the district of
Drago Verde, was largely funded by the old families of the area such as the Serragli
and Soderini, who had chapels around the high altar. The Del Pugliese brothers
attained their chapel in this prestigious part of the church in 1465, taking it over from
the Guidoni family.64 Neither the dedication—to Saint Jerome—nor the decora-
tions, frescoes by Gherardo Starnina, were altered.65 This, in itself, is significant. As
will become abundantly clear throughout this study, Piero del Pugliese had both suf-
ficient wealth for and a great deal of interest in the construction and decoration of
chapels. Keeping the trecento decoration and the chapel’s dedication but changing
the coat of arms that signified the chapel’s patrons allowed the aura of age to be taken
on by the Del Pugliese, suggesting that this family represented “old money.”66
Because the greater wealth of the main branch of the family allowed it to invest
more in such display items as chapels, palaces, and their decoration, I concentrate on
it in the following study, and in particular two individuals: Piero di Francesco del
Pugliese and his nephew, Francesco di Filippo. Piero matriculated in the Arte della
Seta in 1438 and the Arte della Lana fifteen years later.67 His first civic office was as a
Gonfaloniere di Compagnia in 1458, about the time that he married Pippa di Jacopo
Arrighi, and this was a position he was to take up twice again, in 1467 and 1480.68 He
was a prior in September 1474 but apart from this seems to have taken more time
developing and protecting his business interests, playing an important role in both
the silk and wool guilds, as Ugolino Verino’s verse suggests.69
Piero is an intriguing figure. Seemingly unconnected with the fashionable
humanistic circles surrounding the Medici and involving other famous Florentines
such as Giovanni Rucellai, he was, nevertheless, well educated and interested in the
new classical learning that had become the fashion among some of his grander peers.
30 changing patrons
Figure 4. Antonio Rossellino,

attributed, Portrait Bust of Piero
del Pugliese, formerly Berlin,
Kaiser Fredrichs Museum
Image not available
In the Biblioteca Laurenziana there is a manuscript copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, dating

from 1454. The remarkable thing about this text is not that Piero should have owned
it (the Aeneid was standard in the education of children, and a copy of it was owned
by many Florentine patrician families), but that he copied it himself in a neat
humanistic book hand.70 There are other tantalizing references to Piero having man-
uscripts illustrated at the Florentine Benedictine abbey, the Badia, that suggest he
maintained his interest in written texts at least until the 1470s.71 As I discuss below,
Filippino Lippi’s Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, which Piero commissioned,
would suggest a keen involvement on the part of its patron in the knowledge of the
writing of manuscripts.
In 1467 Piero was rather suddenly thrust into position as the head of the main
branch of the family. His elder brother had died at forty-two, leaving his son,
Francesco, in Piero’s care. Moreover, a son was born to Piero the year after this. He
was named Filippo, in memory of his recently deceased uncle, a normal practice
among the Florentine elite.72 It was also probably around this date that Piero had a
portrait bust made of himself (fig. 4). The marble bust, attributed to Antonio
Rossellino and dated to the late 1460s, was recently identified as Piero del Pugliese by
Francesco Caglioti through connection with another portrait.73
The growth of the independent sculpted and painted portrait during quattro-
cento Florence has traditionally been connected with the Burckhardtian idea of a
growth in a sense of individual, as opposed to group, identity at this time. Connected
with the other evidence about the main branch of the Del Pugliese family acting
quite separately in purchasing chapels and houses from the cadet branch, this seems
to support the view that in this period the extended kinship group was becoming
increasingly dislocated. However, I would argue that through this representation of
himself, Piero was playing a part in the discourse of lineage that was diffused in
Florentine society: the role of the paterfamilias.
The pressures and expectations of fatherhood in Renaissance Florence have been
rehearsed elsewhere. Indeed, the role of the father in leading the family and educating
his sons is not only a constant preoccupation of ricordanze and zibaldoni (common-
place books) of this period but often a stated motivation for writing memoirs and
maxims in the first place.74 Giovanni Morelli discussed the dangers of growing up
without a father as a role model, recounting in his ricordanze his own experiences as
an orphan at an early age: “whereas children take teaching and direction and status
and every good habit from their father, we remained without a head and without a
guide.”75 If, like Trexler, we can see a “pathology” in Morelli’s attitudes because of his
own unhappy experiences, it was a particular mental state that could have been
shared by many other Florentines, not least Piero del Pugliese, whose own father,
Francesco, died when Piero was very young.
Through having a portrait bust made at this time, Piero was ensuring that both
his natural and adopted sons had an enduring memorial of a father figure and pro-
viding them with a permanent exemplar to follow. Dressed in the sober mantle of a
Florentine citizen, he wears a stern expression perhaps meant to incorporate the
authoritative control that some Florentine prescriptive texts stressed as the duties of
a capofamiglia. As Geraldine Johnson has recently pointed out, there is an inherent
ambivalence in the portrait bust form. Most of these sculptures do not have inscrip-
tions that inform the viewer of the sitters’ identity, and those that do tend to be invis-
ible from normal viewing angles.76
It is significant that this is just the first of several representations of Piero that
occur in a variety of contexts from the 1470s up to his death in 1498. There are many
motivations for these portrayals, which I discuss in more detail later, but the idea of
his providing an exemplar to his sons and ward should be thought of as an underly-
ing motivational theme throughout. In his appearance as Saint Nicholas on the
Lecceto altarpiece (discussed in Chapter 5, figs. 32 and 40), for example, he is playing
the role of the name-saint of his recently born younger son and, implicitly, showing
him correct modes of behavior by dispensing charity to good causes in his gift of gold
32 changing patrons
to the Madonna. Far from these portraits being artifacts of a newfound individual-
ism, the motivational structures for their creation are bound up with ideas of lineage:
in particular, the role of the Florentine father as exemplar for his heirs.
Piero seems to have been extremely interested in the visual arts and is recorded as
having commissioned and owned many works by the best masters of his day. This
interest was passed down to his ward, Francesco di Filippo, who is the other member
of the Del Pugliese family who concerns us here. Born in 1460, he was around six or
seven years old when his father died, and, as noted, he was placed in the care of his
uncle.77 In 1485 he married Alessandra, the daughter of a prominent local lawyer,
Domenico Bonsi, and a year later gained his own household, taking over half the Del
Pugliese palace on the Via degli Serragli.78 Over the next ten years, he bought various
properties both for business, in the city, and for relaxation, in the countryside; I shall
discuss his estate at Sommaia in more detail later on. Like his uncle, he was
respectably rather than effectively involved in communal politics, being a prior in 1491
and 1498. During the later 1490s and 1500s Francesco was inextricably linked with
the Savonarolan cause. His name appears on the petition sent to the pope to over-
turn the friar’s excommunication in 1497; he was present at San Marco, “breathing
like a bull” during the siege of April 1498; and he was fined and disqualified from gov-
ernment in May of that year due to allegations that he had acted in Fra Girolamo’s
interests when he was a prior from January to February 1498.79 After Savonarola’s
death, he maintained his loyalty to the friar.80 Eventually, his continuing anti-
Medicean views, too fervently expressed in his description of Lorenzo di Piero di
Lorenzo de’ Medici as “the Magnificent Turd,” resulted in his expulsion from
Florence for ten years in 1513. Although he was actually allowed to return in
December 1515, the expulsion led to the sale of much of his property, and he died,
childless, five years later.81
Unfortunately, all the decoration that was undertaken during his ownership of
the Del Pugliese palace has been lost, but it possibly originally included a series of
panels by Piero di Cosimo and certainly a fresco of Saint George and a crucifix by
Fra Bartolommeo.82 Besides his private space for prayer attached to his villa at
Sommaia, the only chapel project Francesco was involved in was in the church of
Santa Maria a Cestello. Displaying the Del Pugliese arms crossed with that of the
Bonsi, his wife’s family, this chapel once again indicates the wish to claim sacred space
for a particular family grouping. However, its dedication to Saint Jerome may well be
a reference to the chapel at the Carmine, which his father and uncle had founded
about thirty years earlier.83

The experience of family and the representational choices made by the Nasi and Del
Pugliese were relatively diverse. As one would expect, individuals linked by a com-
mon surname could perceive and represent their interrelationship in different ways,
depending on the resources available to them. From the declaration of the tombstone
of their paterfamilias to the verses of Ugolino Verino, the Del Pugliese’s identity was
bound up with their trade, living in a gonfalone whose inhabitants, both rich and poor,
were overwhelmingly involved in the production and sale of wool. This district was a
relatively new addition to the Florentine cityscape. There were never any clan towers
or great castellated palaces there in the fourteenth century, but by financially sup-
porting ecclesiastical and domestic building in their area, the Del Pugliese could be
seen to be investing in both future generations of their family (whether through a
patrilineage or a broader definition of kinship) and in their neighborhood.84 Piero
seems to have been extremely self-conscious of his role as head of the household and,
perhaps, as the paterfamilias of a relatively recently founded patrician lineage.
Material objects made in the fashionable classical style could be used to justify and
maintain the family’s newfound social status even after his death.
The Nasi, one of the inner group of Medicean families, sought to construct their
identity around a different history, one of martial and noble greatness, which had
implications for the past and future of the Florentine commune as a whole. As I will
discuss further in the next chapter, there were close links of business and property
purchase between the brothers of the main branch and the cadet side of the lineage.
What they shared with the Del Pugliese, and many other Renaissance patricians, was
the perceived need to manifest and make permanent family identity and status, born
from the sense of forming a link in a genealogical chain that stretched behind and
before them. I have mentioned here only a few of the building and decorative projects
the families paid for, but the very act of spending money on permanent structures
and decorative objects, to be handed down through the male line, was always implic-
itly motivated by the ideology of lineage to a greater or lesser degree. The linkage of
the family to the material world is nowhere closer than in the building and purchase
of family palaces, the subject of the next chapter.
chapter 2
Private Wealth and Public Benefit

The Nasi and Del Pugliese Palaces

T
he fifteenth-century Florentine palace has provided a dynamic area of
research over the last two or three decades, interest in the physical manifesta-
tion of the casa accompanying the renewed consideration of the family as a
social unit. There are now several excellent interdisciplinary studies of individual
palaces, especially the Corsi-Horne, Rucellai, Strozzi, and Medici houses, as well as
analyses of the phenomenon of palace building in Florence as a whole.1 The family
house was clearly of the greatest importance to Florentine patricians and, as Richard
Goldthwaite has shown, they often spent a great proportion of their wealth in buying,
building, and decorating their dwelling places.2 Both the Nasi and Del Pugliese took
part in this palace craze, spending large sums of money on purchasing and constructing
their homes and decorating them honorably. What motivated them to do so? Before
discussing the two families’ houses in particular, I wish to introduce an important
theme that runs throughout this study: Florentine attitudes to wealth and spending.
Scholars have devoted much attention to Florentine Renaissance notions of
wealth and in particular to the “theory of magnificence,” concentrating on the writings
of such humanists as Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, and Matteo Palmieri.
In these texts, adapting the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, wealthy people were
exhorted to spend their money wisely in praise of God and for the good of the com-
mon weal, adopting the mean between shabbiness and vulgarity. Virtuous projects
included church and chapel building, palace construction, rich clothing, and lavish
festive entertainments.3 These works were typically written by members of the elite
and addressed an elite audience, and this connection has led some historians to por-
tray them as putting forward a classically inspired cynical justification for the “con-
spicuous consumption” of the very richest in society, such as Cosimo de’ Medici and
his descendants, Giovanni Rucellai, or Filippo Strozzi.4 To put it simply, these
wealthy men’s innate greed and vain wish to display their riches were justified by the
work of humanists whose interests it served to collude with their patrons.
36 changing patrons
However, the rhetoric of magnificence in Florence, while perhaps dressed in clas-

sical clothes, also owed much to late medieval spirituality, stemming from a set of val-
ues that were more diffuse than these classically inspired texts may suggest. The idea
that wealth was acceptable if spent wisely was, as Hans Baron noted sixty years ago,
a key part of Franciscan ideology.5 The symbiotic relationship between the mendi-
cant movement and the urban mercantile elite has been extensively discussed in ref-
erence to the importance of charitable giving, essential for the maintenance of
mendicant communities and well-ordered cities.6 Giving to the “poor” was an aspect
of the devotional life of this period that was readily understandable throughout
urban society, and it was participated in by all but the most destitute, particularly by
the confraternal groups that were such an important part of civic devotional and
charitable life.7 Marvin Becker calculated that in 1427, one-sixth of the declared
wealth of Florentine citizens was given as alms and charitable legacies.8
Charitable giving was beneficial for the recipients, for their daily needs; for the
donors, for the good of their souls; and for the city, which would enjoy peace between
its inhabitants and the blessings of God, pleased to see such charity. These notions
inspired by the urban spirituality of the mendicant movement held sway in Florence
during the entire period under investigation. The central idea of “magnificence” was
effectively to elide the expenditure of wealth on display objects such as buildings,
paintings, clothes, or festivities with a wider concept of charity, claiming that this
type of spending was equally pleasing to God and beneficial to the entire population.
These claims were by no means universally accepted—I discuss the opposing argu-
ments in my chapter on Savonarola, below—but neither were they restricted to a
narrow elite: the morality in the virtuous nature of spending to make Florence visu-
ally pleasing was shared by a broad constituency.
As Benedetto Dei repeats like a mantra in his Cronica, Florence was beautiful. It
was beautiful not only because of the skill of its craftsmen in the visual arts but
because these skills were bountifully employed in building and decorating great
palaces and churches, in making rich clothes for citizens to wear, and in creating
floats and costumes for the lavish festivals that foreigners flocked to Florence to see.9
Wealth created the beauty that impressed foreigners and natives alike. Praise for
spending on visual display was given not only by the elite but also by less wealthy
members of society. The coppersmith Bartolommeo Masi, for example, describes the
beauty and riches of the company led by Giuliano de’ Medici with pride and awe.10
Luca Landucci, an apothecary, mentions favorably how the “estimable Messer Jacopo
Manegli” spent five hundred florins on the setting for the relics of Saint Jerome, a set-
ting the whole city could enjoy when the relics were processed annually through the
city. He praises God for the gift of twenty thousand florins given to the new Cardinal
private wealth and public benefit 37
Giovanni de’ Medici by the Florentine Signoria and is pleased to see the “triumph” of
the decorations made for the French king at Piero de’ Medici’s house in November
1494, as “everything was done so well, and on such a grand scale.”11
The poorer inhabitants of Florence not only admired the magnificence and beauty
paid for by wealthy citizens but also contributed to the ornamentation of the city
themselves, through participating in processions, plays, and spectacles staged by guilds
and confraternities. One has only to look through the inventory of the Confraternity
of Sant’Agnese, which met in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, to see how rich
and expensive materials could be appreciated and utilized by the less well-to-do.12
Similarly, through group participation, poorer men and women could help to pay for
chapel and church decoration, street tabernacles, and honorable burial locations.
An aspect of this collective desire to make Florence seem both wealthy and beau-
tiful was manifested on the first day of the festival of Saint John the Baptist,
Florence’s patron saint, when it was customary for all the shops and botteghe in the
city to line the streets with their richest wares. Piero Cennini described the scene in
1475:“they ostentatiously show their things in the more frequented places of the city.
For almost all the artisans and those with warehouses who do business in such places
put whatever precious things they have outside.”13 This was on the first day of
Florence’s prime religious festival and indicates, I think, how beauty, wealth, and piety
could be elided in this period. This flaunting of “precious things” was done, after all,
to give honor to a saint. The display of beauty was connected with moral goodness.
The claim that God was pleased to see wealth spent on the building of churches was
a commonplace, one that was often extended to other forms of display, as in
Francesco Altoviti’s avowal that “with the sacrifices and vows and solemn diversions
and the adornments of his people, a delighted God becomes a placable friend and the
benefactor of great cities.”14 If you were wealthy, therefore, it was surely better to
spend as much of your money as was feasible on grandiose projects for the good of
religion and the city, rather than avariciously hoarding it away. Altoviti goes on to
explain that a key opponent of this point of view, Savonarola, was wrong, as through
making Florence beautiful, it becomes like an earthly paradise:“when one goes to par-
adise, they say that one finds there flowers, little birds, and joy, and pearls and clothes
of imperial purple (porpora) and silk of every color, and that there would be playing,
dances and songs.” He complains that Savonarola “wants to reduce [Florence] to
primitive poverty, and he doesn’t want us down here on earth to dance or play music
or sing chastely with modesty like the angels of heaven.”15 Opponents to spending on
beautiful things, therefore, could even be polemically cast as unholy.
The arts that benefited from this spending were, in themselves, a source of pride to
Florentines, who felt that in their skilled painters, sculptors, masons, and other artisans,
38 changing patrons
they had a civic resource outshining that of other Italian and foreign states. Ugolino
Verino in his De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae stresses how important the contribution of
these craftsmen was to the history of the city; the first part of his poem culminates in a
celebration of its most worthy citizens, including painters, sculptors, and architects.
Similarly, Benedetto Dei claimed that one of the reasons that Florence could be called
a “perfect city” was that “all the arts [are] complete and in perfection,” and he went on to
compile lists of the goldsmiths, jewelers, painters, sculptors, and “masters of perspective”
who had done so much to make the city beautiful.16 That a private citizen could be cru-
cial in encouraging the development of the visual arts was suggested in Vespasiano da
Bisticci’s biographical account of Cosimo de’ Medici, written in the 1480s, where it is
claimed that the pater patriae showed favor to Donatello although “in his time sculptors
found scanty employment.”17 This concept, central to the development of the notion of
“art patronage,” was later perpetuated by the hagiographers of the Laurentian golden
age in Florence in the 1500s and beyond.18
Once the spending of wealth on visible objects had become such a widely under-
stood aspect of civic virtue, there was an obligation for the wealthy patriciate to spend
money not only on explicitly charitable acts such as almsgiving or church building
but also on the beautification of the city—directly through the building and orna-
mentation of private palaces and the wearing of rich garments, as well as indirectly
through providing employment and encouragement for the masters of the arts who
had attracted praise from other states. Certain patterns of behavior were codified as
correct, and any diversion from this could lead to dishonor and shame. In the words
of Matteo Palmieri, “in every way [the wealthy citizen] should conform to the
approved customs of others, according with the ways of his equals so that together
they live liberally in their own city.”19 In Florence, the “approved custom” was to make
the city beautiful.
An individual’s palace was held to embody his personality. Dei describes the quar-
ter of Santo Spirito as if its inhabitants were topographical monuments: “a street
from Mariotto Lippi, to the piazza of Santo Spirito . . . a street of Antonio Fantoni to
Matio Clari to the Convertite in Guascania . . . a street from the bridge of Santa
Trinita to Nanni Bello to the Paghini to the Ghucciardini” and so on.20 Palmieri,
exhibiting his reading of Cicero, claims that those who have built “magnificent
houses”“merit blame if firstly they have not added to or increased their virtue,” pre-
cisely because these buildings could be held to be a cipher for civic good.21 Indeed, the
spending of money affected the identity of these individuals, who could earn the epi-
thet “magnifico” in recognition of their efforts to beautify their surroundings.22
To see this praise for spending as a celebration of a new individualism is now gen-
erally, and quite rightly, perceived to be a misinterpretation. The studies on families
completed over the last three decades have revealed just how significant—and almost
sacred—a great family palace could be for an entire lineage.23 Moreover, the ramifica-
tions of these buildings went beyond the family. Controlled by Florentine statute,
new buildings had to be in conformity with immediate neighbors, and city authori-
ties stipulated certain regulations regarding the size of new structures. The buildings
on Via Maggio, one of the main thoroughfares into the center of the city from the
Porta San Piero Gattolini, were singled out as having to be “large and beautiful.”24 As
the palace builders were also held responsible for paving the area of street directly in
front of their buildings, they benefited all those who walked past them.25 Large proj-
ects could constitute, as Caroline Elam has pointed out, programs of urban renewal.26
The “consumers” of buildings formed a greater constituency than those who paid for
and lived in them, as they acted as a source of pride and civic identity for the wider
population, let alone the financial benefits they provided for those employed in their
construction.27 This is not to claim that there were no contrary currents in Florence
regarding the building of palaces. Savonarola, for example, was later to claim that
these edifices were built “with the blood of the poor.” The rhetoric of “magnificence”
was more than merely empty justification; it provided a motivating framework for
palace builders that took the well-being of society as a whole into account. Whether
it worked in practice or not is another question.
Of course, there were many self-interested reasons that prompted the wealthy
Florentine to build palaces. Giovanni Rucellai famously claimed that “there are two
principal things that men do in this life: the first is to procreate; the second is to
build.”28 His juxtaposition of building with continuing a lineage is significant. Not
only did building a palace carve out a piece of the city for a family, it also acted as
insurance for the family’s continued prominence in the future. Palaces were a vital
part of the patrimony to be passed from father to son through generations. It was
common for palace builders to protect their investment in building from alienation
outside the family in their wills.29 In this light, we should perhaps see the apparent
anomaly of the Florentine patriciate spending money on palaces that were much
larger than they needed and stretching their financial means to the limit as being an
investment in the future, going beyond the demands of economic rationalism as we
understand it today.30 Investment in building secured a family’s status through occu-
pying time as well as space. It is against this background that we should consider the
building and buying projects of the two families under consideration.
The Nasi Palaces

The earliest verifiable date we have for the Nasi confirms that the family lived in the
parish of Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli in the gonfalone of Scala, Santo Spirito from the
40 changing patrons
Figure 5. Former palace of

Piero di Lutozzo Nasi, Via
San Niccolò, Florence
Image not available
end of the thirteenth century.31 Typically, they showed a remarkable degree of tenac-
ity to their area, living there until the family died out in 1667.32 In the first catasto of
1427, we see that the two Nasi households who submitted declarations owned three
houses on the Via de’ Bardi. One of them was the home of Lutozzo di Jacopo; one
belonged to his brother, Giovanni; and their uncle, Francesco, lived in the small cen-
tral house belonging to Lutozzo di Jacopo.33 By 1469 the only member of the family
still living on the Via de’ Bardi was Monna Checcha (Francesca di Jacopo Cattani),
the last wife of Lutozzo, who had been given his house for life on the condition that
she remain a widow.34
Lutozzo’s eldest son, Piero, was given a house on the Via San Niccolò, just along
the road from the Via de’ Bardi, which had been purchased by his father in 1446.35
Figure 6. Upper stories of

facade of former palace
of Piero di Lutozzo
Nasi, Via San Niccolò,
Florence
Image not available
Figure 7. Detail of
sgraffito decoration on
Image not available the facade of former
palace of Piero di
Lutozzo Nasi, Via San
Niccolò, Florence
This was a year after Piero’s marriage to Margherita di Bartolommeo Corsi, and
Lutozzo presumably gave his son the house to allow him to establish a home for his
new family. After the Nasi died out, it was sold to the Quaratesi, and is now Via San
Niccolò, 107 (fig. 5).36 Lorenzo, who shared the same financial household as Piero in
his catasto declaration, actually rented accommodation during this period and was
eventually to move back to his father’s house after the death of Monna Checca in
1476.37 No trace of this house was left after it was destroyed in a landslide in 1547.38
Piero’s house, of quite modest proportions compared with his brothers’ palaces, is
best known in the art historical literature for the decoration of its facade. Although
much restored, indications of the quattrocento sgraffito decorations remain (fig. 6).
Above a ground floor of painted brickwork, the two upper-story windows are inter-
42 changing patrons
Figure 8. Detail of sgraffito decoration in the court- Figure 9. Detail of sgraffito decoration on the
yard of the Medici-Riccardi Palace, Florence facade of the palace of the Arte della Seta,
Florence
spersed with fictive fluted pilasters. The top of each window is flanked by pairs of
putti holding a circular wreath that surrounds a wheel-like motif, possibly a reference
to the wheel on the Nasi insignia. At either end the putti hold a coat of arms, which
was probably changed to that of the Quaratesi family on the sale of the property in
the early sixteenth century. On top of the pilasters rests a shell ornament frieze, and
the pilasters in turn stand on a stringcourse under which is another frieze of putti
alternately holding and riding foliage festoons (fig. 7). Gunther and Christel Thiem
dated this decoration to the 1460s, an addition by Piero to the house he had been
given by his father.39 This design is reminiscent of the courtyard of the house of
Piero’s powerful friends, the Medici. There, too, sgraffito brickwork is topped by a
frieze of swags of foliage (fig. 8), though the playful putti are replaced by sculptural
reliefs. The Nasi palace facade is also reminiscent of the facade of the silk guild
palace, which was probably executed just a little earlier. This is particularly true of the
frieze underneath the first-story stringcourse, which, again, is decorated with putti
and festoons (fig. 9). That Piero should have chosen to decorate his house in a style
that had such august precursors is significant. Without incurring the expense and
inconvenience of building anew, he managed to transform his rather plain palace into
an elegant edifice that displayed its owner’s fashionable classicizing taste. Moreover, it
may have been intended to evoke in the minds of its viewers an association with two
Florentine repositories of financial and political power.
By the time Piero was having the facade of his palace decorated, the rest of the
family had moved from the Via de’ Bardi around the corner to the Piazza de’ Mozzi.
From 1460 Francesco di Lutozzo lived in the oldest, and the most prominent, house
on the piazza. Facing the Ponte Rubaconte, the palace originally belonged to the
Mozzi lineage and, as I noted in the previous chapter, had played a significant part in
Florentine diplomatic history. Francesco bought the property in two parts, the first
Image not available
Figure 10. Former palace of Francesco di Lutozzo Nasi, now called Palazzo Mozzi, Piazza de’ Mozzi,
Florence
from Lorenzo di Niccolò Gualterotti in 1460, and the second from Monna Cassandra,
the widow of Ridolfo di Tommaso Bardi, three years later. In total it cost him 1,400
florins, though this debt was offset by the annual rent of 330 florins he took from the
heirs of Ridolfo Bardi, who continued to live in their half of the palace after the sale.40
It was eventually to go back into the hands of the Mozzi in 1551. It has been much
restored over the succeeding years and is now Piazza de’ Mozzi, 2 (fig. 10).41
44 changing patrons
Judging by the catasto records, Francesco also helped his younger brothers,
Bernardo, Bartolommeo, and Filippo, set up a household, paying 500 florins toward
the purchase of their palace on the northern side of the Piazza de’ Mozzi in 1469.42 In
doing this, they were taking advantage of the financial difficulties of the Banchi fam-
ily, whose property was in the hands of auditors and being sold off to repay credi-
tors.43 Bernardo had just married and the purchase was probably connected with this
event.44 The rebuilding program started by Bernardo’s son, Roberto, employing
Baccio d’Agnolo as architect, greatly enlarged the palace.45 Giovanni Cambi’s inclu-
sion of the building project as one of the notable events in 1516 indicates the stir it
caused in Florence, as the house was extended 20 braccia (about 12 meters) up to the
banks of the river, knocking down a small dwelling and altering the Ponte Rubaconte
in the process. This “beautiful adornment to the piazza and the bridge” was, accord-
ing to Cambi, a result of the success of the Nasi business.46 The collapse of the Lyons
branch of this business may have led to the sale of the palace, as yet incomplete, to the
Del Nero family in 1552. It eventually came into the hands of the Torrigiani and is
now Piazza de’ Mozzi, 5 (fig. 11).47
If Roberto di Bernardo Nasi was publicizing the family’s wealth by starting the
construction of a grand new palace, his uncle Francesco was making just as large a
statement by buying a very old building. This was a period when Florentine citizens
were building palaces that deliberately looked old-fashioned, to suggest the antiquity
of their lineage: the connotations of the purchase of the Palazzo Mozzi are clear.48
The family had bought itself a part of history and suggested noble origins for its clan
that justified its appointment as ambassadors for the republic. It was an act of iden-
tity creation—and fabrication—colluded in by the entire Nasi clan.
It was not only the sons of Lutozzo Nasi who were moving on to the Piazza de’
Mozzi. Lutozzo’s brother, Giovanni, had three sons who also purchased palaces on
the piazza between 1427 and 1468. Battista di Giovanni lived next door to Bernardo
and his brothers, and Agostino and Jacopo di Giovanni next door to Francesco.49
This wholesale relocation on the part of both branches of the Nasi has to be consid-
ered as self-conscious family strategy. By transferring to the Piazza de’ Mozzi, the
loyalties to the parish of Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli were retained, yet the family liter-
ally achieved a higher degree of visibility, as their houses could be easily seen by their
fellow citizens across the river in Santa Croce (fig. 12).50 Moreover, even in the rela-
tively peaceful fifteenth century, it was still perceived that the domination of piazzas
forming the termination of bridges could have a tactical function: the revised city
statutes of 1415 reasserted the city’s ownership of these sensitive spaces so that they
ensured free access across the river.51 This was particularly true in Santo Spirito, the
quarter always perceived as the most ready to rebel.52 No wonder, then, that the other
Image not available
Figure 11. Site of former palace of Bernardo, Bartolommeo, and Filippo di Lutozzo Nasi,
now Palazzo Torrigiani, Piazza de’ Mozzi, Florence
piazzas at the mouth of bridges on the Santo Spirito side of the Arno were domi-
nated by old and rich lineages such as the Soderini and the Frescobaldi. By moving to
this piazza the Nasi were making a statement about the family’s place within the
commune. By the end of the 1460s, Nasi households undoubtedly dominated this
part of civic space.
46 changing patrons
Figure 12. View of Piazza de’

Mozzi from the north bank of
the Arno
Image not available
The Del Pugliese Palace

The Del Pugliese palace suggests quite a different attitude to lineage identity. In the
first catasto of 1427, both branches of the family lived together in a house on the Via
della Cuculia (now Via de’ Serragli), backing on to the Via d’Ardiglione. Although
the younger branch, all minors at this time, owned a house on the prized Canto della
Cuculia, this seems to have been a rather small property, which they rented to a
Matteo di Bartolommeo for the paltry sum of one florin a year, compared with the
twenty-two florins they paid for their own domicile.53
In 1428, the year after these declarations, the main branch of the family, headed by
Francesco and Giovanni di Jacopo, bought a house more suitable to their require-
ments from the auditors of Nicola Serragli, just along the road at the far side of the
Borgo della Stella.54 In 1450 two more houses were purchased to extend Del Pugliese
property toward the Borgo. Soon after that, the building work on the new palace was
under way, Giovanni del Pugliese employing Maso di Bartolommeo to make the well
and stairway for the courtyard in 1452.55
As has been recorded in many other incidents of palace building at this time, con-
struction of the main palace must have continued over several years, with property in
the surrounding area being bought up as the work continued. It was only in 1475 that
Image not available
Figure 13. Former palace of Piero and Francesco del Pugliese, Via de’ Serragli, Florence
the last piece of property was bought from a man simply named Bartolommeo
rimendatore (sewer of wool cloth), whose house had previously been jammed right in
the middle of the Del Pugliese property.56 It is still possible to see the effects of this
jumbled pattern of acquisition through the appearance of the side facade on the
Borgo della Stella. By 1480 the main house and garden were completed, and Piero
was turning a neighboring tavern that he had bought into stables with a woodshed
and cellar.57
The Del Pugliese palace still stands today, now Via de’ Serragli, 8 (fig. 13).
Extensively refashioned internally during the eighteenth century, the original facade
48 changing patrons
Figure 14. Detail of Del Pugliese arms on facade of

former palace
Image not available
is at least partially intact, and the Del Pugliese arms can still be seen at either side of
the building (fig. 14), marking out an area of the street that was known as the Via del
Pugliese for a period at the beginning of the sixteenth century.58 Although the family
seemed to have lived in Drago Verde for several generations by this point, this was
the first palace they owned in the district. The correlation between social and physi-
cal expansion is surely more than a convenient metaphor: by building, the Del
Pugliese were not only reflecting their rise in status but ensuring its continuity by lit-
erally staking a place for themselves in the neighborhood, which could be handed
down through the generations of the family. Building a palace adorned with their
coat of arms in a location that physically aligned them with the more wealthy families
of the district was an investment in future memory—an inheritable and physical act
of self-location. Moreover, the Via della Cuculia offered their new status ample expo-
sure. A route for traffic from the Porta San Pier Gattolini to the Ponte alla Carraia,
this street, like the Via Maggio, was one of the most traveled by those passing from
the gate to the center of the city.
On the corner of the palace at the intersection of the Via della Cuculia and the
Borgo della Stella, there was once a tabernacle with a Virgin and Child with Saints
Catherine and Barbara, which Vasari claims was painted by Raffaellino del Garbo.59
Perhaps paid for by Francesco di Filippo del Pugliese, who was living in the palace at
the height of Raffaellino’s career, this painting highlights the complex nature of the
public benefits that private building and decoration could be thought to bring. The
choice of saints links it to the community of German and Flemish woolworkers liv-
ing in the western part of Drago Verde. Santa Barbara was a German saint adopted
by a confraternity of mainly northern European weavers from the parish of San
Barnaba near San Lorenzo, whereas the equivalent company south of the river was
dedicated to Saint Catherine and met in the church of the Carmine from 1435.60 The
symbols of these two groups were again put together on a glazed terracotta taberna-
cle that can still be seen on the Via Nazionale, executed by Giovanni della Robbia in
1522.61 Given the proximity of the palace to the church of the Carmine and the Del
Pugliese’s position as an employer of many woolworkers, the evidence for the connec-
tion of this image to these groups is compelling. Through the tabernacle, therefore,
the Del Pugliese palace was linked with the men employed by the family, the holy site
a permanently visible act of patronal largesse. The relationship between patron and
worker was given sacred connotations; the patrician employer could be seen to be
caring for his charges’ spiritual as well as physical sustenance.
Moreover, the Borgo della Stella, leading from the Via della Cuculia to the
Carmine, was one of the poorest streets of the district, being home mainly to
poverty-stricken unskilled workers and laborers.62 With a tabernacle on this corner,
the poor of the district were provided with a permanently available sacred painting of
a quality that they would not have been able to afford themselves. Through this
image Francesco was also making the family home sacred and hoping, perhaps, that
those men and women who prayed to the Madonna and saints would remember him
and his house (in all senses of this word) in their prayers.63 Finally, it may be that this
image provided illumination at nighttime: the torches burning around tabernacles
supplied the few points of light permanently available in a dark city.64 The addition of
this tabernacle to the exterior of a family home drew attention to the piety and civic-
mindedness of its builder, an explicit reminder that the wealthy family that lived
inside the property spent their riches for the good of the surrounding community.
the nasi inventories

The contents of palaces, like the buildings themselves, constituted an important asset
to be handed from generation to generation. As with the construction and purchase
of palaces, their furnishing (masserizia) could be conceived as a test of virtuous spend-
ing. Giovanni Rucellai urged his sons to be “massaio” in their use of wealth in the
home: to take the balance between prodigality and avarice, to esteem honor more
than they esteemed wealth.65 Household management was clearly a virtue to be
praised in young men, as the goods they purchased added to the patrimony that was
to become part of the identity of the lineage as a whole; Luke Syson and Dora
Thornton’s recent book has served to remind us that domestic objects were often
used in an attempt to inculcate desirable social behavior, displaying examples of con-
duct for the members of the household to follow.66 In the remainder of this chapter I
examine three inventories that reveal how both the type and placement of goods
owned by the Nasi sought to bolster the family’s social position, as well as providing
insights into the texture of their everyday life.
50 changing patrons
As was normally the case, all three of the Nasi inventories were drawn up as the
result of the death of a man who had left children too young to take care of their own
finances. The earliest document, of August 1488, lists the belongings of the heirs of
Bartolommeo di Lutozzo Nasi; the second, those of his eldest brother, Piero di
Lutozzo; and the third, of their nephew Alessandro di Francesco di Lutozzo.67
Bartolommeo Nasi died in December 1487. In his will of October of that year he
had given the custody of his six children, and one yet to be born, to his two brothers
and his second wife, Lisabetta di Ristoro Serristori.68 Soon after his death and the
birth of their youngest daughter, however, Lisabetta renounced the guardianship of
her children and stepchildren, presumably because she was young enough to
remarry.69 A new guardian had to be found to protect the heirs’ interests, and the chil-
dren were placed in the care of Lactantio di Papi de’ Tedaldi.70 As Bartolommeo had
requested in his testament, money for the girls’ dowries was put in the Monte delle
Doti (the communal dowry fund), and an inventory of goods was taken for his uni-
versal heirs—his sons Lionardo, Raffaello, Lorenzo, and Alamanno.
The second Nasi inventory is a shorter document. The goods it describes
belonged to Bartolommeo’s half brother, Piero, who died in November 1491 while
acting as the Florentine ambassador in Naples.71 His will of that year names as his
universal heirs his two sons, Dionigi and Lutozzo, and his grandson, Antonio di
Lionardo, whose father had died some years before. As Antonio was still a ward,
Piero’s wife, Margherita di Bartolommeo Corsi (Monna Tita), was named his
guardian, and they lived in Piero’s house together until her death in 1496.72
The third inventory records the belongings of the heirs of Alessandro Nasi, his
two sons, Francesco and Giovanni.73 Like the other members of the Nasi family, he
too named his wife as his children’s guardian in his will of 1511. Typically, he laid down
certain conditions about his wife’s conduct: she could stay in the family palace and
use their room and its furnishings as long as she stayed a widow and took care of
their four remaining children with the advice of three relatives: Filippo di Lutozzo,
Roberto di Bernardo Nasi, and Marco di Simone del Nero.74 She agreed to this, and
four months after her husband’s death appointed another guardian to help her bring
up her children, Leonardo di Leonardo da Filicaia.75
These inventories have a number of properties in common: first, the key role that
the women of the household played in the taking of the inventory. In the latter two
cases, the inventories were taken at the behest of the mother and grandmother of the
heirs, who were present during the process. It is logical to surmise that these women’s
attendance was essential for the inventory taker, a notary who would not necessarily
have been familiar with the household. They could help by naming goods and
explaining to whom they belonged. Indeed, the constant appraisal of items as “used,”
Image not available
Figure 15. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Taking of an Inventory, Oratory of San Martino dei
Buonuomini, Florence
“worn” (triste), or new is reminiscent of Matteo Palmieri’s injunction to wives to be

aware of all the objects in the house made for the family’s needs, to suggest what was
lacking and what needed replacing.76 In this way, these documents concerned with
the annotation of objects owned by men for their transmission through the male line
reflect the central importance of women in running the home and, perhaps, in the
way the individual items that made up the patrimony were described. Notably, in the
only fifteenth-century representation we have of an inventory being taken, the
woman of the household is literally central to the painted narrative (fig. 15).77
Because of the understandable interest in identifying works of art, many of the
partial inventories that have been published to date perhaps give a rather skewed pic-
ture of the nature of these documents.78 They are generally not confined to recording
the movable belongings in the family palace but also include the buildings in the con-
tado and the goods in them, as well as the land belonging to the heirs. The Nasi
inventories are not atypical in that, with the exception of jewelry, they do not give
valuations of the objects listed.79 What seems to be at stake is the inheritance in
its entirety. Even the belongings that are explicitly stated to be of “little value” or “sec-
ond rate” are parts of the totality of the deceased man’s legacy to his heirs. In
52 changing patrons
Bartolommeo’s case, his life was explicitly remade in the renaming of his youngest
son after his father a short time after the inventory was taken.80
Because of the urge to catalogue each object, making an inventory was a major
task. It involved the presence of three to four people, and could take several days: it
took four sessions over a period of almost two weeks to list Alessandro Nasi’s goods.81
In his valuable dissertation, “The Domestic Setting of the Arts in Renaissance
Florence,” Kent Lydecker found the inventories he studied were rationally organized
and followed a regular pattern.82 This is not the case with the Nasi inventories. In
fact, in the documents I have consulted in the archive of the Magistrati dei Pupilli, it
seems that there is little consistency of form. Religious paintings, for example, are
only occasionally mentioned as the first objects in a room, as they are in Lydecker’s
examples. Sometimes clothing is listed by the chest in which it is kept and sometimes
not. Indeed, occasionally, names of items are noted with no reference to their loca-
tion, the rooms where they were found not being mentioned.83 This lack of consis-
tency in the ways in which inventories were taken, and the discrepancy in the
description of objects contained in them, means that the evidence from these docu-
ments is not easily reduced to quantifiable units and has to be treated with care.
There are, however, certain patterns of inventory taking. Beni immobili (the land
and buildings owned by the family), for example, always seem to be catalogued sepa-
rately from movable goods. This list can be located at the beginning or end of the
same inventory or in another place entirely.84 Taking its pattern from the catasto, the
beni immobili list invariably starts with property owned in the city before itemizing
country possessions. The form of the 1488 document is particularly interesting
because it shows how the family perceived the inheritance that was to be passed to
Bartolommeo’s heirs. Starting with beni immobili, primarily tying the inheritance and
its heirs to the family’s locality in Florence and the contado, it then notes the account
books owned by Bartolommeo and the Nasi company, which are concerned with
transactions made in Florence, Lyons, and England. The contents of the palace in
Florence are then listed room by room. This is followed by the contents of the villas
in the contado. On the final page, there is a section for books owned by the Nasi, not
connected with any particular building, followed by the family’s revenue from farm-
ing and its monte comune credits, the money the brothers had lent at interest to the
Florentine commune. The objects representing commercial and intellectual life are,
therefore, separated from the house’s contents as a whole: they are seen as distinct
from other material belongings, requiring a different categorization on the part of the
guardian and heirs. The other two inventories both start by listing the contents of the
main family house. The 1492 document ends with beni immobili, whereas the 1511
inventory goes on to annotate the items in the family villa. The fact that neither
of the later inventories lists any commercial interests is probably because both
Alessandro and Piero also had adult sons, who presumably had already taken over
much of the running of the family business.
The largest sections of the inventories—the detailing of the contents of the fam-
ily palaces—are the major concern here. As stated above, these houses were all in the
parish of Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli, in the gonfalone of Scala, Santo Spirito. The 1488
inventory enumerates the belongings in the palace on the west side of Piazza de’
Mozzi, overlooking the Arno, whereas that of 1492 was concerned with the house on
the Via San Niccolò (fig. 5), and the 1511 document lists the contents of the Palazzo
Mozzi (fig. 10). Reconstructing the interior of these palaces from the rooms named
in the inventories would be a hazardous procedure, as the route taken around the
house by the inventory makers is uncertain in each case. Nevertheless, the informa-
tion given does furnish us with an idea of the disposition of space in the interior of
the buildings.85
Bartolommeo Nasi and his brothers lived in a house with at least thirteen rooms,
Piero’s had sixteen, and Alessandro’s inventory lists eleven. In the palace on the Arno,
the rooms seem to be distributed in two main blocks. On the first floor, at one side of
the sala (central hall) were the kitchen, servants’ chambers, the children’s room, which
overlooked the balcony, and the place where Costanza, the widowed sister of the Nasi
brothers, slept. At the other side of the hall were the suites of rooms belonging to the
brothers and their wives. Although three chambers with their antechambers are
mentioned, the eldest brother, Bernardo, is not listed at all, though his room in the
Nasi villa at the country property at Villamagna is inventoried.86
Richard Goldthwaite depicts the “renaissance palace” as an empty place, far too
large for the family’s needs and at best semifurnished.87 Whereas this may have been
true of vast edifices such as Palazzo Strozzi, fraternal households also could become
very large indeed. By 1488 the Nasi brothers between them had seventeen children.88
This meant that when all the family members and their servants were at the house in
Florence, it would have contained at least thirty-one individuals, not counting any
possible guests.
As well as the main family, all three houses were the dwelling places for several
domestic servants. In Bernardo, Bartolommeo, and Filippo’s catasto declaration of
1480, seven servants were mentioned: three wet nurses—who may have lived in the
Nasi palace or in their own homes—a female slave, a maid (fante), and a manservant
(famiglio) for Bernardo.89 It seems likely that during the next eight years this situation
would have changed: female servants, at least, tended to have relatively short tenures
of employment, and the number of wet nurses employed presumably varied accord-
ing to the number of breastfeeding children.90 There are no domestic servants men-
54 changing patrons
tioned in Piero or Francesco di Lutozzo’s catasto entry, but this is probably owing to
the varying status that servants held, sometimes not being declared as members of
the household.91
Very little work has been done on domestic service in Florence in this period, and
it is difficult to determine exactly the different roles of the servants.92 However, the
inventories do give an idea of their comparative status. Only two kinds of servants
were given a dedicated room, the serva and the famiglio—an indication that they were
of a higher status than the rest of the domestic staff. This is confirmed by the salaries
of the famiglio and the maid, the fante, in 1480. He received sixty florins a year as
opposed to her ten.93 The famigli in Bartolommeo’s house enjoyed a relatively well-
furnished room. The chamber contained a bed with its covering and a chest, all
described as in decent condition. The chamber for Piero’s famiglio, however, had no
bed, just bed linen.94 Judging by the inclusion of her “dosso grande,” it seems that the
fante, the maid, was expected to sleep in this room, and this perhaps casts doubt as to
whether there was a famiglio living in the house at all at that time. The fact that
Bernardo’s famiglio, Barvino, worked for a specified member of the family in 1480 sug-
gests that these male servants worked as valets or personal assistants; given that there
were no adult males in the house, the service of a famiglio may not have been required.
The other dedicated servant’s room was for the serva’s use. In all three palaces, this
servant slept in the room next to the kitchen, always with a bed of her own, though
the serva in Bartolommeo’s house was slightly worse off than the famigli, with a simi-
larly furnished room except with old furniture in poor condition (trista).95 The serva
had no escape from her job, which was to prepare food for the family. In all of the
houses, either her antecamera or her bedroom itself contained such items as a “lettuc-
cio dappane” (a kneading trough for dough) and a jar to hold flour. Still, despite the
discrepancies in the quality of furniture in her room and that of the famigli, her role
as a cook was sufficiently prized for her to have a bedroom of her own. The other ser-
vants presumably had to make do with sleeping wherever they could find a place.
Given that almost every room had a bed in it, this option may not have been as harsh
as it sounds.96
Alessandro Nasi’s house and villa also contained chambers for the maestro, the
teacher of his children. The high status of this member of the household is attested
to by the large size of the room in the house, a “chamera grande,” and its position in
the villa, next to the loggia, where Alessandro and his wife also slept.97 Moreover,
these rooms seem to have been richly furnished, with a gilded tabernacle of the
Virgin, two walnut beds, and several intarsiaed chests. Interestingly, apart from the
sala, it is the only room in the house that contained a table with benches. Perhaps this
was a place where lessons could be taught.98
Significantly, the maestro in Alessandro’s home fared better than one of the mem-
bers of Bartolommeo’s family. The widow Costanza’s room was between that of the
famigli and the kitchen. This location is enlightening about Florentine attitudes to
widows who were too old to remarry. Costanza, who was about fifty-three years old
at the time of the inventory, had outlived no fewer than three husbands before
returning to her brothers’ house sometime between 1480 and 1488, probably having
no children in her last marriage to Andrea di Matteo Albizzi.99 Klapisch-Zuber has
discussed the problems of widowhood in Renaissance Florence, suggesting that these
women represented a threat to the reputation of the casa if not taken under male pro-
tection.100 Placing Costanza in the less-honored part of the house perhaps reflects her
lowly role in the family. It is a relationship with the rest of the household that is repli-
cated in the country property at Villamagna. Here she was placed on the first floor,
where the famiglio slept, whereas Filippo and Bernardo had rooms on the cooler
ground floor. Although her room in the palace was fairly well furnished, with a bed
and a lettuccio (generally translated as “daybed”), an intarsiaed chest, and six forzieri
(great chests), the latter were “in bad condition, and old of little value.”101 Perhaps each
pair of chests corresponds with one of her three marriages. In the account books of
the cassoni painter Apollonio di Giovanni, there are records of payments for a forziere
painted in honor of her first marriage to Matteo di Sandro Biliotti in 1453.102
Although the remarriage of widows met with some ambivalence in fifteenth-
century Florence, at least the married woman had easily ordained social roles laid out
for her.103 Unlike her mother, Monna Checca, or her sister-in-law, Monna Tita, how-
ever, Costanza was not the head of her own household with responsibilities toward
her children. Neither was she fulfilling the role of producing babies, like Bernardo’s
or Bartolommeo’s wives, who spent the 1480s more or less constantly pregnant.
Judging by the location of her room, she was hardly considered to be a full adult
member of the family at all and may, perhaps, have been expected to help with the
running of the household and the care of the children.
The room where the children slept was on the first floor in this house.104 The
“camera dove dormono i fanciulli” had a balcony and contained a greater range of fur-
niture than in any of the servants’ rooms. There were a lettiera and a lettuccio with one
forziere, a cassone, and two smaller chests. There was also a greater range of decorative
objects in this chamber: a number of tapestries, some of which were used to cover the
entrances to the chamber, like the one that can be seen in Ghirlandaio’s painting of
the birth of the Baptist in Santa Maria Novella (fig. 16), and two pairs of spalliere.
Normally translated as “wall panels” or “wainscoting,” it is unlikely in this case that
these items were made from wood; given their presence among tapestries and other
cloth household items, it seems more probable that they were made from some kind
56 changing patrons
Image not available
Figure 16. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Birth of Saint John the Baptist, Tornabuoni Chapel, Santa Maria Novella,
Florence
of fabric, one pair decorated with arms and the other with figures.105 Although the
children enjoyed a greater range of decorative furniture than the servants, this was
often described as being old and in bad condition: the best items of the house were,
as we shall see, reserved for the rooms of the brothers and their wives, and the sala. It
may well be, given the number of children and servants in the household, that other
rooms whose function was not specified in the inventory were also given over to their
use. Every chamber, with the exception of the two sale and the kitchen, contained one
or two beds.
In the earliest inventory, the contents of Bartolommeo’s main chamber are listed
in the most detail, presumably because the inventory was for the benefit of his heirs.
The largest piece of furniture was the bed with a bedstead of five and a half braccia
(about three meters), with a gilded and painted frame and two intarsiaed chests
attached. There was also a smaller lettuccio, of four and a half braccia, also intarsiaed
and gilded. These beds were covered with two lengths of cloth (sargia) painted with
animals and figures. On the wall was a painting of the Virgin,“of inferior quality.”The
room also contained freestanding chests of various sizes, some with coats of arms,
and all lavishly decorated with painting and intarsia. Presumably these chests stored
the extensive collection of household linen, as well as the large collection of men’s and
women’s clothing.106
Piero’s widow, Monna Tita, also lived in some luxury, again with two rooms for
her use.107 The principal chamber contained a bed of intarsiaed walnut and no fewer
than eight chests, including a pair of painted forzieri, whose contents are carefully and
systematically noted. Like Bartolommeo’s, her room contained an effigy of the
Virgin, and in this case, we have evidence of its use for domestic devotional ritual. In
a first-floor room, along with horse blankets and plates, there was kept “a candlestick
of iron, tin-plated and painted, to place in front of the Virgin Mary.”108
Alessandro also had a series of rooms devoted to his use, one on the ground floor
of the house and one upstairs next to the great hall, with an antechamber attached.
These had an impressive array of furniture, both main rooms containing three beds
each with a total of ten freestanding chests. The downstairs room contained his
clothes and a large mirror with a gilded and carved frame.109
The main difference between his possessions and his uncles’, however, is the
number and variety of religious images. The other two households possessed a total
of five religious effigies, all paintings and/or sculptures of the Virgin. Alessandro, by
contrast, had three religious paintings in his ground-floor chamber alone: a tondo of
the Virgin, a crucifix in a tabernacle, and a Flemish painting of the Virgin.110 There
were three other images of the Virgin around the house, as well as a painting of Saint
Catherine, a Nativity, a Flemish Crucifixion, and a Flemish tapestry of Christ on the
wall of the great staircase.111 Alessandro was a follower of Savonarola, and it may be
that his religious beliefs influenced his taste in devotional objects: I will discuss the
way that Savonarola may have affected the purchasing and commission of images in
Chapter 8. Particularly interesting here, however, is the way that these items are
described. In the earlier two Nasi inventories, they are simply summarized as “una
Vergine Maria” or “una Nostra Donna.” This is true whether they are painted panels
or sculpted wood. The subject represented and the devotional value of the object
supersede its form. A different set of concerns is revealed in the near-contemporary
inventory of Lorenzo de’ Medici: “A tavoletta of marble, by the hand of Donatello, in
which is an Our Lady with the baby at her breast.”112 The physical form of the repre-
sentation is stressed, the hand of the master, Donatello, giving this object its value, as
well as the subject it depicts. Perhaps this kind of description gained currency as the
years went by. Alessandro’s inventory, although not giving the makers’ names, always
starts by mentioning the physical characteristics of the object before saying what it
represented:“a painting on linen with a crucifixion in the Flemish style” or “a painting
in which there is a Saint Catherine with a gilded frame.”113 More work would need to
58 changing patrons
be done on this subject to see whether this mode of description became more com-
mon in most early sixteenth-century inventories. If this is the case, it would indicate
a mental shift in the understanding of religious images during this period.
It has frequently been noted that Florentine furniture is often decorated with
coats of arms. Despite their ubiquity, the placing of family symbols on household
objects was far from being indiscriminate or arbitrary. There were certain locations in
the Nasi houses where the family’s emblems appeared: the main camera of the head of
the household and the sala grande. This distribution is partly explicable because fam-
ily coats of arms were only placed on the more luxurious objects: the chests that had
been painted, inlaid, or gilded; the large silver knives; or maiolica plates. However,
there was also, almost certainly, a more symbolic reason for the disposition of insignia
around the house.
In Bartolommeo’s palace, the sala formed the hub of the fraternal household. The
individual family units of each of the two brothers, represented by their separate
suites of camere, are ceded to the unity of the casa in this room. The sets of brass ewers
and basins in the great hall carried coats of arms. One had the stemme of the Nasi and
the Albizzi family, referring to Filippo’s marriage to the daughter of Maso Albizzi in
1480, the other had the arms of the Serristori and Nasi, referring to Bartolommeo
and his second wife, and one had only the Nasi arms.114 The marriages here are
shown in their role as auspicious family alliances for the consorteria as a whole, to be
shown off in a room used by the entire household and guests.
Moreover, it is significant that in the halls of all three palaces the objects deco-
rated with the family insignia were not tables, benches, or chairs but the bronze
basins used for washing hands before dining. Eating together, in this case at a table
specifically designated as “per la famiglia,” was an act that defined the notion of fam-
ily, those who share bread and wine under one roof.115 Indeed, after the settling of
marriage negotiations between two families, the groom-to-be would dine at his
betrothed’s family’s home as part of the ritual sealing of the agreement.116 Before sit-
ting down to eat, the Nasi would wash the dirt of the outside world from their hands
in basins that displayed the emblems of the lineages that came together conceptually
and actually to “make” the family, a daily ritual that acted as a reminder of the sancti-
fication of family life and of the ties binding these individuals together. Guests also
would use these basins; as Alberti stressed, during the period of staying in a house
and eating meals there they would become part of the family.117
The other main locus for the family arms was the chamber of the married head of
the family, the camera, the center of key events—procreation, birth, and death—that
altered the physical constitution of the lineage. Although the coats of arms that
appear on the furniture in the 1488 inventory are not specified, they are identified in
the other two documents. They appear on beds, their pillows and covers, a sculpture
of the Virgin Mary, and on many of the forzieri. Not surprisingly, a single coat of arms
is always that of “la casa,” the Nasi, and when two appear together, they celebrate the
union with the Corsi and the Tornabuoni, the families of Piero’s and Alessandro’s
wives.118
The presence of arms here, in a part of the house that was specifically given over
for the use of named individuals, reminded those members of the family of their role
in the lineage. Perhaps, like the idea that beautiful paintings could bring forth beauti-
ful children, the profusion of coats of arms in the camera had an almost totemic pur-
pose, intending that the issue of the union between two families would be worthy
inheritors of the values of the lineage and perpetuators of its success.119 Rather than
marking out these rooms as “private” spaces, I would argue that these coats of arms
act as a reminder to the owner of the chamber that he has a broader duty to his kin:
this was the location where the union between two families was finalized in its con-
summation and, perhaps, that the only worthy acts of sexual union were those that
had the continuation of the lineage as their end.120
The careful annotation of bed linen and clothes dominates the inventories of all
the Nasi camere. The number and range of garments listed, as well as the trouble
taken over their description—which is often far more detailed than for items of fur-
niture like cassoni—attests to their importance as luxury goods. One of Benedetto
Dei’s requirements for a “perfect city” was that “she has a large number of people who
are rich and well-dressed.”121 Just as living in a great palace and spending money char-
itably were expected of wealthy citizens, so were they obliged to dress suitably
according to their station, adorning the city as they did so. Catherine Frick has
recently outlined the time and expense lavished on the design of a wedding dress by
the Alamanni family in the 1440s, the honor of the entire clan seemingly being at
stake, and Jane Bridgeman has illustrated just how much Florentines’ wardrobes
could cost, making fines from sumptuary legislation an affordable tax rather than a
punishment.122 A sermon of 1488 compared the incongruity of a citizen dressed in a
peasant’s clothes with the purity of the soul wrapped in the sinfulness of flesh.123
Alberti notes the difficulties of having to be well-dressed at all times; he recommends
that the country house of a patrician should be close to the gates of the city nearest
his home so that he could leave for his villa without being observed and “without the
need to dress up.”124 Moreover, as Bridgeman’s work has shown, sumptuary laws and
tradition in Florence meant that clothing, in a quite straightforward way, could be an
index of status, creating a series of easily legible social codes.125
In this connection, it is, once again, relevant that the Nasi were ambassadors for
the republic. They, perhaps more than any other citizens, were expected to dress richly
60 changing patrons
to maintain the honor of the city in front of foreign potentates. An ambassador’s dress
was keenly observed and noted by contemporary chroniclers. Vespasiano da Bisticci,
for example, noted that when Piero Pazzi left Florence for France in 1461 he and his
entourage were “covered with infinite garments and jewels.”126 The coppersmith
Bartolommeo Masi was similarly impressed at Piero de’ Medici’s bejeweled finery
when he left on an embassy to Pope Alexander VI in 1493.127 Piero di Marco Parenti
spent one hundred florins on crimson cloth for suitable garb for his embassy in
1477.128 Indeed, it could be argued that the way an ambassador appeared was as
important as what he said.129 Alessandro Nasi spent protracted periods of time in the
court of the French king, and the long list of clothing in rich materials such as velvet,
silk, and taffeta in his inventory is a reminder to his heirs of their father’s grandeur.
The women’s clothing kept in the Piazza de’ Mozzi palaces is even more opulent,
including girdles of gold brocade, embroidered with roses of silver and gold thread.
Bartolommeo and Alessandro also owned several jewels, some of which are specifi-
cally marked out for use by the women of the household. As well as items for
Bartolommeo’s wife, which we perhaps would expect to see listed in the room she
occupied, there is jewelry belonging to Monna Checca and Bartolommeo’s widowed
sister, Costanza. Indeed, the latter owned several pieces: a table-cut diamond, a ruby,
and a pearl, all separately set in gold.130 As with the traditional swapping of rings
between women of the family on the Sunday after a wedding, these objects were
owned by the paternal family, being lent rather than given to the women who wore
them. Indeed, it may well be that several of the rings mentioned in these inventories
were used for this purpose.131 Through dressing up in luxurious materials and
sparkling jewels, the women of the family themselves became commodities for the
family to display, as women were ritually shown off each year during the festival of
San Giovanni.132

If the amount and quality of the furniture in the three palaces differ somewhat, its
similarity in kind and arrangement outweigh the differences: basic ways of categoriz-
ing objects and people through the space they occupied remained the same. One of
the notable factors brought out in the comparison of these inventories is the similarity
of furniture in each house. This cannot be explained away by the fact that they belong
to the same family. Both Lydecker and Attilio Schiaparelli note patterns of placing
certain types of furniture in certain rooms: the ubiquity of beds and chests in camere as
opposed to the placing of tables and benches in sale. Rooms were disposed according
to function and status of the room’s inhabitants, which affected both their location
and their contents. The seemingly private locus of the patrician home was clearly gov-
erned by a set of cultural expectations that were not only well known but also well
adhered to. As is becoming increasingly clear, one of the reasons for this is that the
patrician home was, in reality, far from being a private space in the quattrocento.
Brenda Preyer has convincingly argued that palaces were planned on the assump-
tion that their interiors would be used as “theaters for social interaction,” as a series of
reception rooms for visitors on formal and everyday occasions.133 Much of the domes-
tic decoration—the spalliere and cassoni panels, the painted and sculpted Madonnas—
that are now displayed in art museums were, of course, bought or commissioned
partially for their aesthetic qualities. Visitors could be impressed with the good taste
of the head of the household, and his wealth would quite literally be on display for
them to see. For some patricians, as I will discuss later, this desire to impress may have
been coupled with a sense that they were aiding the revival and development of the
visual arts by commissioning work from promising young artisans. I find it hard to
believe, however, that this was a primary motivation for the Nasi’s choices in purchas-
ing decoration of their homes. Their painted and carved furniture formed the setting
that contributed to and confirmed their notions of family status and honorable dis-
play and was executed within the boundaries of expectation and honor that provided
a model for many aspects of Florentine patrician life, from the palaces people built to
the clothes they wore. In following these models, individuals and families together
made Florence a city where beauty was a key element of civic identity. Private spend-
ing on display objects was predicated on a notion of public good. In Matteo Palmieri’s
words,“private citizens . . . make cities glorious.”134
chapter 3
Family, Church, Community

The Appearance of Power in Santo Spirito

I
n 1445 the friars of Santo Spirito and Santa Maria del Carmine, the two great
mendicant churches south of the Arno, petitioned the Signoria for funds from
the salt tax. They explained why the money was required:“because it would be so
pleasing to both God and to his holy mother to adorn and complete their most
sacred temples, and, in addition to the praise and honor that would follow for the
city, we should hope that our Lord God, through his clemency, and through the
intercession of his most glorious mother, will concede to us peace, tranquillity, and
well-being, both to the community and to each person who gives favor to [the
church].”1 God and the intercessory saints, seeing the beauty and expense of the
buildings built and decorated in their honor, would be encouraged to benefit those
who contribute to them. Not only those who directly gave money for the building
would be granted God’s favor, but the whole community would benefit from “peace,
tranquillity, and well-being.” An ordered and “complete” church was, perhaps, a figura-
tion of a well-ordered society, but it also had power beyond the metaphorical. Divine
aid could be attracted to achieve the peace required for a community to flourish.
The Nasi secured a chapel in the new church of Santo Spirito during the course
of its construction in 1445, and, as noted, the Del Pugliese gained the patronage
rights over a transept chapel in the Carmine in 1464.2 Both families also became
involved in the maintenance of these convents through participating in their opere.
Other studies of Florentine families would suggest that this behavior was fairly typi-
cal, and there have been several examinations of this kind of investment from the
family’s point of view over the last decade.3 In this chapter, I wish to concentrate on
the church of Santo Spirito from a slightly different perspective, seeing the building
and interior decoration of the church, not as the result of separate family or individ-
ual initiatives, but of the interrelation of corporate entities: the chapter of friars, the
opera, and the commune of Florence, in the belief that the stress on the force of fam-
64 changing patrons
ily identity in shaping church space has sometimes been overstated and can obscure
the church’s role as a focus for a broader neighborhood and civic identity.
Although the underlying moral to the friars’ rhetoric should be familiar from the
discussion of the virtuous use of wealth in Chapter 2, the construction and decora-
tion of Santo Spirito form a useful case study to demonstrate the ways that power
relationships, at both a local and a communal level, could be manifested, understood,
and organized through the structure of church buildings and their ornamentation.
Churches, increasingly lined with family chapels, were locations where several of the
wealthiest families from the district could display their riches and piety. They were
more than an arena for competition between lineages, however; they also provided a
place where the surrounding community could be served, where families had to
cooperate with each other and with the ecclesiastical authorities to produce an hon-
orable decorative scheme for the whole building. As we shall see below, chapels were
not allocated haphazardly to anyone with sufficient money; the disposition of chapel
space was a carefully thought-out business, the cost varied depending on the appli-
cant, and the most prized areas of the ecclesiastical interior were reserved for the
most worthy citizens.4 In this way, church space could be a microcosm of the social
relationships manifested through palace building in city streets.
Across the Arno from the political and religious center, the quarter of Santo
Spirito was actually and conceptually set apart from the rest of Florence. Its inhabi-
tants included some of the most prominent and ancient families of the city—such as
the Capponi and the Soderini—as well as some of the poorest unskilled laborers
who lived especially at its western edges in the gonfalone of Drago. This combination
could be politically explosive. Throughout the period, people from Santo Spirito
were involved in major plots against the ruling regime, and there was always a risk
that the bridges could be seized by hostile families, thus effectively cutting off the
center of Florence from the south.5
As part of the new administrative divisions of Florence, since 1343 the quarter had
been divided into four gonfaloni.6 The most populous and most poverty-stricken by
far was where the Del Pugliese lived, Drago Verde, which took up the western area of
the quarter, roughly from the Ponte Santa Trinita to the Porta San Frediano.7 The
church of Santa Maria del Carmine was in this gonfalone, and it is no coincidence that
the Carmelite friars and companies that met in the church had a special responsibil-
ity for poor relief.8 As Nicholas Eckstein has pointed out, Drago was a fiercely inde-
pendent and self-contained neighborhood in the fifteenth century. This contrasts
with the other three gonfaloni of the quarter, Ferza, Nicchio, and Scala, where less
attention seems to have been paid to gonfaloni boundaries than elsewhere in Florence,
many large Santo Spirito families having dwellings in two or three of these districts.9
family, church, communit y 65
The relative isolation of Drago in the quarter is reflected by the chapel ownership
within the churches of Santo Spirito and the Carmine. In the old church (founded in
1250 and burned down in 1471) most chapel owners were from the gonfaloni of
Nicchio and Ferza, the central areas of the quarter, bounded by the Ponte Vecchio
and the Ponte Santa Trinita on the north side and the Porta Romana and Porta San
Giorgio to the south. The allocation of chapels in the new church of Santo Spirito
from 1445 onward maintained this pattern, the transept again being dominated by
grand lineages from Ferza and Nicchio such as the Frescobaldi, Corbinelli, and
Capponi. The only significant additions from a new area were the Nasi, from the gon-
falone of Scala to the east of the quarter. There were no patrons from Drago in the old
church, and of the twenty-one families who paid for chapels in the new church
between 1445 and 1500, only one of them, the Antinori, was from this area.10
Conversely, chapel ownership in Santa Maria del Carmine was almost exclusively
dominated by families from Drago.11
This clear difference in patrons cannot be explained simply by geography. For the
Del Pugliese, for example, living on the Via de’ Serragli, each church was a brief walk
in either direction from their palace. Yet, because they lived in Drago, they invested in
a chapel in the Carmelite church, along with their “neighbors,” the other wealthy fam-
ilies of their gonfalone. The “neighborhood” that the church of Santo Spirito embodied
was more spatially diffuse and perhaps more socially coherent, including patrician
houses from all the rest of the quarter. The relationship of the disposition of internal
ecclesiastical space to civic topography was complex. It had less to do with physical
proximity than with conceptual boundaries, which by the fifteenth century were
largely delineated by gonfalone divides. Unlike parish churches, which were necessarily
the central points of a defined area, these mendicant institutions could become the
repositories for a local identity that was outside the control of diocese organization:
because they were not connected with a predetermined section of city space, they
were better able to reflect the shifting loyalties and mental divisions of the changing
urban fabric of Florence.

The convent and church of Santo Spirito were unique among the mendicant institu-
tions built in Florence in the late thirteenth century in that the fabric of the buildings
wholly belonged to the Florentine republic, the commune being responsible for all
the construction work. A later chronicle of the convent explains why:“Because it was
a most magnificent building, so that to maintain it would have been a huge expense
to this monastery, the Republic retained the ownership themselves, and conceded its
use to the order.”12 Although the old church may have been extremely grand, and the
men of the commune were no doubt acting most piously in extending their generos-
66 changing patrons
ity toward the Augustinians, it is hard not to see political motivations behind this
decision. In placing a building owned by the commune at the heart of the recalcitrant
district across the river, they were stamping the locality with the authority and
grandeur of the republic while simultaneously encouraging devotion to the civic gov-
ernment among the people of the district who entered the church under the city’s
coats of arms. It was an action that sought to include the Oltrarno in the commune
of Florence. The “old church” of Santo Spirito no longer exists, partly because it was
gutted by a disastrous fire in 1471, and partly because of the construction of the
Brunelleschian “new church” that still stands today.13 The construction of the later
building was also deeply enmeshed in communal politics.
The first proposal for the construction of the new church was in a provvisione
(statute) of 1397. To give thanks to God for Florence’s victory over Gian Galeazzo
Visconti of Milan on Saint Augustine’s Day (28 August), the Signoria ruled that “the
operai [works committee members] of Santa Reparata are obliged in the space of five
years to build a church for the mendicant friars of Saint Augustine, under the name
and insignia of the said commune. And this building should be splendid and remain
a record of this victory in perpetuity, and this church should be made, built, orna-
mented, and beautified as seems most fitting.”14
In this project, as with the original church, the city government intended to pro-
vide a building for the Augustinians that the friars would occupy rather than control.
The new church was to be a homage to the military virtues of the city as a whole, an
attempt to affirm communal values in a potentially maverick area. Rather than
appoint an independent board of operai, the task of supervising the building was
entrusted to the Opera del Duomo, the ecclesiastical building that marked the geo-
graphic and conceptual center of the diocese of Florence. Santo Spirito (both church
and quarter) was therefore being notionally related to two key embodiments of
Florentine political and religious life.
Nothing, however, came of this plan, and the next significant event relating to the
new church took place on 19 January 1434. The priors and friars of the convent
elected two operai, Piero di Gregorio del Benino and Stoldo di Lionardo Frescobaldi,
who were given the power to collect money and employ functionaries to help with
the building of a new church. These certainly were not the first operai elected by the
friars of Santo Spirito—a list exists of a committee from 1425—but they were the
first documented specifically to concern themselves with this new construction proj-
ect.15 They were elected when Florence was in considerable factional turmoil, and just
as the anti-Medicean conservative group was enjoying a temporary victory. Cosimo
de’ Medici had been exiled in September 1433, but his political opponents did little to
shore up their advantage and could not resist the powerful networks of Medici
friends who worked to bring about Cosimo’s return almost exactly a year later.16
Nerida Newbigin, noting the date of the election of these operai, has suggested that
the impetus for the project was led by the opponents of Cosimo from former mag-
nate houses asserting their dominance in the Santo Spirito quarter. As already sug-
gested, Santo Spirito was always a potential hotbed of magnate rivalry to those in
power, and the fact that Stoldo Frescobaldi, a member of an old magnate clan, was
deprived of his right to hold office on Cosimo’s return in 1434 would seem to support
her view.17 The other operaio chosen, however, was from a pro-Medicean family, the
Del Benino, and had delivered a speech unfavorable to Cosimo’s opponent, Niccolò
da Uzzano, when he was spokesman of the Dodici.18 It seems likely to me that rather
than being the pawn in the anti-Mediceans’ game, the friars of Santo Spirito took
advantage of the divisions in the city to recapture the initiative for the building proj-
ect, electing an opera that would not be in thrall to any one interest group. They had
already successfully petitioned the Signoria for the proceeds of the salt tax in June
1433, and the election of the operai was partly concerned with the administration of
this money. Like the rest of the city, the Augustinian chapter was presumably aware
of the potential power of Cosimo’s friends, despite their temporarily reduced circum-
stances, so elected two operai who had ties with both factions. As we shall see below,
this astute political maneuvering would perfectly accord with the chapter’s election of
operai in the years to come.
According to Antonio Manetti, it was Stoldo Frescobaldi who asked Filippo
Brunelleschi to provide the designs for the new church at around this time.19 Two
years after this, in March 1436, the salt tax money was given to the opera.20 Here, once
again, the central communal authorities found an opportunity to interfere with the
building of the church. The administration of the tax was put into the hands of the
Sei di Mercanzia, a cross-city, cross-guild judicial body. The opera elected that year by
the friars of the convent—and “the men of the quarter of Santo Spirito” according to
one commentator—was expanded to include three candidates elected by the
Mercanzia, including Giovanni di Jacopo Nasi, as noted, a member of a family
favored by Cosimo il Vecchio.21 Tracing the payments in the Mercanzia accounts,
Howard Saalman has found that the next opera to be elected, two years later, was
entirely nominated by this communal body rather than by the friars.22 Although they
seem to be acting on suggestions given by the convent, as all the men named had been
previously connected with Santo Spirito either as chapel owners or operai, this
change in nomination does suggest that the commune and its leading figures once
again were attempting to exert their power over this neighborhood church, with
important tactical implications.
68 changing patrons
However, the Mercanzia’s influence seems to have been confined to a limited

period. The next documents concerning the building of the church date from 1445.
In May of this year, the first column of the new building was erected, just a month
after the joint petition by the Carmine and Santo Spirito to the Signoria for a divi-
sion of the salt tax funds.23 In February of the next year, a new opera was elected with,
seemingly, no interference from the Mercanzia.24 From this date onward, the chapel
spaces in the new church started to be allocated to families. It seems likely that the
money from this gave the opera and Augustinian chapter a degree of financial auton-
omy, and it may be for this reason that it was possible to cede some of the salt tax to
the Carmelites.
Building work seems to have gone on rather slowly until early 1471, when disaster
struck. After the sacra rappresentazione of the Pentecost, held in honor of the visit of
Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the old church caught fire and was ruined.25 An element of
urgency was now injected into the building program, as money was needed quickly to
make the new church ready for use. The Signoria responded in June of that year by
imposing a new catasto on the city, the proceeds going to the opera of Santo Spirito
over the next four years. There is no record of the constitution of election of operai
over those years, so whether the civic authorities sought to exercise their control
through nominating members of this committee is not known. However, what is
clear is that the commune sought to remind the citizens of Santo Spirito of the
importance of the central government. The provvisione concerning the new tax ends
with the declaration that on the pain of five hundred florins each “the operai of the
said church should have the arms of the people and the commune of Florence placed
in the body of the church of Santo Spirito and on the facade outside in the most
prominent place.”26 The commune had effectively declared ownership over the build-
ing of the Augustinian church once again.27 While the church was being constructed,
the arms were put on the facade of the opera building, but these were taken down just
as the church started to be used, in early 1482.28 As noted in the ricordanze of the opera
of 1481, on 11 May “the mandorla on the facade of the opera, where the arms of the
people and commune of Florence are, was taken down, to put it in a worthy place in
order to please those of the Compagnia del Pippione, and this was requested by
Lorenzo di Piero di Medici, a most worthy man.”29 The arms of the Councils of the
People and the Commune were not placed on the exterior facade of the church, as
originally requested, but less prominently on the church interior.30 This compara-
tively ignoble end possibly reflects the dwindling powers of this council, which had
been gradually stripped of its powers by pro-Laurentian reforms during the 1470s
and 1480s.31 Typically, Lorenzo’s influence was felt, not through official governmental
channels, but through his careful participation in and manipulation of groups, in this
case the most important confraternity meeting in Santo Spirito, the Compagnia del
Piccione. As detailed below, his later involvement in the opera of the church was to be
equally as effective, and to have a more lasting effect on the building, than the com-
paratively heavy-handed attempts of the official city government.

Examining the opera of the new church of Santo Spirito is crucial for our under-
standing of the relationship between the church and its local area, as well as for indi-
cating how central government sought to maintain control over this quarter.
Opere—appointed boards of works—have received renewed attention over the last
ten years, notably in the important collection of papers recently edited by Margaret
Haines and Licio Ricetti.32 However, their importance for understanding the rela-
tionship between church and laity and the context for ecclesiastical building and dec-
oration has not yet been fully exploited. Following the groundbreaking work on this
subject done in the 1940s by Nicolai Ottokar, the traditional mode of inquiry is to see
the opera at the nexus of the relationship between ecclesiastical and communal insti-
tutions, a sign that the lay commune and other lay corporate bodies were wresting
control from an often unwilling church.33
The evidence from Santo Spirito complicates this picture. Most of the work to
date on Florentine opere has concentrated on examples connected with large civic
building projects, notably the Palazzo della Signoria, Orsanmichele, and the Duomo.
All of these buildings had an opera whose composition was decided by nonecclesias-
tical bodies. However, these constitute only a small fraction of such committees,
which were near ubiquitous in Florence by the fifteenth century, ranging from those
charged with the care of one chapel to huge ecclesiastical edifices. This difference in
scale and intention means that generalizing about the nature of opere is problematic;
the creation of such bodies does not necessarily indicate a “laicization” of control over
religious building. Besides the guild-run opere like those of the Spedale degli
Innocenti, San Giovanni, or the Duomo, in some parishes, like San Giorgio sulla
Costa, the opere were elected by the men of the parish; some confraternities, such as
Sant’Agnese in the Carmine, elected operai to look after their chapels or meeting-
houses; and in large mendicant and monastic churches such as Santa Trinita, Santa
Croce, Santo Spirito, and the Carmine, the operai tended to be elected by the chapter
of the convent.34
Undeniably, as suggested above, the commune was interested in controlling
appointments to the opera of Santo Spirito, but from at least the mid-fifteenth century
onward, the Augustinian friars themselves seemed to exercise considerable authority
70 changing patrons
over this body and, subsequently, the appearance of their church. After the interfer-
ence of the Mercanzia in the 1430s, there is no evidence that any communal body
wielded influence over the selection of operai, and later in the century the documents
betray an eagerness on the part of the prior and friars to keep a close watch over the
membership of the opera, at least after the Medici expulsion of 1494. In 1498 the means
of voting was changed to guarantee that each operaio elected received at least half the
vote of the chapter. In 1511 it was decided to keep the same operai for an extra year:“see-
ing that the aforementioned [operai] have conducted themselves well, they were re-
formed.”35 The implication, clearly, is that if the chapter had not been happy with the
committee, it would have been dissolved after the yearlong tenure of office.
The reason for so much interest in controlling the opera is that its powers were
extensive. In common with most opere, it was the Santo Spirito committee’s main
task to organize finance for the building work—the provvisioni of the commune con-
cerned with the formation of opere almost always explicitly gave these committees
special authority for collecting money. Thus, when the opera of the Innocenti was cre-
ated in 1439, it took the foundation document of the opera of Santa Reparata as its
model: this was almost entirely concerned with its rights to collect money from
debtors.36 This is also one of the tasks specified for the two operai named in 1434 for
the new church of Santo Spirito.37 Not surprisingly, the records of this building cam-
paign recount several episodes of the operai attempting to get money from the recalci-
trant relatives of those who bequeathed gifts to the convent in their wills.
Of course, operai were also charged with spending the money they had recovered.
In the earliest document pertaining to the new church, Piero di Gregorio del Benino
and Stoldo Frescobaldi, as well as being given power to recoup debts as mentioned
above, are specifically elected as “operai and constructors and builders of the opera,
church, chapter, and convent of Santo Spirito” and charged to employ various func-
tionaries to carry out necessary tasks.38 Clearly, operai were in a good position to dis-
pense employment and favors. The building of the new church was a large operation
that provided many people with livelihoods. Richard Goldthwaite has estimated that
the opera of Santo Spirito spent 83,172 lire between 1477 and 1491, the equivalent of
554 years of labor for an unskilled worker.39 The committee engaged a supervisor,
known as Scorbaccia, and a master builder, Salvi d’Andrea, who had as many as
thirty laborers working on the building at one time. It was the opera that determined
how much these men should be paid. Moreover, they kept many suppliers of build-
ing fabric well paid throughout the latter half of the fifteenth century.40 For this rea-
son alone, an operaio could be an important source for patronage in the quarter.
Moreover, in common with many other opere, the Santo Spirito committee had
the power to allocate chapel and tomb space from an early date, as the surviving ricor-
danze make clear. In the case of Santo Spirito, prospective chapel owners were voted
on using black and white beans.41 The chapter of the convent itself could intervene in
the making of these decisions, as it did in 1458 when it granted a free chapel to Luca
di Buonaccorso Pitti.42 However, because the opera was in charge of finances for the
church building, the friars of the convent were answerable to it when they wanted a
chapel for themselves. This occurred on two occasions: the first, in 1485, when Jacopo
Guicciardini offered to pay for a chapel for the friars, provided it was dedicated to
Saint Augustine and decorated in the way he chose; then again in 1493, when the fri-
ars were conceded the Luti chapel as the family had not been able to pay the remain-
der of their account.43 It also seems that, in the case of Santo Spirito, the opera
maintained a degree of visual homogeneity in the decoration of chapels, as is dis-
cussed more fully below.
The building history of Santo Spirito would suggest that control over appoint-
ments to the opera of the convent was important to those civic institutions and pri-
vate individuals who wished to assert their position in the neighborhood church
through chapel ownership and display of family and group insignia. There is abun-
dant information to tell us the names of the men on the committee, including a near
complete record for the period 1477–1500.44
All the men elected up to 1490, and the great majority of them afterward, came
from the same quarter. Although the opera of Santo Spirito was dominated by mem-
bers from the gonfalone of Nicchio, it consistently had representatives from two other
gonfaloni in Santo Spirito, Ferza and Scala. This is such a regular pattern that it must
have been deliberate; it can be seen even after the changes in personnel that occurred
following the Medici expulsion of 1494. As with chapel ownership, the leading fami-
lies from Drago, the fourth gonfalone of the quarter, were not represented; they con-
centrated their energies in the opera of the Carmine.45 Apart from this obvious
omission it seems that, like the pratiche, the advisory committees held by the
Florentine magistracies, it was important for the opera of Santo Spirito to be seen as
representative. Notably, in his ricordanze entry for 1436, one of the operai elected in
that year, Francesco de’ Giovanni, claims that in addition to the friars of the convent,
the “men of the quarter of Santo Spirito” gathered to decide the election of the opera.46
It is perhaps indicative of the disposition of patrician homes throughout the quarter
that the operai of Santo Spirito tended to be next-door neighbors. With the exception
of the Nasi, almost all of them lived on the same two streets: either the Via Maggio
or the eastern end of Via del Fondaccio (now Via Santo Spirito), which runs parallel
to the Arno between Ponte alla Carraia and Ponte Santa Trinita. These two streets
formed part of the most well-to-do area of the city south of the river.47
Between 1468 and 1483 the same five families—the Corbinelli, Frescobaldi,
72 changing patrons
Guicciardini, Nasi, and Ridolfi—provided the five operai of Santo Spirito, the indi-
viduals concerned changing only when one of them died or was unavailable for some
reason. After the latter date, the Frescobaldi no longer appear on operai lists, being
replaced by the Capponi and/or the Corsini. For the opere of both the Carmine and
Santo Spirito, the individuals concerned acted as representatives of their lineage. If
the elected operaio could not attend, he was always replaced by a stand-in from his
own family. If he died, his place was generally taken by his heir.
The changes that do exist in the composition of the Santo Spirito opera are signif-
icant for the convent’s ongoing relationship with civic politics. Previously confined
to a small group of the Santo Spirito patriciate, in March 1490 the chapter of the
convent elected a new operaio, Lorenzo de’ Medici. After his death two years later, his
eldest son, Piero, replaced him on the committee.48 These new additions had a dis-
proportionate influence on the decisions of the opera. In April 1492 the committee
told Giuliano da Sangallo to design the sacristy according to “the will of Lorenzo.”49 A
year later, it was decided that the columns of the new building should be designed as
seemed best by Lorenzo’s son, Piero.50
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s influence on other opere of the city has been noted by F. W.
Kent and Melinda Hegarty.51 There has, however, been little work completed on any
Florentine opera after the Medici expulsion. The case of Santo Spirito suggests that
this topic would reward greater investigation. At some time between 1496 and 1505,
the composition of this opera changed completely. By the latter date, none of the fam-
ilies whose names had become so familiar in the earlier documents appeared on the
committee. They had been replaced by men who were largely from newer families:
Giovanni di Ser Antonio de’ Bartolomei, Bernardo di Stefano Segni, Niccolò
di Giorgio Ugolini, and Rinieri di Bernardo Dei. There were two exceptions: the rep-
resentative of Scala, Angelo di Bernardo de’ Bardi, and the nephew of the new leader
of the republic, Tommaso di Paol’Antonio Soderini.52 As the earlier analysis of
the opera’s composition would suggest, it was absolutely unprecedented that the
Soderini—a prestigious old Drago Verde family who possessed the patronage rights
to the cappella maggiore of the Carmine from 1318—should be represented on the opera
of Santo Spirito.53
The evidence of political involvement in the opera of Santo Spirito should not be
seen simply as an act of “colonization” by the political elite with the Augustinian fri-
ars playing a passive role. In fact, it seems likely that the friars actively invited those
with influence to sit on the opera because it was good for the church. Influential and
wealthy men, unlike their poorer counterparts, were able to supply urgent funds in
times of need. The Nerli, for example, were frequent creditors to the opera of Santo
Spirito in the 1490s; similarly, Richard Goldthwaite mentions several instances of
operai lending funds to the building project.54 They also had political influence at the
center of government, which could reap rewards for the church: the proceeds of the
salt tax, after all, were an important part of its funding. When a member of the opera
of Santo Spirito had a seat on the priorate, the meetings took place in the Palazzo
della Signoria. As priors had to stay in the palazzo during their tenure of office, no
doubt this was partly to avoid their missing the meetings or needing to send a
replacement. It also seems likely that it was hoped decision making would go in the
opera’s favor.55
Indeed, the canniness of the prior’s political maneuvering is shown by the compo-
sition of the opera in October 1512, just over a month after Piero Soderini was
expelled: it included Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici.56 In this way, although the insti-
tution of the opera is characterized through consistency in its membership over much
of the period, the mode and frequency of election of these committees allowed the
convent authorities considerable flexibility if and when necessary.

When allocating chapels for the new church of Santo Spirito, two types of donor had
precedence over all others: owners of chapels in the old church and operai, who often
tended to be the same people. For example, in August 1455 the first two chapels to be
allocated in the as yet unbuilt church were ceded to Stoldo di Lionardo Frescobaldi,
a stalwart of the opera, and he received a discount on one of them because of his past
service as an operaio and because his family were patrons of the cappella maggiore in the
old church.57 Three years later, Luca di Buonaccorso Pitti, an operaio and one of the
richest men in the quarter, who “with his wisdom has increased the income of the
said opera,” was awarded a chapel without cost to demonstrate the friars’ gratitude.58
Both these men, in common with the rest of the operai, were granted chapels in the
transept of the church.
Moreover, these operai tended to offer the patronage of other chapels to friends
and relatives. Occasionally this was explicit: Tanai de’ Nerli, for example, an operaio in
1493, tried to acquire the chapel at the right-hand side of the entrance for one of his
friends, but normally these relationships were not noted in the records.59 Certainly
the Nasi were related by marriage or business to at least six of the other chapel-
owning families. They had ties of marriage to the Capponi, Guicciardini, Pitti, and
Biliotti, they were neighbors of and had property dealings with the Bardi, and under-
took business transactions with the Della Palla. Elena Capretti has noted similar net-
works in relation to the Capponi family.60 As operai tended also to be chapel owners,
it is easy to see how the dynamic between the opera and chapel ownership became
self-perpetuating during the latter half of the quattrocento.
74 changing patrons
The design of the new church of Santo Spirito encouraged direct comparisons
between the ownership of space by different families of the area, similar-sized chapel
niches without gates lining the walls at regular intervals (fig. 17). This has led some
commentators to read a “democratization” of ecclesiastical space into the arrangement
of chapels in this and other Brunelleschian churches.61 Whether this was the inten-
tion of the builders is questionable, and if the way this space was used is examined, it
becomes abundantly clear that these lofty ideals did not inform the way chapel own-
ership was managed in practice.
Just as possible locations for palaces in city space were hierarchically encoded into
areas of lesser or greater status due to their visibility and/or strategic importance, the
location of chapels within the church interior could be read as a sign of relative social
position. The Santo Spirito records are typical in indicating a clear demarcation in
the desirability of certain parts of ecclesiastical space. The most sought-after chapels
were those nearest the high altar. The economic ramifications of this were shown
when, in 1490, Marco di Mariotto della Palla complained that he was paying too
much for his chapel in Santo Spirito as it was “fuori della croce,” outside the more
desirable transept area, and the operai agreed with him.62 In the earliest extant note-
book of the opera’s decisions over chapel allocation in the as yet incomplete church,
from 1455 to 1460, most of the chapels conceded were in the most potent location of
all, behind the high altar (chapels xiv to xxv on the plan, fig. 17) and went to promi-
nent families of the quarter who had owned chapels in the old church, like the
Frescobaldi, Biliotti, and Capponi, or rich and prominent citizens of the quarter who
had not previously owned a chapel, such as Luca di Buonaccorso Pitti.63
Throughout the fifteenth century, the chapels farthest from the high altar were
always ceded to men who were not on the opera and, typically, were of a lower social
status than men whose chapels were closer to the altar. For example, Mariotto della
Palla and Francesco Petrini, neither from distinguished families, were both given
chapels on the nave, despite the Della Palla being patrons of a chapel in the old
church (chapels vi and vii).64 This was not a matter of these smaller families having
less money. The Petrini and Della Palla chapels each cost 150 florins, as opposed to
the 50–100 paid for the transept chapels by the operai some years earlier. By 1495 the
Segni bought a chapel on the left transept for 500 florins, a considerable increase,
even when inflation is taken into account.65 The earliest nave chapels to be given away
were to corporate bodies rather than families: the Company of the Archangel
Raphael (given chapel ii in 1483) and the nuns of the Mantellate, who were conceded
chapel xxxviii in 1487.66 Each of these groups seems to have received its chapel free of
charge, on the condition that the spaces were decorated.
Apart from this social delineation of church space, families had other ways of
Image not available
Figure 17. Plan of church of Santo Spirito, Florence
stressing their status. Instead of having the biggest chapels in a church, wealthy con-
sorteria would purchase two or three chapels next to each other. The Frescobaldi
dominated the space to the right rear of the high altar, owning chapels xx, xxii, and
xxiii. Three branches of the Corbinelli owned four chapels—including the Chapel
of the Sacrament—on the right transept of the church (xxvi–xix). It is even possi-
ble to see who owned which chapel on the church exterior. Coats of arms are dis-
76 changing patrons
Image not available
Figure 18. Exterior of east wall of Santo Spirito, Florence, showing windows and coats of arms
played both in the glass of the windows and in stone on the outside walls of each
chapel (fig. 18). It would be difficult to have a more convenient or public way of com-
paring relative family status in the quarter.
It must have been partly the demonstration of status and influence among the
Santo Spirito patriciate that led authorities of the central government and Florence’s
“leading citizen,” Lorenzo de’ Medici, to show so much interest in the opera of the
church. The chapels in Santo Spirito together formed a microcosm of the elite com-
munity of three gonfaloni of the quarter, showing which individuals and families
deserved the most respect and consideration from the less wealthy citizens who used
the church, and provided a central and easily legible guide to the most prominent in
the community.

We should not understand chapel ornamentation in this church, however, simply on
the model of families competing for prestige and honor. It seems to have been impor-
tant that the overall appearance of the church not be spoiled by a clash of individual
aesthetic impulses. As several commentators have pointed out, the original altar-
pieces and paliotti (altar frontals) still in the church suggest that there was a scheme
used to regulate chapel decoration in the fifteenth century, one that is particularly
Image not available
Figure 19. Chapels in the left transept of Santo Spirito, Florence
noticeable in the left transept (fig. 19).67 Judging by this evidence, each space was to
have an altar table flanked by a paliotto with a prescribed design, a near-square altar-
piece of just less than two meters on each side, a stained-glass window, and most had
a marble tomb slab right under the altar.68 Just how fashionable the regulation of
chapel ornamentation became in churches in this period will be discussed later. Here,
I am concerned both with how family and local identity could be expressed within
the boundaries of this decorative plan and how the scheme changed alongside politi-
cal upheavals in the 1500s.
The opera seems to have policed homogeneity within the church. For example, in
1485 they note that the Velluti chapel needed a glass window, and two years later they
are concerned that a tomb should be made there “like in the other chapels.”69 There
were, once again, some advantages of being a member of the opera for those who
wished to bend the rules. On 12 September 1488 the committee agreed to a petition
from the sons of Gino di Neri Capponi. It was decided that they could knock down
the wall of their chapel and replace it with a grill so that Neri’s tomb could be seen
more easily. A relative of Neri, Niccolò di Giovanni, was an operaio.70
The decoration of the Nasi chapel (no. xiii on fig. 17) was provided for in the will
of Bartolommeo di Lutozzo Nasi, made just before he died in 1487: “the house and
78 changing patrons
Image not available
Figure 20. Raffaellino del Garbo, The Pietà with Saints John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalen,
and James, Munich, Alte Pinakothek
family of the Nasi have a chapel in the church of Santo Spirito of Florence, called the
Nasi chapel, which lacks a glass window, [altar] table, and tomb . . . he elects that his
heirs, within a year of the death of the aforementioned testator . . . should have a
glass window made for the chapel and a panel for the altar of the chapel painted and
decently furnished . . . and in the said [place] in perpetuity have made a sepulcher or
tomb with a marble slab.”71 Bartolommeo could be so precise about what was “lack-
ing” in the chapel because precedent established what was required. The will took
some time to fulfill, but about 1500 Raffaellino del Garbo completed the altarpiece
for the chapel: The Pietà with Saints John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Mary Magdalen,
and James (fig. 20).72
This panel, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, shows the Virgin Mary with
the crucified Christ extended over her lap. His shoulder is supported by Saint John
while Mary Magdalen cradles his feet, gazing at his wound. The emphasis on Christ’s
stigmata here is reflected by the angels holding instruments of the Passion who fly
above the Virgin’s head. The biblical tableau is framed by two saints: Saint John the
Baptist and Saint James. As the subject of this panel would suggest, the Nasi chapel
was dedicated to the Pietà. It seems likely that this dedication was suggested by the
Augustinians. The chapel occupies a corner of the transept between two others ded-
icated to mysteries of the Virgin and Child. The Nerli chapel on the right is dedi-
cated to the Nativity, and the Capponi, on the left, to the Visitation: together they
constitute a group representing pregnancy, birth, and death. The presence of the
Nasi is very much felt in the Raffaellino panel through the inclusion of Saint James,
standing to the right of the central group. Jacopo was the name of Lutozzo’s father,
the founder of the family’s two main branches. Notably, in a later family chronicle,
the chapel in Santo Spirito was referred to as the “Cappella di San Jacopo.”73 John the
Baptist, as well as being the patron saint of Florence, was the name of Lutozzo’s
brother, the head of the cadet branch of the family. His prominent position in the
altarpiece indicates that this chapel very much belonged to the lineage as a whole
rather than to any one household and reminds the viewer that the remains of all the
Nasi were to be buried in the sepulcher in the floor of the chapel niche.
Raffaellino painted altarpieces for three other chapel owners in Santo Spirito, and
the Pietà also shares several characteristics with panels painted for the church by
other masters. These altarpieces tend to be dominated by a symmetrical tripartite
composition of a Virgin and Child flanked by one or two saints at either side.74 The
central motif of the Nasi altarpiece, the Virgin with her dead son draped over her,
would have presented a sad parallel to the other similar compositions in the church,
the Virgin gazing lovingly down on her son, cradling his neck as if he were a baby.
The mournful faces of the two standing saints and the direct gaze of the central
angel, who displays nails, a crown of thorns, and the cross, are designed to evoke
pathos and identification in the viewer. The landscape setting, with its craggy rocks
and cityscape of spires, owes a debt to Piero di Cosimo’s Visitation panel in the neigh-
boring Capponi chapel (fig. 21), yet has none of the iconographic complexities of this
earlier work, which, as Elena Capretti has pointed out, was probably designed with
Augustinian advice.75
In this way, the Nasi altarpiece served the devotional needs of the congregation
and friars, reflected the decorative program of the church, and honorably represented
the lineage that funded the chapel’s construction. As this suggests, three main
constituents—the family, the opera, and the Augustinians—came together to decide
on the ornamentation of the church. As the opera was elected to represent the friars’
interests and many of the chapel owners took part in the meetings, negotiation over
80 changing patrons
Figure 21. Piero di Cosimo,

The Visitation with Saints
Nicholas and Anthony Abbot,
Washington, D.C., National
Gallery of Art, Samuel H.
Kress Collection
Image not available
chapel decoration was probably less complicated than this tripartite division would
suggest. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the change in the composition of the
opera during the first decade of the sixteenth century, discussed above, had repercus-
sions on the decorative scheme. The visual rhythm was first partially disrupted in the
Segni chapel altarpiece of 1505. Raffaellino del Garbo’s Virgin and Child with Saints John
the Evangelist, Lawrence, Stephen, and Bernard shares many features with the earlier
altarpieces. It is set in an architectural space within a landscape, the Madonna seated
on a slightly raised throne. The blue frame with its gold ornamentation and the
paliotto below it are also similar to many others in the church. In fact, the main differ-
ence is simply one of scale: the Segni altarpiece retained the just off-square landscape
format of its predecessors but is about double the size of the works made in the
1480s, which were all about two meters square.76 Significantly, the man who commis-
sioned it, Bernardo di Stefano Segni, was, as already mentioned, an operaio at this
time.
The real break with tradition came with the altarpiece for the Dei chapel. The
commission for this well-studied work came from the testament of Rinieri di
Bernardo Dei of 1506. He left money for “a painted panel to ornament this altar and
chapel . . . with a glass window above this altar . . . in the memory of Saint Bernard.”77
The result of this was the unfinished panel known as the Madonna del Baldacchino,
now in the Pitti Palace, begun by Raphael between 1506 and his departure for Rome
in 1508 (fig. 22).78 The articulation of this work is completely different from the previ-
Image not available
Figure 22. Raphael, Madonna del Baldacchino, Florence, Palazzo Pitti
ous altarpieces made for Santo Spirito. It is much larger and has a vertical format; the
figures are located not within a vague architectural setting in a landscape, but in a
rounded side chapel, which is surely meant to echo those in Santo Spirito.79 The
columns that frame the image, with composite capitals, are directly related to the
columns in the church itself. There is a real sense of interaction between the figures
82 changing patrons
on the panel: Saint Peter actually turns away from the viewer to converse with Saint
Bernard. The involvement of the other three saints with the onlooker—a pictorial
device suggested in the panels by Raffaellino del Garbo previously—is clearly a cru-
cial part of this painting; Saint Augustine turns to the viewer quizzically, his right
hand pointing us toward the Virgin and Child. The angels, raising the curtains of the
baldachin, are portrayed in the act of revealing the figure of the Virgin, both to the
worshiper and to the saints standing at either side in the image—a circle of figures
that is closed by the presence of the onlooker. This painting is not a window onto a
separately conceived perspectival world, but a continuation of reality in which the
viewer becomes a participant.80
This forms a strong contrast with the works in vogue in the 1480s and early 1490s,
represented most clearly in Santo Spirito by the complex iconography of the Piero di
Cosimo Visitation panel (fig. 21). The importance of the Augustinians in bringing the
word of God to the laity is stressed in both paintings, but in different ways. The
Piero di Cosimo panel demands reading in a literal sense. It presupposes a select
audience able to read Latin and versed in the interpretation of texts, whereas
Raphael’s painting stresses the importance of the Augustinian order through gesture
alone, with Saint Augustine acting as mediator, bridging the painted and real worlds.
In several ways, therefore, the Madonna del Baldacchino disrupted the conformity of
the chapels in Santo Spirito. The Dei family, recently returned to Florence from
Lyons, was already consolidating its claims in the neighborhood by building a family
palace on Piazza Santo Spirito; perhaps they saw the altarpiece commission as an
opportunity to assert family pride while identifying themselves with a newly fashion-
able artistic style.81 The fact that Rinieri di Bernardo Dei was an operaio, however,
would suggest that this new form had institutional consent. Raphael was an artist
actively promoted by Soderini allies, and the opera connection may well explain the
choice of painter for this commission.82

The new church of Santo Spirito, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi with the sacristy
by Giuliano da Sangallo, had always been associated with the most fashionable prac-
titioners of the visual arts. Though south of the Arno, it was visually connected with
church projects on the other side of the river, often with strong Medicean connec-
tions. For both the design of its chapels and the adoption of the tavola quadrata
(unified field altarpiece) in a homogeneous decorative scheme, the most obvious
counterpart is San Lorenzo, the church at the notional and geographic heart of
Medici territory. In this way the church and, by implication, the quarter of Santo
Spirito were brought into the Medicean fold, and through this visual “bridge” across
the Arno seen to be contributing to the beauty of the city as a whole.
Moreover, the ordered appearance of the church, the evenly spaced and propor-
tioned columns and chapels filled with altarpieces of the same size, is perhaps con-
ceptually linked to a wider social order: the great families of Santo Spirito, as
represented by a spatially coherent set of chapels, together contributed to the
grandeur of the church as a whole, and implicitly to the greater good of God and the
city. “Peace, tranquillity, and well-being” were suggested through the visual clarity of
the interior as well as being evoked in a wider world through the piety of those who
funded the building. (I discuss these ideas in more detail in Chapter 6.) By the early
1480s, when the church was in use, Lorenzo de’ Medici sought to become associated
with this metaphoric (and literal) order through his involvement in the Compagnia
del Piccione and, more important, by becoming an operaio. Whether the Medici were
directly associated with the construction project at an earlier stage is debatable.
Friends of theirs, such as the Nasi, played a prominent part in the opera. By the
early 1490s Lorenzo and then his son took the initiative for new designs, guiding the
friars and opera to their favored decorative solution. The disruption of this ordered
scheme in the era of Soderini must have had political as well as aesthetic motivations.
The change of scale and mood of the altarpiece declared that the church—and
Florence—was moving into a new era, one that the Augustinians and their operai
were eager to show they embraced.
The importance of visual rhetoric in signaling, confirming, and helping to achieve
political change in the period after 1494 has been largely ignored by historians, who
concentrate on written texts to form their narrative version of events. The wish to
place “art in context” has led to discussions of the distribution of power through
patronage relationships as a possible contributing factor in choice of artist, subject, or
location for investment. I would like to suggest, however, that in the case of Santo
Spirito, the art and architecture of the church supplied the context in which political
change was understood and manifested. The distribution and decoration of chapels
were visual attestations of power relationships and changing allegiances, which had a
far wider audience than any written text in this society, whose constituents were still
mainly illiterate or unlettered but versed in interpretation of visual material such as
coats of arms and devotional images. Through being allocated their section of sacred
space, the patrons of chapels in Santo Spirito were publicly announcing their posi-
tion within a set of patronage networks that encompassed the quarter and the com-
mune, setting their elite status and political allegiances in stone.
chapter 4
Patronage and the Art of Friendship

Piero del Pugliese’s Patronage of Filippino Lippi

M
uch of this study is about how material objects can embody, maintain,
and affect social relationships. As Michael Baxandall has pointed out,
their creation is also the result of a relationship.1 Most often, this was
probably closest to a relatively simple commercial transaction, the customer specify-
ing his desires, the work being done and paid for at an agreed amount and in an
agreed period of time. Larger-scale projects could involve written contracts, several of
which have survived and have been discussed elsewhere.2 These documents can illu-
minate the mechanics of commissioning well and in particular have been used to
attempt to ascertain the respective degrees of influence of maker and purchaser on
the finished appearance of a work. This chapter aims to look at the broader social
change in relationship between these two parties during the quattrocento. The
notion that the status of the “artist” changed during this time is now accepted almost
as a truism, but comparatively little attention has been given to the self-perception of
those who bought work from the craftsmen who had been newly elevated in status.
Just as the concept of the autonomous artistic creator was being developed, so too
was the relationship between those “artists” and the people who funded their activi-
ties, the people we now call patrons. What models of behavior they followed in work-
ing out these new social roles is the focus of investigation here. Using a recently
rediscovered painting of Filippino Lippi and Piero del Pugliese, and the poems
that were written about it by contemporaries, I examine how the portrait reflects dis-
cussions of friendship in Medicean Florence and, finally, consider if the concept of
amicizia—friendship—can help us understand the changing perceptions of artist-
patron relationships.
The existence of a double portrait of Filippino and Piero was noted in the 1950s
by Alessandro Perosa, who found two poems on the subject by Alessandro Braccesi.3
Along with these poems, there exists a short Latin verse by Ugolino Verino, which
also celebrates a portrait of Piero del Pugliese.4 Identification of these poems with
86 changing patrons
Image not available
Figure 23. Filippino Lippi, Double Portrait of Piero del Pugliese and Filippino Lippi, Denver Art Museum, The
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Collection
existing paintings is problematic, but it seems likely that the Braccesi poems at least
should be examined in reference to a painting now in Denver, Colorado (fig. 23).5
This painting is extremely unusual. It is the only fifteenth-century Italian example
I know of a double portrait of a patron and painter.6 It shows Piero del Pugliese to
the left-hand side, torso positioned at right angles to the picture plane, his face look-
ing slightly to the right. The profile bust of Filippino seems uncomfortably inserted
in the right half of the painting, the head being rather too large in comparison with
Piero’s to be spatially convincing. There are piles of books on the shelf behind the two
men, and in the upper right-hand corner stands an open book with writing that is
now largely illegible. The only word that can be read with any clarity is on the third
line: convegnono. In modern Italian, convengono tantalizingly means “they come
together,” and hopefully restoration will reveal more of the text.
Apart from the poems mentioned above, there are no contemporary references to
this portrait. Before it entered the Guggenheim collection in 1933, it belonged to the
Contini Bonaccossi in Florence, but its location before this is not known.7 On stylis-
tic grounds, Patrizia Zambrano considers this double portrait to be autograph and,
therefore, the one described in the poems. She has suggested that the seeming awk-
wardness of the composition may be due to the fact that it was intended to be placed
in an elevated position, well above eye level; this would correspond to the information
patronage and the art of friendship 87
we have about the placing of portrait busts above doorways and fireplaces.8 Even if
the panel is by a follower of Filippino, the uniqueness of the composition, taken with
the poems, and the fact that the painting is almost certainly datable to the late fif-
teenth or early sixteenth century, would suggest that it is at least a workshop copy of
the original subject.9
How would this painting have been understood by its viewers and creator? The
poems offer a starting point. There was a long tradition of poetry about painted por-
traiture, ultimately derived from a collection of Greek poetry, the “Iconic Epigrams,”
which were known in Italy from about 1460. Before this date, the form was transmit-
ted through Latin poets, notably Martial. The nearest precedents for fifteenth-
century poems about portraits, however, were Petrarch’s two sonnets on Simone
Martini’s portrait of Laura. All these poems have certain elements in common. The
most important feature explicitly claimed for written and painted portraiture was
that it conferred immortality on the sitter. A portrait could bring the dead alive, make
the absent present. Which medium did this most effectively was to become a key
argument in the paragone of the next century.10
Quattrocento poems about portraits tend to share a literary device that John
Shearman has described as a “bathetic cliché.” The skill of the artist is praised for rep-
resenting with all accuracy the outward appearance of the subject, but painting fails
to capture the life of the sitter: the portrait lacks breath, or speech.11 This trope
occurs in the later Braccesi poem, which claims that “for the painted [portraits] only
voice and breath are wanting.” That accurate external representation could be
achieved in this period was taken for granted: what was at stake were the limits of
painting for showing internal truths.
Given his literary connections, it is not surprising that Filippino would be aware
of this tradition.12 His double portrait forms a visual contribution to the debate
framed by poets. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi
(fig. 24), now in Madrid, refers to the bathetic topos in the inscription on the wall
behind the sitter. This verse, derived from an epigram by Martial, reads “Art, would
that you could represent character and mind, there would be no more beautiful
painting on earth.” Because the painting cannot speak, the verse of a poet is made to
speak for it. In the Filippino double portrait and the poems that describe it, however,
it seems that character and mind are just what the painter is seeking to represent.
The figures are presented with their torsos cut off just below the shoulders in a
truncation reminiscent of that classical purveyor of immortality, the sculpted portrait
bust. Indeed, as noted previously, Piero del Pugliese had a portrait bust made some
years before, whose form is possibly echoed in this composition (fig. 4).13 At the same
time as taking advantage of the connotations of an honored prototype, Filippino
88 changing patrons
Figure 24. Domenico

Ghirlandaio, Portrait of
Giovanna degli Albizzi,
Madrid, Thyssen-
Bornemisza Collection
Image not available
changes the pose of Piero, making the sitter less static and archetypal. His head leans
slightly to the right, toward Filippino, his gaze downward, his right ear picked out
prominently against the dark cover of a book behind his head. Filippino stands in
profile, his lips slightly open. What is represented here is a verbal exchange. Filippino
is telling Piero something, and the older man is listening intently. The portrait has,
effectively, been given a voice.
This attempt to go beyond the perceived strictures of painted portraiture was rec-
ognized in the poems. Braccesi avers that “Piero del Pugliese scarcely resembles him-
self as, in truth, how closely the painted panel resembles Piero,” then explains that
Filippino “bestows to any of those painted the truth of themselves.” Verino goes fur-
ther, stressing the confusion that would be provoked in the viewer of this panel:
Anyone who has seen the painted Piero del Pugliese claims
Here is Piero! and he would not say it was an image of Piero!
Nature has yielded to artifice! as the art is truer!
The painted panel surpasses the breathing man.
Filippino’s skillful rendering of Piero del Pugliese has produced a visual truth. He
captured the appearance of this man so accurately that not only would the panel fool
the onlooker but paradoxically it represented the sitter more genuinely than even his
own external features. In this case the “bathetic cliché” is spurned in favor of a decla-
ration of painted victory. Filippino and Piero appear on the panel together, joined for
posterity, the painter’s profile gaze locked on his patron’s face. An interesting prece-
dent is the now lost painting by Andrea Mantegna of Janus Pannonius and Galleotto
Marzio da Narni, documented in a poem by Janus of 1458. This allowed the two
men, according to the poem, to be combined in “a knot of unbroken friendship.”14 The
Filippino panel, too, I believe, is a permanent visual attestation of the friendship
between painter and patron. Filippino’s representational skill as portrayed in the
rhetoric of the poems comes partly from his own divinely fueled gift as a painter but
also, in this case, from the God-given friendship he had with Piero del Pugliese.
Alberti in De Pictura explicitly elides the powers of painting with the powers of
friendship to “make the absent present.”15 The friend, like the painter, has special
powers of vision. As Ficino claimed,“a friend sees deep in a friend not merely his own
image, but his very self.”16
Much external evidence suggests that Piero del Pugliese and Filippino Lippi were
friends. Their relationship started at least at the beginning of the 1480s and contin-
ued until Piero’s death in 1498. Even after this date, Filippino maintained his connec-
tion with the family. Francesco di Filippo, as executor of his will, was one of the
people responsible for making up an inventory of the painter’s belongings on his
death in 1504.17 In a previous will of 1488, Francesco was given the task of obtaining
payment from Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary, for paintings that Filippino
had executed for him, and in the same year he acted as a guarantor for a loan for a
house purchase.18 About ten years later, Piero acted as guarantor for another loan to
the painter.19
How the two men met is not known, though it was possibly through Piero’s con-
tacts with the convent of Santa Maria del Carmine, where, of course, Filippino’s
father, Filippo, had been a friar. As well as gaining the patronage rights of a chapel
90 changing patrons
Figure 25. Domenico

Ghirlandaio, Old Man and Boy,
Paris, Musée du Louvre
Image not available
there in 1465, Piero was an operaio of the church from at least 1488 and almost cer-
tainly before this date.20 It is possible that he helped Filippino to secure the commis-
sion for the restoration of the Brancacci chapel, part of a series of restorations that
occurred in the church during the mid-1480s.21 At any rate, he was one of the first
Florentines to entrust Filippino with a major commission, the altarpiece of the
Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, which was probably executed about 1480–81.22
He later commissioned work from Filippino for his house, the “storie di figure pic-
cole” mentioned by Vasari.23 His nephew and son also bought works from the artist.
Filippo di Piero commissioned a tondo, left incomplete at Filippino’s death, and
Francesco di Filippo owned the sportelli panels (wings) and the Adoration of the Magi
that he put in his chapel at Sommaia, discussed in Chapter 8.24
The Denver double portrait operated within the boundaries laid out for it by
rhetoric of friendship of the period. True friendship and its instrumental counterpart
were issues that occupied the minds of quattrocento Florentines. As well as the more
formal sources—notably Alberti in Della Famiglia and the entrants in the poetry com-
petition, the Certame Coronario, that he organized on the subject—ideas and expec-
tations about how friends should act were discussed in letters, ricordanze, and
zibaldoni.25 Work of the last twenty years on this subject has demonstrated the prime
importance of amicizia for the workings of the Florentine political system and social
life.26 Indeed, the linkage of friendship to patronage means that these words have
been used almost interchangeably by historians.27 Florentines themselves, as Alberti
did in Della Famiglia, separated ideal friendship, a disinterested linkage between like
minds, from instrumental friendship, which could be more akin to patronage. In
practice, however, this distinction was blurred: if you were true friends with someone,
you would clearly want to help him or her succeed; if you were in a position to fur-
ther someone’s career or general well-being, you were acting as a friend would. Thus,
when requests for patronage were turned down, the person’s ability to act as a friend
was questioned. When Piero del Pugliese refused to give Ser Bartolommeo Dei a
loan in 1491, the latter was outraged: “he replied to me more brusquely than I would
have believed . . . in my opinion he’s a man who’s more for himself than for friends.”28
Piero’s patronage of Filippino as a painter was inextricably linked with their
friendship. They are placed together for posterity on the Denver panel. Double por-
traits surviving from this period are rare, but those that do survive, primarily of fam-
ily members, provide an insight into how the rhetoric of friendship was incorporated
into the composition of this painting. Ghirlandaio’s portrait of an old man and a
young boy, now in the Musée du Louvre, is an interesting comparison (fig. 25). Here
the elderly exemplar is shown greeting his young relative who, like Filippino, stands
to our right and who, like Filippino, is depicted in profile. In another painting by
Ghirlandaio, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we again see this juxtaposi-
tion of profile and full face (fig. 26). Thought to be a portrait of Francesco Sassetti
and his son Teodoro, it is datable to the mid-1480s.29 It shows Francesco standing at
the center, his face parallel to the picture plane and his son, once again, on the right in
profile.
Patricia Simons has pointed out that increasingly from the mid-fifteenth century
onward, only women and young men were represented in profile. The more direct
gaze of the three-quarter view was reserved for figures of older men.30 While this can
be interpreted as an instance of a social concern to maintain feminine passivity, the
use of it for young boys and the references it has to the more heroic form of portrait
medals suggest that the distinction between the profile and the full-face portrait was
not simply hierarchical. Alison Wright has discussed the pious implications of the
profile and its connection with the donor portrait, which emphasizes the subject’s
chastity and holiness.31 It is worth pointing out in this connection that women and
92 changing patrons
Figure 26. Domenico Ghirlandaio,

Francesco Sassetti and His Son Teodoro,
New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, The Jules Bache
Collection, 1949 (49.7.7)
Image not available
children in their idealized and sentimentalized forms were perceived to be more nat-
urally pious and holy than their older male counterparts. The cult of youth in
Florence during this period, and especially under Savonarola, has been discussed
elsewhere.32 In the two Ghirlandaio portraits, both parties are shown to be exem-
plary, albeit in different ways. The youth is a cipher of purity, chastity, and other-
worldliness, whereas the older figure owes his exemplarity to a wisdom gained from
confronting the world more directly. Moreover, these representational choices are
more than the sum of their parts. Holy youth and wise old age are shown together to
stress familial interaction and continuity. Recent work on homosociality and sodomy
has also drawn a relationship between youth and female-gendered roles in homosex-
ual activity, the younger partner almost invariably playing a passive role. Thanks to
Michael Rocke’s work, we now know how normal this “life stage” of same-sex rela-
tions was in Renaissance Florence.33 This may have had a bearing on some contem-
poraries’ reading of both the double portrait and the friendship between Filippino
and Piero, though it should be noted that Piero certainly was beyond the age nor-
mally associated with this practice.34 Potential homoerotic overtones aside, this chap-
ter’s focus is on the intended rhetoric of the portrait and the poems, which are
concerned with idealized concepts of friendship and its representation.
Giovanni Rucellai claimed that although wealthy and fortunate friends were the
ideal, “you should wish for friends who are full of virtù rather than rich.”35 Piero del
Pugliese, as a wealthy patrician who had served on the priorate several times, was
clearly of a social status superior to that of the artisan Filippino, whatever the respect
he gained for his talent as a painter. The rhetoric of friendship as revealed in
Florentine correspondence and theory was able to encompass these inequalities
through likening them to age difference within a family setting. Thus, the Florentine
notary Lapo Mazzei played the “younger brother and friend” to the wealthy Pratese
Francesco di Marco Datini, and supplicants to Averardo de’ Medici in the 1430s
claimed him as “noble and honored, almost a father” or “most dear, and like a father to
me.”36 Vasari extolled Filippino: “his excellence was such that he obliterated the stain
of his birth . . . not only by his eminence as an artist . . . but above all by his lovable
nature, the true power of which was to win the affections of everyone.”37 As the
renaming of certain artists such as Piero di Cosimo indicates, spiritual paternity
could form links more effective than blood. In the portrait of Piero and Filippino, the
closeness of this relationship was represented using the visual language of family,
mirroring the practice in the verbal rhetoric of the period where the permanence and
strength of kinship ties provided the most easily available metaphoric resource. The
books on the shelf, which visually and notionally link the two figures in the double
portrait, suggest that this is an affective tie based on the intellect and learning repre-
sented by the written word. The fact that it is Filippino who is shown speaking, per-
haps communicating the knowledge revealed in the open book behind his head, is
also significant. The older patrician is giving his attention to the younger painter.
Can we relate this relationship between Piero and Filippino to wider notions of
patron-artist relationships in this period? If Vasari is to be believed, almost all the
painters and sculptors in Florence had great friends in members of the patriciate. As
Patricia Rubin has pointed out, throughout the Lives, and particularly in the Life of
Donatello, the ideal of friendship is stressed as a guiding principle for the behavior of
patrons and artists alike.38 There are good reasons for this. True friendship implies
the virtue of both participants, ennobling a relationship that otherwise could be con-
ceived as a mere commercial transaction. It implicitly raises the status of the painter
or sculptor or, rather, rhetorically makes social status an irrelevance.
As with all ideal and idealized friendships, for Filippino and Piero inequalities of
age and social status do not prohibit the true joining of like minds. Indeed, I would
94 changing patrons
argue that the idea of equality of spirit despite social differentiation is crucial in the
development of the concept of the patron-artist relationship: the virtue of the
wealthy man is proven by the fact he chooses a poorer man for a friend; the poorer
man must be virtuous or he would not have been chosen. A central part of Florentine
beliefs about friendship was that true friendship rested in virtue. Bartolommeo Dei’s
comment was more than a onetime barbed reflection on Piero’s refusing him a loan;
it struck right to the heart of his character. Alberti claims that “virtue always adorns
an excellent friendship,” although “truly virtuous men to delight in our virtue are
rare . . . only the few who are truly good can be true and lasting friends.”39

The main classical source for the artist-patron ideal, the Natural History of Pliny the
Elder, also described friendship and equality existing between patrons and artists. In
his discussion of Apelles he reveals that “the charm of his manner had won him the
regard of Alexander the Great, who was a frequent visitor to the studio,” the emperor
holding the painter in such high regard that when he “talked about things he knew
nothing about, Apelles would pleasantly advise him to be silent . . . such power did
his personality give him over a king habitually so passionate.”40 The linkage of minds
implied in this ideal patronage relationship places the painter outside the boundaries
of normal social stratification.
Pliny’s writings clearly influenced Vasari’s view of events.41 What is less clear is
how influential they were in the fifteenth century: should we, like Barbara Mitchell,
dismiss his patron-artist model as “a pattern of fabrication”?42 The great majority of
Florentines who commissioned paintings in the fifteenth and early sixteenth cen-
turies probably were not friends with the masters they employed. Examining the
painters commissioned by the Nasi family during the quattrocento, for example, sug-
gests that they had no patronage relationship—in a meaningful sense of the word—
with any of the masters concerned. Raffaellino del Garbo and Perugino were
commissioned by the Nasi for altarpieces in the churches of Santo Spirito and
Cestello respectively, but there is no evidence of a broader connection between these
painters and the family. Indeed, their completion of other altarpieces in the same
churches suggests that the choice of artist in these cases was more likely influenced
by the ecclesiastical institution than by the chapel patrons. The only painter with
whom the Nasi were connected through business ties was Neri di Bicci, and, as far as
we know, they bought no work from him.43 The same can probably be said for the
majority of works commissioned in the period. It would seem that Vasari overstated
his case.
However, there is contemporary evidence to suggest that Vasari was not com-
pletely misleading. Cosimo il Vecchio, for example, was celebrated by Vespasiano da
Bisticci in the 1480s for being “a great friend to Donatello and to all the painters and
sculptors,” giving Donatello a salary and dressing him in fine clothes. Interestingly, we
see similar observations about ideal friendship as those used by Alberti repeated at
the end of Vespasiano’s passage on Donatello: “Cosimo used the same liberality to
anybody who possessed some virtù, because he loved such people.”44 Cosimo’s son,
Piero, and, to a greater extent, grandson Lorenzo carried on this tradition. Donatello
was, as Vasari says, buried in San Lorenzo, honored sufficiently by Cosimo’s heirs to
lie near them in death. Similarly, Benozzo Gozzoli addressed Piero de’ Medici in 1459
as “my most singular friend.”45
It seems that Lorenzo, more than his predecessors, started to build a close rela-
tionship with painters, sculptors, and architects, and F. W. Kent has recently shown
that the evidence for these ties is becoming ever more compelling.46 Although
Lorenzo probably did have genuine friendships with men such as “his” architect,
Giuliano da Sangallo, the public face of these relationships at least have seignorial
overtones, suggested by his reaction to the death of Giuliano da Maiano in 1490;
Lorenzo complained that the news “brought much unhappiness to my mind . . .
because he was very much mine.”47 Certainly after the purchase and filling of the
renowned sculpture garden in the mid-1470s, Lorenzo seems to have been deliber-
ately pursuing a policy of patronage of artists reminiscent of that of a courtly house-
hold.48 Vasari and Ascanio Condivi are probably accurate in telling us that the
sculptor Bertoldo had custody over this garden. This pupil of Donatello had a room
in the Medici palace and, we are told by Benedetto Dei, was “always with the magnif-
icent Lorenzo.”49 Michelangelo, it seems, did indeed learn there as Condivi and Vasari
claim, possibly making his first large-scale work, a marble Hercules, for Piero di
Lorenzo.50 Whether other artists who have been connected with the garden actually
were there is impossible to say without more evidence. This pattern of cultural
patronage moves toward a courtly model, the young artist of skill being positioned as
the grateful recipient of wise patronal largesse. This would mirror the slow shift in
the language of clientage and friendship around Lorenzo, which accelerated after the
Pazzi conspiracy, becoming “less concerned with fraternal friendship . . . and more
courtly and even obsequious.”51
The importance of Lorenzo as the archetypal art patron should not be underesti-
mated. As I argue elsewhere, the rhetoric likening him to a second Augustus presid-
ing over a Florentine golden age was to become particularly important after his death
in forming notions of how art patrons should act and of their contribution to a wider
society. It is important, however, not to read fifteenth-century behavior through the
lens of what came later. In fact, some examples of artist-patron relationships outside
Lorenzo’s sphere indicate that the hierarchical relationship—which places the patron
96 changing patrons
as a courtly Maecenas and the artist as a grateful client—was tempered by the more
equalizing idea of amicizia for some fifteenth-century Florentine patricians and the
masters they employed. It is perhaps significant that I have come across no uses of
the word “patron” in the documents relating to artists and their employers of this
period.52 The relationship models of friendship and family are, however, quite wide-
spread. Raffaellino del Garbo was possibly “adopted” by the Capponi family or, at any
rate, was sufficiently close to them to adopt their surname about 1499.53 Antonio
Pollaiuolo was described as a “most dear friend” by the Lanfredini family who com-
missioned several works from him and may have been responsible for recommending
him to Innocent VIII, when Giovanni Lanfredini was the ambassador to Rome in
1489.54 In 1501 a letter from Cronaca to Lorenzo Strozzi attests to the undying friend-
ship of the architect.55
It seems that Piero del Pugliese, in his friendship with Filippino Lippi, may have
wished to see himself as playing a part in fostering youthful talent. He commissioned
work from both Filippino and Piero di Cosimo early in their careers and paid for
paintings from these artists for years to come. He may have pitted the two painters
against each other on two occasions, creating competition to promote enhanced
results. The altarpieces for Lecceto and the Campora were both made about the same
time, between 1481 and 1485, and then both Filippino and Piero di Cosimo produced
a series of spalliere panels for the Del Pugliese palace, both of which Vasari claims
were greatly admired.56 That Del Pugliese appears in the portrait with Filippino, and
that the portrait was celebrated in poems, suggests that a certain section of the
Florentine population was familiar with a notion akin to our “art patronage” by the
later quattrocento. It certainly indicates that a friendship of equals between an arti-
san painter and a patrician was possible—even desirable—and that this friendship
involved a linkage of minds. If Laurentian Florence adopted ideals of patronage of
artists from a Plinian model, the image of Pliny’s Alexander was refracted through a
republican lens.
The concept of friendship as an ideal in the patron-artist relationship had further
implications. It allowed for a certain freedom of action.57 Just as the contractual norm
of Florentine social relationships could be partially violated in the name of friend-
ship, latitude could be given to the artist-friend to act in a noncontractual way.
The idea of commercial transaction—in which money is given by the customer for
work promptly carried out exactly to his order—has no place in a friendship, as
Bartolommeo Dei’s disgust at Piero del Pugliese indicates. In a relationship based on
amicizia painters should, for example, be able to respond to a commission by follow-
ing their own ideas rather than being contractually dictated to, or should be able to
take longer completing a project. Vasari notes a failure of friendship in the case of the
Del Pugliese altarpiece in the church of the Innocenti.“The manager of the Innocenti
was a good friend of Piero [di Cosimo], and wanting to have a panel made . . . for the
chapel of the Pugliese, he allotted it to Piero, who completed it to his satisfaction. But
he drove the manager to desperation, as he was not allowed to see it before he was
finished. And how strange it seemed to him that a friend should be thinking all the
time of money.”58 A real friend would have trusted Piero to finish the work to his
satisfaction, and value would have been found outside monetary considerations.
Whether this story is true or not is hardly the point: it reflects a license that could be
given to gifted artists because of their special talents. As early as the 1470s another,
perhaps apocryphal, story in Angelo Poliziano’s Giornale indicates that Donatello,
like Apelles, cut across the boundaries of social status because of his talent: his skill
made him “a sovereign in his field.”59
The main issue of these art historical anecdotes is not to determine whether they
are historically verifiable. They suggest that a cultural narrative was developing at the
end of the fifteenth century that allowed for changing modes of behavior between
artisans/artists and the people who employed them. Indeed, by the early 1500s the
idea that the talented visual artist was deserving of special treatment had become suf-
ficiently entrenched in Florentine thought to be expressed in a kind of shorthand in
the ambassadorial correspondence of the day. In 1503 the Florentine Dieci di Balìa
were explaining to Alessandro Nasi, their ambassador in France, why Michelangelo
had not yet finished the bronze David that had been requested by Cardinal Rohan
several years before.60 Michelangelo was the “great friend” of Piero Soderini, the leader
of the republic, and was given considerable leeway in finishing time.61 “As you know,”
they claim, “of the ways of painters and sculptors, you can hardly promise anything
certain.”62 They are, by nature, unreliable. Again, they claim that Michelangelo may
finish the sculpture soon, but “this isn’t very certain given the mind of such people.”63
However, the contract was not taken away from him and given to a more reliable
sculptor. Rather, the good patron has to be patient with his artist’s idiosyncrasies:
“you cannot, due to the nature of the man and the quality of the work, hurry it
through in a few days.”64
So here the association between maker and purchaser is transformed from a con-
tractual commercial transaction, with each side expected to fulfill clearly stated obli-
gations, to a more complex relationship in which one side, the patron, is expected to
grant latitude to the other, the artist. By doing so, the “quality of the work” is ensured
and the patron’s part in the relationship in itself is accorded with a cultural reward
over and above the material product of the transaction, the artwork. In effect, the
patron’s place was ennobled through his participation in the friendship.
98 changing patrons
The social and artistic milieu in which Vasari’s Lives were written was the result of
a process of change that had its roots in the fifteenth century. By this time skilled
artists could be marked out as a special sort of people who deserved delicate han-
dling. The quattrocento was a time when these new social relationships between pur-
chaser and producer of the visual arts were being worked out. I would suggest that
in Florence, where courtly notions of service between painter and princely patron
were problematic, friendship could provide a conceptual basis for the relationship.
The equality of spirit and virtue implied by amicizia was integrated into the nascent
idea of the patron-artist relationship. It allowed the notion of a intellectual, quasi-
spiritual link between the two parties involved, implying that the artist would be able
to fulfill the patron’s needs without stringent contractual terms and endowed the
relationship itself with an air of virtù.
part ii
The Individual, the Family, and the Church
chapter 5
Patronage Rights and Wrongs

Building Identity at Santa Maria a Lecceto

O
n 12 September 1473 Fra Domenico Guerrucci was called by God. Inspired
by the words of the prophet David to “Flee far away and stay in solitude,”
this Dominican friar from the convent of San Marco decided to leave the
depraved city of Florence to become a hermit.1 He traveled with a companion to the
commune of Gangalandi, modern-day Lastra a Signa, about fourteen kilometers
west of Florence. Within a month, the first mass was said in the small oratory the fri-
ars had constructed on a wooded hillside there, in a place called Lecceto. Two years
later, wishing to expand further, Fra Domenico petitioned the Twelve of Gangalandi
for help. They duly agreed and gave him 10 staiora (just over five kilometers) of
wooded land around his original foundation in exchange for patronage rights. In
December of the same year, the friar got further help from Piero del Pugliese, for the
foundation of a church next to the small oratory. Piero’s involvement with the build-
ing scheme continued until December 1477, when the church was half-built. At
around this point Filippo Strozzi pledged money to complete the building. He
promised to spend one thousand florins on finishing the church and its interior dec-
oration, and he lived up to his promise. In the first half of the 1480s he received the
patronage rights to this church.2
A document of 1480, reproduced in the Appendix, defines the rights of patronage
gained by the commune of Gangalandi in return for their gifts of land.3 The right of
patronage, ius patronatus, was a legally defined relationship between lay donor and eccle-
siastical institution. Using the events at Lecceto as a focus for discussion, this chapter
investigates the nature of this relationship and examines how it formed a conceptual
base for the understanding of pious giving to church building and ornamentation—
what is now typically described as the patronage of architecture and art.4
The legal dimension of lay payment for ecclesiastical building was developed in
response to a need for money for church building, especially in rural areas.5 First dis-
cussed by the codifier of canon law, Gratian, in the mid-twelfth century, the term ius
102 changing patrons
patronatus was coined by the canonist Rufinus around the same time, in his Summa
Theologica of 1157–59.6 The possession of patronage rights by lay patrons in Florence
and the contado was very common in the quattrocento and actually increased during
the century. By the 1460s fifteen out of sixty-two of the parishes within the city were
under the control of family or individual patronage, and by 1514 half the priests of the
pievi (baptismal churches) and smaller parishes in the diocese as a whole were elected
by family patronage.7
The key element of this right, Rufinus claimed, was that its holders could elect
the priest who officiated in the building over which the right was held. Later devel-
opments confirmed that in return the patron was expected to provide funds to main-
tain the fabric of the building and protect it against any detractors: the canonist
Stephen of Tournai in his Summa Coloniensis claimed that “three factors are comprised
by patronage rights: honor, burden and profit, namely the selection of persons, the
provision of and care for the property of the church lest it be squandered, and the
founder’s upkeep through [times of ] poverty by work.”8 Saint Antoninus drew
directly from this canon law tradition in his description of patronage rights in his
Summa Theologica: “To the patron is owed honor, burden and profit. He should pres-
ent [candidates], superintend, protect, support in [times of ] poverty.” Interestingly in
this case, he adds to the rights of election, defense, and provision of funds the specif-
ically Florentine right of the patron to proceed first in any procession.9
As the Lecceto example confirms, it is the election of people, of church personnel,
rather than the control over the building’s fabric, that formed the central meaning of
ius patronatus to fifteenth-century Florentines. At the same time, the whole notion of
ius patronatus refutes a simple division between the former kind of patronage and the
physical maintenance of the church or convent. This is made clear by Antoninus and
his canonist predecessors and repeated in the 1480 document: “any person who
should . . . impede the building of the said hermitage and church,” we are informed,
“shall be deprived of the said right that he will not be able to elect new friars for the
said place.” Rights of nomination and election are dependent on the continuation of
the building of the hermitage.
In fact, as briefly mentioned above, people generally received patronage rights
over an ecclesiastical building because they provided for its physical foundation. This
was a fundamental requirement for the holding of these rights from their earliest
codification by Gratian and was later to be enshrined by the Council of Trent.10 The
same is true in local summaries of canon law. Foundation is one of the three bases of
patronage listed in the 1310 constitutions of Florence, and this is repeated by
Antoninus more than one hundred years later.11 Visitors to churches were advised to
ascertain, before anything else, the identity of the building’s founder, according to
patronage rights and wrongs 103
instructions of 1512.12 Later in the sixteenth century, Vicenzo Borghini castigated

those powerful men who took over the giuspatronato of a church by manipulating the
history of its foundation:“little by little their name alone appears on the records, and
so they are made patrons.”13 This was exactly what happened at Lecceto. In his will of
1491 Filippo Strozzi claimed that he bequeathed masses at the church not only for
the “remedy of his soul” but also “in sign of recognition of the foundation of the church
and convent and protection and patronage [patronaggio] of the said goods.”14 Later
histories of the church make no mention of the gifts given by either the commune of
Gangalandi or Piero del Pugliese, even stressing that Filippo Strozzi built the church
“from the foundations.”15
This was not an exceptional case: the Tornabuoni family were keen to stress the
slightly dubious claim that they had made the original gift of land to found Santa
Maria Novella when staking their claims for patronage rights of the cappella maggiore
in that church.16 The rewriting of the past presumably gained even greater impor-
tance after the Tridentine reforms, when written evidence of foundation was
required to preserve patronage rights that may well have been in the hands of the
same family for centuries.17 The tendency toward the falsification and manipulation
of written records due to this practice could possibly explain seeming discrepancies
in documentation regarding the building histories of several churches.
Given the importance of foundation in their bestowal, the transferal of patronage
rights posed a problem. Antoninus again agrees with the canonists on the rights of
patrons to hand over their ius patronatus by means of hereditary succession, exchange,
or donation—all with episcopal consent.18 Sale was not allowed, because of its simo-
niacal implications, and neither was usurpation, a problem that the Florentine
church was well aware of throughout the period.19 Patrons, however, were constantly
under the threat of having patronage rights taken away from them, even if they had
founded a church building. This generally happened because they had not fulfilled
the other two requirements of patronage outlined by the Florentine constitutions
and Antoninus: the maintenance of the building and the continued provision of
funds in the form of a dote, a dowry.20
The commune of Gangalandi seemed to fail to fulfill its promise to maintain the
building program at Lecceto, and there is evidence that the Twelve were well aware of
the possible results of their diffidence. The original gift of land in 1475 to surround
the first oratory at Lecceto had no accompanying notarization of ius patronatus. It was
only two years later, when Guerrucci had found an alternative source of funding for
the foundation of the large church in the form of Piero del Pugliese, that the com-
mune stressed its patronage rights in legal terms by having a contract drawn up and
placing its arms on the oratory, while giving the friars more land.21 In 1480, in the face
of the patronage onslaught of Filippo Strozzi, another ten staiora were given with
another notarized contract drawn up to specify what ius patronatus entailed.22 A doc-
ument of the mid-1480s details the problems over the ceding of these rights.23
Neither the commune of Gangalandi nor Piero del Pugliese had given enough
money to finish building the church. Filippo Strozzi, by contrast, pledged to give one
thousand florins to the church, considerably more than the previous donors.
Seeing also that the rest has to be completed, the house and the aforementioned church, and see-
ing that it is seemly to give money for its ornamentation and the same Filippo intends to finish it
all at his own expense, so it is conceded by apostolic authority to them, that is, his heirs and suc-
cessors, in perpetuity, the patronage rights to the same large church and second building . . . and
placing on the same church and on the house and on the aforementioned goods . . . his family’s
arms and insignia in sign of the truth.24
An element of bargaining seems to run through this whole process. The offering
of patronage rights to Filippo Strozzi was as much an acknowledgment of what he
had given to the church as an incentive for future giving. The offers of land made by
the commune of Gangalandi at points when its patronage was threatened by the gifts
of an outsider testify to its knowledge of its precarious position. The granting of
patronage rights because a patron had spent money on the fabric of a church and—
crucially—was likely to carry on spending once the rights were secured seems to be a
typical illustration of the mechanics of this form of patronage. There are many other
examples. The ius patronatus of San Niccolò sopr’Arno passed from the bishop to the
parishioners in 1421 when they sponsored the rebuilding of the church; Tommaso
Soderini gained patronage rights over his parish church of San Frediano in the 1460s
because he spent 280 florins to restore it—and he promptly elected a kinsman of his
to be prior; Medici dominance in San Lorenzo from the 1420s was largely a conse-
quence of financial involvement in the restructuring of the building.25
The power of the religious institution to change its patrons was crucial. Because
the first patron at Lecceto, the commune of Gangalandi, had failed in its obligations
to the church, its rights were taken away through legal means by appealing to apos-
tolic authority, going directly to the archbishop.26 In fact, the archbishopric keenly
observed changes in patronage of both churches and chapels, and many of the
fifteenth-century notarial records kept in the Archivio Arcivescovile today deal with
cases of this kind. As noted above in respect to the opera of Santo Spirito, interpret-
ing the patronage of churches as an act of“colonization” underplays the importance of
the religious institution in negotiating between conflicting bids for patronage. If, in
the end, it was generally the most politically influential and wealthy patron who
gained the rights, this was precisely because this type of patron was likely to be the
most beneficial to the institution in question.27
Filippo Strozzi and his heirs received the same patronage rights as the commune
had been granted previously, receiving a candle yearly, and having the right to choose
the friars at Lecceto after Guerrucci’s death.28 He also commissioned masses in honor
of Saints Jacopo and Filippo about 1484.29 Beyond his contribution to the building
and its religious upkeep through masses, moreover, Filippo Strozzi’s patronage col-
ored daily life at Lecceto. Already in the 1480s he “provided alms daily,” and letters
from a Fra Girolamo of 1490 attest to his continuing involvement with the church,
the friar reminding him of his obligations as well as giving him news of visitors and
the problems of other brothers there.30 As this case would suggest, when discussing
motives for church patronage, citing a display mentality is not sufficient. Although
supplying money for the fabric of the building was almost always an important com-
ponent of ecclesiastical patronage, the relationship between institution and patron
was more intimate and regular than that of merely supplying building funds. The
patron had an obligation to maintain the liturgical function of the sacred space
through endowing masses, and a responsibility toward church personnel—either
employing a chaplain or, in this case, providing the friars with their daily bread. Thus,
the desires of Filippo Strozzi affected not only the fabric of the church building but
also the activities that went on inside it.
Coats of arms were used to symbolize the contractual relationship involved in
patronage. It is significant that in the document ceding Filippo Strozzi the patronage
rights, he is told he can also place his arms on the building, which he later did.31 The
Strozzi arms were also put at various points around the convent, which Filippo had
also helped to fund. The patron’s insignia was generally positioned (as in this case) on
the facade of a church, over the door. The Strozzi arms must have replaced those of
the commune of Gangalandi, which, Guerrucci tells us, had been put in this position
“in recognition of the truth” of the foundation of the church.32 This motivation for
placing family insignia on church facades is significant. Although motives of prestige
and display were undoubtedly present in the use of arms, in the context of patronage
rights it seems that they had a quasi-legal status. The Florentine synod complained
in 1336 that when laymen wished to take over a benefice they “invade and despoil the
church. They post their arms there to prevent those to whom the church belongs in
law from taking possession.”33 In 1472 the commune of Florence is reported to have
prevented the benefice of San Gallo going to an outsider during its vacancy by plac-
ing its arms on the church and other buildings.34
This elision of arms with patronage rights seems to have been born of custom
rather than law, arising from a confusion at the time as to exactly what legal rights
were signified by coats of arms on the exterior of a building. This topic was discussed
in the 1460s by four canon lawyers, at the request of the monks of Santa Maria alle
Campora. As Lando Albizzi and his brothers provided for the foundation of this
church, the Albizzi arms had been on the facade above the entrance for many years,
as well as on the cappella maggiore. However, because the family stopped giving money
after a while, the monks decided to take the arms off the facade, much to the conster-
nation of the Albizzi heirs.35 It was finally decided by arbiters, with the help of the
canon lawyers’ verdict, that the monks had the right to take down any coats of arms
they wished, and that these insignia did not mean that the family had patronage
rights over the church “even after one hundred years”: rather, it was a sign of friend-
ship and devotion between the family and the monks.36 Coats of arms were not pri-
marily a recognition of the patron’s contribution to the physical foundation of an
institution but were held to symbolize the ongoing relationship between the fabric of
the building and the patronage of those who officiated within its walls. They com-
pleted and solemnized the multifaceted nature of the patronal contract.37
Of course, as the reaction of the Albizzi would suggest, having a family insignia
above the entrance to a church was extremely desirable. Family prestige and identity
undoubtedly were served by this placement, although I would argue that the idea
that this form of family advertising “secularized” sacred space has been overstated. It
could also sacralize the “secular” family insignia. Ever since the first lay patrons
donated money to churches, inscriptions of their names were placed on the exterior
of churches not only for worldly esteem but also to attract the intercession of the
faithful.38 The Franciscan canonist Francesco da Empoli, in the early fifteenth cen-
tury, claimed that coats of arms on the facade of a church inspired prayers for the
benefactor’s soul.39 Furthermore, they could inspire additional acts of benefaction by
like-minded patrons.40 The Florentine who had made sufficient money to pay for the
foundation of a church partly relied on the prayers of those perhaps less fortunate for
the fate of his immortal soul after his death.41 Notably, Filippo Strozzi claimed that
he was paying money toward Lecceto and Le Selve to give thanks to God for the
renewed fortunes of the family.42 At the center of the notion of patronage was a sense
of obligation and gratitude as well as privilege.
The fact that coats of arms could be used as a kind of nonverbal public contract
between religious institution and patron takes us to the key issue about ius patronatus,
the relationship between the control over appointments within the church or oratory
and, concomitantly, the control of space within its walls and the funding of the fabric
of the building itself. This relationship was both subtle and intricate. The concept of
ius patronatus makes any neat differentiation between patronage over building and
patronage over appointments seem crude. That they are inextricably linked is crucial
to understanding what patronage in the period meant. The funding of a building

could justify control over its internal space and the selection of the clergy who
worked there, a control that was expressed in visual terms through placing family or
corporate symbols above points of entry into that space.
A strong moral dimension attached to the ownership of patronage rights. The
founder of a church was expected to maintain his responsibilities for the building
and in return be rewarded. The documents of Lecceto show how the failure of the
patron to maintain his side of this contractual relationship was cast in this moral
light. In his ricordanze, Guerrucci articulates the duty of the patron in near saintly
terms. The failure of the owner of ius patronatus to act in an appropriate and expected
way was an offense to God. The main fault of the commune of Gangalandi, as an
allegation made against it shows, was that of neglecting the church building after the
first consecration but still expecting to retain patronage rights.43 Although it seems
that Filippo Strozzi was asked to intervene by the leader of the commune, Domenico
di Agostino Pandolfini, the Twelve later proved recalcitrant in allowing him to help
and hindered Guerrucci’s and Strozzi’s attempts to construct the church. By 1479
Guerrucci was angry: “these officials [the Twelve of Gangalandi] deserve to be
deprived of all honors and patronage of this place, insofar as they were not patrons
but destroyers.” As becoming to his station, however, he hoped that God would even-
tually show pity on them, demonstrating “true justice and knowledge.” Finally, and
most important, he wished that God should “protect this place from unjust sons and
evil men through the merit of the blessed Virgin Mary and the intercession of all the
saints, and bless all benefactors and devotees of this place.”44
Where does Piero del Pugliese’s donation fit within this rhetoric of good and bad
patronage? His gift of money from the sale of a vineyard in 1477 was not dependent
on his ownership of patronage rights and seems to have been at least in part a pious
wish to help a former neighbor. The Guerrucci lived just around the corner from the
Del Pugliese, on the Borgo San Frediano, and one member of the family witnessed
Piero’s brother’s will in 1467.45 Partially, at least, his largesse must have been governed
by ties of neighborhood in the gonfalone of Drago Verde.
In contrast to the reaction against the commune of Gangalandi, there is no sugges-
tion in the documents that he was in default when he failed to fund the church to its
completion. Indeed, he had an altar built on the right-hand side of the church, which
was consecrated on 1 May 1481. Fra Domenico explicitly states in a section of his ricor-
danze that Piero did not wish to place his arms on this altar: the implications of his
reluctance in terms of the donor’s cession of patronage rights are clear.46 The reasons
why his arms do, in fact, appear on the altarpiece—suggesting earthly exigencies had
perhaps been victorious over otherworldly aspirations—will be discussed below.
Using the terms of the period, Piero del Pugliese was not a patron at all but a
doer-of-good, a benefactore, in that none of his actions involved an expectation of (at
least earthly) reciprocity. His gift was not contractually based and was one-sided, a
sacrifice:“May it be God’s pleasure,” Guerrucci hoped,“to receive this sacrifice to bless
his home and temple, and to make us [Guerrucci and Del Pugliese] among the num-
ber of his elect.”47 The discussion of Piero del Pugliese’s gift in this hyperbolic lan-
guage signals the difference between his relationship with the church and that of
Filippo Strozzi. Piero had acted outside the notion of patronage that was founded on
the legally contractual and spiritually “mercantile” system of credit and debit.48 These
different but parallel modes of pious giving to this ecclesiastical institution were
articulated visually in its interior decoration.

The church at Lecceto still stands today, now part of the Florentine seminary
(fig. 27). Account books belonging to both Filippo Strozzi and Domenico Guerrucci,
which have been partially published, show the course of the building work in detail.49
Filippo founded the cappella maggiore with three consecrated stones in July 1478, and
the interior of the church was finished by September 1480.50 He seemed to have
taken great care over the interior decoration of the church, spending the enormous
amount of 1,591 florins on the building and its ornamentation.51 His ownership of
patronage rights over the church was demonstrated in no uncertain terms in the
design of the cappella maggiore (fig. 28). As Domenico Guerrucci recorded,“he intends
Figure 27. Church of SS. Filippo e

Giacomo (formerly Santa Maria)
a Lecceto, Lastra a Signa
Image not available

Figure 28. Cappella

Maggiore of church
of SS. Filippo e
Giacomo (formerly
Santa Maria) a
Lecceto, Lastra
a Signa
Image not available
to make the chapel which is now founded to be similar to the cappella maggiore of
Santa Maria de’ Ughi of Florence.”52 This church, destroyed in 1890, was located on
Piazza Strozzi, surrounded by houses belonging to that family.53 Filippo had already
provided money for a new facade for this parish church and paid for the construction
of its cappella maggiore, over which the family possessed patronage rights.54 Through
choosing to repeat the visual formulation of the Santa Maria de’ Ughi chapel for the
high altar at Lecceto, the expression of the family’s rights over a church in its ances-
tral neighborhood was visually echoed in a location where these rights were less cer-
tain and the Strozzi’s historical position less deep-rooted. The identification of
Filippo Strozzi with the church of Lecceto was built into its fabric through this
choice of form.
In 1489 the cappella maggiore at Lecceto was personalized further. Filippo had an
inscription painted in gold letters around the cornice of the chapel, reading “vir-
gini genitrici philippus strozza sui in salu tem condidit.” As
Eve Borsook has pointed out, the large size and grandeur of this inscription seem
somewhat incongruous in this small, single-naved church standing alone on a hill in
Image not available
Figure 29. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Annunciation to the Shepherds, Rotterdam, Museum
Boijmans-Van Beuningen
the Tuscan countryside.55 This was indeed an attestation of pride and public magnif-
icence, but it was also more than that: it was a confirmation of Filippo Strozzi’s
patronage, a plea for those using the church to pray for his soul and, above all, an
identification of the patron with the building he had funded.
Filippo Strozzi commissioned an altarpiece from Domenico Ghirlandaio in
1487–88.56 It remained in the church until it was removed for sale in 1843:“a painting
on panel in the style of Fra Bartolommeo della Porta, depicting the Virgin with the
Holy Child in a glory of Angels, and underneath Saint John and a Saint James, with
a separated gilded frame in a poor state, placed in the former church of Lecceto, and,
precisely, at the high altar.”57 This main panel has not been found, but Borsook has
convincingly identified the central section of the predella of this altarpiece as that
now in the Boijmans-Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (fig. 29).58 This panel,
by Ghirlandaio’s workshop, is normally described as an Adoration of the Child, with
Filippo Strozzi as a donor.59 In the sky in the left background of the panel, there is
what seems to be an angel in glory hovering over a hill. In the middle ground to either
side we see two shepherds, both looking up toward the angels at the center. The
Filippo Strozzi figure is not wearing the long gown appropriate for a wealthy
Florentine citizen but a rough, short-skirted garment, ragged at the hem. At his
feet is a staff and behind him crouches a dog. In fact, this predella depicts the
Annunciation to the Shepherds, and Filippo Strozzi appears in the guise of a shep-
herd who kneels before the Christ Child. Before discussing the reasons for Filippo’s
surprising appearance as a contadino here, I would like to consider another painting
that was also originally in the church.
Piero del Pugliese’s chapel in Lecceto was consecrated in 1481 by Fra Giuliano da
Montelupo “in honor of Christ and Saint Mary and Saint Peter Apostle and Saint
Image not available
Figure 30. Piero di Cosimo, Virgin and Child with Saints Nicholas, John the Baptist, Peter, and Dominic, Saint
Louis Art Museum
Nicholas and of all saints.”60 Given the correlation of the saints and the presence of
the Del Pugliese arms on the predella, the altarpiece by Piero di Cosimo now in Saint
Louis, Missouri, is almost certainly the “altar with the new and beautiful predella”
that Guerrucci reports was given by Piero del Pugliese (fig. 30).61 The friar died in
1485, which allows us to confirm the early dating generally given to this work on sty-
listic grounds.62
This altarpiece shows the Madonna in the center of the panel, seated on a stepped
throne with the Christ Child on her lap. To her right is Saint Peter, standing with his
hand resting on the shoulder of the kneeling Saint Dominic. To her left stands Saint
John the Baptist, who points at Christ, and kneeling at his feet is Saint Nicholas, his
face in profile, holding out to the Virgin his attribute of three gold balls.
The choice of saints for this altarpiece is easy to explain. Peter is the name-saint of
the donor, John the Baptist the patron of Florence, and Saint Dominic representative
of the order. Nicholas was the name of Piero’s son, born in 1477, just at the time Piero
was most involved in giving donations to the church.63 Niccolò is not a traditional
Pugliese family name. No other member of the main branch of the family or its cadet
side had been given that name before this date. Given the importance of identity cre-
ation and re-creation in the use of traditional family names in Florence in this period,
discussed by Klapisch-Zuber and others, Piero’s choice of the name for his son and
the depiction of Saint Nicholas on the altarpiece should be explained in conjunction.64
About the same time as he commissioned this panel from Piero di Cosimo, Piero
del Pugliese was painted by Filippino Lippi as the donor on the altarpiece The
Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, discussed in Chapter 7 (figs. 31 and 44).
Comparing the donor figure on this painting with Saint Nicholas on the Piero di
Cosimo altarpiece proves fruitful. The head of Saint Nicholas is rounder and almost
bald, but the large ear, the profile of the face, with its prominent brow and down-
turned mouth suggest that the same man is portrayed in both paintings: in the Saint
Louis altarpiece, Piero del Pugliese appears in the guise of Saint Nicholas.65
So, in the church at Lecceto both major private donors appear on the altarpieces
they commissioned, not “as themselves,” as in a traditional donor portrait, but as an
integral part of the sacred scene. This may be an exceptional occurrence. The practice
of donors being depicted in such a guise is generally presumed to be very rare, though
by its nature the identity of the sitter is to some extent concealed, and there may be
many more unidentified instances. Savonarola, after all, felt moved to complain that
the Florentines “have figures in churches painted in the likeness of this woman or
that other one, which is ill done and in great dishonor of what is God’s.”66
This practice seems to have originally been confined to portraits of kings and
other temporal rulers, but close pictorial identification between saint and citizen
occurred in Florence from at least the early quattrocento. Depictions of the Magi
especially seemed to lend themselves to this treatment: for example, Palla Strozzi and
his son are emblematically represented, if not portrayed, as the adoring kings on
Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi of 1423.67 The Medici were also accorded
this honor, notably in an altarpiece painted just before those at Lecceto, Botticelli’s
Adoration of the Magi. Although the identification of portraits on this panel are prob-
Image not available
Figure 31. Filippino Lippi, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard (Fig. 39), Florence,
Badia, detail of donor
lematic, it is generally accepted that the oldest Magus is a portrait of Cosimo il

Vecchio.68 According to Rab Hatfield, by the 1470s the Magi “seem often to have been
looked upon as the emblematic representatives of the Medici,” and the ritualized re-
creation of members of the family as the three wise men on festive occasions has been
also been discussed by Richard Trexler.69 It is notable that these rich Florentines
adopted the guise of biblical characters who were not only rulers but also wealthy
men who used their wealth wisely in bringing gifts to the Christ Child.70
A comparison can be made between this case and that of the Saint Nicholas/
Piero del Pugliese figure on the Piero di Cosimo altarpiece at Lecceto. Saint
Nicholas, in the right-hand corner, takes a similar position in the panel to that of
Piero-del-Pugliese-as-patron on the Filippino Lippi altarpiece, his face also being in
strict profile. The way that Saint Nicholas’s gaze is fixed on Saint Peter is perhaps
intended to give the viewer a visual clue to the identity of the saint/patron. He in
turn proffers the three gold balls to the Virgin and her son, as both gift and attribute.
This is surely an allusion to Piero’s original gift of land and money that helped to
build a church in the Virgin’s honor. The life of Saint Nicholas was paradigmatic of
the judicious use of great wealth,“not in order to win men’s praise but to give glory to
God.”71 The most famous story of Saint Nicholas was his gift of gold to three virgin
daughters of a poor man to save them from prostitution. He threw the gifts through
the window of their chamber and then fled to escape detection. Their father eventu-
ally found out the identity of the benefactor and wished his name to be made public.
In response the saint had him make a solemn vow that he would never reveal
Nicholas’ identity.72 Guerrucci’s assertion that Piero del Pugliese did not want to
place his coat of arms on his altar should be read in these terms, terms that would
have been instantly recognizable to a contemporary. The benefactor “did not want
fame or worldly vainglory because he is a man of conscience.”73
The inclusion of the features of a church patron in the depiction of Saint
Nicholas hallowed and ennobled the act of donation, sanctifying Piero del Pugliese’s
gift by association and making its import universal. He becomes a permanent good
example as opposed to the “bad example” of the “evil men” of the commune of
Gangalandi who took and did not give to the church. The substitution of the donor’s
features for those of a saint makes the individual a paradigm of patronal virtue and
otherworldliness. This transformation of an individual into an exemplum also per-
haps explains the choice of name of Piero’s son. Niccolò di Piero was the second son
of the family, born nine years after his elder brother and nineteen years after Piero’s
marriage to Pippa di Jacopo d’Arrighi.74 Pippa must have become pregnant soon after
Piero’s original gift to Lecceto at the end of 1475. Perhaps the naming of his son was
linked with this event: a further expression of gratitude for rewards from heaven. At
any rate, the portrait and the naming combined seems to serve as a self-conscious
example of a virtuous use of wealth. This adoption of a saintly persona affected
future acts of ecclesiastical patronage: Piero introduced his nephew, Francesco di
Filippo, to the world of donation to churches when they both gave a painted frieze
for his chapel at Santa Maria alle Campora on Saint Nicholas Day 1487.75 The fact
that this gift came ten years after the birth of Piero’s son and two years into
Francesco’s as yet childless marriage is, perhaps, significant.
However, a tension exists between exemplarity and anonymity in this representa-

tion. Piero acts as an exemplar of pious, self-abnegating benefaction only through
making himself known. Piero di Cosimo seems to take the donor portrait directly
from the Filippino Lippi painting, making the head rounder, divesting it of its hair,
adding more prominently incised crow’s feet around the eyes, and deepening and
broadening the lines on the forehead. The lower part of the face remains substantially
unaltered. The result is to make Piero del Pugliese/Saint Nicholas seem some years
older than Piero del Pugliese as donor. In the latter, he is probably represented at his
actual age, fifty-five in 1485. Perhaps these changes are meant to indicate that this
depiction is an allusion to the physiognomy of Piero del Pugliese rather than a por-
trayal of him. By being presented as a saint, his identity was subsumed in that of a
holy figure. There is no internal pictorial evidence to suggest that Saint Nicholas’ fea-
tures are those of the man who commissioned the altarpiece. Future generations
would not recognize him as a Florentine citizen, alive at the time of the painting’s cre-
ation: his features as an individual would have been forgotten, and he would, effec-
tively, have become Saint Nicholas.
The relationship between pious donation and Saint Nicholas is relatively clear,
but why would Filippo Strozzi want to appear as a shepherd? He maintains his phys-
ical identity to a greater extent in the Ghirlandaio predella than Piero del Pugliese
did on his altarpiece.76 Not only does Filippo retain his individual features, but he
also appears more explicitly in the attitude of a donor, kneeling before the Virgin and
Child in an aspect of prayer and physically separated from the other shepherds who
form the narrative.
The subject of the Adoration of the Shepherds was represented most dramati-
cally in Florence in the Santa Maria Nuova altarpiece painted by Hugo van der Goes
for the Portinari family. Christina Knorr has seen a deliberate political turn away
from the Magi in the Portinari’s choice of this subject.77 This is surely not the case
with Filippo Strozzi, who became closely associated with the Medicean oligarchy
when he returned to Florence.78 Indeed, Federico Zeri has made a convincing argu-
ment that to the right of Ghirlandaio’s central scene was an Adoration of the Magi, now
in a private collection in Rome.79 The continuation of the left-hand side of the stable
and the curve of the hill in front of it between the Annunciation to the Shepherds and the
Adoration of the Magi scenes makes Zeri’s opinion almost indisputable. This certainty
of identification is especially important in this case as, to my knowledge, placing these
scenes on the same predella was unusual, if not unprecedented. More usual would be
the depiction of an episode from the lives of the saints appearing on the main panel.80
Although there is one scene left to be found, the whole ensemble clearly emphasized
the Nativity of Christ, the day on which the church at Lecceto was founded.81 In the
written records and histories concerning Lecceto, Filippo Strozzi and his heirs
manipulated the past to stress that he was its true founder; in this predella panel, his
presence as a shepherd in the biblical narrative of the birth of Christ signifies his
presence in the historical narrative of the foundation of the church. Once again, the
iconography of a painting is used to refer to and comment on an act of patronage.
In doing this, however, he deliberately humbled himself by appearing as a poor
peasant, belying the magnificence of the chapel he had built. Filippo acts as an exam-
ple to the contadini who may have formed a large part of the congregation at Lecceto:
the poor may not be able to afford patronage rights, but they too have the gift of piety
to give to the Virgin and Child. Filippo’s act is reminiscent of the inversion of roles in
the Holy Thursday ritual, when the officers of a confraternity washed the feet of the
other members.82 It is both reminiscent in its ritualized degradation and also in the
way that social humility is elided with spiritual power. On Holy Thursday, the offi-
cers washing their brethren’s feet were, after all, playing the role of Christ ministering
to his disciples. Similarly, the seemingly lowly shepherd has a crucial role in looking
after his flock, remaining continually vigilant in his care for each soul.83 Notably, this
particular shepherd is also in possession of a fine hunting dog with a studded collar:
this representation is tense with ambiguities of social status.84
Filippo Strozzi did, indeed, take on pastoral duties in his role of church patron.
The two letters of October 1490 between a Fra Girolamo at Lecceto and his patron
are full of the incidental detail that suggests the level of Filippo’s interest and involve-
ment in the day-to-day running of the monastery:
I beg you to give a little something to Frate Bartolommeo to put some work in order. I tended a
good part of these gardens as if they were a pearl. . . . I find that Frate Martino is really wearing
himself out for this place. It seems to me that your Magnificence could do [him] a little good.85
Last Sunday there were more than twenty citizens at the mass. There have been a lot of people
at this time and homini da bene will have gained great pleasure from this place, greatly prais-
ing God and your Magnificence. . . . In these few days that I have been here more than fifty fri-
ars [from Naples and Pisa] have been housed. I do not believe we have spent four grossoni of
yours for them, and they were well received and greatly praised the place.86
Such assurances that his good works were being appreciated alongside requests
for more money are as suitable a recognition of the role Filippo Strozzi played at
Lecceto as Fra Domenico Guerrucci’s high-flown praise of Piero del Pugliese. The
two men’s differing visual personae on the altarpieces in the church suggest that the
word “role” is used with some justification. It seems that each followed a cultural
script laid down by sacred precedent and contemporary custom, which delineated
ideal behavior and was encapsulated in the visual and verbal rhetoric chosen to com-
memorate their actions. Piero del Pugliese replayed Saint-Nicholas-the-donor, giv-
ing for no earthly return; Filippo Strozzi replayed the holy-shepherd-as-patron, ever
solicitous for his flock. By doing this they ordered their individual acts of giving in
an idealized spiritual narrative. We should, perhaps, not be surprised at these
instances of identity manipulation in a society where individuals were encouraged to
empathize with Christ and the saints and imagine themselves and their contempo-
raries in their roles as a spiritual exercise.87 At present it is difficult to assess how
frequently individuals were represented as saints on altarpieces. However, the perma-
nent and public visual manifestation of this mental habit through painting was
fraught with an ambiguity that was to become a theme of Savonarola’s sermons: did
exterior appearance truly divulge interior motivation?

From the example of Lecceto, it is possible to gain an idea of how ecclesiastical
patronage was understood by Florentines during the quattrocento. The ownership of
patronage rights over a church was primarily concerned with the control of appoint-
ments of the ecclesiastical personnel. However, the rights were also bound up in the
building and maintenance of that ecclesiastical property. Failure to maintain the
building led to a breakdown of this relationship, and the original patrons, the com-
mune of Gangalandi here, effectively gave up their rights. As the whole relationship
was based on this contract, they were, in effect, no longer patrons. This failure was
clearly regarded as morally reprehensible. By contrast, if a benefactor gave without
expecting reciprocal worldly returns from the church, his actions were seen as excep-
tionally good, to be rewarded after death. Ecclesiastical patronage benefited not only
the patron and church but also the community as a whole, and as such it should be
considered in conjunction with other charitable acts, connected with the virtuous use
of money.
Ecclesiastical patronage was unique among charitable acts, however, as it allowed
the patron to transform virtuous giving into a perpetual memorial to himself and his
family. The appending of family symbols in the form of coats of arms to the exterior
of the building, family chapels, and frames of altarpieces was an expected part of the
patronage process, with near legal connotations. The placement of arms above the
doorway to a church symbolized the entrance into a particularized spiritual space.
This use of emblems, altarpieces with representations of family saints, and the fund-
ing of special masses meant that the patron directed the tenor of religious ritual, as he
hoped to attract devotees both in life and after death. Lay control over ecclesiastical
space was a problem that attracted the attention of canon lawyers from the initial dis-
cussions of ius patronatus. It was a problem still evident in Florence in the quattro-
cento; this tension informed much of the ecclesiastical decoration we see displayed as
art in museums today. How some religious institutions sought to assert their corpo-
rate identity through the sublimation of individualized decorative schemes in chapels
forms the subject of the next chapter.
chapter 6
Framing Patronage
Beauty and Order in the Church of the Innocenti

I
n Chapter 5, I sought to demonstrate how the legal definition of ius patronatus
could inform our ideas about the nature of patronage in the Florentine
Renaissance, in addition to having an effect on the self-perception and actions of
laypeople involved in this kind of contractual relationship. The legal and customary
prescriptions of patronage rights affected investment in chapels as well as churches in
this period. Because of emphasis on lineage as a key factor of Renaissance identity,
the importance of family competition and honor within decoration of church space
has often been stressed. No doubt, patrons of chapels were sometimes in competi-
tion with one another for the most honorable decorative complex. However, concen-
trating particularly on the decorative project of one church, that of the Spedale degli
Innocenti in Florence, I show that this was far from always the case and examine
how institutional identity expressed by desire for an integrated decorative scheme
directed the decisions made about the appearance of individual chapels. The first
part of this chapter is structured around a notarial document connected to the
Innocenti redecoration, which I use as a device to address more general issues about
chapels and chapel patronage of this period. I then examine the quattrocento interior
of the Innocenti church in more detail.
In November 1489 the prior and operai of the Innocenti made a contract with the
Lenzi family, who had the patronage rights over the chapel of Saint Catherine in the
hospital’s main church.
License of the chapel in the Innocenti given by the Lenzi to the hospital to enable it
to renew its form and to remake it in the likeness of the other opposite.
Because it is certain that Lorenzo and Piero, brothers and formerly sons of Ampherone de’
Lenzi, citizens of Florence, have been and are the true and legitimate patrons of the chapel of
Saint Catherine located in the church of Santa Maria degli Innocenti of the city of Florence, and
Master Francesco, prior, and the operai of the said hospital desire to renew the said site of the
chapel in a different form in order that the church should be more orderly, the said De’ Lenzi, as
well as wanting to accede willingly to the said request, also voluntarily gave and conceded full
authority and power to the said operai and prior, with the following exceptions and conditions:
insofar as [the operai and prior] can change the said chapel visibly into another form, all at the
expense of the said hospital, and readjust and rebuild its structure appropriately, up to the point
that it looks better rather than deteriorated; while their patronage, dominium, and funerary
rights remain firm, on the ground that until now the said De’ Lenzi have always maintained it
themselves, and . . . this is not in any way understood to prejudice them. And the same chapel
[having been] newly constructed in the manner and shape and condition above just as it seems to
the said operai and prior . . . [the De’ Lenzi] promised to the said Master priors, present, that
they would not undo what they did for them, nor come into debt for the said goods.1
“chapel”
Although today the word “chapel” suggests a partially closed room or niche within a
church, during the quattrocento the concept of cappella was allied to a space’s liturgi-
cal function rather than its formal qualities. Thus the term could include virtually
any altar within a church where mass was celebrated in the interests of a particular
individual or group. Chapels generally, but not always, were demarcated from the rest
of the church architecturally, by being set back in a niche (as at Santo Spirito) or in a
more separate walled area (as in the transept at the Carmine). Sometimes, however,
as with the cappella of Guasparre del Lama at Santa Maria Novella, they could merely
be an altar and tomb combination, not enclosed by walls.2 The lateral chapels at the
Innocenti, under the patronage of the Lenzi and Del Pugliese, were smaller struc-
tures of this latter kind, as I shall discuss below, consisting of an altar with a stone
framing structure that contained an altarpiece and lunette.
The construction of private chapels in churches became increasingly popular
from the end of the thirteenth century onward.3 Despite their ubiquity in pre-
Tridentine patrician religious practice, there are many unresolved questions about
the use of chapels, notably concerning the access of the laity. Does the evidence we
have for iron gates being fixed to chapels mean that their use was restricted to family
members or clergy? Was it possible for women members of the patron family to enter
their chapels beyond the tramezzo (rood screen) in a monastic church? The evidence
is patchy and sometimes contradictory. As Julian Gardner has pointed out, evidence
of vandalism by the laity does suggest that there was access to private chapels and
their altars.4 Other evidence, such as the Pievano Arlotto’s chastising of a woman
praying in the chapel of Saint Nicholas in the old church of Santo Spirito—which
must have been the Capponi chapel—supports this supposition.5 Landucci also
claims that a miraculous crucifix placed in the Serragli chapel, behind the tramezzo in
framing patronage 121
the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, was worshiped there “by the neighborhood,”
so broader access than merely the family and friars is clearly implied.6 It was also pos-
sible for nonowners to have mass said in other people’s chapels. Francesco di Piero de’
Marchi, for example, asked for masses in the Del Pugliese chapel in the Carmine in
1507.7 More extensive work in this area remains to be done before generalizing about
chapel use. At present, on balance it seems fair to say that “private” chapels in
churches were often open for the use of the lay congregation, and that the images that
decorated these altars had a greater audience than those who paid for them or offici-
ated in front of them. Indeed, the charitable impulse that provided a contemporary
justification for chapel building in itself suggests that these spaces were somehow
used for, if not always by, the wider community.
“true and legitimate patrons”

Whatever the size and exact usage of chapels, their patronage shared the legal termi-
nology of ius patronatus with the patronage of benefices of entire churches. Thus, the
document of 1465 giving the chapel of San Girolamo in the Carmine to the Del
Pugliese family says it is transferring to them “ius et nomen patronatus dicte cap-
pelle.” In Filippo Nasi’s testament of 1512, he gives houses to the chapel of San Jacopo
in the parish church of Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli in a bid to keep the ius patronatus of
the chapel in the hands of his successors. There are several other published instances
of the use of this term.8
The repetition of this linguistic formula would in itself suggest that the relationship
between patron and institution was considered in the same light whether the layperson
was investing in an entire building or a chapel. Some of the same legal stringencies were
also retained. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century visitation records now in the arch-
bishopric archive in Florence betray a great deal of concern about the patronage of
chapels in the parish churches under the archbishop’s care, listing conscientiously the
name of the patron of each chapel, the chaplain who was employed to conduct mass,
and whether these spaces were fit for divine office. Before chapels could be transferred
between patrons, the archbishop had to give his consent. This is the case with the
transferal of the chapel of San Girolamo in the Carmine from the Guidoni to the Del
Pugliese.9 The notarial agreements about Filippo Strozzi’s chapel of San Giovanni in
Santa Maria Novella are also carefully copied in the archbishop’s record.10
Although in the latter two cases, the officiation of mass in these spaces would be
the responsibility of friars, chapels in parish churches, nunneries, and elsewhere
where there were not sufficient clerics present involved direct lay patronage of cappel-
lani, clerics employed to take on the upkeep of the altar for a particular patron or
group of patrons. This was the case at the Innocenti church, where there are lists of
payments made to chaplains in the account books.11 Chaplains were also employed
by the Del Pugliese in their chapel at San Jacopo Oltrarno, Alessandra di Francesco
del Pugliese’s chapel at Santa Lucia de’ Via San Gallo, and the Nasi chapel at their
parish church of Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli.12 The hiring of a particular functionary for
the chapel may have increased the sense that these spaces were independent of the
church as a whole, locations for the celebration of the spirituality of a particular fam-
ily or group. Certainly, the Nasi family talked about their chapel at Santa Lucia
almost as if it had a separate existence: when giving money for masses in wills they
tended to allow separate donations to the church and the chapel.13
Even where a cappellano was not directly hired by chapel patrons, however, they
did have a great effect indirectly on the economy and the work of the church as a
whole. In his study on San Lorenzo, Robert Gaston has pointed out how chapel
foundation was always intimately connected with the performance of the liturgy
within that space, the money paid by patrons of chapels for the celebration of specific
masses making up the bulk of the salaries of those who worked there.14 All the
bequests for chapel foundation and decoration in Nasi and Del Pugliese wills are
bound up with donations for special masses to be said posthumously.15 Patrons
would also donate masses well before they made provisions in their testaments. Just
after obtaining the chapel in the Carmine, Piero del Pugliese gave money for a mass
in honor of its titular saint.16 By investing in a chapel, therefore, patrons were entering
an ongoing relationship with a religious institution that provided funds for both the
fabric and ornamentation of a building and the maintenance of the clerics.
“until now the said De’ Lenzi have always maintained it themselves”
Beyond bequests for the saying of mass, what did the maintenance of chapels involve?
To celebrate the divine offices, the chapel needed to be furnished. The Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215 codified these basic requirements: a monolithic altar table, a
crucifix, two candles, a chalice, and a proper titulus—a clear dedication to a saint or
mystery to be given to the altar during the consecration ceremony.17 The 1512 advice
to visitors of parish churches tells them to check that there are “books, chalices, vest-
ments, crosses, relics, and other church furnishings.”18 It was up to the patron, there-
fore, to adorn honorably the chapel space and the person officiating in it. Confirming
the contract, the Innocenti archives show that the Lenzi had given a gift of a chalice
and paten to the hospital church in early 1485.19 The long lists of richly embroidered
vestments bearing family coats of arms still existing in church archives and the
endowments for such goods in wills suggest how much store was set by this latter
form of gift, reminding us of the link between chapel patronage and the basic func-
tion of the chapel: the saying of mass.20
Even beyond items such as candles, which needed to be replaced regularly, the
nature of the mass meant that it was considered dishonorable for both church and
patron to allow other furnishings or priestly vestments to become worn and aged.
Investing in a chapel was a decision that involved a relationship between the church
and patron and the patron’s descendants that would last for life and beyond: ideally
for time immemorial.
As we have seen in church patronage, if the patron did not maintain the chapel
space, the patronage rights to the chapel were forfeited. There are numerous exam-
ples of this. The Boni family ceded the rights to its chapel at Santa Maria Novella
primarily because its poverty meant that the chapel could no longer be maintained,
and “the divine offices could not be celebrated or performed” because it lacked “orna-
ments and books and other expenses.”21 It was quite usual for chapels to be ceded to
individuals on the condition that he, she, or they give money for “honorable” orna-
mentation, which provided a fitting location for mass to take place as well as some of
the essential items, such as books, candles, and chalices that were laid down in the
Fourth Lateran Council. Bernardo del Bianco received patronage rights over his
chapel in the Badia on the condition that he paid for its decoration; the friars of
Santa Maria Novella awarded rights over the cappella maggiore of that church to the
patron who was most amenable to providing honorable decoration for the space.22
The power of the institution in giving and taking away patronage rights based on the
commitment of the patron to the decoration and maintenance of a chapel should
indicate that the honorable ornamentation of a church was for the benefit of the
institution just as much as the person who funded it. Decoration was a visible sym-
bol of a patron’s commitment, and making a church beautiful was viewed as pleasing
to both God and the community.
Apart from the bare minimum listed in the Fourth Lateran Council, tradition
and precedent delineated what was included in chapel furnishing. In his will Filippo
di Lutozzo Nasi puzzled over the patronage of the Nasi chapel at San Francesco al
Monte and worried over its lack of panel and altar. His brother Bartolommeo saw
the need to provide for a window, panel, and tomb at Santo Spirito.23 Sometimes
patrons exceeded expectations in their generosity in furnishing their chapels. As
noted, for example, Piero del Pugliese in his chapel at Santa Maria alle Campora paid
not only for the construction of the chapel, its windows, the altarpiece, and vestments
but gave an illuminated manuscript, spalliere, curtains, and an organ.24
“the chapel of Saint Catherine”

The fundamental function of images in chapels was to identify the dedication of the
altar. The Synod of Trier of 1310 codified this requirement, declaring that “before or
in front or above the altar should be an image, either a sculpture, some writing, or a pic-
ture” identifying the saint who was honored by the altar or chapel.25 It is sometimes
assumed that it was normal for the lay patrons of chapels and side altars to be permit-
ted to choose their own dedications, but at present the evidence about how dedications
for chapels were chosen is patchy. The Lenzi chapel’s dedication to Saint Catherine
may have been a reflection of family devotion to that saint; if so, it luckily coincided
with one of the patron saints of the silk guild, the body responsible for the upkeep of
the church. On taking over the chapel in the Carmine, the Del Pugliese also took over
the dedication and seemed to gain a “special devotion” for Saint Jerome from that time
on, rather than vice versa.26 Similarly, Piero del Pugliese’s founding of a chapel dedicated
to Saint Bernard at Santa Maria alle Campora seems particularly suitable for a
Benedictine church, next to a chapel dedicated to the Annunciation;27 the three Nasi
brothers, Bartolommeo, Bernardo, and Filippo, founded a chapel dedicated to the same
saint at Cestello, in the prestigious location next to the high altar. This dedication was
not, I believe, intended to honor one of the brothers above the rest but referred to the
great Cistercian saint in a church of that order.28 In the dedication of chapels, we have
to see an element of discussion and compromise between donor and institution.
In relation to the guidelines laid down at Trier it is perhaps significant that often
the dedication of an altar could, perhaps deliberately, be made less than clear through
the use of an image. The patronage rights of Francesco del Pugliese’s chapel standing
next to his villa at Sommaia, for example, were contested. Those who claimed it was
a parish church under the patronage of the Da Sommaia family called it the chapel of
San Michele; those who claimed the patronage rights belonged to the owner of the
villa pointed to the fresco of Saint Andrew over the entrance to assert it was dedi-
cated to that saint, and the church of San Michele was, in fact, an entirely different
building.29 As I have mentioned previously, the altarpiece in the Nasi chapel at Santo
Spirito has at its center the Pietà with Saints James and John the Baptist placed at
either side of the scene. Significantly, the convent records refer to this chapel as being
dedicated to the Pietà, and the family records suggest it is in the name of Saint James,
a Nasi patron.30 Similarly, the Capponi chapel, next door, which contained Piero di
Cosimo’s Visitation altarpiece, was said in the convent records to be dedicated to that
mystery, whereas the family consistently referred to it as being dedicated to Saint
Nicholas of Tolentino.31 Family and institutional requirements could be met simulta-
neously through sensitive use of iconography. The dynamic between ecclesiastical
and family claims was important in determining the final form of the altarpiece or
fresco, and it seems that the ambiguities of nonverbal representation were sometimes
exploited to reflect the religious needs of both parties. To imply, as did Charles Hope,
that a panel cannot simultaneously display theological narrative and the favorite
patron saints of a lay donor ignores the different levels of meaning on which this kind
of painting can work, as well as (ironically) overestimating the power of the patron to
decide the content of an altarpiece without reference to the religious needs of the
church in which it was displayed.32
“they voluntarily gave and conceded full authority and power to the said operai and prior . . .
[they] can change the said chapel visibly into another form, all at the expense of the said hospital”
These words constitute the crux of what the Innocenti contract with the Lenzi set
out to achieve. The operai’s and prior’s plans for remodeling the interior of the church
involved their changing the appearance of the Lenzi chapel. It makes sense that
church authorities would keep a careful eye over what went on in their buildings.
This phenomenon has been noted in early examples. J. C. Long has made a convinc-
ing argument for the institutional control over iconography and form of frescoes in
Franciscan churches in Florence in the fourteenth century.33 A similar concern with
suitable fresco decoration can be seen in the way the Dominicans at Santa Maria
Novella managed conflicting patronage bids for the cappella maggiore in their church
to ensure the chapel received an apt and honorable decorative scheme.34
The new popularity of the single panel altarpiece from the 1430s onward did not
change the desire to exercise control in the way a church was decorated but changed
how it was exercised. The growth of the popularity of the tavola quadrata over the
polyptych has been linked with the new architectural form of chapel-lined churches
whose earliest exponent was Brunelleschi. Whether he was personally involved with
the development or promulgation of this form is a matter of debate.35 Nevertheless,
the design of the wood frames themselves and the stone setting in which they were
placed did preestablish the format and shape of the altar panel. In the case of the
Innocenti, and probably in many other churches, curtains were used to hide the altar
panels from view when the altars were not in use during mass and on Sundays and
other feast days, and this possibly enhanced the unified appearance of the interior.36
The earliest documentary evidence for the application of a “pattern” for chapels
concerns the Brunelleschian church of San Lorenzo. In 1431 a chapel was conceded
to Tommaso Spigliatti on the condition that he decorate it “according to the form of
the other chapels,” so that the chapels should be “conforming and ordered.”37 In 1434
more detailed guidelines were laid down. This directive regulated the size of the
chapel spaces and the columns around them, the shape of the architrave, frame, and
cornice, and also ruled that they had to have a round window like that of the chapel
of Giovanni de’ Medici. Each chapel had to contain an altar of macigno, the local
hard sandstone, on five columns, topped by a “panel, square and . . . honorably
painted,” with a glass window above.38 As already discussed, the existing quattrocento
decoration in Santo Spirito would indicate that similar guidelines existed for this
church. We should also consider other Florentine examples. Louisa Bulman, for
example, suggests that the operai and prior made the crucial decisions about the form
of chapels, and possibly their decoration, at Santissima Annunziata.39 Outside
Florence, we can see other indications of this practice. Pius II, taking his lead from the
precedent of Siena Cathedral and his reading of Alberti, introduced a unified scheme
for the setting of altarpieces in the cathedral at Pienza.40 In Venice as early as 1443, a
number of pendant altarpieces were created, such as the ones in San Francesco della
Vigna by Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna. Twenty years later, Jacopo
Bellini and his workshop made four altarpieces in an identical format for the church of
Santa Maria della Carità.41
The main difference between these examples and the circumstances at the
Innocenti was, of course, that the Lenzi had already paid to build the original chapel
and had maintained it adequately. The only thing wrong with it was that it did not
match the decorative scheme planned for the church by the operai and the prior,
Francesco di Giovanni Tesori. Presumably because of this, it seemed only fair to
them that the silk guild should pay for the work. The notional linkage between pay-
ing for the construction of a sacred space and the ownership of patronage rights over
it was so entrenched, however, that this contract is at pains to explain that the Lenzi
retained their patronage even though they were not going to fund the reconstruction,
that they had always paid for their chapel, that the hospital paying for these works
did not reflect badly on the family, and so on. The situation was clearly perceived to
be out of the ordinary, and the hospital went to some lengths to assert that the Lenzi
still held the moral rights of patronage.
“in the likeness of the other, opposite”

The motivation behind this institutional control in the Innocenti was to make the
Lenzi chapel look like another one in the church. The contract explains that the rea-
son for this is to make the church look more “espedita,” a word that suggests clarity
and orderliness in appearance. As well as the examples above, where institutional
control was introduced explicitly or implicitly with the aim of creating a coherent and
ordered space, the same motivation was given by Alamanno Rinuccini to explain
changes made to the Florentine Baptistery in 1484. The Arte de Mercatanti, in con-
sultation with the balìa, ordered that all the wax votive statues and banners should be
taken from San Giovanni: “because it was judged that they covered and took up a
large part of the beauty of this church, they had to take them all away and put them
in another place, and similarly they took down many panels, paintings, and images
that were attached to columns or pilasters of this church, so it became clean and
orderly [espedita] and it made a great show of beauty, that previously was covered up
even though it was displeasing to many people.”42
The aesthetic and moral virtues of clarity and order were endorsed by other com-
mentators. For Saint Antoninus (quoting Saint Ambrose), beauty was an important
quality to be encouraged in church decoration as “through this adornment should
shine forth the dignity of God.” He despaired, however, of the “excesses, pomps, and
many vanities of arms, pictures, vases of gold, and suchlike things.”43 Clarity and
order within church space can, therefore, have a divine purpose. Alberti praises the
simplicity of the early church, and although he approved of the use of panel paint-
ings, he believed that reliefs would be better, as being less diverting to the eyes of the
worshiper.44 A practical application of these ideas is surely what influenced the prior
in his decision to take control of the decoration of all the chapels in the Innocenti
church, to bring this decorative complex into line with other recently built
Brunelleschian churches, most notably Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo. Beauty in the
service of God had been a moral good throughout the quattrocento, but concepts
of what constituted the beautiful changed from the midcentury onward. In the
churches built after San Lorenzo—Santo Spirito, Santa Maria di Cestello, the
Innocenti, San Francesco al Monte—the vibrant and potentially distracting colors
of fresco, permanently open to view on the walls of a church, were eschewed.
Ecclesiastical honor was seen as better served by a more regular rhythm of similar
stone-framed altars, which, though often richly gilded, afforded a more focused
frame for the devout onlooker’s gaze on the religious image.
the inno centi church

The main church of the Innocenti had only three chapels during the fifteenth cen-
tury: the cappella maggiore, under the patronage of the Arte della Seta, which was ded-
icated to the Virgin and the Holy Innocents; the Del Pugliese chapel on the
right-hand wall of uncertain dedication, perhaps to Saint Peter; and the Lenzi chapel
on the left, which was consecrated in honor of Saint Catherine, a patron saint of the
silk guild.45 Unfortunately, none of the quattrocento decoration is visible today, the
interior of the building having been completely refurbished in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries (fig. 32). Most of the artworks have either been placed in the
museum of the hospital or sold.46
Francesco di Giovanni Tesori was made prior of the hospital in 1483, then treas-
urer a year later.47 His period of office was to see many changes to the building,
including renovation of the refectory, the women’s church, and the commission of the
famous Andrea della Robbia tondi of the Holy Innocents, which decorated the
facade, put into place in August 1487.48 Tesori turned his attention to the high altar
Figure 32. Interior of church of Ospedale degli

Innocenti, Florence
Image not available
chapel of the main church in 1485. The documents for this commission were mainly
published by Gaetano Bruscoli in 1902. It seems that the whole decorative complex
was designed under the close supervision of Tesori with the help of Fra Bernardo di
Francesco, a friar of the convent of the Ingesuati.49 Although the first item commis-
sioned was the altar panel from Domenico Ghirlandaio (in October 1485, fig. 33), it
seems likely that Tesori had the structure of its frame in mind from the start.
Commissioned in 1486 from Antonio di Francesco di Bartolo legnaiuolo—better
known now as Antonio da Sangallo the Elder—in March 1490 his older brother,
Giuliano da Sangallo, was paid for the completion of the “adornamento della tavola.”50
The original contract stipulates that the surrounding furnishings should look like
those on the high altar of the church of the Ingesuati, except without “two adoring
angels” that would not fit. Unfortunately, the Ingesuati was destroyed in the siege of
1529, and we have little information about its appearance, except that Francesco
Albertini tells us that this church had a high altarpiece that was also painted by
Ghirlandaio. However, the contract and payment documents indicate the elements
that made up the ensemble: “a tabernacle for the Body of Christ, candlesticks at the
side, and the large frame [cornicione] either with a ledge or without.”51 Apart from this
and the panel, payments were made for the cross that stood on the altar, the painted
curtain to cover the panel, and a predella to stand at its feet. The whole ensemble—
Figure 33. Domenico Ghirlandaio,

Adoration of the Magi, Florence,
Museo del Ospedale degli Innocenti
Image not available
the cross, tabernacle, candles, and parts of the panel and predella—were gilded. In
addition to all this gilded woodwork, a considerable amount of money was spent on
luxury cloth. Five braccia of green silk were bought for a frieze, for example, and a
black taffeta paliotto (altar frontal) was also made.52
The contract with the Lenzi was made around the time that the high altarpiece,
tabernacle, and surrounding items for the cappella maggiore were in place and awaiting
gilding. The Lenzi chapel was probably looking a little old-fashioned in comparison.
As the contract makes clear, this was not because the chapel had been neglected by
the family—the accounts also show that the Lenzi regularly gave money for the
chapel—but because it no longer looked suitable.53 After spending so much money
on the cappella maggiore, the silk guild also decided to fund the rebuilding of the archi-
tectural frame of the Lenzi chapel. The original altarpiece, commissioned by the
Lenzi from Neri di Bicci in 1460, was retained (fig. 34).54 In December 1489 payments
were made for the “remaking of the altar and the pillars on the wall around it and an
arch of stone above.”55 Although the contract between the Lenzi and the institution
specifically states that the chapel was to be made “the same as the other opposite,”
work on the Del Pugliese chapel did not start until the autumn of 1491.56 This in itself
suggests that the form of both chapels was conceived at the same time.
Piero del Pugliese played a significant part in the refurbishing of the Innocenti.
Figure 34. Neri di Bicci, Coronation of

the Virgin, Florence, Museo del
Ospedale degli Innocenti
Image not available
An indication of his role appears in the account books. In November 1490 a Piero
dipintore was paid for “repainting the Flagellated Christ as Piero del Pugliese says.”57
Where this panel was to be placed in the hospital is not certain, but it should proba-
bly be connected with another painting of a Pietà, also finished in 1490.58 It is possi-
ble that they were intended for the women’s church. Payments for these works were
also made by the Innocenti itself, through the sacristy accounts.
Why should the opinion of Piero del Pugliese have been followed, especially
given that he had not even bought his chapel by this date? As noted in Chapter 1, the
Del Pugliese are known for their prominence in the Arte della Lana in this period,
but their range of business interests also qualified them for membership in the silk
guild. Giovanni di Jacopo, Piero’s uncle, was a consul of the guild on four occasions
between 1435 and 1452. Piero himself matriculated in 1438.59 During the period of the
construction of the hospital up to about 1450, the opera of the Innocenti was distinct
from the consuls of the Arte della Seta, but as Philip Gavitt has noted, after this date
their powers were yielded to the consuls of the guild.60 It is significant, therefore, that
Piero del Pugliese was a consul of the Arte della Seta between September and
December 1489.61 He was one of the six men who made the decision to fund the
rebuilding of the Lenzi chapel and, almost certainly, had influence over its final form.
That he was consulted on the repainting of the panel of the Flagellation of Christ a
year after this consulship may be partly due to the fact that he was seen as represent-
ing the guild’s opinions. It seems likely that it was also because he was considered
something of an authority in these matters.
Image not available
Figure 35. Piero di Cosimo, Virgin and Child with Saints Peter, Elizabeth of Hungary, Catherine
of Alexandria, and John the Evangelist, Florence, Museo del Ospedale degli Innocenti
The most pertinent fact that is left to us about Piero del Pugliese’s life is that he
spent a large amount of time dealing with painters. As I have already discussed, he
undisputably had a close friendship with Filippino Lippi and, circumstances would
suggest, with Piero di Cosimo. Even before his investment in the Innocenti church, he
had been involved with the construction and/or decoration of three chapels, the build-
ing and ornamentation of an elegant family palace, and was a long-standing operaio for
the church of the Carmine. He must have seemed an ideal candidate to give advice on
decorative matters. Perhaps Gombrich’s characterization of Lorenzo de’ Medici as an
“arbiter of taste” has an application here on a smaller scale, as some individuals were
deemed to possess a refined sense of what was beautiful and appropriate.
Unfortunately, exactly what these side chapels looked like is uncertain.
Nonetheless, though the Del Pugliese chapel has been dismembered, many elements
of its decorative complex are extant. The altarpiece by Piero di Cosimo (fig. 35) is
Image not available
Figure 36. Andrea della Robbia, Annunciation, Florence, Ospedale degli Innocenti
Image not available
Figure 37. Bartolommeo di Giovanni, Predella for Innocenti Adoration of the Magi, Florence, Museo del
now in the museum of the hospital, though its predella panels are lost. Standing
above it was a lunette, an Annunciation by Andrea della Robbia, which is now in the
courtyard of the hospital (fig. 36). Giuseppe Richa said that the Piero di Cosimo
panel was “enriched by heads of cherubs made in glazed earth by Luca della Robbia.”62
These are presumably the “angels” that a Domenico di Michele muratore was paid to
place on the wall in January 1492, and their original appearance is unknown.63 It does
seem likely, however, that the use of this Della Robbian blue-and-white terracotta in
the Annunciation, at least, was a deliberate reminder of the roundels of infants on the
exterior facade of the building that had been commissioned by Tesori five years
before.
The arch that was built over the Lenzi chapel probably echoed that formed by the
Andrea della Robbia Annunciation opposite it, and the upper part of both of these
side chapels presumably responded to the space taken up by the tabernacle for the
Corpus Christi, which accounts show was placed above the panel at the high altar.64
There is not a great deal of information about the appearance of the Lenzi chapel,
but the amount of gilding paid for by Piero del Pugliese—for the frame of the altar
panel, its predella, the candlesticks, architrave, columns, and pillars of the chapel—
suggests that this chapel at least was as lavish in appearance as the cappella maggiore.
The altarpieces in the Del Pugliese and high altar chapels were both surrounded by
frames consisting of gilded columns. It may be that the columns used to support the
stable in Ghirlandaio’s Adoration (fig. 33) give us an indication of what they may have
looked like—they reflect columns on other frames of the period.65 Both the Del
Pugliese altarpiece and the one in the cappella maggiore were covered with curtains
when not in use. It seems likely that the Lenzi altar would also have had a curtain.66
Moreover, both the Piero di Cosimo and the Neri di Bicci panels are nearly square in
format (137 × 142 cm and 203 × 197 cm, respectively). The later panel was possibly
planned to correspond to the earlier one. With the paintings normally covered by
curtains and the frames largely the same, the chapels must have looked quite similar.
Judging by the contract, this was the effect Tesori desired.
the new altar panels

Domenico Ghirlandaio finished the high altarpiece for the church in December 1488.
The choice of main subject for the panel, the Adoration of the Magi, does not reflect
the dedication of the altar, which was to the Holy Innocents who were murdered by
Herod’s soldiers. The Massacre of the Innocents is represented in the left back-
ground of the picture, and it is easy to understand how the violence and distress nec-
essarily contained in this narrative were not considered suitable as the main subject
for the new high altarpiece of the foundling hospital. Instead, Tesori and Fra
Bernardo of the Ingesuati asked Ghirlandaio for an Adoration of the Magi, a fashion-
able subject in Florence that had several advantages. It allowed the other dedicatee of
the altarpiece, the Virgin, a literally and figuratively central role; it highlighted an act
of gift giving to an infant, a reminder of the hospital’s main function; and, in the rich-
ness of the Magi’s and their entourage’s dress, it allowed Ghirlandaio to employ his
skills in depicting brilliantly colored vestments and sumptuous ornamentation. The
use of fine materials was stressed in the contract:“he has to color the said panel all at
his own expense in good colors and ground gold in the ornaments where it occurs . . .
and the blue has to be ultramarine of a price of about 4 florins an ounce.”67
The main panel must have been nearly complete when, in July 1488, Bartolommeo
di Giovanni was contracted for the predella. According to the earlier contract with
Ghirlandaio, its subjects were devised by Fra Bernardo. All seven panels survive in
the museum of the hospital (fig. 37). Unlike the altarpiece itself, it seems that no
Image not available
Figure 38. Bartolommeo di Giovanni, Saint Antoninus Consecrating the Innocenti Church, Florence, Museo del
drawing existed for the predella—detailed accounts of the panels to be executed are
given, along with where they should be placed in relation to the main painting:
in the middle our Lady with her dead son in her arms, with the Marys at the side, as requested;
at the foot of Saint John the Evangelist on the panel, the story when Saint John was put in the
cauldron; at the foot of Saint John the Baptist, the baptism of Christ; two stories of our Lady, that
is, the Purification of our Lady and the Marriage; and at the ends of the said predella, on one
side the Annunciation, and on the other the archbishop Antoninus when he consecrated the
church of the said hospital.68
Clearly, this work was envisaged symmetrically, the Pietà in the middle flanked by
pairs of suitable stories. Unfortunately, it is presently displayed with the John the
Evangelist panel on the far right, rather than second from the left, thus not visually
balancing with John the Baptist panel as originally intended; and the Annunciation
and the consecration of the Innocenti Church are no longer the starting and ending
stories that enclose the other narratives.
Perhaps the most interesting choice of story is the last one mentioned in the con-
tract, the consecration of the church by Antoninus (fig. 38). It is rare for a recent his-
torical event of this kind to be depicted on a predella panel. The fact that it was
speaks volumes about the self-perception of the Innocenti. Vertically bisected by
Brunelleschi’s all’antica columns, the panel shows Antoninus sprinkling holy water at
the entrance of the church, accompanied by the prayers of kneeling Florentine citi-
zens. In its juxtaposition on the predella with biblical stories, this event is shown to
be of great sacred and historical import.
The John the Baptist and John the Evangelist panels are also significant. Placed
under their respective saints on the main panel, they draw attention to the actions of
each of these sacred intercessors. At the feet of each kneels the object of the hospital’s
charity, a Holy Innocent. The Evangelist, patron saint of the Arte della Seta, places a
protective hand near his infant charge’s back, gesturing him to gaze on the Madonna
and Child receiving homage from the oldest Magus. The Baptist, patron of Florence,
stares at the onlooker and directs our attention toward the central scene. Together,
silk guild and city provide for the foundlings in their care.
Piero del Pugliese commissioned a painter who had worked for him on previous
occasions, Piero di Cosimo, to paint his altarpiece, which was put into place ready for
gilding in November 1493.69 Given what we know about Piero del Pugliese’s role in
the decoration of the church, it is likely that he made the major decisions about the
iconography of this painting, but, as we shall see, if this was the case, he did so in
close collaboration with institutional preoccupations. This work is traditionally
described as a Virgin and Child with Saints Peter, Rose of Viterbo, Catherine, and
John the Evangelist (fig. 35). However, as has been noted recently, the kneeling female
saint to the left cannot be Rose of Viterbo.70 Saint Rose, who died at eighteen, is gen-
erally shown as a young woman, dressed in a gray habit, a knotted girdle, and a chap-
let of roses.71 This hardly accords well with the older woman, dressed in an unbelted
black habit, whom we see here. A more likely identification is Elizabeth of Hungary,
a saint who was noble by birth, compelled by her father to marry, which she did “not
for pleasure’s sake but in obedience to the will of her father, and in order to raise up
children to the service of God.”72 Widowed, she became a Franciscan tertiary—hence
the black habit she is regularly depicted as wearing—and maintained her celebrated
charity to the poor. This led to her building a hospital at Marburg: she was clearly a
suitable saint for this location in a hospital church. She had a special devotion for
Saint Peter, who presents her to the Virgin here, and is associated with Saint
Nicholas, that alter ego of Piero del Pugliese; he was often her companion and asso-
ciate in miracles.73
In Tuscan painting, her iconography, like that of Saint Nicholas, is bound up with
anonymous charitable giving. She is generally portrayed as having a lap full of roses,
because when she was surprised by her husband giving food to the poor, the bread
she was carrying changed into these flowers so her charity would not be discovered.74
Here, therefore, we see the Saint Nicholas motif of the Lecceto panel repeated: char-
ity, as symbolized by the miraculous rose of Saint Elizabeth, is shown as a direct gift
to Christ. Saint Nicholas’s most famous act of charity was, of course, his anonymous
provision of a dowry for three poor girls, and we should bear this in mind when con-
sidering the iconography of this work. The provision of dowries for poor girls was,
according to contemporary accounts, considered a particularly suitable act of charity
for rich widows like Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.75
As Adrian Randolph has recently shown, Saint Catherine is wearing the tradi-
tional jewelry—the brocchetta da testa and brocchetta di spalla—associated with the dress
of contemporary Florentine brides.76 Here she takes the place of the ideal bride partic-
ipating in the ideal, chaste marriage, laying her princess’s crown on the step as she sub-
mits her will to that of her new husband. The event is eagerly watched by the
garlanded angels standing at either side of the Virgin’s throne. Thus the holy charity
represented by the rose of Saint Elizabeth has an immediate effect in providing for the
marriage of Saint Catherine: Christ takes with his right hand and gives with his left.
The whole transaction is supervised by the two standing male saints who gently
gesture their female charges toward the Virgin and Child. Saint Peter, on the left,
represents the donor of the chapel, Piero del Pugliese. Saint John the Evangelist, on
the right, is both the patron saint of the Arte della Seta and reflects the patronymic
of the prior of the hospital, Francesco di Giovanni Tesori. The visual counterpart to
the Ghirlandaio altarpiece must have been clear, where the two Saint Johns shelter
the infants kneeling at their feet.
The Florentine foundling hospital, as well as taking in abandoned infants, also
had a duty to provide for their future. Boys were found apprenticeships where possi-
ble, and the hospital went to great lengths to provide dowries and find suitable mar-
riages for the girls in its charge. Thus Piero di Cosimo’s depiction of a wedding is a
suitable counterpart for Ghirlandaio’s altarpiece. The social role of the Innocenti
in guarding the interests of the two groups perceived most vulnerable in society,
women and children, is made clear. Abandoned children are taken in and brought up
through Christian charity. When their female charges reached adolescence they were
protected from the potentially corrupting power of their own sexuality by being
transferred to the care of a man in marriage. The inclusion of Saint Elizabeth, the
Franciscan tertiary, suggests another virtuous choice for women, particularly wid-
owed women: to become a member of a religious order under the protection of the
male church authorities, represented by Saint Peter, for the higher good of religion
and the community. The symmetry of the transaction between women saints is
mediated by Christ and notionally and actually framed by male protectors. It figures
the balance of a rhetorically created, well-ordered Christian commonwealth, where
women’s special propensity for intense spirituality and uncontrolled sexuality was
ordered and channeled through male authority.
In applications to the Florentine dowry fund, the Monte delle Doti, the Ospedale
degli Innocenti was treated “just as if [it] were the true and natural father of the afore-
said girl.”77 The foundling hospital, through its custodianship of male and female
children, provided for those unfortunates who were cast outside the prime institu-
tion of Florentine society, the patriarchal family. The new altarpieces made for the
renovated Innocenti church provided a visual rhetoric encapsulating the foundling
hospital’s role as institutional father, a role that the hospital was only able to play
because of the pious donations of Florentine citizens. Hence the Piero di Cosimo
panel celebrates the divinity of charity as well as showing its practical effects.
Through charitable gifts for the dowries of poor girls the donor was maintaining
social order by providing a family for those who otherwise would be outside this key
social structure and, implicitly, also giving a gift directly to Christ, winning his favor
for his or her own soul, as well as for the spiritual well-being of the city. Like Piero di
Cosimo’s Lecceto altarpiece, this image acts as a recognition of previous donations
and a spur for future giving.
Tesori’s work to decorate the church, the sacred focus of the Innocenti, sought to
make the building a fitting expression of civic pride in charity and family by making
it beautiful. This was a beauty expressed in order and symmetry, which, as with the
homogeneous chapels in Santo Spirito, formed a visual counterpart to the social
order that the Innocenti helped to maintain in the life of the city. Here, once again,
the “order” in the church went beyond the metaphoric: actual control over a family’s
rights had to be exercised. The desired visual effect could only be achieved by apply-
ing a unified plan to the entire building and integrating individual chapel patrons’
interests into a harmonious whole. This should not be characterized, as it has been
recently, as enforcement of drudgery on the individualistic creative impulses of
painter, sculptor, or patron. Rather, it reflected an increasingly diffuse perception of
desirable decoration and provided a structure in which aesthetic and patronal imper-
atives could, at the same time, be met.

What I have attempted to argue in the previous chapters is that we should perhaps
reframe the context in which we look at the commissioning of church decoration in
Italy in the later quattrocento. What do we mean when we describe an individual as
being the “patron” of religious “art”? The system of patronage that existed in churches
in Florence in the fifteenth century was based in canon law and was bound up in the
rights to influence the liturgical activity in a particular church or chapel. Like all
forms of patronage, properly defined, this involved a reciprocal relationship between
two parties—the donor(s) and the clerics of a religious institution—which contin-
ued over a period of time.78 Patronage also involved providing funds for the physical
construction and maintenance of the fabric and ornamentation of the building. This
could involve the purchase and commissioning of work from various artisans, includ-
ing painters and sculptors, but these individual commissions did not necessitate a
patronal relationship between the two parties involved.
The funding for the ornamentation of a chapel also did not necessarily mean that
the owner of its patronage rights made complex decisions about the formal aspects
of that space. As I have attempted to show, the content of chapels was defined
through law and custom, through perceptions of what was expected and honorable.
Moreover, it seems that the ecclesiastical institutions had more influence over the
decoration of familial space inside their churches than is sometimes thought. We
should not see church decoration as a series of haphazard decisions by independent
lay “patrons” but, in many cases, as part of an integrated and carefully thought-out
program. These programs, in turn, could be the product of advice from authorities
and of the imitation of admired prototypes. Thus, we see the San Lorenzo canons
using the chapel of Giovanni de’ Medici in that church as a model and the prior of
the Innocenti copying the cappella maggiore of the Ingesuati, and asking for advice
from Fra Bernardo di Giovanni and Piero del Pugliese. In this way, changes in fash-
ions for altarpieces, now characterized as transitions in artistic form, at least partly
were spread through institutional channels. Lines of descent may even be traceable
from one institution or individual to another, though this question is beyond the
scope of this study.
In the new churches of the later quattrocento in Florence, individual decorative
interests were often subsumed in the name of a greater goal: to allow churches as a
whole to attain the harmonious and ordered beauty that had become fashionable
through the work of Brunelleschi and Alberti and the enthusiastic employment of
their ideas by certain members of the patriciate. In its figuration of the cooperation
of wealthy families, the attainment of this beauty was held as pleasing to both God
and city. The spending of these lineages’ wealth on display for this purpose was con-
ceptually in accordance with the desires of the church, and the lay and religious elite
were essentially in agreement. The implication was that both groups could be trusted
with the care they exercised over the lesser members of society—women, children,
and the poor. The harmony and permanence of this arrangement, however, were
more rhetorical than actual. A rupture in these power structures and the culture of
display was already being heralded by Savonarola in the early 1490s, when the
Innocenti church had just been completed. The changes that occurred during and
after his period of Florentine ascendancy, 1494–98, will be discussed in Chapter 8.
chapter 7
Differing Visions
Image and Audience in the Florentine Church

I
f homogeneity was an important consideration in the commission of some altar-
pieces in Renaissance Florence, I would argue that the institutional context of
these pieces of ecclesiastical decoration should always be taken into account,
even when relatively little is known of their original physical context. In the later fif-
teenth century, members of both the Del Pugliese and Nasi families commissioned
altarpieces of the Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard (figs. 39 and 40). The
painting by Filippino Lippi was originally located in Piero del Pugliese’s chapel in
Santa Maria alle Campora, whereas the version by Piero Perugino was executed for
the chapel of Bernardo, Bartolommeo, and Filippo Nasi in Santa Maria Maddalena
di Cestello (now Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi). The formal differences between
these two paintings are immediately striking and suggestive of the variety of choices
available for the purchasers of religious painting in quattrocento Florence. Frederick
Antal, though considering paintings from an earlier period, posed the basic question
of this chapter more than fifty years ago: “how could two such widely differing pic-
tures have been painted in the same town and at the same time?”1 I seek to suggest
answers to this question by examining the intended audience of these images, con-
sidering how the desires of the chapel patron and the liturgical and devotional needs
of a religious body could simultaneously be met through the use of imagery.
Filippino Lippi’s Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard (fig. 39) was the center-
piece of a new family chapel for the Del Pugliese in the monastery church of the
Campora. This church, now destroyed, was attached to a Benedictine monastery just
outside the Porta Romana. The information we have regarding the construction and
decoration of the Del Pugliese chapel, much of which was published by Iodoco
Supino in 1903, is highly detailed.2 This was a lavish and expensive project including
work of the finest quality and cost Piero 651 ducats in total. Compared with the 50 to
70 ducats spent on the construction of the chapels at Cestello about ten years later,
this sum indicates the project was near to Piero’s heart. The language of church
Image not available
Figure 39. Filippino Lippi, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, Florence, Badia
patronage used in these accounts is fascinating. Piero del Pugliese is not named at
first, simply called “A devoted friend and benefactor of our monastery.”3 This has led
one commentator to see Piero as “a very religious man” with “a life long desire for
anonymity.”4 “Religious” perhaps, but if anonymity was his goal, he failed: his phys-
iognomy is famously celebrated as the donor in Filippino’s painting, and the Del
Pugliese arms decorated many of the gifts he gave to the chapel. We are also told in
the accounts that he specified that “he did not want [to pay for] any of our [daily]
needs, but he wanted us to spend [his money] on some ornament in our church of
the Campora.”5 He desired some concrete memorial of his generosity.
The Filippino altarpiece is the most famous of Piero’s donations to the Campora,
differing visions 141
Image not available
Figure 40. Pietro Perugino, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, Munich, Alte Pinakothek
but it stood in the middle of a splendid chapel, with iron gates, windows, spalliere,
paliotti, and a frieze. The intarsiaed “very beautiful” walnut choir that decorated the
chapel was destroyed by German soldiers along with most of the rest of the furnish-
ings during the siege of 1529.6 The progress of the decoration of the chapel allows us
to estimate the date of Filippino’s altarpiece. Wrongly dated to about 1486 by Alfred
Scharf, owing to a mistranslation, most of the work in the chapel had been completed
by the late spring of 1480.7 This includes the whitewashing of the walls, the predella
of the altar, and the holes for lamps.8 It seems likely that the altarpiece would have
been painted about this time.
There are several reasons why Piero should have chosen Santa Maria alle Campora
as a center for his patronage. He rented wool botteghe from the Badia Fiorentina, the
Campora’s mother church, and also seems to have acted as some kind of agent for it,
acting as the middleman to buy some white cloth on its behalf from Giuliano di
Pagnazzo Ridolfi in 1487. In fact, in 1481 he is described as “our Piero di Iacopo [sic] del
Pugliese.”9 Moreover, the location of this church was in its favor. The church stood just
outside the Porta San Piero Gattolini, the gate at the end of the Via de’ Serragli; even
though it was outside the city walls, it was still extremely close to the Del Pugliese
palace. Indeed, Piero bought a villa and small farm in the parish where the Campora
stood, San Donato a Scopeto, sometime in the 1480s or early 1490s.10 Around this date,
he also acted as a benefactor to San Donato, giving the canons a barrel of wine from his
land annually, and he may have been depicted by Filippino in the Uffizi Adoration of the
Magi, an altarpiece that was originally placed in their church.11 In this way, the purchase
of a chapel in the Campora may have been an opportunity to make a suitably pious
impression on the local community. The laborer who tended the land on Piero’s farm
could have seen an image of his padrone when he went to mass and perhaps be inspired
to offer prayers for his employer’s soul.12
The Nasi also invested in a chapel outside their quarter of Santo Spirito.
Perugino painted the altarpiece for the Cistercian church of Santa Maria Maddalena
di Cestello, located on Borgo Pinti in the quarter of Santa Croce. Francesco del
Pugliese, along with his wife, Alessandra di Domenico Bonsi, also paid for the con-
struction of a chapel there. The reasons for these families’ involvement remain uncer-
tain, and Alison Luchs’ thorough research on the construction and patronage of the
church did not reveal any single explanation. It seems worth pointing out, however,
that Cestello was a church dominated by friends, associates, and relations of Lorenzo
de’ Medici and was designed by Giuliano da Sangallo, an architect close to Lorenzo.
The earliest chapel patrons seemed to have connections with the Medici bank.
Angelo Bardi, the first patron to found a chapel in 1488, ran the London branch; the
Nasi, the second chapel purchasers, were brothers of the man who ran the Naples
branch, which was taken over by another chapel owner, Lorenzo Tornabuoni, in
1489.13 Moreover, other chapel patrons, the Salviati, were related to the Medici by
marriage, as were the Pucci, who had been closely allied with the Medici since
Cosimo’s day.14 It may be the case that Francesco del Pugliese wished to be associated
with the Medici through his involvement in this church dominated by the family’s
friends. As discussed in the next chapter, he was expanding his property ownership
in the late 1480s to include a house on the Borgo San Lorenzo and a large country
possession in Sommaia, both areas inhabited by Medici friends.
Bernardo, Filippo, and the heirs of Bartolommeo Nasi started to construct their
chapel in March 1489.15 Dedicated to Saint Bernard, this was to the right of the high
altar, the most prized position in the church. The panel of the Apparition of the Virgin
to Saint Bernard by Perugino was moved in 1628, when the monastery was taken over
by the Carmelites. The chapel was completely renovated in the nineteenth century
and now bears little resemblance to its original appearance.16 Francesco del Pugliese’s
chapel was the first on the right from the door, bought in June 1490, and dedicated to
Saint Jerome.17 There is no altarpiece documented for this chapel. The dedication to
Saint Jerome, changed when the Del Pugliese ceded the chapel to the Rutini in 1556,
was almost certainly Francesco’s choice; it was possibly intended as a reminder of the
Del Pugliese family chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine.
Neither of these chapels was for the use of the lineage as a whole. The Nasi chapel
was restricted to the household of the youngest three sons of Lutozzo Nasi and their
heirs. In fact, it may be that it had a memorial function. Bartolommeo died about a
year before the first stone was laid, and his presence is felt in the appearance of
his name-saint in the Perugino altarpiece. The ceiling of Francesco del Pugliese’s
chapel shows the arms of the Del Pugliese and Bonsi families. Francesco married
Alessandra di Domenico Bonsi in 1486, and it seems that Alessandra was also
involved in this new chapel project: she gave a chasuble to the church a few days after
the initial donation.18 As well as celebrating their union, perhaps the building of
the chapel was meant to have a talismanic purpose. After four years of marriage,
Alessandra and Francesco were still childless. It may be that the founding of this
chapel in their name and that of their heirs was wishful thinking as well as a form of
prayer for offspring. Francesco’s uncle and guardian, Piero, after all, had been blessed
with a second son while he was providing funds for the building of a Dominican
church at Lecceto.
Whatever the reasons for the chapel foundations, it may be that there was a ten-
dency for chapels in churches outside a family’s local area to be patronized by indi-
vidual members or branches of families rather than by the entire lineage. This was
the case with other Cestello patrons, as Luchs has pointed out.19 It also seems that
the chapel at Campora was specifically linked to Piero di Francesco and his heirs.
However, investing in these churches meant that links with neighbors, friends, and
family could still be maintained. The chapel opposite the Nasi’s in Cestello belonged
to the heirs of Giovanni di Agnolo Bardi who, after moving from the Via de’ Bardi
(where the Nasi formerly lived) in 1483, constructed a palace facing the three Nasi
brothers’ house at the other side of the Ponte Rubaconte.20 Three of the other chapel
owners were related to them through marriage: Lorenzo Tornabuoni’s sister was
Alessandro di Francesco Nasi’s wife; Francesco del Pugliese was married to the
daughter of Domenico Bonsi and Bartolommea di Piero Nasi, the brothers’ niece;
and Alamanno Salviati’s son would later marry Bernardo Nasi’s daughter. Just as the
Image not available
Figure 41. Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard,
Florence, Accademia
churches of Santo Spirito and the Carmine could embody local networks and social
hierarchies in the allocation of their chapels, a church not so aligned to neighborhood
loyalties, like Cestello, could reflect citywide ties of kinship.

The representation of the Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bernard became increas-
ingly popular during the fifteenth century in Florence. This was a facet of a renewal
of interest in the saint and his writings, especially his treatise on family care (the
Letter to Raimondo), his sermon Super Missus Est (the account of the Annunciation in
the Gospel of Luke), often called In Laudibus Virginis Matris, and a text now ascribed
to one of his followers, Planctus Sancte Marie Virginis, often simply called the Planctus
Marie.21 Through these writings and a biography (the Vita Prima) written by one of
his followers, from at least the thirteenth century onward Bernard was noted both for
his eloquence and for his special devotion to the Virgin, evident from his appearance
in the climax of the Divine Comedy, where he prepares Dante to see the Queen of
Heaven by reciting a hymn in her praise.22
Despite the wealth of texts written by and about Bernard, there is no straightfor-
ward textual prototype for the pictorial tradition of the Virgin appearing to the saint
Figure 42. Filippino Lippi, The Apparition

of the Virgin to Saint Bernard, Florence,
Badia, detail of books
Image not available
to inspire his writings.23 It was a subject that was peculiar to Tuscany, and its first
painted representation seems to have been a now-lost panel painted in 1335 by
Bernardo Daddi for the Palazzo della Signoria, documented when it was cleaned in
1432.24 The palazzo had always contained an altar to the saint, which possibly reflects
the role that Cistercian monks from the Badia a Settimo played in government, keep-
ing the account books of the Camera del Comune and the official seal of the repub-
lic.25 The version of the Apparition by Filippo Lippi, now in the National Gallery in
London, was painted for the building in 1447.26
One text that was possibly influential on early versions of the subject was the
Planctus Marie, an account of Bernard’s conversation with the Virgin about her feel-
ings and actions during the Crucifixion.27 The earliest extant Florentine altarpiece of
the Apparition, painted by the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel in the 1370s, displays
text from the Planctus Marie (fig. 41). In it, Bernard is shown writing a question in his
open book:“Regina celi mater crucifixi dic mater domini si in Jerusalem eras quando
captus fuit filius tuus . . . cui illa respondit.” We can see the reply emerging from the
Virgin’s mouth: “J(e)ru(sale)m q(ua)n(do) hoc audivi.”28 The Planctus Marie was a
popular work during the quattrocento, and we know that Piero del Pugliese was
aware of it, because in 1490 he gave the monks of the Campora a book of selections of
Bernard’s writings that included it (fig. 43).29 As we shall see below, this relationship
between the text that Bernard is shown to be writing and its inspiration by the Virgin
was an important precedent for Filippino. The altarpiece by the Master of the
Rinuccini Chapel was possibly in the Campora or its sister church, the Badia a
Settimo, at the time Filippino painted his panel.30
In this altarpiece (fig. 39), Piero is seen at the lower right in prayer, his gaze fixed
on the Virgin. He is wearing a black fur–lined garment, with a bright red cappuccio, a
sign of citizenship and office holding.31 The Virgin, with her entourage of angels, has
placed her hand on the open book of Saint Bernard, who gazes at her in wonder-
ment, holding a pen in his right hand as if he had been interrupted while writing.
Above him, a subsidiary scene is being enacted by similarly white-clad monks, while
cowering in a rocky crevice to the right of the painting is a demon gnawing his chains,
an owl placed in the darkness beside him.
The abundance of writing in the painting is immediately striking. There is the
open book directly next to the Virgin, the manuscript that Bernard is in the process
of composing, a small piece of paper attached to the rock behind Bernard’s head, and
books, closed and half-open, scattered all around, as well as the inscription on the
frame. It is apparent that this work was intended for an audience both literate and
literato—not only an audience that could read but one that had a knowledge of Latin
texts.
In this painting Bernard is acting in the role of the intercessor’s intercessor, phys-
ically placed between the donor and the Virgin. This role for the saint would have
been familiar to most Renaissance Florentines from his similar position in the Divine
Comedy, where, at the climax of the Paradiso, he sings a song in the Virgin’s praise.32
The saint’s eloquence is stressed in this panel more than in any visual predecessor.
Unlike in the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel’s version of the subject, Bernard is not
writing a passage from the Planctus Marie. He has, instead, been interrupted by a
vision while writing a sermon on the biblical passage shown on the open book at the
center of the painting. The book, the text of which is entirely legible, shows Saint
Luke’s account of the Annunciation, starting with the words “Missus est Angelus
Gabriel.” Bernard’s sermon on this text is part of a series entitled In Laudibus Virginis
Matris, or simply Super Missus Est.33 He is on the concluding part of the second ser-
mon of the set, concerned with the comparison of Mary with a star; the star’s rays are
like her virginity, shown visually by the star on her mantle.34 He goes on to explain
that our lives are like a voyage at sea, where one needs the guidance of a star to avoid
pitfalls. The Virgin has interrupted him just before he was to write the impassioned
passage beseeching his audience to invoke and think of the Virgin in order to weather
the difficulties of life and escape the path of sin. This part of the passage is summed
up on the frame: “in rebus dubiis mariam co gita mariam invo ca”
(In matters of doubt, think of Mary, invoke Mary).
It is important to point out that anyone who did not know the text being written
by Saint Bernard would not be able to understand the truncated lines that appear on
the painting; there is simply not enough information given to make the meaning clear
to the uninitiated. Presumably the Benedictine monks who serviced the chapel in
which the altarpiece was placed would be mentally able to fill in the blanks and thus
apprehend further meanings of the painting. If they wished to jog their memory, they
only had to look at the manuscript book that Piero del Pugliese left the Campora in
1490, which includes the sermon Super Missus Est. So, too, for Piero’s family: he makes
clear in his dedication that the book should always be available to his family should
they desire it.35
Our attention is drawn to books and writing almost obsessively in this painting.
Behind the two men enjoying a vision of a golden sky in the background are two
more monks wearing the black scapulars that protected their robes during work.
What work they were involved in is in no doubt: hanging from their belts are, respec-
tively, the wax tablet and the pen case of the monastic scribe. Above them, on the hill,
is perhaps a further representation of the duties of convent life, as two younger
brothers help their lame colleague down the hill. Given that the mother house of the
Campora, the Badia, had a large library and was the center of manuscript book pro-
duction in fifteenth-century Florence, it is likely that the monks saying mass in front
of this painting would have recognized in it appropriate models of behavior to follow.
They would also have been well placed to read additional iconographic complexi-
ties in the different types of handwriting on this image. Remarkably, the saint is being
inspired to write his commentary on Luke in a humanistic book hand. As Dario
Covi has pointed out, Filippino took great pains here to replicate accurately both the
Gothic minuscules of Luke’s gospel and the humanistic hand of Bernard’s commen-
tary on it (fig. 42).36 This surely has iconographic significance: with divine help
Bernard is elucidating what is written in the Bible not only by what he writes but also
in the way he writes it, by transforming the Gothic original into a protohumanist
commentary. The classicizing minuscules in the Bernardine text are visually linked
with the classicizing majuscules on the scrap of paper directly above it on which is
written the motto of the stoic Epictetus, “substine et abstine” (sustain and
abstain). The works of this philosopher were translated by Poliziano for Lorenzo de’
Medici in 1480, and in his prefatory letter to his printed edition, Poliziano explicitly
states that the complete works of Epictetus could be summarized in this phrase.37 In
this usage of the words, a pagan philosopher associated with the Medici is explicitly
Figure 43. Unknown Florentine, Vita Sancti

Bernardi, BNF, Conventi Soppressi B.1.2578,
fol. 7r.
Image not available
shown to be influential not only in Bernard’s Christian textual commentary but also
in his way of life. Bernard’s clarity of expression and purity of life are inspired by the
Virgin and Epictetus alike; eloquence, antiquity, and religiosity are shown as inextri-
cably linked. However, it is made clear that Christianity is superior: the epigram of
Epictetus is placed in the shadows of the rock, whereas the Bible and the commen-
tary are bathed in the light emanating from the Virgin/star.38
The real focus of the painting is further emphasized in the inscription on the
frame. This exhortation is intended to have several addressees. It refers to Bernard’s
looking to Mary for inspiration in his time of suffering, while mirroring advice he
would give. It refers to Piero del Pugliese, praying in the bottom left corner of the
painting, his eyes fixed on the Virgin, perhaps beseeching her notice. Finally, it
encourages the individual viewer, and Florence as a whole, to pray for intercession
from its particular protectress. It polices reactions to the work and reminds the
viewer that the figures are examples to be followed. The composition of the painting
itself suggests a hierarchy of holiness, with the Virgin at the top, Saint Bernard
slightly below her, and Piero del Pugliese well below them, only half-accepted into
their world. He is both a model for imitation on the part of the laity who may have
prayed in front of this image and a reminder to them to keep him in their prayers.
The frame inscription ensures that for those with only basic Latin, and little ability
to recognize all the texts displayed, the key message of the painting would neverthe-
less be understood.
Such a complex range of readings suggests that immense time and effort were
taken over the composition of this painting. It is likely in this case that Piero was
involved in the design of the altarpiece in collaboration with the young Filippino
Lippi. He himself was an able scribe, judging by the copy of Virgil’s Aeneid in the
Biblioteca Laurenziana that is written in his hand.39 He also had dealings with the
Florentine Badia concerning other religious books; in 1477 they paid Felice di
Michele Feo to illuminate a Rationale Divonorum Officiorum, which may also have been
written out by him.40 Indeed, the copy of Saint Bernard’s works that he gave to the
Campora in 1490 (fig. 43) is in a hand very similar to that of the Aeneid, and it is not
impossible that it was also written out by Piero. Whatever the circumstances of its
creation, however, the altarpiece was clearly planned with its future audience in mind.
The Saint Bernard presented here is one of a community of monastic scribes who
lead an ascetic life outside the city.

Perugino’s Apparition of the Virgin (fig. 40) has an entirely different appearance. Its
seeming simplicity in comparison with the Filippino panel has led some commenta-
tors to dismiss this work. Melinda Lesher, for example, claims that the faces of the
figures are “bland and expressionless,” and that the panel as a whole suffers from a
“confused iconography.”41 It seems likely, however, that Perugino was deliberately
attempting to rearticulate the narrative of Bernard’s vision. Filippino’s version of the
subject had been extremely popular in Florence, having spawned several imitations
over the next decade.42 Perugino was the first painter to break away from this influ-
ential model. In fact, like the earlier altarpiece, it fulfills the need of a specific audience
and, I would argue, its relative simplicity should be read in relation to this situation.
Saint Bernard is seated at a desk to the right-hand side of an open, arcaded loggia.
He holds his hands up in veneration as the Virgin appears to him; standing behind
the Queen of Heaven are two angels, one staring out at the viewer. Behind Bernard
are Saints Bartholomew and Philip, who seem to be discussing the vision. This
arrangement differs from earlier versions of the subject in several ways. Although a
landscape background is visible through the arches of the loggia, the scene is entirely
set within a building. Thus, instead of representing Bernard as a solitary thinker, who
along with other holy hermits deliberately absented himself from civilization, he is
shown surrounded by the trappings of institutional life: classicizing columns and a
carved wood reading desk. This altarpiece, after all, was displayed in a Cistercian
church, and Bernard here appears in his guise as spiritual leader of that order. This
image would have supplied a more meaningful model of holiness for the cloistered
monks at Cestello than the Filippino version.
Interestingly in this light, he is less physically separated from his companions
than he tended to be in the paintings inspired by Filippino. Saints Bartholomew and
Philip stand directly behind him. The representatives of the three brothers of the
Nasi family form a tight-knit group on the right of the panel, providing a visual bal-
ance for the Virgin with her entourage of two angels. The inclusion of these two
saints in place of Cistercian onlookers has proved the most offensive element in this
painting to some iconographers: there is no textual reason why they should appear in
the panel, and they have been seen as extraneous elements detracting from the main
narrative.43 This seems to be a misreading in several respects, notably in the percep-
tion that the main function of this altarpiece was to display a story; in fact, it bears a
closer relationship to the typical altarpiece format of a Madonna and Child with
saints than to the kind of religious narrative painting more often seen on a predella
panel. The primary requirement of altarpieces was to identify the dedication of an
altar, and they were also crucial for invoking prayers for the patrons of a chapel. The
presence of Saints Bartholomew and Philip together symbolizes the devotion of
those who paid for the painting and the chapel it adorned. The Nasi brothers sup-
ported the Cistercian order, represented by Saint Bernard. They deserved to be
shown by his side, as they were all working toward the same goal: the praise of the
Virgin. Perugino found an elegant pictorial solution to the potential problem of rep-
resenting two patron saints in conjunction with Saint Bernard’s vision by balancing
the narrative with three figures at either side.
Perhaps the most important difference between the paintings by Filippino and
Perugino, however, lies in Perugino’s portrayal of the relationship between Bernard
and the Virgin. Bernard is not holding a pen in the Cestello altarpiece. Mary’s dicta-
tion of text to Bernard, which forms the focus of the Filippino composition, has no
place here. Indeed, the book that Bernard was apparently reading before the Virgin
appeared is filled with letterless lines. Given that readable text had been so important
in previous versions of the subject, this surely requires an explanation. I think it can
partly be found in Bernard’s own work. In one of the passages in the sermon on Super
Missus Est, coming shortly after the passage being written in the Filippino panel,
Bernard extols his readers to contemplate the Virgin without words: “It is sweet to
contemplate in silence that which a labored discourse is not sufficient to express.”44
One is reminded of Dante’s Paradiso, when the narrative breaks off at the end because
some sights are too beautiful to describe in words.45 This wordless panel of Perugino
celebrates “vision” in all its senses.
Figure 44. Pietro Perugino,

Annunciation, Fano, Santa Maria
Nuova
Image not available
Mary’s hand does not touch the book, and she takes no heed of it. Instead, she
extends her index finger and points to Bernard. This gesture is strikingly similar to
that of the angel in the Annunciation Perugino executed for Santa Maria Nuova in
Fano at about the same time (fig. 44).46 Indeed, the Apparition painting as a whole is
reminiscent of an Annunciation, with Bernard, like the Virgin Annunciate, the pas-
sive receptacle for the spirit. His subordinate, feminized role in this painting is
stressed by the great difference in height between the two main characters, the spirit
emerging from Mary’s pointed finger, seemingly directed between Bernard’s raised
hands. The angel behind Mary holds a book and a lily, familiar additions to an
Annunciation scene, and the Virgin’s left hand clutches the cloak that covers the area
of her womb.
Although the subject of the Virgin appearing to Bernard lends itself to compar-
isons with the Annunciation, nowhere, I think, is this comparison more deliberately
drawn than in the Perugino panel. Through visual means, therefore, we are once
again reminded of Bernard’s most famous sermon, his commentary on Super Missus
Est, Luke’s account of the Annunciation. The saint’s knowledge of Mary’s trials at
the Crucifixion expressed in the Planctus Marie passed into him without words or
corporeal forms like books, just as he claimed the Virgin was penetrated at the
Annunciation as “light falls through glass.” Here, Bernard’s special understanding of

Mary is shown to derive, not from his learning or eloquence, but from his ability to
empathize, to replay her role. The wordless form of meditation and role-playing
articulated by Perugino here was to gain importance in sacred images in Florence in
the 1490s and 1500s.47
These contrasting versions by Filippino and Perugino of the same subject have
differing messages. One celebrates the potency of sight, the other of the written
word. Both of them celebrate their purchasers in differing ways. Piero del Pugliese
appears as the wealthy merchant-donor, flattered by association with his saintly role
model. The presence of the Nasi brothers is suggested through the inclusion of their
name-saints. Here, the material world of the onlooker, perfected through the figure
of a pious donor, is eschewed in favor of a more ethereal symbolic order, while still
paying the homage to the patrons of the chapel. The presence of both Piero del
Pugliese and the Nasi in their respective churches was predicated on the knowledge
of who would see these altarpieces. Filippino Lippi’s version, placed in a Benedictine
church in the countryside, sets Bernard outside in solitude, showing that true reli-
giosity can be experienced in a natural setting. The Benedictine monks who said
mass in front of this altarpiece would have been able to understand the Latin texts
ranged for them to read. Moreover, this monastery was part of the Badia Fiorentina,
an important producer of manuscript books in this period; thus, these Benedictines
would have been well placed to understand the nuances of the different book hands
displayed on the painting. Clearly, this Saint Bernard, a scribe in the countryside,
whose holiness gained him inspiration from the Madonna, would have seemed a pos-
sible model for imitation. Perugino’s altarpiece, one of a number of works he executed
for the church and convent, shows Saint Bernard firmly set within the cloisters of a
monastery, the outside world visible but distant, irrelevant to the contemplation of
the Madonna. Each altarpiece was intended to prompt a devotional response suitable
to its institutional and geographic location, presenting idealized models for chapel
patron and cleric alike.
part iii
Identity and Change
chapter 8
Painted Prayers
Savonarola and the Audience of Images

A
bout 1498 Filippino Lippi painted an altarpiece for the Valori chapel in the
church of San Procolo in Florence (figs. 45 and 46). The main panel of this
triptych depicted the crucified Christ between Mary and Saint Francis
and was flanked by wings of John the Baptist and Mary Magdalen, set in niches.
Commissioned by the family of a leading supporters of Savonarola, Francesco Valori,
this work is frequently cited as an example of “Savonarolan style.”1 Recently two com-
mentators, one discussing the central section and the other the wings, have explained
what this term can mean. For the first, the main panel contains “abstract and ideal
representations” of the human body against a “supernatural background.” He relates
these pictorial qualities to what he perceives as Savonarola’s request for painters to
“reconstruct divine perfection,” hiding the agony of Christ’s Passion in the pursuit of
calm meditation. The second scholar, by contrast, asserts that the wings betray the
influence of Fra Girolamo because “the realistic appearance of the figures . . . conform
to the thoughts of Savonarola that art has to imitate nature.” Their “vibrant religious
intensity” and air of “a suffered spiritual torment” help the viewer to meditate on the
pain of Christ.2
Both these interpretations are extremely convincing, and both are well supported
by visual and textual evidence. The problem is that juxtaposed in this way, the sug-
gestion seems to be that Savonarola gave contradictory stylistic instructions to
painters in his sermons. If Filippino Lippi was sufficiently perplexed to paint in two
apparently conflicting styles in order to produce “Savonarolan” work, what chance
does the art historian have to pinpoint the friar’s influence on painting? I would argue
that the problem does not lie with Savonarola’s ambiguous ideas about the visual
arts, but with how his writings and sermons have been used to analyze paintings
from this period. Despite the new emphasis on historiography in Savonarola studies
generally, the way that his work has been used in relationship to visual culture has
not changed very much since the subject was dealt with in the nineteenth century by
Figure 45. Filippino Lippi,

Crucifixion with Virgin
Mary and Saint Francis,
formerly Berlin, Kaiser
Friedrichs Museum
Image not available
Gustave Gruyer and Vincenzo Marchese.3 True, the influence of Savonarola is now
seen to rest in the amorphous figure of the “art patron” rather than the “artist,” but the
question has remained the same: what effect did Savonarola have on the visual arts?
This influence is still tested by reading through his sermons, extracting sections that
are deemed to relate to “art,” and attempting to show that paintings were produced
with these excerpts in mind. The process becomes ever more tortuous as the same
extracts are repeated by more and more commentators and become further isolated
from their original context. This chapter endeavors to suggest new strategies for
thinking about Savonarola’s interaction with the developments in the visual arts in
this period, to use his writings as a resource for deepening our understanding of the
way images were generally used in devotional practice, rather than as an anomaly to
be justified or explained. I also examine how his concepts about spending money on
display objects marked a decisive break with the previous accommodation between
church and ostentation. Before looking at the sermons and their contemporary
reception, I examine the history of Savonarola’s devoted follower, Francesco del
Pugliese, who decorated his chapel at Sommaia with five paintings between 1498 and
1503. This extraordinarily well-documented case has been previously discussed by art
historians, particularly in relationship to Botticelli.4 Here the paintings commis-
painted prayers 157
Figure 46. Filippino Lippi, John the Baptist and

Mary Magdalen, Florence, Accademia
Image not available
sioned are placed in relation to other information about Francesco’s support of

Savonarola, and, for the first time, their original setting is taken into account.
Francesco del Pugliese and the Castellaccio at Sommaia

On 11 June 1488 Francesco del Pugliese paid Niccolò di Donato Donati 1,500 florins
for a country estate, including two laborers’ houses and a villa, set around a ruined cas-
tle, the Castellaccio, at Sommaia, about fourteen kilometers northwest of Florence.5
His choice of this area, at some distance from the rest of the family’s holdings, can
partly be explained by precedent: his grandfather and great-uncle had declared own-
ership of land and a small farm there in the 1427 catasto.6 There were also family links
to two of the other major landowners in the area, the Da Sommaia and Ginori fami-
lies. In 1460 Francesco’s aunt, Costanza, had married Guglielmo di Francesco
da Sommaia, and Francesco seemed to be good friends with their son, another
Francesco, who was made an executor of his will of 1503. These men shared a devo-
tion to Savonarola.
The primary link with the Ginori family was through Francesco’s sister, Caterina,
who married Giovanni di Francesco Ginori in 1470. Caterina, like Francesco, seems
to have been a follower of Savonarola. After her husband’s death she became a nun
at the Dominican convent of Santa Lucia on the Via San Gallo, and she named
Francesco as a universal heir in her will along with her son, Agostino.7 In January
1493 Francesco bought a house on the Borgo San Lorenzo, which he gave to his sister
later that year. This palace was bought from Francesco di Lazzaro de’ Medici and
stood next door to the property of his distinguished kinsman, Piero di Lorenzo.
Another of Caterina’s next-door neighbors on the borgo was Rosso da Sommaia,
while the Ginori lived nearby on the same street.8 Interestingly, she also bought prop-
erty in the area of the Castellaccio in early 1489.9 It seems that by the early 1490s,
Francesco, through the marriages of female relatives and property-buying decisions,
was becoming part of a network of friends and family that was separated from the
area around his palace in Drago Verde, thus associating himself with part of the elite
group of the city that was linked both with the Medici and, at this date, with sup-
porters of Savonarola.10
As already noted, Francesco was entirely drawn to the Savonarolan cause, his fer-
vor often leading him into difficulties. Fined and disqualified from government in
May 1498 due to his allegiance to the friar, in 1513 he was expelled from Florence for
publicly insulting Lorenzo de’ Medici, yet was allowed to return after two years of his
ten-year sentence had elapsed.11 It was already too late, though, to save his business
and reputation. He was forced to sell much property on his return to pay back debts
incurred during his absence. This includes the Castellaccio at Sommaia, sold to
Bartolommeo di Leonardo Ginori in February 1516.12
During the course of his eventful life, Francesco made four wills: the first, of
December 1498, just after his fine for his support of Savonarola; the second in
January 1503, two months after the institution of the first lifetime head of state in
Florence, Piero Soderini; the third in August 1512, just as the Florentine state was
about to undergo another change of regime; and the last just before his death.13
Testaments, as Lorenzo Polizzotto has so persuasively argued, were public state-
ments, and Francesco del Pugliese’s first three wills are open affirmations of his
Savonarolanism and mark changes in his relationship with the movement.14 These
testaments, of 1498, 1503, and 1512, were all made at San Marco, with friars there act-
ing as witnesses. The second and third wills are much the same, with just a few dif-
ferences resulting from a change in living circumstances. The first has the air of a
document written in a hurry, being worked out as he went along, full of emendations
and marginal additions. Unlike the other three, it was not made with the help of the
Savonarolan notary, Lorenzo Violi, but with Bartolommeo Bindi, the notary whom
Francesco had used for land purchases from the late 1480s onward; thus we do not
have here the “Savonarolan” preamble made familiar by Violi. Significantly, in this
first will, made only a few months after his disqualification, Francesco asks to be
painted prayers 159
buried at the convent of San Marco rather than in the family tomb at Santa Maria
del Carmine.15 He eschews family tradition in death, a significant act, cutting
through former ties of neighborhood loyalty. By the second testament, however, he
changes his mind, though this does not signify a change of heart: the character of
the rest of the will, with its generous bequests to San Marco, remains distinctly
Savonarolan. He consistently makes large gifts of money and land to this convent
and the Savonarolan foundation of Santa Lucia in Via San Gallo throughout his first
three wills. The testament of 1519, made after his exile and in reduced circumstances,
is subdued in tone. Taken and witnessed in the neutral surroundings of the church of
Cestello, this testament contains no pious bequests to any religious institutions, and
Francesco even apologizes for any offense he may have previously caused. It seems
that the disgrace of his exile had finally affected his willingness to express openly his
Savonarolan sympathies.16
The second will has received the most attention from art historians. This is
because it contains an extraordinary and, to my knowledge, unique bequest to the fri-
ars of San Marco. Not only does he leave them his entire estate at Sommaia, but in
particular the contents of a chapel that formed part of the Castellaccio:
he leaves to the aforementioned chapel and church of Sant’Andrea a Sommaia five pictures
painted on panel . . . that is: a picture on which is painted a head of Christ made in Flanders,
with two wings at either side, painted by the hand of Filippo di fra Filippo; and a picture
on which is painted a Judgment painted by the hand of fra Giovanni, with two wings at the
side, painted by the hand of Sandro di Botticello; and another picture on which is painted the
Transition of Saint Jerome, by the hand of the aforementioned Sandro; and another small paint-
ing, by the hand of Pesellino; and another large painting, by the hand of the aforementioned
Filippo, where is painted a Nativity with Magi.17
The Chapel of Sant’Andrea

A great deal of information is available about the chapel of Sant’Andrea, which,
though much battered, still stands today (fig. 47). Francesco made the decision to
bequeath his estate at Sommaia to the friars of San Marco in his first will of 1498,
adding almost as an afterthought that it had a chapel, though leaving the impressive
sum of five hundred florins for its decoration.18 By his second will, his thoughts about
the bequest had matured, and he makes the chapel building central to his gift:
because the said testator has a chapel at his estate and villa of Sommaia, in the contado of
Florence, since it is not yet consecrated, he wants nevertheless that it should be consecrated and
made into use as a church . . . he leaves to the said chapel, and for its upkeep [dota] all the build-
Figure 47. Chapel of

Sant’Andrea/San Michele,
Sommaia
Image not available
ings that are around and alongside the said chapel . . . that is: a building called the castle of
Sommaia, where the said chapel is, with all the rooms and halls of the said building, and with
the laborer’s house and the tower near the Chiosina river, and with all the furnishings and with
all the movable goods of whatever quality there should be . . . and in effect the whole hill of
Sommaia.19
In return he asks for sixty masses each year to be said in San Marco and an annual
office of the dead at the chapel at Sommaia for his and his wife’s souls.
Perhaps we can see in this extremely generous gift an attempt to “remake” Piero
del Pugliese’s involvement with the Observant Dominican hermitage at Lecceto.
Sommaia, after all, was in a relatively isolated country area—there were sixty com-
municants in the parish of San Ruffignano/San Michele at Easter 1515, and in the
seventeenth century the church building was used as a hermitage.20 It is, however, a
painted prayers 161
donation made under very different circumstances, when leaving such a bequest to
San Marco was a political as well as a charitable act.
The chapel is a modest, single-naved structure to the north of the villa with a
small bell tower. It was built by Borghini di Niccolò Cocchi Donati in 1464, accord-
ing to an inscription on the door.21 By the late eighteenth century, it was being used as
a stall for animals, and the indignant local priest of San Ruffignano closed the build-
ing and deconsecrated it. It is now not used.22 In the 1950s the frescoes in the interior
were published, and unfortunately not long after, these paintings, attributed to Paolo
Schiavo, were detached from the wall and stolen.23 Photographs of the frescoes and
the records of a seventeenth-century dispute over the patronage of the church, how-
ever, allow us partially to reconstruct the appearance of the interior. The only impor-
tant decoration that seems to have been eroded before the photographing of the
church was the image of Saint Andrew with his cross, formerly on the entrance wall
above the door, which, according to the documents, was “painted at the time of the
del Pugliese.”24
There were three altars, one on the east wall of the church and one on each side
wall.25 In the niche in the south wall was painted Saint Michael—probably a tribute
to the dedication of the parish—with Saint John the Baptist on his right and Saint
Paul on his left. On the walls surrounding them were Saint Christopher and Saint
Sebastian, with God the Father in an oculus directly above, flanked by the Archangel
Gabriel and the Virgin Annunciate (fig. 48). The Virgin and Child with Saints
Ignatius and Boniface were painted on the opposite wall, with Saints Francis and
Raphael on either side (fig. 49). Both compositions were set in classicizing fictive
architecture. Whether Francesco was, in fact, responsible for commissioning the lost
Saint Andrew or not, these frescoes must have been executed before 1488, when he
bought the villa, so the choice of the painter and decorative program cannot have
been his. Apart from the purchase of a bell in 1489, he probably made no new addi-
tions to his chapel for some years, concentrating instead on purchasing land to con-
firm his position in the area. Then, notwithstanding the fact that the chapel was
already highly ornate, in his will of 1498 he decided to give five hundred florins for the
building’s “construction and ornamentation.”
The Paintings
By 1503 Francesco had already decided on the design of his church, listing five paint-
ings in his will of that year, as noted above. Two of these works have been securely
identified. The “head of Christ made in Flanders, with two wings at either side,
painted by the hand of Filippo di fra Filippo” is now in the Venetian seminary, the
central panel attributed to the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula (figs. 57 and 58).
Figure 48. Anonymous, Saint Michael with Saints Figure 49. Paolo Schiavo, attributed, Virgin and
John the Baptist, Paul, Christopher, and Sebastian, Child with Saints Ignatius, Boniface, Francis, and
formerly Sommaia, chapel of Raphael, formerly Sommaia, chapel of
Sant’Andrea/San Michele Sant’Andrea/San Michele
Image not available
Figure 50. Fra Angelico, Last Judgment Triptych, Rome, Corsini Gallery
painted prayers 163
The “Transition of Saint Jerome by the hand of the said Sandro [di Botticello]” is
now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, generally described as the
Last Communion of Saint Jerome (fig. 59).26 In its original frame, it is crowned by a
lunette showing the Trinity surrounded by angels, attributed to Bartolommeo di
Giovanni.
The “Judgment painted by the hand of fra Giovanni,” now called Fra Angelico,
seems to be lost. Of the four surviving Last Judgments connected with this painter,
there is only one that would have been a suitable size for Franscesco’s chapel (55 × 38
cm). Now in the Corsini Gallery in Rome, this panel has wings also by Fra Angelico
that makes it unlikely to be the triptych at Sommaia. I nevertheless reproduce it here
to give an idea of the kind of painting mentioned in the will (fig. 50).
The “two wings at the side [of this Last Judgment], painted by the hand of Sandro
di Botticello” are probably two small paintings now in the State Hermitage Museum,
St. Petersburg, described as depicting the penitent Saint Jerome and Saint Dominic
(figs. 51 and 52). This connection was first made by Carlo Gamba in 1936 but has
been denied by more recent commentators, largely because of difficulties of recon-
structing the tabernacle—both saints are looking the same way, rather than facing
each other and the central scene, as would be normal practice. Moreover, the earliest
Figure 51. Sandro Botticelli, Saint Jerome, Figure 52. Sandro Botticelli, Saint
St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Vincent Ferrer, St. Petersburg, The
Museum State Hermitage Museum
Figure 53. Pesellino, Madonna and

Child with Six Saints, New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Bequest of Mary Stillman
Harkness, 1950
Image not available
secure notice we have of these panels (1896) shows they were framed together with
two panels of the Annunciation of the same height and exactly half the width.27
Leaving the problems of reconstruction aside for a moment, it is likely that these
panels (surely the wrong dimensions for a predella) are wings for a devotional image.
Given the iconography, it would be surprising if the central panel were not of a Last
Judgment. The figure normally identified as Saint Dominic is, in fact, Saint Vincent
Ferrer. He was a Dominican preacher canonized in 1455 and associated above all with
the prophecy of the coming apocalypse. He was often shown in the later fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries as pointing to a vision of the judging Christ, as he is
here.28 This saint had recently been depicted on the reverse of Ghirlandaio’s altar-
piece for the Tornabuoni chapel in Santa Maria Novella and was also a familiar sight
for anyone, like Francesco del Pugliese, who frequented San Marco.
The penitent Saint Jerome also has connections with the Observant Dominican
convent, being a direct copy of the predella of Botticelli’s altarpiece that stood in the
chapel of the Arte della Seta in the church there. Given the similarity in size of the
two figures, the same preparatory drawing may even have been used. I find it hard to
believe that the decision to repeat this figure was simply a bid to save time, given that
the iconography of Saint Vincent Ferrer is unusual and seemingly worked out anew;
the relationship with the San Marco altarpiece is, therefore, probably deliberate.
painted prayers 165
Image not available
Figure 54. Filippino Lippi, Adoration of the Magi, London, The National Gallery
The will mentions a painting by Pesellino but says only that it was “small” and
on panel: at present, it remains untraceable. There is a small painting in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art that may at least indicate the style of work. This panel,
a Madonna and Child with Six Saints, seems to be an independent work, rather than
part of a predella (fig. 53). Its painted surface measures 22.6 by 20.3 centimeters, a lit-
tle smaller than Botticelli’s Saint Jerome, and it is one of the few remaining religious
paintings by the artist of this size.29 Interestingly, Pesellino was noted during the fif-
teenth century for his skill at painting in a small format.30 Perhaps the cursory refer-
ence to this work in the will at least served to signify that it was a painting of quality.
I have also been unable to establish the identity of the Filippino Lippi Adoration of
the Magi mentioned in the testament. The only painting of the subject by this artist
that has no known original location is in the National Gallery in London (fig. 54). It
is generally considered to be an early work of Filippino, almost certainly painted
before 1488, when the land at Sommaia was purchased. This does not necessarily
mean that it cannot be the panel in the will, however, just that it was not painted for
this location. Some factors are favorable for connecting it with the Del Pugliese.
First, its early dating: Piero del Pugliese was one of Filippino’s earliest patrons, know-
ing him when he was still young. Second, the Thebaide-like background to the
Nativity scene includes small representations of saints that could be connected with
the family. To the upper right of the painting kneels Saint Bernard, receiving a vision
from the Virgin. Directly below this scene is the penitent Saint Jerome, and to the
right an equally penitent Magdalen. The scene as a whole is clearly suitable for a fam-
ily with an interest in hermitages, both Piero and Francesco wanting to establish
churches in isolated areas, as discussed above. This painting, like Botticelli’s Last
Communion of Saint Jerome, was in the Capponi collection in Florence by the eigh-
teenth century, and it may be that the Capponi acquired them from the same
source.31 Herbert Horne pointed out that the Filippino Adoration is described as
“grande” in the will, and the National Gallery panel is small in comparison with other
altarpieces. Size, however, is relative, and this early Filippino painting is considerably
larger than the works identified as being in the chapel. Unless more information is
found, however, any connection remains speculative.
How were these panels arranged? Of course, they are mainly small and portable,
but Francesco obviously wanted them to stay in the building, taking the trouble to
record them in detail to make sure they did so. A reconstruction is necessarily tenta-
tive, but I wonder if the paintings are listed in the order they are because the writer
was trying to replicate the experience of seeing them from the doorway to the chapel,
looking from left to right. The last painting mentioned, Filippino’s Adoration of the
Magi, is the largest, probably the most suitable for the main altar of the church at the
east end. The first to be described, the winged Flemish head of Christ, may have sat
on the altar in the niche on the left-hand side of the church, under the fresco of the
Virgin and Child. This would suggest that the winged Last Judgment would have been
placed on the altar underneath the painting of Saint Michael, on the right-hand side,
a suitable location in iconographic terms. The two smaller panels by Pesellino and
Botticelli may have been placed on the north and south walls between these altar
niches and the main altar.
Given the amount of attention that Francesco gave to his chapel in his wills, the
project must have been close to his heart. There are several aspects shared by the
paintings listed in the 1503 document, notably their small size. If it were not for the
will, both the Botticelli Last Communion and the Venice triptych would be character-
ized as works intended for private devotion in a domestic setting. It may well be that
this was their original function. Some of these paintings, certainly those by Fra
Angelico and Pesellino, cannot have been painted for the chapel, having been exe-
cuted long before 1498. We know that the Del Pugliese palace contained several
works by renowned masters, among them, perhaps, the “most precious” things
Francesco had to sell to pay his debts on his return from exile. It may have been the
case that these images were simply taken out of the domestic context and placed
painted prayers 167
in the chapel. However, Francesco’s will of 1498 allows five hundred florins for the
decoration of the chapel. It seems to me probable that the wings by Botticelli and
Filippino were additions made with their final location in mind, and the same can
possibly be said for the Last Communion of Saint Jerome. All these works are considered
to have been painted around this time on stylistic grounds.
As the testaments imply, the form of the chapel of Sant’Andrea was that of
a church in miniature, with the decoration of the three chapels completely in
Francesco’s hands. Given that he hoped this building would eventually fall under the
control of the friars of San Marco, I believe we can take the complex as a whole to be
one that this Savonarolan, at least, believed would be pleasing to Fra Girolamo’s mem-
ory. Rab Hatfield suggested that when Guasparre del Lama took over the patronage
rights of his chapel at Santa Maria Novella, the provisions he set down in his will
acted as a kind of contract between patron and religious institution.32 The circum-
stances in which Francesco’s first three wills were made are also significant. Drawn up
in the sacristy of San Marco, with friars acting as witnesses, we can assume that
Francesco believed his testaments would be met with approval by the convent, if they
were not positively influenced by them. It seems unlikely that he would have chosen to
name the paintings in his chapel if he had believed that this would not accord with the
Savonarolan message of the rest of his testament. Notably, the only other incident of
which I am aware of naming the painter of a work in a will of this period is in the tes-
tament of Jacopo Bongiani, another Savonarola supporter, or piagnone. The artist he
named was Lorenzo di Credi, who was himself a follower of Savonarola.33
Savonarola and Earlier Ecclesiastical Thought About Images

Savonarola actually said very little that was new about “correct” painting content or
style. His language is steeped in a Christian discourse about images that was cen-
turies old, and it is worth discussing his main points and putting them in the context
of this tradition. I have already made a case that we should consider spending on
ecclesiastical ornamentation against the background of ideas about the correct use of
wealth. The contrast between wasting money on the decoration of churches and
spending it on alms for God’s poor had been made by Saint Jerome in the fourth cen-
tury and was repeated periodically since, notably by Saint Bernard.34 During the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the development of the theory of magnificence by
humanists and churchmen alike gave theological justification for spending on splen-
did decoration, arguing that it was done in honor of God and for the good of the
community.35 Immediately after the Medici expulsion, Savonarola seemed to be rela-
tively sympathetic to this concept. In his De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae, first pub-
lished in 1495, he argues that although it is hard for rich men to enter heaven, they
can spend money justly in three ways: by building churches, or other things for the
honor of God; by buying things for themselves to aid them in their personal devo-
tion; or by giving alms to the poor.36
By 1496, however, he started to see danger in the ambivalent motivations that
fueled church and chapel building. He contrasts the wrongful spending of money on
personal honor with real charity:“If I should say to you ‘Give me ten ducats to give to
a poor man,’ you wouldn’t do it, but if I say to you,‘Spend a hundred on a chapel here
in San Marco,’ you would do it in order to place your arms there, and you would do it
in your honor, not for the honor of God.”37 He repeats this concern throughout his
sermons of this year, finally including spending on private houses built “with the
blood of the poor.”38 Unlike his most illustrious predecessor at San Marco, Saint
Antoninus, he does not temper his pronouncements with a recognition of the value
of virtuous spending.39 Rather, he likens those who spend money on chapels or fur-
nishings to the philosophers and Romans who murdered Christ and the apostles
with their idols.40 By returning to the more uncompromising stance of Saint Jerome
and his twelfth-century followers such as Hugues de Fouilloi and Peter the Chanter,
Savonarola eventually cuts through the tension between exterior display and interior
devotion so carefully negotiated by his more immediate predecessors, claiming that
the mixing of “church things with human pomp” led to confusion and sin. It is per-
haps hardly surprising that his sermons could be interpreted as socially revolution-
ary. The Dominican friar Giovanni Caroli attacked Savonarola in his pamphlets of
1497, claiming that his followers were the gente nuova and plebeians who wished to
overturn the social order by attacking privileges and the goods that went with them.41
Interestingly, most noticeably in his first will, Francesco del Pugliese gave most of his
belongings to Dominican convents and other charitable institutions, with no connec-
tion to potentially “worldly” glory. As well as his bequests to San Marco, he gave a
farm and 1,500 florins to Santa Lucia and land to the hospital of Santa Maria
Nuova.42
Apart from the incorrect use of wealth, Savonarola also inveighed against what he
saw as a fashion for overornamentation in churches for other reasons. Visual extrav-
agance, like the playing of organs and choral polyphony prevented proper contempla-
tion of God. “The true Christian loves . . . exterior simplicity” as this reflects
the interior simplicity needed to reach God: “Today they make images (figure) in
churches with so much artifice and so much ornament and elaboration that they
extinguish the light of God and true contemplation, and one does not consider God,
but only the artifice in the figure.”43 Once again, these complaints were not particu-
larly novel. Savonarola believed that church decoration should be imbued with
painted prayers 169
“onestà” and “semplicità”; Saint Dominic’s Acta Canonizationis of 1233 repeatedly said
buildings should have “honestas” and “simplicitas.” Saint Bernard also claimed that
images could be a distraction from contemplation of God. The Cistercian statutes in
fact banned painting and sculpture from churches and monastic buildings so that
they did not disturb meditation. All these sources complain of “superfluitas,” as does
Savonarola.44 A more immediate contemporary, Giovanni Caroli, who was, as we
have seen, a staunch opponent, also linked a wider decline in morals with a love for
ornament and a decrease in sobriety of expression.45 In some ways, Savonarola was
simply rearticulating the growing fashion for order and clarity in church decoration
that was discussed in Chapter 6.
Savonarola’s occasional chastisement of painters is also reflected in near-
contemporary sermons by other preachers. For example, he rails against the “dishon-
est” representation of the Virgin, dressed like a prostitute, and the use of people’s real
features in the representation of saints, saying,“You painters, you act wrongly, if you
knew the scandal that follows, and what I know, you would not paint in this way.”46
The Franciscan Fra Bartolommeo da Colle in 1474 blamed painters for mistaken doc-
trine, claiming that “to get money, they . . . would paint anything.”47 Antoninus’s cau-
tionary words to painters misleading their public by depicting images contrary to
doctrine or provoking libidiousness are now well known.48 As more sermons of the
fifteenth century are studied, further examples may come to light.
Savonarola’s key point in his discussion of human display in general was the
dichotomy between appearing and being, exterior and interior. This is not entirely
new—Antoninus discusses a similar division in his Summa—but it is perhaps more
prominent in Savonarola’s preaching than previously, and more forcefully applied.
During his time, he claimed the devil found “beautiful ceremonies, churches full of
drapes and organs, and he says this is not mental form nor interior cult, but the
images and colors are solely outside”;49 men today “have their hearts in their eyes, and
they don’t have their eyes in their hearts, they love only things that are outside.”50 This
is especially important because, as we shall see below, through correct meditation on
an image with the exterior sense of sight, Savonarola believed one could achieve a
perfected, internal vision, which would lead one to God.
Praying and Painting

Despite the many precedents for Savonarola’s opinions it is clear that those people
who flocked to hear his sermons perceived them as something of a novelty: “He
introduced an almost new method of pronouncing the word of God,” enthused
Bartolommeo Cerretani, and most other commentators note the unparelleled effect
his sermons had on the population of Florence, many citizens modifying their behav-
ior according to his prescriptions.51
On reading the sermons of his immediate Florentine predecessors, it is easy to
appreciate why Savonarola gained such a large audience and his preaching style
seemed so different from what had gone before. The Lenten sermons of 1489
recorded by Antonio di Piero da Filicaia, for example, all have a similar structure.52
Based on a passage from the Evangelists, each concentrates on a particular vice.
Typically, the unnamed preacher defines the sin, listing characteristics that his audi-
ence should avoid, and then expounds each point in turn. For example, hate is evil,
according to Saint Bernard. There are seven unwanted results of hate. The first has to
do with material things, the second is damage to one’s family, the third is hatred
between neighbors, the fourth is hatred of one’s homeland, and so on.53 Although
there is much work to be done on sermons of this period before any generalizations
can securely be made, this “dividing of sermons into parts” seems to have been
extremely common and must have become rather predictable.54 It was unquestion-
ably echoed in many other sermons made by various preachers in the 1470s and
1480s.55 It may be that sermons became formulaic due to the use of Latin sermon
books composed as manuals for preachers. These provided a skeleton set of sermons
on biblical texts to be preached at suitable points during the ecclesiastical year, and
the number of extant manuscript versions of these model sermons remaining in Italy
would suggest they were widely used.56 The effect of fluency and spontaneity of
Savonarola’s passionate, image-filled sermons, which are rarely separated into parts
and rarely list items, befitted someone who claimed to be divinely inspired.
Much of the rhetorical manner of Savonarola’s sermons is bound up in the paint-
ing of word pictures. Of itself, this is far from unusual in mendicant, especially
Franciscan, preaching, which had a long tradition of detailed description of sacred
scenes that were thought to be efficacious in stimulating the audience’s imagination
and empathy.57 Indeed, in some cases it seems that preachers gave sermons alongside
mystery plays to heighten the visual sense and vividness of their words.58 The aim was
to make biblical stories seem more immediate and to encourage identification with
the trials of saints and biblical protagonists. Savonarola went a step further than this,
however. Basing his preaching style on the Thomist concept of the efficacy of mental
images in reaching the deity, Savonarola treats his images as if he were analyzing a
real painting, going through each element and discussing its significance. His treatise
Triumphis Crucis makes his method explicit. Here he explains that all knowledge
starts from the senses, but with an image it is possible for the devotee to lift his or her
eyes to consider invisible things, which are too vast to comprehend without this
starting point. Also, through describing this image and placing it in the mind’s eye of
painted prayers 171
his reader or listener, the message of his sermon will be consistently remembered and
pondered.59
Judging by contemporary accounts of his sermons, this method worked.
Cerretani, for example, relates how in Savonarola’s sermons of Lent 1494,“he started
to build an ark, as Noah did in the Old Testament, and in every sermon he continued
to build it with another four planks, with wonderful exposition.”60 Piero Parenti
reports a similar metaphor that the friar used in July 1495: “he figured the city of
Florence as a ship in the middle of the sea surrounded by other ships, which, sinking
because of a tempest, wanted to attach themselves to our boat, showing that only our
land was safe, all the other parts of Italy were ruined.”61 Even Savonarola’s detractors
used his images as an easily memorable shorthand for the preacher’s opinions:
Francesco Altoviti’s 1496 tract against the friar is entitled “Defensione contro all’arca
di Fra Girolamo.”
In a late fifteenth-century zibaldone, largely consisting of summaries of sermons,
the anonymous compiler records Savonarola’s preaching on Good Friday 1496. The
narrator tells us that Fra Girolamo had received in the night a “fantasia e ispirazione”
of a ladder, which he had seen in the Old Testament. Each step of the ladder had a
virtue that one had to achieve to become closer to God. Although the ladder to virtue
was a familiar image, notably used in the popular devotional text Monte Sancto di Dio,
our compiler points out that Savonarola, unlike other preachers of his day, “did not
want to give this sermon to make people cry and weep. But that instead he wanted to
attract people to devotion and interior mental cogitation . . . [as exterior] devotion
lasts little longer than the tears. But from the contemplation of the seven steps comes
delights and interior mental thoughts that yield more fruit and are more useful for
salvation.”62 This active involvement with an image is something Savonarola made
explicit earlier in the sermon. After describing a complicated word picture of a
mountain on a plain with Florence and Rome at either side and rivers of blood lead-
ing to them, he breaks off, explaining that he does not want to interpret this image
(figura) any more because the conclusion is clear,“but as for the details, what those red
crosses, that robe, that sword, those masks and those other details signify, consider it
yourselves: I’ll leave this exposition to you.”63 Not only does Savonarola assume that a
kind of allegorical visual analysis that we would now consider quite sophisticated was
in the reach of his (mass) audience, but he also believes that this mental habit will
help them to lead a holy life.
Savonarola’s intention was not to influence pictorial composition with this word
painting. Quite the contrary. The whole point of Savonarola’s images is that they are
created by the mind’s eye. Influenced by Neoplatonic conceptions of contemplation
on an internalized beautiful image as a way of reaching the divine, the use of “vision”
as a means of attaining salvation was his key metaphor. If he did want something that
he said in his sermons to be painted, as he did in his Predica dell’Arte del Ben’ Morire, he
was quite explicit about this, explaining that those who felt more prone to sin may
need a concrete stimulus for their contemplation. Paintings could be used as a cata-
lyst for visual prayer. Moreover, these images had the benefit of being readily under-
standable by all, including the women, children, and illiterate men who could be
moved “like plants” by what they saw; it was especially important that they were not
exposed to potentially harmful visual stimuli.64

In a passage in the Vita Latina, an account of the life of Savonarola written in the 1520s,
the narrator describes the events that occurred in San Marco on the Feast of the
Assumption 1497. Savonarola had ordered that all the gates of the convent should be
opened to the public. His pious followers entered and went into the second cloister,
where they came to “a beautiful and devout [bella et devota] chapel in honor of the
Virgin, which was built with marvelous skill; among other things there was an altar
there, built with marvelous beauty with a sculpted image of the glorious Virgin, who
had in her arms her only Son who was sleeping, of so much beauty that they seemed to
be alive, and he laid his head on the breast of his Mother, and it rendered people dumb
with devotion.” After vespers, Savonarola went to the chapel to give a sermon and pray:
“It seemed to [his audience] that they were in paradise. . . . And the sermon having fin-
ished, in front of this image of the Virgin, [Savonarola] said a devout and beautiful
[devota et bella] prayer.”65 The seen qualities of the chapel are, in this text, made exactly
analogous with the heard qualities of Savonarola’s prayer. They are both bella and
devota. Using similar devices of simplicity and clarity, they inspired devotion, a height-
ened interior mental state, that struck their audience dumb. This expectation, that seen
and heard stimuli could produce the same response, was not an unfamiliar one in the
quattrocento. It tends to be discussed in the context of parallels made between poetry
and painting in a humanistic discourse confined to elite groups.66 In the case of
Savonarola, however, I believe it is valid to see a wider dissemination of this idea. The
friar implicitly approves of the images in this chapel, despite the fact—contrary to
some commentators’ analyses of his sermons—that the chapel was highly decorated:
“The Holy Virgin was sitting on a throne, on the steps of which were five short mottoes
in letters of gold . . . the ornamentation of the ceiling and walls of the chapel were of
gold and of silver, silk and ornate tapestries.”67 In this example, rather than distracting
the devotees from their prayer, the rich ornamentation added to the emotional inten-
sity of the moment.“Beauty,” as represented verbally by descriptions of the rich materi-
als used to decorate the chapel, is given particular powers to arouse piety. Elsewhere in
the text, as we shall see, beauty is characterized, not by richness, but by simplicity.
painted prayers 173
Throughout the Pseudo-Burlamacchi’s account, the images that tend to be asso-

ciated with Savonarola are described in similar ways: in the convent he wished to
build, Fra Girolamo would place “in the church, not frivolous figures, but simple and
devout ones, without any vanity.”68 On the procession on Palm Sunday, the friars of
San Marco follow “a humble and devout tabernacle on which was painted the image
of our Savior seated above ‘the meek donkey.’”69 The word devoto is used in every case.
The translation of this word as “devout” in reference to painting style is obviously
inadequate. In his discussion of the term, Michael Baxandall drew from an early
fifteenth-century preaching manual:“The fourth style [of preaching] is more devout
(devotus) and is like the sermons of the saints which are read in church. It is the most
easily understood and is good for edifying and instructing the people. . . . The fathers
and holy doctors of the Church, Saint Augustine and other saints, kept to this style.
They shunned elaboration and told us their divine inspirations in one coherent dis-
course.”70 It is illuminating to compare this description with these contemporaries’
assessments of Savonarola’s preaching style:
He introduced an almost new method of pronouncing the word of God, namely the Apostolic
manner, without dividing the sermon into parts, without proposing questions, and shunning
cadences and the ornaments of eloquence, as his only aim was to expound some passages of the
Old Testament, and to introduce the simplicity of the primitive church.71
The voice and the enunciation of the Father [Savonarola] was such that he was heard extremely
well universally by all, so that it seemed a miraculous thing, and [he preached] with such spirit
that he seemed a Saint Paul.72
The friar’s clarity and ostensible artlessness were perceived as an index of his piety
and devotion. Unlike Georges Didi-Huberman, I would not see Baxandall’s definition
of devoto as being incompatible with the Thomist concept that devotion was the most
difficult and important Christian virtue to attain, reached through contemplation of
the divine image and the acceptance of the shortcomings of man.73 Clarity of exposi-
tion, both verbal and visual, offers a starting point, accessible to all whether educated
or not. The difficulty lies in contemplating this extrinsic matter and seeing it with the
mind’s, or soul’s, eye. A simple and easily graspable image of any type lends itself to
this kind of personal meditation because it contains no external distractions,“vanities”
of learning or worldly pretension, and it is all the more worthy for not being confined
to those who were educated. Savonarola, in his Defensione dell’oratione mentale, exhorts
his audience to search God “neither in Heaven nor on Earth, but in their own hearts.”74
Some images were able to help in this difficult process more than others.
Perhaps the kind of visual images that followers of Savonarola would favor were
those that aroused in them emotions similar to those of his sermons, which were per-
ceived to be fluent, unornamented, simple, and able to inspire devotion. As I dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, the aesthetic of simplicity and order in church
decoration had already become fashionable by the later quattrocento. Perhaps we
should see Savonarola’s rhetoric of nonrhetoric as an appropriation of the concept
that beauty should be equated with simplicity and, through this, equated with the
divine. Moreover, he popularized this notion and gave it a broader application.
Does this help us recognize paintings that would be attractive to a piagnone? The
inventory of the goods of Alessandro Nasi, a follower of Savonarola, proves fruitful
in this light.75 He owned many more religious images than his uncles, Bartolommeo
and Piero—ten in his main residence as opposed to their three each—with a greater
variety of subject matter, including a Crucifixion, a Nativity, and a Saint Catherine as
well as the ubiquitous Madonnas. Significantly, of the thirteen religious images listed
as being in his town palace and villa, six are described as either “alla fiamingha” or
“fiandrescho.” One of these is a tapestry of Christ, which hung above the great stair-
case, and the others were paintings.76 Given that Paula Nuttall’s investigation of 349
inventories from the Pupilli archive 1439 to 1510 uncovered in total only two panels
identified as Flemish, we have to see Alessandro’s choice of religious images as
unusual.77 We can, perhaps, relate this to his wish to own images appropriate for the
kind of private prayer espoused by Savonarola.
The word devoto was commonly used for the description of Flemish painting in
Italian descriptions during the fifteenth century. It may have been perceived to have a
simplicity that much Italian work lacked. We see this in Alessandra Strozzi’s admira-
tion for her Flemish “volto santo,” because it was “a divota image, and beautiful,” and
Michelangelo’s alleged assertion that “Flemish painting will . . . please the devout bet-
ter than any painting of Italy . . . not through the vigor and goodness of the painting,
but owing to the goodness of the devout person.”78
Although she made no explicit connection with Savonarola, Nuttall has noted
the influence of northern painting in the work of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi.
Whereas in their work in the 1480s they, along with painters such as Ghirlandaio and
Piero di Cosimo, borrowed motifs from northern paintings, by the 1490s both these
painters seemed to be looking more wholeheartedly at northern stylistic devices.
Examples of this can be seen in Botticelli’s two late Pietàs in Munich and Milan,
which seem self-consciously to emulate the emotional intensity of Flemish works of
the same subject, attempting to invoke in their viewers a similar mental state. Here, in
Nuttall’s words, we see a shift from “imitation” of Flemish painting of the 1480s to
“total assimilation.”79 The same could be said of Filippino’s Valori chapel triptych
painted prayers 175
(figs. 45 and 46). The very form of this winged altarpiece takes on a format associated
with the most renowned piece of northern painting in Florence, the Portinari trip-
tych. Like Hugo van der Goes in the Portinari Altarpiece, Filippino eschews natura-
listic scale in favor of symbolic size differentiation: in both altarpieces the Virgin,
should she stand up, would tower over the other figures. The combination of highly
naturalistic details confounded by their setting or scale is also possibly inspired by
the North. His placing of the “real” figures of Mary Magdalen and Saint John the
Baptist within niches normally associated with sculptural pieces is also reminiscent
of Van Eyck’s treatment of Adam and Eve in the Ghent Altarpiece, replicated in sev-
eral Flemish engravings of the period. The figure of Saint John, in particular, with his
left arm raised to his shoulder, his left hand covering his draped genitalia, and one
foot placed as if exiting the panel and entering the viewer’s space, is curiously like Van
Eyck’s Adam.80
Francesco del Pugliese also chose to have a Flemish work in his chapel and, in his
case, one that was associated with a sacred local relic. A copy of Francesco’s Head of
Christ forms the central panel of the cover for the miraculous sweating crucifix in the
Carmine.81 The other winged work in the Sommaia project was by Fra Angelico.
Well before the advent of Savonarola, a connection was made between the holiness of
this friar’s life and the images he painted. In 1469 Fra Domenico Corella explains that
“Giovanni, the angelic painter . . . flourished in his many virtues, also mild in his skill,
honest in his religion, so above other painters, to him deservedly was given one grace,
of rendering the Virgin.”82 In his 1481 commentary on the Divine Comedy Cristoforo
Landino also claimed devoto as one of Fra Angelico’s qualities.83
Another work that belonged to the Del Pugliese should be mentioned here, a tab-
ernacle that, according to Vasari, came into the hands of Duke Cosimo by 1550.84 The
central panel, a relief by Donatello (generally identified as one now in the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London or the Madonna of the Clouds in Boston), was flanked
by two wings by Fra Bartolommeo, with the Adoration of the Child and the Presentation
on the inside, and the Annunciation in grisaille on the outside (figs. 55 and 56).85
Whether this work did indeed belong to Piero del Pugliese as Vasari says or, as
seems more likely, was Francesco’s is now impossible to ascertain.86 Fascinating, though,
is this predilection for surrounding the small works of renowned older masters—Fra
Angelico, Donatello, and the Flemish master—with wings by younger contempo-
raries—Botticelli, Fra Bartolommeo and Filippino Lippi. The central pieces are pro-
tected by the wings as something precious, only to be looked on through deliberate
choice, rather than have their beauty squandered through becoming familiar. As
Savonarola himself said in his Predica dell’Arte del Ben’ Morire, devout images should
be “often in front of the eyes, but not so that you make a habit of seeing them so that
Figure 55. Donatello, The Virgin and Child,

London, Victoria and Albert Museum
Image not available
then they do not move you.”87 The experience of looking is both intensified by
restricting access and becomes an active choice in which the viewer participates.88
The reason why the Del Pugliese triptychs, in particular, were so precious is not only
because of their sacred subject matter but because they were beautiful. Fra Angelico,
Donatello, and Netherlandish masters were among the most praised in Florence at
this time. Indeed, their images were efficacious precisely because of their beauty; they
were beautiful because they were so devout. Inner meaning matched exterior form.
Looking at the paintings that Francesco del Pugliese chose to place in his chapel
at Sommaia as a whole, it is possible to see how they could have been perceived as
suitable starting points for the pious mental exercises advocated by the friar. Their
small size required close contemplation. We should perhaps see this placing of “pri-
vate” devotional pieces within a “public” space in itself as an avowal of the superiority
of individual prayer and internal contemplation over verbal declarations and external
ceremony.89
painted prayers 177
In the final part of this chapter, I examine how Savonarola’s writings can help us
to consider ways to look at two of the works that were placed in Francesco’s chapel,
those that we can safely identify: the triptych in the Venetian seminary by Filippino
Lippi and the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula, and Botticelli’s Last Communion
of Saint Jerome.
The Water of Life: Filippino Lippi’s Samaritan Woman at the Well

It is possible that Francesco bought the Flemish panel that formed the central part of
this triptych when he was in the Netherlands; we know from a letter about the pos-
sibility of his accompanying Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna northward that he did
travel there for business.90 However, given that this kind of panel was highly fashion-
able in Florence at the time and available for purchase on the open market, he could
also have bought it at home.91
Fortunately, although the panels were separated for some time before Bianca
Hatfield Strens recognized this connection, the original frame still exists, so we know
how the three pieces fitted together. The episode of the Samaritan woman goes to
the left of the Head of Christ, and the Magdalen to the right (figs. 57 and 58).92 When
the wings of this triptych were open, the viewer would be immediately confronted
with this central panel. The image of the head of Christ, caught on the cloth of
Figure 56. Fra

Bartolommeo, The
Presentation at the Temple,
and The Adoration of the
Child, Florence, Uffizi
Image not available

Image not available
Figure 57. Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula and Filippino Lippi, Sommaia Triptych, Venice, Pinacoteca
Manfrediana
Veronica on his way to crucifixion, stares out, full face, at the viewer. The wings show
other encounters with the Savior: on the left is the scene of Jesus meeting the
Samaritan woman at the well; and on the right, the resurrected Christ encountering
Mary Magdalen in the garden and telling her that she should not touch him.
Filippino shows the Samaritan woman as if speaking to Jesus, her left hand raised as
if asking a question. Christ, his left hand pointing to the vase and his right to his
chest, provides the answer: “da mihi hanc aquam.” The flow of her draperies and her
pose suggest a movement toward Christ, from left to right. On the left panel there is
a resolution, through contemplation of the literally and figuratively central figure of
Christ. The Samaritan woman shown in the act of conversion on the left becomes
the penitent Magdalen on the right; their idealized profiles provide near-identical
mirror images. She is wrapped in humble robes, her hair loose about her shoulders,
gazing up at Christ who holds his left hand in an attitude of blessing. The Magdalen
holds her hands out in a pose of amazed prayer and kneels at his feet.
Both scenes have titoli underneath them. On the Samaritan woman panel is
inscribed: “si scires/d onum/dei/damihi/hanc/aquam,” and under the
Magdalen scene, “rabboni/noli me/tangere,” derived from the account of
painted prayers 179
Image not available
Figure 58. Filippino Lippi, Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well and Noli me
Tangere, Venice, Pinacoteca Manfrediana, detail of fig. 57
the stories in John 4:10 and 20:26–27 respectively. These titles are interesting as their
function for identifying the subject of the paintings is somewhat redundant. Both
scenes are painted in such a way as to make their subject absolutely clear to anyone
with the most rudimentary biblical knowledge. The text used is, notably, not taken
directly from the Vulgate but adapted to form a dialogue rather than a description,
giving each scene the quality of a tableau vivant by putting words into the protagonists’
mouths. His words written in the second-person singular, Christ is simultaneously

addressing the woman in the painting and its viewers, who notionally take the place
of the newly converted Samaritan woman or the Magdalen. By gazing at the central
head of the Savior, the viewer replicates the link of eyes between Christ and the two
holy women on either side. The subject of the shutters locates the audience’s response
to the central panel in the biblical narrative. It provides a role for the viewer to play
and shapes his or her contemplation.
The implied addressees in this work—the Samaritan woman and Mary
Magdalen—are both female. There is no extant evidence that directly supports the
following assertion, but perhaps we can connect this painting to Francesco del
Pugliese’s wife, Alessandra Bonsi. Like Francesco, she was a staunch supporter of
Savonarola: she became a nun at the convent of Santa Lucia on the Via San Gallo
after her husband’s death. She provided for a chapel in the church there in her will
but asked to be buried in San Marco.93 As already stated, Francesco’s will asks for
prayers for her as well as him to be said in the chapel at Sommaia, which would imply
that the chapel was intended to serve for both of them in life as well. At any rate, it
seems likely that the models of behavior of conversion and penitence implied by this
work would be especially relevant to a female audience. Notably, the Vita Latina tells
us that Alessandra owned the friar’s copy of his sermons on the minor prophets.94
The sermon that Savonarola gave on the text of the Samaritan woman at the well
appeared in his series on the minor prophet Amos:
there is not anything more delectable or more sweet than the contemplation of the deeds of Christ:
sometimes you are there at the villa and go walking: it would be better if you contemplated the
deeds of Christ. You don’t pay attention to anything except wandering round and chatting. Holy
men don’t do this, rather, they constantly think and ruminate on the deeds of the life of the Savior.
Therefore place these deeds in front of your eyes so they will be a source of flowing water [aqua
viva], that will take you to eternal life.95
The Samaritans, according to Savonarola, were evil people who adored idols.
Thus Filippino—typically—is presumably attempting historical accuracy with the
painting of the centaur on the wall of the well. The wall is cracking as the new dis-
pensation takes away the need to worship idols. Savonarola interpreted the passage
as showing that the only thing that could satisfy one’s thirsty soul was the water of
God: “Riches don’t quench your thirst; honors don’t quench your thirst; nothing of
the world quenches your thirst, nor ever satisfies you.”96 There is a pictorial contrast
between the Samaritan woman, wearing her flimsy, complex robes and intricately
braided hair and carrying an ornate, all’antica urn, with the lowly figure of the
painted prayers 181
Magdalen. The latter has accepted the central message of redemption through
Christ, and her thirst has been quenched.
Whether Filippino was directly influenced by this particular sermon or not is not
really the point. This painting, commissioned by a piagnone, either Alessandra or
Francesco, prompts its audience to look and to contemplate using images in a way
that Savonarola condoned here and elsewhere. Imitative association was a meditative
technique familiar by this period. We have seen the effects of it in the depiction of
individuals as saints, like that of Piero del Pugliese as Saint Nicholas at Lecceto, and
in traditional donor portraits, where the person who paid for the painting is held up
as a worthy example to follow. Here, however, a living individual is no longer depicted
as being actually present at a scene, but the viewer’s presence is demanded and
implicit nevertheless. Roles are suggested by the wings, and participation in them is
demanded by the central panel. We “place Christ’s deeds first in front of our eyes” and
then, through imaginative contemplation, we participate in them through our mind’s
eye. Exterior display gives way to interior devotion.
The Art of Dying Well: Botticelli’s Transito di San Girolamo

In 1492 Ser Bartolommeo Dei described the manner of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death to
his uncle, Benedetto. The Magnifico “died so well and with as much patience and
knowledge and reverence for God, as excellent religion and divine spirit, with such
holy words in his mouth that he seemed like a new Saint Jerome.”97 Jerome’s creden-
tials for acting as an example of virtuous death were spelled out in an account of his
demise then thought to be by his follower Eusebius, Il Devoto Transito del Glorioso
Sancto Hieronymo, printed in Florence in several editions in the late 1480s and early
1490s.98 The text explains that the saint, because he died a martyr, now stood “with
the green palm in the blessed kingdom.” There are two kinds of martyrdom: one is to
submit to the sword of tyranny, and the other is to “suffer voluntarily every infirmity
and mental and bodily pain for love of justice.”99 For this reason, Jerome was the “per-
fect martyr,” one whose manner of dying in old age could be more readily copied by
Florentine citizens than the heroic and bloody feats of other martyr saints.
The description of Botticelli’s Last Communion of Saint Jerome in Francesco’s will as
“il transito di San Girolamo” would confirm the Pseudo-Eusebius text as the source
for this painting, which includes a description of Jerome taking his final sacrament.
In fact, though the “transition” of Saint Jerome from this world to the next forms the
climax of this work, many of the chapters are taken up with the saint’s words on the
vanities of human life. The general tenor of the saint’s exhortations would be familiar
to any of Savonarola’s audience: for the sin of luxury “God sent the flood into the
world at the time of Noah”; the rich, noble, and powerful with their luxury, pride, and
Image not available
Figure 59. Sandro Botticelli, The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913
avarice “are thieves who usurp and consume that which [belongs] to the poor . . . and
they build great buildings and honored palaces to be contemplated by human eyes
and to be well esteemed; and Christ’s poor die.” Because of this, these people suffer
from a “great blindness” and “never think of death.”100 Perhaps for Francesco del
Pugliese, the account of the death of the first Saint Jerome was a deliberate reminder
of the sufferings of his namesake at his execution in May 1498.
painted prayers 183
Botticelli’s tiny panel (34.3 × 25.4 cm), now in New York, shows the aged Saint
Jerome kneeling on the floor of a hutlike bedroom, supported by two friars, taking
communion from a priest with two acolytes holding candles behind him (fig. 59).
The martyr’s palms surrounding the crucifix at the head of Jerome’s simple bed
remind us of what we are witnessing, the perfect death or, rather, a perfect example of
the process of dying.
Savonarola’s sermon on the art of dying well was given in November 1496, part of
the series on Ruth and Michea.101 It was immediately published, with Savonarola’s
compliance, as a separate text with three woodcuts, entitled Dell’Arte del Ben’ Morire.
It seems likely that Savonarola had as his inspiration the Ars Moriendi, another devo-
tional handbook on how to die well that was published as a blockbook comprising
twelve woodcuts and that had been extremely popular in northern Europe since the
mid-fifteenth century.102 This sermon is crucial for understanding Savonarola’s atti-
tudes to painting. As usual with him, it is structured around images. This time, how-
ever, he asks that the images should not be mental, but that “if you are wanting to
prepare yourself well for death, you should have three carte painted.”103 He then fur-
nishes descriptions of three scenes that were to form the basis for the woodcuts that
accompany the text in the three Florentine editions of this sermon made between
1497 and 1498.104
In this sermon Savonarola emphasizes the importance of always pondering the
imminence of death and how being aware of death will prevent lapses into sin. He
explains this mental habit in visual terms: “have made a pair of spectacles that are
called the spectacles of death.”105 He explains this metaphor: “if you wish to act well
and flee sin, have a strong perception (fantasia) of death. These are the spectacles that
I tell you to make, so that death should be always impressed on your imagination, and
in all of your actions you remember death.”106 He understands that however good
people’s intentions are, the “spectacles of death” often fall off, so they need some
way—a hat or a hook—to keep them on. This has to be “something concrete (sensi-
bile) that reminds you of death, because perception comes from the senses, and is
moved by concrete things.”107 You have to see death to be able to think of it. This can
be achieved by looking at burials, tombs, and dying people, but “if you are very fragile,
you would have to have death painted in your house, and also carry in your hand a lit-
tle bone memento mori and look at it often.”108
He suggests that people have three images of death in their house.“The first that
you have to have painted on a card is Paradise above and the Inferno below . . . look
at this image very well, and know that death is always with you to take you away from
this life, as if saying to you, ‘You have to die in any case and you cannot escape from
my hands; look where do you want to go, either up here in Paradise, or down there in
Figure 60. Death Showing a Man

Heaven and Hell, illustration to
Savonarola, Predica dell’arte del ben
morire, Florence: Bartolomeo de’
Libri, 1494
Image not available
Hell?’”109 The woodcut to the printed edition graphically illustrates these instructions
with a male figure standing by Death between depictions of heaven and hell (fig. 60).
Death asks him,“O qua su,”“O qua giu”? (Up here? Or down there?). Perhaps a Last
Judgment, such as the one by Fra Angelico bought by Francesco del Pugliese for his
chapel, would have fulfilled the same function, with the viewer notionally taking
the place of the man in the woodcut, pondering his posthumous fate. If the
St. Petersburg wings did surround this image, its Savonarolan allusions would be
made clear through the combination of Saint Vincent Ferrer and Savonarola’s name
saint, Jerome (figs. 50 to 52). As with the Filippino Lippi sportelli, they comment on
the subject of the main panel. Indeed, comparing the woodcut of the second, 1497,
edition with the Saint Vincent panel, I wonder if Botticelli was influenced by the
pose of the figure of Death in the conception of his Saint Vincent. Both gesture
upward with their right arms toward God surrounded by angels playing trumpets.
“The second card . . . is this, that you have painted a man, who has started to
become weak, with Death standing at the door and knocking to come in” (fig. 61).110
This is intended to be an illustration of Savonarola’s warnings about distractions
painted prayers 185
Figure 61. Man

Lying on His
Deathbed,
illustration to
Savonarola,
Predica dell’arte
del ben morire,
Florence:
Bartolomeo
de’ Libri, 1494
Image not available
from penitence and prayer at the point of death, when the devil introduces worldly
concerns directly into the mind of the invalid and encourages his wife and child also
to distract him. The last card should depict a scene after the illness has run more of
its course, of “an invalid in bed, who was conducted to the extreme point to make
penance” (fig. 62).111 This is to act as a reminder of the four things that the sick man
should do to avoid temptations of the devil: meditate on the crucifix, repent of his
sins, confess and take communion, and, along with the people around the deathbed,
pray. The stakes are high: the deathbed is your last chance of salvation. If you do not
die well, your chances for eternal salvation are dashed.
Despite this, and his huge following in Florence, no painted versions of
Savonarola’s suggested woodcuts survive. There are, however, three surviving copies
of Botticelli’s Last Communion of Saint Jerome.112 These paintings do not “illustrate”
Savonarola’s words in his Predica dell’Arte del Ben’ Morire and are not copies of the
woodcuts, but the paintings, the Devoto Transito del Glorioso Sancto Hieronymo, and
Savonarola’s sermon are united in having the same function: indicating how to
achieve a good death.
There is no particular paragraph in this text of Il Devoto Transito that corresponds

to the scene as painted by Botticelli. The account of Jerome’s last communion is a
long one, and the action of kneeling on the floor to take the sacramental wafer is
interspersed with Jerome’s opinions on the importance of fearing God and dying in
penitence, professing himself unworthy of the host. Like Savonarola, Jerome treats
dying as a prolonged process that is essential for the well-being of the soul.
Botticelli paints the scene in a strange hutlike chamber, with rushes for the walls
and two glassless windows at either side. It seems like the space is not enclosed: we
can see the edges of the wooden roof at either upper corner. The viewer is placed just
outside the space, looking in. Just as the Pseudo-Eusebian and the Savonarolan texts
treat of the period of “dying,” a liminal space between life and death, Botticelli places
the viewer of this painting at a threshold, contemplating a step into another world.
The location of Jerome’s death is stark. Although renowned for his learning, Jerome
is given no books or other distractions from his contemplation of death, just as a
good Savonarolan death should be. His cardinal’s hat hangs discarded, as worldly
honors and study are no longer relevant. Everything has to be concentrated in his
communion with his maker.
The viewer is in no doubt as to the end of the story. From the lunette, God the
Father and the son look down on the saint who is soon to join them in heaven. For
those less certain of their own end, contemplating this work inspires the onlooker to
don the “occhiali della morte” so crucial for leading a virtuous life and being prepared
to make a good death. Typically, in his sermon Dell’Arte di Ben’ Morire, Savonarola was
not proposing a radical departure from precedent. Il Transito di San Girolamo is itself
largely a handbook dedicated to suggesting how to die well. Savonarola’s version goes
further in presenting a readily graspable three-point plan that leads to salvation, all
based on visual images because of their perceived efficacy in arousing devoted con-
templation and in staying fixed in the memory. Botticelli’s Last Communion of Saint
Jerome, placed in the chapel at Sommaia, would have acted as a permanent reminder
of both these texts, of the martyrdom that all beleaguered people can achieve through
contemplation of suffering, and of the need to eschew all worldly distractions to con-
centrate on the salvation of one’s soul.

Francesco del Pugliese was elected prior for January and February 1498. On the Feast
of the Epiphany (6 January) that year, the Signoria visited San Marco in procession
to pay homage to Savonarola by kissing his hand.113 Richard Trexler has noted
Savonarola’s appropriation of Laurentian ceremonial identity by taking on the role of
a Magus in the “liturgical drama” that took place in San Marco on that day, but here
he acts as the Christ Child, and the Signoria, Francesco among them, play the wise
painted prayers 187
Figure 62. Man on

the Point of Death,
illustration to
Savonarola,
Predica dell’arte
del ben morire,
Florence:
Bartolomeo
de’ Libri, 1494
Image not available
men coming in homage to their new king.114 By this point, however, the implied rules
for taking on roles had changed. For followers of Savonarola, it was deeply problem-
atic to be externally represented as a saint or Magus in physical, painted form. The
shift into a new character had to be an internal one, which could be provoked, though
not represented, by concrete and permanent painted images. Virtue could be attained
through an internalized process of visualization. Paintings could be a crucial starting
point for this process.
Savonarola dismissed the old accommodations made by churchmen, when a tense
ambivalence between individual or family honor and the honor of God was accepted,
or even encouraged, for financial reasons. Francesco del Pugliese, like his contempo-
raries who wished to fund the decoration of chapels, was confronted with a situation
very different from that of his uncle’s in the 1480s. He chose to make his miniature
church into a decorated homage to the sermons of Savonarola, an Adoration of the Magi
its largest work. Shuttered images demanded (literally) interior involvement and
active participation from the viewer who opened their doors. Small paintings invited
close contemplation of their message. They did not illustrate Savonarola’s words but
were analogous to them, in both their style and the devotion they aimed to inspire.
conclusions and questions
art patronage, as we understand it today, was a creation of the Renaissance.

The study of the Nasi and Del Pugliese families reminds us of how the fifteenth-
century patrician could use paintings, sculptures, and buildings to mediate relation-
ships with the wider world. Artworks and buildings were generally designed to
present the dominant social virtues of family permanence, of neighborhood and civic
solidarity, of piety and charity, and of intelligence and learning. Those who paid for
these works could be seen as contributing to the common weal and as possessing
those virtues they were helping to promote. “Art” was far from being solely for art’s
sake. The audience of this propaganda was certainly not a passive receptacle for the
values of the patrician purchasers. The sense of unease generated by decades of con-
spicuous consumption came to a head in the Florence of the 1490s; Savonarola’s atti-
tude to the visual arts struck a chord with Florentines because it forcefully presented
familiar misgivings about the culture of display, rather than creating an entirely new
arena for popular dissatisfaction.
Interacting with these changes in attitudes to display and patterns of consump-
tion was the rise in status of painting, sculpture, and architecture from mechanical to
liberal arts. A revived interest in the textual and material culture of the classical world
led to new demands being placed on visual artists, and new skills such as imagination
(or fantasia) being prized—the ability to depict narrative and the reproduction and
reconstruction of classical artifacts. For men such as Piero del Pugliese, this shift in
conception allowed long-term affective relationships between master artisan and
patrician to be seen in a different light. The link between people of differing social
status is at the core of patronage proper and, as such, was hardly a Renaissance inven-
tion. What did start to happen in the fifteenth century—and was articulated clearly
in the sixteenth—is the reframing of the implications of this relationship. The
objects and buildings commissioned could now be seen as part of a distinct historical
development, driven by the skill and imagination of artistic practitioners. The people
who paid these designers and, sometimes, took an interest in educating them in the
new classical learning were an essential aspect of this process. The representation of
the friendship between Piero del Pugliese and Filippino Lippi (see Chapter 4) self-
consciously places the link between the two men on a new iconic plane, where the
patron of a client becomes the patron of art. This suggests that the relationship
between maker and consumer in itself became worthy of cultural approbation,
190 conclusions and questions
beyond the material results produced by the artist. It was this model that was to
become increasingly diffused as the sixteenth century went on.
This study has been deliberately confined to the quattrocento, a necessary peri-
odization to make the completion of this work feasible. However, it seems to me use-
ful to give glimpses of the families’ fortunes at a later date and to suggest further
possible lines of enquiry. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Nasi and Del
Pugliese had both passed their social and economic peak. The collapse of the Nasi
bank at Lyons in the 1520s led to the selling of their grand new family palace on the
Piazza de’ Mozzi and a retreat of the family to the Via de’ Bardi, where they had
started out. The Del Pugliese never fully recovered from Francesco’s exile, and his
half of their palace was sold in the early sixteenth century to the Marchese Botti,
themselves notable collectors of painting and sculpture.1
The fragmentation of the patrimony of these two lineages occurred during the
period that Francesco Guicciardini dubbed “the years of misfortune” for Florence and
the Italian peninsula.2 The invasion of Italy by the French army in 1494 and the sub-
sequent expulsion of the Medici family led to an extended period of disruption in
Florentine social and political life, a time that was often compared unfavorably by
contemporaries with the golden age of Lorenzo the Magnificent.3 The relationship
between exterior appearance and interior motivation—already questioned in the ser-
mons of Savonarola—became an increasingly frequent theme in the writings of the
period, notably in two of the most famous texts to emerge from central Italy at this
time—Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier.
Moreover, the inherent tension between the charitable precepts of the Christian faith
and the use of riches for display became impossible to ignore in a civic world that, for
many years after Savonarola’s execution, was inhabited by a significant proportion of
his followers.4 Despite this, there was only a short-lived slowing-down in the produc-
tion of the visual arts in Florence immediately after the expulsion of the Medici. In
the 1500s the city saw the coming together of such renowned artistic figures as
Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo who, arguably, created a new visual
idiom that was to affect the work of painters, sculptors, and architects for decades to
come.
Despite a great number of monographic studies on artists working during these
years, and some notable contributions to the political history of the era, there remain
many unexplored issues, particularly about how social change could relate to develop-
ments in visual style.5 The examination of the Nasi and Del Pugliese suggests further
lines of investigation impossible to pursue fully in one study. For example, how did the
range of social identities permissible to the Florentine patriciate, and the means
through which they displayed them, change in the years after Savonarola? We have seen
that Piero del Pugliese and his nephew, Francesco, both had a keen interest in the visual
arts and both commissioned and collected a variety of display objects.6 The over-
whelming theme of Piero’s known commissions is the repeated use of his physiognomy
in various guises. He presents himself as a Florentine citizen and paterfamilias (the
portrait bust, Chapter 1), as a friend and patron (double portrait with Filippino Lippi,
Chapter 4), as a pious officeholder and benefactor (The Apparition of the Virgin to Saint
Bernard, Chapter 7), and even, his features slightly changed, as a saint (the altarpiece for
Santa Maria a Lecceto, Chapter 6). He has also been recognized as a leading light of
the gonfalone of Drago Verde on the Raising of the Son of Theophilus in the Brancacci
chapel and, with more problematic identifications, as a visual commentator on
Filippino Lippi’s Uffizi Adoration of the Magi, and as Job in a small devotional panel by
Filippino’s workshop.7 If this fervor for explicit self-representation may not have been
entirely typical in the fifteenth century, it does suggest the range of possible guises avail-
able for the Florentine patrician, and also that it was not necessarily indecorous to have
oneself presented in this way.
It is tempting to ascribe the fact that there are no known portraits of Francesco to
his adherence to Savonarola, though this is impossible to prove. Yet it is important to
recognize that the absence of such images does reflect a turning away from the mix-
ture of personal representation with religious imagery. Although independent panel
portraiture remained popular, the age of the painted donor and the portrayal of
groups of recognizable faces on the walls of chapels had ended by the time of
Francesco’s death in 1520. Obviously it was still possible to hold patronage rights over
a church or chapel, and to be a religious benefactor. The benefits of providing a per-
manent exemplar of charitable giving, however, began to be undermined by the dan-
ger of vainglory in the celebration of these secular patrons. I touched on this issue in
Chapter 8, but it would be interesting to consider in more depth how the disappear-
ance of the contemporary donor figure from the decoration of churches interacted
with changing perceptions of charity and the relationship between people of differ-
ent economic status.
The Nasi family contributed to the development of a new visual style in the early
sixteenth century through their commission of Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino
(fig. 63), probably painted on the occasion of Lorenzo di Bartolommeo’s marriage in
1505.8 The Virgin cradles the infant Christ between her legs, his head level with her
womb and his bare foot touching hers, the physicality of the relationship between
mother and child being stressed to the viewer. Interrupted from reading, the Virgin
looks down at the infant Saint John and rests her hand on his back, as if encouraging
his offer of the goldfinch to Christ—she knows of her son’s eventual sacrifice and
accepts it despite (or perhaps because of ) her motherly love. As an exemplar to the
Image not available
Figure 63. Raphael, Madonna del Cardellino, Florence, Uffizi
new bride of womanly obedience and virtuous child-rearing, Raphael’s panel is

related to the many images of the Virgin and Child found in Lorenzo’s father’s inven-
tory of 1488 (see Chapter 2). However, the circumstances of the commission do sug-
gest that it was appreciated as much for its art as for its talismanic properties.
A much quoted letter of 1504 claimed that Raphael went to Florence “to learn.”The
authenticity of this document has now been questioned, but its tenacity in the litera-
ture is due to the fact that the young Umbrian clearly set out to study Florentine visual
style and to incorporate it into his own work: his drawings from this period alone pro-
vide sufficient evidence for this.9 It is worthwhile noting here that Raphael had access
to works of both Leonardo and Michelangelo that were not on public display. This
includes public commissions such as the Battle cartoons and Michelangelo’s Saint
Matthew and private ones such as the Mona Lisa and the Taddei and Doni tondos.
The display of these, often unfinished, works to a younger master is suggestive. It
indicates a knowledge of artistic practice and the benefit of copying on the part of
those who owned the works. It also implicitly places these objects within a frame-
work of historical progression, where they play a part in the future development of
the talent of a young artist, and it gives the collector-patron an essential role in facili-
tating contact between great masters of the past and the future. Lorenzo de’ Medici’s
collections of classical cameos and other sculptural works already were seen to act in
this way in the fifteenth century.10 Moreover, Lorenzo’s image as the archetypal
enlightened patron, variously compared with both Augustus Caesar and Maecenas,
became increasingly commonplace in the early cinquecento. This was particularly
true of the writings of some opponents of the Soderini government, who contrasted
the golden age of Lorenzo’s stewardship of Florence with the barbarism of the pres-
ent times. The conceptual model of the educated patron, who provided the condi-
tions in which artistic talent could flourish, was becoming an increasingly important
part of political discourse during these years.11
The relationship between Raphael and those who commissioned his work was
more intimate and informal than the businesslike transactions between painter and
purchaser that seem to have typified the fifteenth century. Raphael, in common with
Michelangelo and Leonardo, had no Florentine workshop to mediate and regulate
his relationship with customers. As Alessandro Cecchi has pointed out, this young
foreigner benefited from a tight patronage network. Many of his patrons were
related: Lorenzo Nasi was brother-in-law to both Taddeo Taddei and Domenico
Canigiani; he was also a distant relation of Agnolo Doni.12 Raphael’s close relation-
ship to Taddei, stressed by Vasari and substantiated by contemporary documenta-
tion, seems to have been one of friendship and mutual benefit.13 Perhaps it was
through Taddei that Raphael received his commissions from Nasi and Canigiani.
More work certainly needs to be done on this subject, but it does not seem too far-
fetched to suggest that their actions in respect to Raphael were concerned both with
the furtherance of this young painter’s career and with his place in the development
of the visual arts.
At any rate, the next generation had a keen sense of the transcendent value of the
art object. On 12 November 1547 Lorenzo Nasi’s palace was destroyed by a landslide,
along with most of the eastern end of the Via de’ Bardi. His relative, Raffaello,
recounts that there were only three human casualities. He tells the story of one of
them, a factotum called Piero di Michele, who, running with his three-month-old
daughter toward safety, was killed by falling masonry. Four hours later, crying was
heard from the ruins, and the baby was found safe and sound, protected by her
father’s arms.14 Vasari narrates the salvage of another victim. Battista di Lorenzo
Nasi,“a great lover of art,” rummaged through the wreckage of his house to collect the
pieces of one of his most prized heirlooms, Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino.15
In some ways, therefore, we can see Lorenzo Nasi and his brothers-in-law’s nur-
turing of Raphael as an adoption of an attitude toward the visual arts that had been
familiar to the Del Pugliese for many years. This is not merely to characterize one
family’s attitude as progressive and the others as conventional. The Nasi engaged
with the fashionable classicizing idiom of the visual arts, as witnessed by the sgraffito
facade of Piero di Lutozzo’s palace, Bernardo’s portrait medal, and the Cestello altar-
piece by Perugino. Similarly, Piero del Pugliese’s commissions were bound up with
the traditional ties of family, neighborhood, and church, rather than solely seeking to
further the development of a new artistic style. Change and continuity coexisted, and
the members of these families were able to take more or less conscious decisions
about how and when to engage with a new cultural ideology.
appendix
Nasi Family Tree

Bartolommea
= Domenico Bonsi 1464
Piero Isabella
= Margherita di Bartolomeo Corsi = Antonio Francesco Scali 1466
1445
Lionardo
= Oretta d’Andrea Quaratesi 1472
Cosa
Ginevra = Girolamo Mannelli 1482
= Francesco di Bartolommeo
Lutozzo Carnesecchi 1450 Dionigi
= Nera di Mariotto Banchi 1416 = Nanna di Marcello Strozzi 1484
Nera
= Piero di Berardo Beradi 1446 Nanna
= Filippo Machiavelli 1486
Niccolosa
= Salvestro Aldobrandini 1453 Lutozzo
= Alessandra di Lorenzo Lenzi 1495
Lorenzo Bartolommea
= Ginevra di Donato Bruni 1451 = Donato di Giovanni Benci 1472
Francesco Alessandro
= Ginevra di Piero del Palagio c. 1428 = Onesta di M. Andrea Pazzi 1464 = Lodovica di Giovanni Tornabuoni
1491
Costanza Mons. Giovan Battista

= Matteo di Sandro Biliotti 1453
= Bartolommeo di Matteo Cerretani Onesta
1457 = Alessandro Acciauoli 1495
= Andrea di Matteo Albizzi 1466 = Antonio di Lione Castellani
Fiametta
= Lorenzo Pitti 1497
Bernardo Ruberto
= Costanza di Roberto Martelli 1468 = Piera di Raffaello Accaiuoli 1497
= Francesca di Jacopo Cattani c. 1442
Ginevra
= Raffaello Guasconi 1502
Fiammetta
= Alamanno Salviati 1515
Francesca
= Alfonso di Filippo Strozzi 1493
Lionardo
= Ginevra di Matteo Canigiani
Bartolommeo Ipolita
= Ippolita di Piero Pazzi = Gherardo Taddei 1500
= Lisabetta di Ristoro Serristori
Lorenzo
= Sandra di Matteo Canigiani 1506
Bartolommeo
= Maria Maddalena di Piero
Filippo Guicciardini
= Bartolommea di Maso Albizzi 1480
196
Pugliese
Francesco (d. 1375)

12.Burke.195-224.FINALqu
4/1/04
Iacopo Filippo (d. 1421)

= Niccolosa di Agnolo Serragli = Lisa di Buonaccorso Baldinucci
10:25 AM
Francesco (1391–1430) Costanza Giovanni (1395–1459) Iacopo (b. 1416) Buonaccorso (b. 1421)
= Piera di Gherardo Cortigiani = Ginevra di Tommaso Bucelli
Page 196
appendix
Costanza Filippo (1425–1467) Piero (1428–1498) Filippo Jacopo Giovanni Andrea Lorenzo Bartolommeo Giovanbatista
= Gugliemo da Sommaia = Oretta di Silvestro Spini = Pippa di Jacopo Arrighi
= Francesco Lapaccini
Del Pugliese Family Tree
Caterina Francesco (1460–1520)

= Giovanni di Francesco Ginori = Alessandra di Domenico Bonsi
Filippo (b. 1468) Costanza (b. 1474) Oretta (b. 1475) Niccolò (1477–1544)
=Alessandra di Pandolfo Corbinelli = Liona di Lorenzo Morelli
The most frequently discussed individuals are in bold.

unpublished d o cuments 197
Unpublished Documents
d o cument 1
The Inventory of the Goods of Bartolommeo di Lutozzo Nasi
To keep a sense of the original document, unless meaning is compromised, I have maintained
original punctuation and format throughout.
NA 2879 Ser Bartolommeo Bindi 1484–91
[1488, 27 August]
[263v] 1. Una terza parte per indivisa detti Bernardo e Filippo d’una casa per loro
habitare posta nel popolo [di] Sancta Lucia de’ Magnoli e in sulla piazza de’ Mozzi in
primo piazza, a secondo Baptista Nasi, a 3 fiume d’Arno
2. Una quarta parte d’una casa posta in detto popolo e nella via de’ Bardi che fu di
Lutozzo Nasi per indivisa con detti Bernardo e Filippo e Francesco Nasi che da
primo via, a secondo Baptista Nasi, a 3 la via che va a Sancto Giorgio a iiii Niccolo di
Michele di Simone linaiuolo
3. Una terza parte d’una casetta per indivisa con detti Bernardo e Filippo posta nella
via che va a Sancto Giorgio che da primo via, a secondo l’orto della sopradetta casa, a
3 beni detta Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli, iiii ortali di sopra
4. Una terza parte di dua botteghe poste in sulla costa del Ponte Rubaconte conpro-
ronsi da Monna <. . . . .> donna di Pierozzo Banchi che fu di Maso di Niccolaio degli
Alexandri
5. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da signore e da lavoratore posto nel popolo
di Sancto Donnino a Villamagna con suoi vocaboli e confini e piu pezzi di terra colti-
vati e da pastura, luogo detto Poggio
6. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da lavoratore posto in detto popolo con suoi
vocaboli e confini luogo detto Cafaggio lavoralo Piero di Sandro Bello
7. Una terza parte d’uno podere posto in detto popolo con suoi vocaboli e confini,
luogo detto Donicato, lavoralo Donato di Francesco
8. Una terza parte d’uno mulino con uno palmento con piu pezzi di terra coltivati e da
pastura luogo detto Caldavole trallo Betto d’Orso lo tene a mezzo e il palmento afficto
9. Una terza parte d’uno pezzo dette terre boschate poste in Mugello nel popolo di
Sancto Andrea a Comeggiano comune di Manghone da primo via, a secondo fiume di
Loca, a 3º Priore <. . . . .> a 4º Francesco di Andrea conparossi da Nanni di Bandino
198 appendix
10. Una terza parte d’una casetta da lavoratore con dua pezzi di terra lavorata e vig-
nata posta nel comune di Manghone conparamo da Giovanni [264r] e Pagolo di
Bartolomeo di detto luogo
11. Una terza parte di quatro pezzi di terra posti a Villamagna nel popolo di Sancto
Romolo conpramo da Monna Domenica di Piero di Bartolo in dua volta rogato Ser
Giovanbaptista dal Lago
12. Una terza parte di un pezzo di terra di staiora otto in circa, posto nel comune di
Mangone nel popolo di Sancto <. . . . .> a Cortignano compriamo da Chele e
Bartolomeo di Signorello. Rogato Ser Michele
13. Una terza parte d’uno pezzo di terra boscata e d’uno pezzo di pastura posta ne’
Gurielli a Villamagna conpro Lutozzo nostro padre dal Gualdana
14. Una terza parte d’uno podere posto nel comune del Colle della Pietra e parte nel
comune di Furecchio luogo detto Panzano popolo di Sancto Donato a Empoli
insieme colle staiora 150 in circa di terra in circa si conpri d’Antonio di Balerino
Adimari che sono in tutto staiora 300 in circa e acorda
15. Una terza parte d’uno pezzo di terra di staiora sei si conpro da Giuliano di
Michele d’Ugo posta nel popolo di Sancto Andrea a Comeggiano di Mugello
16. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da signore trista posto nel popolo di S
<. . . . .> a Terenzano luogo detto Monte Girone conpramo da figliuolo di
Giachanotto de’ Bardi e altri, rogato Ser Simone da Staggia
17. Una terza parte d’una casa da signore per nostra habitare posta nel castello di
Barberino di Mugello con suoi vocabili e confini. Fu di Monna Checca nostra madre
18. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da lavoratore con piu pezzi di terra lavorata
e vignata e pastura posta a Barberino di Mugello nel popolo di S. Niccolo alla Cera
con suoi vocaboli e confini. Fu di Monna Checca nostra madre, lavoralo Andrea del
Biancho
19. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da lavoratore posto a Barberino di Mugello
con piu pezzi di terra lavorata, vignata e pastura con suoi vocabili e confini lavoralo
Simone d’Andrea del Biancho, luogo detto Comeggiano. Fu di Monna Checca nostra
madre, popolo di Sancto Andrea a Comeggiano
20. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da lavoratore in detto luogo e popolo con
piu pezzi di terra lavorata, vignata e pastura con suoi vocaboli e confini luogo detto el
Colle, lavoralo Cecchone d’Andrea del Biancho. Fu di Monna Checca nostra madre
21. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da lavoratore in detto luogo e popolo di
Sancto Andrea a Comeggiano e piu pezzi di terra lavorata e di pastura con suoi
vocaboli e confini luogo detto Agliocharozzo lavoralo [264v] Biagio e Giovanni del
Biancho. Fu di Monna Checca nostra madre, pagasi di afitto perpetuo al parte della
chiesa di Bonachio staiora 4 di grano e staio uno a redi Tosinghi
Una terza parte di dua pezzi di terra sibaratto con Nello Nelli in sulla sittua che adri-
eto suspetava col sopradetto podere
Una terza parte d’uno pezzo di terra si conpro da Monna Mea dello S. Agnese per
fl. 7 aversi col detto podere.
22. Una terza parte d’uno podere con casa da lavoratore posto nel popolo di Sancto
Salvestro a Barberino di Mugello luogo detto Benfango con suoi vocaboli e confini e
piu pezzi di terra lavorata e vignata e soda lavoralo Francesco <. . . . .> da Cormano
23. Una terza parte di quatro pezzi di terra a uzzi, tre pezzi vignate e sode poste in
decto luogo e popolo, luogo detto Arto in Costa Viendoli aversi col sopradecto podere
24. Una terza parte d’uno poderetto con casa da lavoratore in detto luogo e popolo in
sulla strada che oggi e casolare, conparassi da Sancta Maria Nuova e d’Andrea
Sogliano, con piu pezzi di terra luogo detto La Strada con suoi vocaboli e confini che
fu di Monna Checca nostra madre fassi col sopradetto podere carta della sopradetto
conpara per Ser Mariotto Beciani
25. Una terza parte di sei pezzi di terra lavorata boschata e pastura posti nel popolo di
Sancto Lorenzo a Mozzanello fu di Monna Checha nostra madre fannosi colla
casetta si conpro da Giorgio e Pagolo di Buonarotto da Mozzanello.
26. Una terza parte di tre pezzi di terra posti a Sancta Maria alla cera che si fanno col
decto podere della cera
Una terza parte d’afitti perpetui

Sandro da Cintoia staia quatro di grano l’anno
Figliuoli di Romeo da Cintoia staia 8 di grano l’anno
Figliuoli di Peraccio barbiere staia undici di grano l’anno
Michele di Landozzo da Cintoia staia dua di grano l’anno
Biancolino di Landozzo da Cintoia staia dua di grano l’anno
Parte di Podere e bestiame e per la terza parte delle dette in dette cose
La terza parte di xx pecore e di fl. 251⁄2 di presta d’uno paio di buoi e in sul podere di
Poggio che lavora Barno e Rinaldo
La terza parte d’uno paio di buoi che sono in sul podere di Cafaggio e Donicato
La terza parte di uno paio di buoi e di pecore xxv e di dua porci in su podere [265r] di
Benfango di Mugello lavoralo Francesco di Matheo
200 appendix
La terza parte d’uno paio di buoi e d’una vaccha e d’uno vitello in sul podere di
Agliocharozzo in Mugello lavoralo Biagio e Andrea del Biancho
La terza parte di dua paia di buoi e di 36 pecore e d’otto capre e di sei porci in sul
podere dal Colle e di Comeggiano
La terza parte d’uno paio di buoi e otto capre in sul podere di Agliocharozzo e a uzzi
di Mozanello
La terza parte d’uno paio di buoi grossi e di diciotto pecore in sul podere di Monte
Girone
La terza parte d’uno pezzo di terra di staiora xi insieme si conpro da Niccolo
Guasconi posto nel popolo di Sancto Salvestro a Barberino di Mugello luogo detto
Pezzebianche
La terza parte d’uno pezzo di terra di staiora 3 si chonpro da Rinaldo di Guido posto
a Villamagna nel popolo di Sancto Romolo
La terza parte d’uno pezzo di terra con uno casolare e un pezzo di boscho si conpro
da M. Domenico di Piero di Bartolommeo luogo detto Caseline
La terza parte d’uno pezzo di boscho di staiora xiiii in circa posto alla Chrusca si con-
pro di Zanobi Piccardi
Segue inventario de’ libri dove sono debitori, nostre facende e delle ragioni, cioe per
traffichi da Firenze
1º libro grande coverto da rosso segnato A, titolo in rede di Lutozzo Nasi e compagni
di mano di Bartolommeo Nasi che nastie dentro libretto piccolo biancho segnato A
titolato in detto nome tenuto per detto Bartolommeo Nasi a Llione e in Firenze in
sul quale è scripto piu debitori che attenente a dette rede
Uno libro coreggie rosse segnato A di che atteso a una e primo di spese dal
sopradetto libro
Uno libro rosso segnato A titolato in nome di Bartolommeo Nasi e conpagni insul
quale e poi debite
Uno libro coreggie rosse ricordanze del detto libro
Quatro libri cioe tre libri rossi segnati A B C D titolati in nome di Bartolommeo
Nasi dove sono piu debitore e creditore anzi sono 3 libri segnato A B D, 3 quadernetti
di cambi e ricordi segnati A B D
Uno libro di bianco segnato A della ragione che dixe Ruberto Martini e compagni
setaiuoli
Uno libro segnato A coreggie bianche giornale di detto libro
[265v] Uno libro segnato A coreggie bianche ricordanze di detto libro, mancha el
quaderno di cassa <. . . . .> el quale e stato perduto un tempo stimiamo stia nelle
mani degli Uficiali de’ rubegli e non llo sappiamo certo
Uno traffico in Firenze a exercitio di batiloro che dice in nome di Filippo Nasi e com-
pagni con corpo come appare in su’libro rosso segnato A delle rede di Lutozzo colle
scriptura appresso
Uno libro giallo segnato A dove sono piu debitori de’ compagnia di detto traficho
Uno libro choreggie gialle entrate e uscite e quaderno di chassa di detto libro
Uno libro coreggie gialle giornale e ricordanze
Uno libro choreggie gialle di maestri e manifattori
Uno traffico in Llione di Francia che dice in nome de Bartolommeo Nasi e
Conpagnia nel corpo che appare sul libro rosso segnato A della rede di Lutozzo e le
schritture del detto trafficho sono a Lione dato da mano di Temperanno di messer
Manno Temperanni ghovenatore di detto trafficho
Uno trafficho in Cantes in bretagnia che sie dalle detta ragione di Lione che dice
Piero Tedaldi e Bastiano chambaruoli e le scripture del detto trafficho sono nelle
mani del detto Piero e Bastiano
Segue piu libri e scritture delle ragioni vecchie di Lione che contano in nome di
Bartolommeo Nasi e compagnia, li quali sono a Llione in mano di Temperanno
Temperanni ghovenatore della banca che segue
Uno libro rosso segnato B dalla ragione vechissima che ghovernava Bartolommeo
Nasi con uno aroto di detto libro choverta biancha choreggie rosse, perdessi e libro di
fiere di detto libro quale scrittano le dritte scripture nelle mani dagli uficiali de’ rubelli
sono di pocho valore
Uno libro rosso segnato A della detta ragione di Llione col libro di fiere e richo a
divise
iiii libri cioe 4 libri antichi segnato A B C D che rimasino di Lutozzo nostro padre
Segue Inventario della masseritie troviamo questo dì per uso di chasa

a prima in chamera terrena a pie di schala
Una lettiera di noce chon predella bassa, suvi
Uno sacchone
Una materassa di chapecchio, una coltrice piena di penne e piume di ginevra ch’è
buona, uno lettuccio di noce, suvi uno materassino di chapecchio, uno chassone di
noce intarsiato
In camera terrena detto chamerino

Una lettiera dal letto e [266r] dal lettuccio apichata insieme, suvi uno sacchone rotto,
uno matterassino dal lettuccio di chapecchio, dua guanciali di quoio tristi, una tavo-
letta di pino rotta, uno paio di trespoli
202 appendix
In chamera de’ famigli

Una lettiera selvatica, suvi una materassa di paglia piena di chapechio, una coltricetta
di penne di pollo usata e trista, una chassa pancha a dua serrami
In chamera in sulla sala allato alla chucina cioe in sulla sala della chucina dove dorme
la Ghostanza vedova
Una lettiera chon chassa pancha dinanzi e dappie cioe chassa a iii serrami di noce
intarsiata, suvi uno sachone di paglia
Una matterassa piena di lana, una coltrice piena di penne di ginevra e piuma buona,
uno lettuccio, suvi un matterassino di lana, vi forzieri tristi e antichi di pocha valuta
In chamera allato alla chucina dove dorme la serva

Una lettiera trista con una chassa a iiii serrami, suvi
Uno sacchone di paglia, una coltrice di penne debolcata trista
In antechamera di detta chamera

Uno lettuccio dappane, una madia daffare pane, una giarra da tenere farina
Seghue detto inventario

In chamera in sul verone di sopra dove dormano i fanciulli
Una lettiera d’albero con una chassa e dua serrami, suvi uno sacchone di paglia, una
materassa di chapecchio, una coltrice vecchia piena di penne, ii piumacci vecchi e
tristi, uno forziere anticho e tristo, uno chassone a dua serrami anticho e tristo, uno
paio di chasse a dua serrami che sono nella sala di sopra nel terassino
Uno lettuccio anticho in detta chamera, uno panno d’arazzo grande a portiere vecchio
e tristo, uno pannetto d’arazzo affigure usato e chome nuovo, uno pannetto d’arazzo
bianco a portiere usato buono, uno panno d’arazzo grande a portiere fine con seta
Uno panno d’arazzo grande a portiere grosso usato e buono
Un pannetto d’arazzo piccholo a portiere vecchio e tristo, ii ustiali a portiere usati
affiori con seta, ii ustiali affigure dozzinali usati e tristi, uno ustiale del luogho all’an-
ticha coll’arme tristo usato
[266v] ii spalliere coll’arme a figure usate, uno panchale a portiere strecto usato e vec-
chio, ii spalliere affigure triste e rotte
Uno panno vermiglio dal letto usato assai buono, 1º panno biancho alla chatelana
usato e vecchio, 4 coltrice dal lecto bianche piene di lana usate e vecchie venute da
Llondra piu tempo fa, 6 tovaglie di rensa gross [sic] mandorle minute di br. 8 in circa
usate e vecchie senza guardanappe, 3 tovaglie usate mandorle strette di br. 8 l’una
incirca
3 guardanappe colla detta tovaglia usate e anchora la tovaglia, 5 tovaglie usate alla
parigina triste di br. 6. in circha l’una, 5 guardanappe come la detta tovaglia
6 mantili usati da famiglia di br. 41⁄2 l’uno in circa lavoro alla parigina, 3 mantiletti
vecchi di br. 31⁄2 l’uno da famiglia
4 mantili quadri da parto di br. 2 l’uno in circa usati
Segue detto Inventario

4 tovaglie usate e vecchie lavoro di br. 7 l’una incirca, dua tovagliouole minute usate di
br. <. . . . .>
12 bandinelle da raschiugare le mani tra nuove e vecchie usate e triste, 38 tovagliolini
usati e grossi, 6 canovacci usati da famiglia tristi, 2 teletti da coprire il pane di br. 4
l’uno tristi, 4 paia di lenzuola da lato di br. 5 in circa usate che sono in sulle lette che
son’ tristi, 15 paia di lenzuola tra piccole e grande usate e triste la piu parte, 1o lenzuo-
letto da famiglia tristo
1o chortinnaggio di tela in 5 pezzi del sopracielo co’ pendici fregia d’accia usato e
tristo, ii pezzi di cortine di tovaglia capitate con verghe di bambagia in buchi
1a pezza di cortina de tovagli con una <. . . . .> usata
3 paia di lenzuole usate e vecchie, una pezza di tovagliolo e tovagliolini in uno filo di
br. 60 in circa lavoro grosso alla parigina per operare per casa, una pezza di bandinello
da saccho capitato di br. 200 in circa, una pezza di mantili di famiglia di br. 18, una
tovaglia di rensa usata di br. 12 mezzana, dua tovaglie di rensa sottile di br. 22 l’una
usata, dua guardanappe di rensa sottile di br. 22 l’una usata, una tovaglia di rensa sottile
di br. 18 usata, una tovaglia di rensa sottile di br. 6 larga usata, una tovaglia di rensa sot-
tile di br. 8 usata, [267r] 1ª guardanappa di rensa sottile di br. 12 usata, una tovaglia di
rensa sottile a gigli di br. 6 in circa e largha usata, una tovaglia di rensa mezzana di br. 28
o circa usata, una tovaglia di rensa mezzana a mandorle streta e strette [sic] di br. 2 usata
e vecchia, 1ª tovaglia di detta rensa di br. 22 all’antica, xxiiii tovagliolini di rensa sottili e
tristi, una tovagliola di rensa lavorato minuto vecchia e trista, tre tovagliuole nostrali e
mezzane di br. 6 l’una in uno filo, una guardanappa nostrale e sottile a buchi buona
usata, tre tovagliuole capitate usate, una guardanappa usata a buchi grosse di br. 8, una
guardanappa simile usata di br. x in circa capi a buchi, una pezza di tovagliuole nostrali
e grosso di br. 18 in circa in uno filo, una guardanappa di br. 12 in circa capi a buchi usata,
xii tovagliolini di rensa in pezza in uno filo nuovi, 12 tovagliolini di rensa in pezza in uno
filo nuovi sottili, tre tovagliuole capitate in uno filo nuove, quatro tovagliuole con qua-
tro tovagliolini grosse co’ buchi di br. 31⁄2 l’una in circa usata, tre tovagliuole piu sottile
usate e capi di buchi trista, una pezza di tovaglia forestiere di filo mezzano di br. 100 in
circa nuova, una pezza di guardanappa simile di br. 100 in circa a detta tovaglia, una
tovaglia antica linone streta di br. 10 in circa usata con capi di buchi trista rapichata, una
204 appendix
tovaglia nostrale con capi di buchi di br. 13 capi di buchi [sic], una tovaglia simile di br. 12
in circa a capi di buchi usata, una tovaglia simile di br. 12 in circa capi di buchi usata, una
tovaglia nostrale con capi di buchi e apichata di br. 8 in circa usata, una tovaglia di br. 12
a capi di buchi nostrale trista usata, una tovaglia nostrale a capi di buchi di br. 12 usata
alla parigina, una guardanappa della detta tovaglia di br. 12 in circa, una tovaglia capitata
usata di br. 23 in circa trista e grossa, una tovaglia usata alla parigina nostrale di br. 8 in
circha con buchi, una tovaglia capitata d’azzurro assai buona di br. 12 in circa, una
tovaglia capitata d’azzurro nostrale di br. 22 trista, una tovaglia di br. 8 nostrale grossa e
usata, una guardanappa di br. 8 in circa alla parigina nostrale e usata, una tovaglia di
br. 8 in circa nostrale usata e vecchia, una tovaglia nostrale di br. 12 con verghe bianche
usata e vecchia, una pezzo di tovaglioni di br. 22 in circa nostrale e grossa in uno filo, tre
tovagliuole grosse di br. 21⁄3 l’una in uno filo, uno mantile di br. 2 grosso verghe azzure
e nere, una tovagliuola di br. 6 usata e trista, uno paio di guanciali di broccato d’oro con
otto nappe d’oro, una tovagliuola sottile di br. x rotta e usata, una tovagliuola di br. 6
trista da credenza, una tovagliuola da credenza, tre mantili da parto tristi di br. uno e
mezzo l’uno, una tovagliuola capitata, cinque sciugatoi in uno filo verghe nere, [267v]
dua fazzoletti da capo grossi, una pezza di sciugatoi grossi da piedi cioe dodici piccoli e
sette grandi, una guardanappa cioe dua tovagliuole usate e triste insieme, una pezza di
guardanappa nostrale di br. 40 in circa alla parigina
In sala insu l’acquaio

Uno bacino e una misciroba d’ottone coll’arme de Nasi e Albizi
Uno bacino e una misciroba d’ottone coll’arme de Serristori e Nasi
Uno bacino e una misciroba coll’arme de Nasi d’ottone, uno bacino e una misciroba
coll’arme de Nasi d’ottone, dodici bacinetti piccoli d’ottone coll’orlo largo, ventuno
candellieri d’ottone, cioe cioe [sic] 16 d’una ragione e cinque d’un’altra, dua misciroba
d’ottone grande col coperchio, dua misciroba larghe sanza coperchio
Una secchia d’ottone al acquaio, dodici coltellini per uso della tavola dozzinali, uno
coltello da tavola dozzinale, tre tavole di noce intarsiate di br. 7 in circa, una tavoletta di
br. 41⁄2 in circa per la famigla, dua paia di trespoli a detta tavole, una tavoletta di br. 4 nella
sala di sopra, uno paio di trespoli, quatro deschetti colle spalliere di noce, 4 deschetti senza
spalliere, 8 seggiola di stramba tra grande e piccole, uno bacino grande d’ottone dapie di
stallo, uno bacino minore dapie di stallo d’ottone, uno bacino d’ottone piccolo da lavare e’
piedi, dua vasi di maiolicha sopra l’acquaio, uno quarto di maiolica sopra l’acquaio
Segue lo inventario della masseritia di cucina

Uno bacino grande di rame co’ manichi da lato, una caldaia di rame da bucato di
tenuta di barili uno, uno paiuolo mezzano di rame, uno paiuoletto minore di rame,
una padella a uso di paiuolo col manico di sopra, dua padelle per usare, una grande e
una mezzana, uno paiuiolo d’acciaio, uno alare da fare e’ rosti, una paletta di ferro, uno
paio di molle, dua orciuoli di rame, uno grande e uno piccolo, tre schidioni di ferro uno
grande uno mezzano e uno piccolo, una lucerna di ferro, dua treppi[ed]e da pauioli 1o
grande e uno piccolo, 12 treppi[ed]e da teghie, dua teghie di rame una grande e una
mezzana, dua teghie di rame una piccola e una mezzana, dua scaldaletti di rame, dua
calici di rame da cucina, una secchia di rame d’aquaio, uno bacino d’ottone piccolo da
piedi, uno paio d’alari grandi di ferro da sala, uno paio d’alari mezzani di ferro da sala,
uno paio d’alari di <. . . . .> minori, uno paio d’orcioli di ferro per in sala, una paletta di
ferra per in sala, una forchetta di ferro per in sala, septe lucerne d’ottone, tre candellieri
dalla cucina d’ottone, [268r] otto piatelli di stagno mezzani da scaricare la insalata, dua
piatelli di stagno, un poco maggiore, diciotto scodelle di stagno, diciotto scodellini di
stagno, quattro piattelletti piccoli di stagno, uno piattelletto piccolo di stagno, dodici
quadretti di stagno, undici piatelletti piani di stagno alla catelana, dua stagnate da olio
e acieto di stagno. Tutti e sopradetti stagni sono a mano, usati.
Dua botti d’ariento di libbre tre cioe di tenuta, dodici piatelli grande di stagno
d’Inghilterra usati, 36 schodelle di stagno detto usate
48 schodellini di stagno detto usati, 36 piatellini piani di stagno detto usati, 36
quadretti di stagno detto usati, 12 piatellini mezzani di stagno detto, 12 piatellini di
stagno detto minori usati, 6 piatellini minori di stagno detto nuovi, 2 stagniate di olio
e aceto nuove
4 piatelli di stagnio grandi vecchi, 2 piatelli mezzani e vecchi
Uno coltrone di borddo fine pieno di bambagia, uno coltrone rosso tristo per la serva,
uno coltrone rosso tristo per famigli
Dieci botte da vino di tenuta di barili 12 l’una, 2 botte triste di tenute di barili 9 l’una,
4 botticelle da biancho di tenuta di barili 4 in circha
Una botticella d’acieto biancho di tenuta di br. 4, una botticella da fondiglioli di br. 6
cioe di tenuta, uno bigoncio, ii bigoncioli
Sette barili da vino vermiglio, 2 selle da sedere da donne
Una mula da chavalchare, uno chavallino piccholo, e 1º diamante in punte leghato in
oro di stima di fl. 20, dua tazze d’ariento di peso d’oncie 8 l’una, 2 tazzini d’ariento di
peso d’oncie 6 in tutto
xii chucchini d’ariento, 5 chucchini piccoli d’ariento, 11 forchette d’ariento sode, 6
saliere d’ariento dorate, una coltelliera con 12 coltelli piccoli e dua grandi col leghiera
d’ariento e manicha biancha coll’arme, uno pennone da giustitia coll’arme e cimiere, 2
bandiere quadre di tessuta bolognese coll’arme
xii panziere di ferro, 5 guaine a divisa triste, 2 forzeretti a divisa coll’arme, 1º coltrone
a gigli azzurri di gigli simolato da fanciulli
206 appendix
Inventario di tutto quello si truova in chamera di Bartolommeo Nasi per suo uso e
della donna
Una lettiera di braccia 51⁄2 [con] cornice dorata e dipinta con dua chasse intorno
intarsiate a 4 serrami, uno lettuccio di braccia 41⁄2 intarsiato con cornice dorata, uno
paio di forzieri dipinti e intarsiati e massidoro vecchi, uno cassone intarsiato di br. 3 in
circha, dua forzieri coll’arme e dipinti adivise, 1 forzeretto a divise dipinto coll’arme,
uno cortinaggio e padiglione di tela di Chostanzia
Una coltrice e dua pimacci di piume e penne, una materassa trista di bordo piena di
lana, una sacchone di paglia, uno paio di lenzuola di br. 9 usate e triste
[268v] Uno coltrone di pannolino biancho pieno di bambagia
Una sargia rossa dipinta di nero a tela e figchure [sic]
Uno materassino dal lettuccio pieno di lana, uno tappeto di br. 41⁄2 a detto lettuccio,
una Vergine Maria con cornice d’oro dozzinale, dua coltre dal lettucco 1ª anticha e 1ª
appine
Una lettiera di br. 4 nella antechamera di noce, una coltrice piena di penne e piume di
br. 4, una matterassa piena di lana a detto letto, uno sacchone di paglia a detto letto,
uno coltrone vecchio di tela lina e gigli, una sargia dipinta affiori
4 guanciali grandi dal lettuccio, 6 guanciali dal letto
Dua paia di lenzuola di panno forestiere piccole dal letto di antecamera, uno paio di
lenzuola di pannolino nostrale usate a 4 teli co’mandorle che uno lenzuolo di dette
anticha lavorata
Uno paio di lenzuola di pannolino nostrale a 4 teli con uno garofano in su l’orlo
usate, uno paio di lenzuola di pannolino nostrale cogl’occhi spicchati con una reticella
viniziana usata, nove lenzuola usate tre di panno forestiero e nostrale parte nuove
parte no, una pezzetta di tela sottile a uso di turchino di br. 26 <. . . . .> br. 8 di pan-
nolino da fare grembiuli, septe banducci in un filo grosseti da fanciulli, dua fazzoletti
da capo mezzani, cinque quadrucci, 7 fazzoletti d’accia grossi da famigli, una pezza di
pannolino di camice per Bartolommeo di br. 67 in circa, 4 sciugatoi mezzani da capel-
linaio e mano filo colle verghe bianche, 45 sciugatoi in uno filo da capellinaio <. . . . .>
colle verghe nere, 49 fazzoletti da mano sottile in uno filo, 24 sciugatoi grossi in uno
filo da piedi cioe 12 grandi e 12 piccoli, 2 <. . . . .> mezzani usati, 2 sciugatoi mezzani
colle verghe bianche usati, 5 sciugatoi grossi da piedi in uno filo colle verghe bianche,
xxx libbre di benda da donna, uno telo di raso d’azana lavorato, 2 sciugatoi grandi
bianchi usati d’azana, 2 libbre di pannolino di rensa, 2 federe di velluto di guanciali
con <. . . . .> intorno, una pezza di pannolino mezzano da camice per la Costanza e
per fanciulli di br. 4 in circa, 4 fazzoletti da mano in uno filo, 22 camice da fanciugli,
13 camice per uso di Bartolommeo tra buone e triste, 3 mezzi sciugatoi sottili per uso
della Gostanza, 6 federe da guanciali nuove, 4 sciugatoi sotili vecchi da avolgere al
capo, 3 sciugatoi da capellinaio usati, una coltella fornita d’ariento [269r] fu di

Lutozzo quando fu gonfalonieri di giustizia, una scarsella di velluto nero fornita
d’ariento, 9 camice di donna usate per uso della Gostanza donna di Bartolommeo, 7
sciugatoi da capi usati, 8 sciugatoi grandi da fascina usati con verghe di piu ragioni, 12
federe da guanciali usate, 6 camice usate da donna per uso della Checca, uno grembi-
ule tondo domaschino lavorato per uso della Checca usato e tristo, 2 nappi d’ariento,
5 forchette d’ariento, una cintola d’ariento piena di spranghe dorata e stretta per uso
della Checca, una cintola di raso nero fornita d’ariento dorato per uso della
Gostanza, una cintola largha nuova fornita d’ariento piena di spranghe per uso della
Gostanza incintellata la fibbia e il puntale, una cintola di raso pagonazzo fornita
d’ariento stretta per uso della Honesta, uno chiavachuore largho tanè con dua puntali
d’ariento, 4 br. di seta tanè senza ariento, 4 catenuzze d’oro di peso d’once 5 l’una in
circha, dua agnusdei, una crocellina d’oro, una cintoluzza di broccato d’oro stretta
con puntale d’ariento dorato, uno puntale e una fibbia d’oro alla parigina di peso
d’once una, uno agnusdei d’ariento lavorato di filo, una beccha di taffeta cangiante
lavorata con oro, uno diamante legato in oro tavola per uso della Costanza di stima di
denari 25, uno rubino legato in oro per uso della detta di stima di denari 25, una perla
legata in oro per uso della detta, una beccha di velluto nero, una beccha di taffeta
nera, uno pendentuzzo con uno piccolo balastio con tre perluzze piccole per uso della
Checca di stima di denari 8, uno pendentuzzo simile e minore per uso della Honesta
di stima di denari 5, uno sciugatoio sotile da cimiero
Segue detto inventario delle cose di Bartolommeo

4 borse ricamate con oro di broccato vecchie piu ricami spiccati <. . . . .> d’oro filato
vecchio, 25 libbre di lano di pezzuolo, una grillanduzza all’antica da testa di perluzze
minute, 4 libbre d’accia sottile di piu ragioni piu frange d’oro spiccate <. . . . .> che fu
cappuccio da donna, uno [l]uccho rosato foderato di lattizi per uso di Bartolommeo
[269v] Uno [l]uccho pagonazzo foderato di dossi tristo
Uno [l]uccho di panno foderato di domaschino nero tristo
Uno [l]uccho rosato tristo sanza fodera, uno mantello nero usato e tristo, una
c[i]oppa nera foderato di matore
Uno gonellino di velluto chermisi foderato di golpi tristo, uno gonnellino di velluto
nero tristo foderato di conigli
Una robetta bigia foderato di gola di martore usata
Una robetta bigia insino apie trista, una gabbanella di domaschino nero foderata di
taffeta paganazza usata
Uno mantello rosato tristo che non si usa
Una gabbanella rosata e foderata di golpi rotta
208 appendix
4 cappucci tra tristi e buoni fra di fiore e nero, uno scampolo di br. 3 di panno di piu
colori buono, una cappa di panno di Bruggia colla capperuccia di velluto nero bruno
Uno catelano rosato a buche con capperuccia di domaschino pagonazzo di Gratia,
una robetta di cambellotto tanè trista e sciempia, uno balandrino di fregio, uno gab-
bano di guarnello biancho, una c[i]oppa di panno pagonazzo con <. . . . .> foderata di
golpi trista
Uno cioppone di panno bruschino foderato di gola di golpe
12 berrette di Gratia tra buone e triste, 2 farsetti uno di raso nero e uno di seta nera,
uno farsetto di guarnello nero tristo
Una c[i]oppa di panno pagonazzo di Lione da donna che fu per uso della Gostanza
con coda
Una c[i]oppa di Gratia allazzata a uso della detta
Una c[i]oppa di panno pagonazzo schura foderata di pelli bianchi tonda per uso della
Gostanza
Una c[i]oppa di panno bigio di Perpignano
Uno guardachuore rosato foderato di dossi
Una gamurra rosata per uso della Gostanza di stima di fl. 7
Una gamurra pagonazza trista
[270r] Una gamurra di panno perpignano colombino usata
Una gamurra di seta azzurra usata, una gamurra di seta pagonazza, una gamurra di
seta nera, una cotta di raso nero usata, una gamurra di seta azzurra rotta
Una c[i]oppa di panno nero usata buona
Una c[i]oppa di panno nero schura buona, una c[i]oppa di saia milanese senza i
legati
Una c[i]oppa di rascia nera, una c[i]oppa di rascia e saia
Una c[i]oppa di fregio bigio, una giachetta di taffeta biancha della Checca usata
Una c[i]oppa di cambellotto biancho della Checca
Una c[i]oppa di rascia verde della Checca, uno c[i]oppa di fregio della Checca
Una cotta di velluto alexandrino rifatta e trista
Una c[i]oppa di panno pagonazzo tonda della Checca usata
Una c[i]oppa di panno nero trista della Checca
Una gamurra di panno paghonazzo schuro trista
Uno guarnello biancho della Checca
Una cotta di raso verde trista dell’Onesta
Piu panni da famiglia di pocha valuta
Inventario di tutto quello si truova questo dì otto di novembre in chamera di

Bartolommeo Nasi per suo uso e della donna e de’ figliuoli e prima
Una robetta di velluto nero foderata di chodrioni di dossi nuova daverno

Una robetta di cianbellotto tanè
Una robetta di domaschino nero foderata di dossi e choniglie usata da huomo
Una robetta di domaschino nero foderata di dossi trista
Una robetta di panno bigio schura foderata di fianchi di martore usata
Una robetta di panno perpignano tanè foderata d’indisio usata
Una robetta di panno bigio schuro da chavalchare foderata di panno verde rifatta
[270v] Una robetta di panno bigio chiaro scempia usata e trista
Una cappa di panno perpignano da cavalcare
Una cappa di panno bigio capperuccia foderata di velluto nero
Uno capperone usato colla capperuccia foderata di domasco tanè usato
Uno catelano rosato tristo, uno mantello pagonazzo schuro usato
Uno mantello rosato usato e assai buono
Uno [l]uccho foderato di taffeta chermisi usato
Uno [l]uccho pagonazzo mezzo sfoderato tristo e legero
Uno [l]uccho rosato foderato di lettizi usato
Uno [l]uccho rosato foderato di dossi
Uno mantellino da fanciulli da ciambelloto bigio foderato di dossi
Una giachetta di seta nera da huomo usata cioe robetta
Uno pittocchino di velluto nero usato
Uno pittoccho di ciambelloto tanè usato foderato di pelle biancha
Nove farsetti di seta tra buoni e tristi
Uno farsetto di panno con manichini di panno paghonazzo
Cinque cappucci cioe uno nero uno rosato, 13 paghonazzuschi usati
Uno c[i]oppone foderato usato e tristo
Una c[i]oppa sfoderata lungha e trista e intignata bigia
Una fodera di panno trista e pelata
vi paia di calze usate da huomo
x berrette di piu fiori usate
2 berrette dannotte
Uno schampolo di panno paghonazzo e mezzo ascuro bagnato e usato br. 62⁄3
Uno schampolo di panno rosato di levato di br. 82⁄3
Uno schampolo di panno nero da calze di br. 7 bagnato e usato
Uno schampolo di panno paghonazzo di roba d’Amalfi di br. 9
Una c[i]oppa di domaschino biancho da donna sfoderata usata
Una giachetta da donna di taffeta biancha usata e trista
Una giachetta di taffeta nera da donna a uso di robetta usata
Una giachetta di taffeta nera mancho gl’imbusti drietro e trista
210 appendix
Una c[i]oppa di ciambollotto tanè da donna buona

Una c[i]oppa paghonazza chiara filattata di lattizi da donna
[271r] Una c[i]oppa saiata rosata foderata di panno usata
Una c[i]oppa saiata di panno bigio da donna
Una c[i]oppa saiata di panno bigio arrigentato trista da donna
Una c[i]oppa saiata di panno scuro sfoderata e usata
Una c[i]oppa di rascia nera buona da donna
Una c[i]oppa di rascia fine di lino usata
Una ghamurra di ciambellocto verde usata
Una ghamurra di ciambellocto verde cangiante usata
Una ghamurra di ciambellocto gialla trista
xiii ghamurre di guarnello usate
Una fodera di roba da donna di dossi
Una fodera di roba da donna di panno
br. 5 di rensa alexandrina
br. 14 di rensa rossa, piu panni da fanciulli per loro usare tristi
br. 6 di suentone paghonazzo per calze da fanciulli
Uno paio di lenzuola a 4 teli di br. 9 cogli veli spiccati con una reticella vinitiana
v paia di lenzuola usate dal letto grande
iii paia di lenzuolette usate di panno forestiero dal letto dal antechamera
Una pezza di panno lino da richamire di br. 100 in circa
Una pezza di panno lino da richamire per la donna di Bartolomeo di br. 40 in circha
Uno taglio di panno lino da richamire pe’ fanciulle di br. 30
Uno taglio di panno lino da richamire pe’ fanciulle di br. 20
Uno taglio di tela di ginevra grosso dasseparare
br. 1o1⁄2 di tela sottile nostrale
Uno lenzuolo grosso di panno nostrale tagliato e non areato
v sciugatoi colle verghe bianche pel cappellinaio sottili con br. 10 di pannello appic-
chato in un filo
x sciughatoi da cappellinaio colle verghe nere mezzani
xxviii fazzoletti sottili da mano in un filo
xxiiii fazzoletti da mano mezzano da uscito in un filo
[271v] xl fazzoletti da mano mezzani da usare in un filo
xv sciugatoi in un filo colle verghe bianche da volgere al chapo grossi
iiii sciugatoi in un filo colle verghe bianche piu grossi
iiii sciughatoi in un filo colle verghe bianche grossati
2 sciughatoi e mezzo colle verghe nere da chappellinaio grossetti
2 sciughatoi in un filo da volgere al chapo da fanciulle
vi sciughatoi grossi da piedi in un filo

vi sciughatoi grossi in un filo da piedi di br. 8 di pannello
Uno taglio di panno lino di rensa di br. 30 in circa sottile

Uno taglio di panno lino di rensa di br. 31 grossetta
vi br. di tela di bisso tutto intignato
Uno grembiule di bisso lavorato intignato
2 grembiuli lavorati di bambagina uno rotto e uno messo
2 grembiuli di panno di rensa uno usato e uno nuovo
2 grembiuli di rensa uno usato e uno rotto
1º grembiule di panno nostrale nuovo
Uno grembiule di panno forestiere grosso
2 br. di bambagina in dua tagli
2 tagli di velutto doppi di br. 4 l’uno
Uno sciughatoio di fiore nuova grosseto
Uno sciughatoio di renza con verghe bianche da volgere al capo
Dua fazzoletti da collo senza verghe in un filo
Uno ghrembiule lavorato da fanciulli
Uno sciughatoio sottile di rensa senza verghe da portare in capo
2 fazzoletti sottili da portare in capo in un filo, cioe uno quaderuccio e uno falazzo
[sic] grande
Uno fazzoletto sottile da portare in capo usato
9 camice da donna triste che non sustruanno piu
Tre camice di rensa usate e cotte da donna
9 camice di panno lino nostrale per uso di Bartolommeo
3 camice di panno lino nostrale per uso di Bartolommeo
[272r] 6 camice di rensa usate e rotte per uso di Bartolommeo
xi camice di rensa da donna nuove e stazzonate
9 fazzoletti da capo grosseti in un filo, 2 quaderucci in un filo co’detti fazzoletti, 4
benducci di rensa con capi di verghe usate
2 schiugatoi di rensa con capi di rensa da cappellanaio, 2 fazzoletti di bambagina da testa
e collo, una tela d’azana di rensa, uno fascio di rensa da bambini una nuova una usata
1ª federa da guanciali da fanciulli di rensa, xii br. di benda da capo
9 br. di pannello da fare fascie, 6 sciughatoi larghi da forestieri usate, x camice da fan-
ciulli tra buone e triste, 4 sciugatoi da cappellinaio con verghe nere, 7 benducci da
fanciulli in un filo, dua libbre rotte di guarnello, 6 sciughatoi grossi da pane
7 sciughatoi grossi da stropicciare el capo usate, 4 federe grande da guanciali dal lettuccio
usate, 4 federe da guanciali piccole usate, 9 fazzoletti di rensa da mano tra buoni e tristi
212 appendix
Una schatola che v’è fazzoletti rotti e guanciali e stipone e perfumi

Una cassetta darapresso introvi piu chuffia di piu ragioni usate e nuove e 2 berette di
taffetta e domaschino di pocho valore
E piu 4 mezzi sciughatoi da portare in capo sottili usati a piu che a mezzani, xii grem-
biuluzzi da fanciulli tra buoni e tristi di panno lino grossi, 40 br. di nastri da volgere
el capo, 3 catenuzzi di vetri di Valenza da portare al collo, 1º veletto con una credellina
d’oro intorno intignato, una borsa, un borsotto da donna con perle minute
4 borse, dua borsotti di brocchato e di seta, 2 catenuzze d’oro con una croce di
madreperla con ariento di peso la catenuzza di denari xii in circa, 2 crocelline d’oro
con 4 perluzze piccole per uno damarie a collo da fanciulli
Una crocellina di berilli con tre perle per pendente della Fiammetta, 4 gangheruzzi
d’ariento dorati, 2 vezzi di corallo, un paio di coltellini maniche bianche forniti d’ari-
ento
Una ghieruccia di coltellini verde rotta fornita d’ariento
Una ghieruccia nuova fornita d’ariento a dua coltelli parioni, uno coltellino colla
manicha con ariento
Una crocellina d’oro rotta per fanciulli, 2 pettini d’ariento per uso delle fanciulle uno
rotto e uno sodo
[272v] br. 8 d’accia biancha, uno bossolino d’ariento di peso di denari 8 diamantie la
spugnia, una beccha di velluto nero, una beccha di raso di Gratia, una beccha di
taffetta nera trista usata, br. 1o di domaschino di ghratia per uno paio di maniche, br.
uno di domaschino paghonazzo di Gratia, br. 1o1⁄2 di tabi cangiante, br. 1o di ren-
zanello paghonazzo, uno paio di maniche di renso verde
Uno paio di maniche di raso nero rotte, uno paio di maniche di renso di Gratia usate,
uno paio di maniche di renso tanè rotte, un paio di maniche da c[i]oppa di taffeta di
chermisi rotte, un paio di maniche da c[i]oppa di mezanello pagonazzo tristo, 1⁄2 br.
di ciambellotto azurro, una cotta di ciambellotto azzura della Fiammetta, 1ª cintola
paghonazzo e circa piena di spranghe d’ariento dorate puntale e fibia d’oro di peso
detto puntale e fibia di denari xx, una cintola stretta nera con cinque cignitoi dorati
puntali e fibbia d’oro di peso di denari xii
Una cintola largha domaschina alexandrino con xxi cignitoi di d’alfitii e lavoro d’ari-
ento drieto di peso in tutto di denari 14, una cintola paghonazza stretta fornita d’ari-
ento drento con 100 cignitoi peso di denari 10, una chiavachuore di rosette d’ariento
con catene d’ariento dorate di peso in tutto di once 1ª.
Una cintola di raso verde largha con xx cignitoi e rosette e puntali e con puntali e fibie
d’ariento con tre borde d’oro peso in tutto di denari 13, una fetta largha di
domaschino chermisi con puntali e fibbie d’ariento con venti cignitoi e di rosse con
tre bende d’oro di peso in tutto di denari 13, una cintola di domaschino paghonazzo
largha fornito d’ariento biancho con x cignitoi e rosette di peso di denari 8 in tutto
Una cintola da huomo chermisi stretta rotta e fornita d’ariento biancho in peso in
tutto di denari 2, dua cintoluzze da fanciulli e uno chiavacuoruzzo fornito d’ariento
in tutto di denari 4, uno pendente con uno balastio con 3 perle disotto ii diamante di
sopra per uso della donna di Bartolommeo di stima di denari 200 in tutto, una perla
di <. . . . .> 5 legato in anello di stima di denari 55 in tutto, uno rubino legato in anello
di stima di denari 20 in tutto, una perluzza piccola di denari 21⁄2 legata in annello di
stima di denari 6
[273r] Uno balasciuzzo piccolo legato in anello di stima di denari 4, una filza di
paternostri di calcidonio, uno vezzo di paternostri di coralli di peso denari 2, una
palla d’ariento straforata da tenere in mano di peso d’oncie 1, uno anello grosso d’oro
da suggellire coll’arme, uno bambino con vesta di broccato d’oro vecchia e una cin-
toluzza con perla minute, dua nappi d’ariento uno piccolo di denari 12, uno mezzano
di denari 25, 24 chucchiai d’ariento, 36 forchette d’ariento dozzinali, 2 scarselle da vel-
luto nero fornite d’ariento, uno libretto ricordanze coverto di carta biancha coreggie
rosse segnato D, 25 libbre di lino di pezzuolo e vitechese pettinnato, una lettiera da
letto con lettuccio apicato insieme di noce intarsiato, una coltrice con dua piumacci
pieni di penna e piuma, una materassa di lana, 1o saccone di paglia, una materassa dal
lettuccio piena di pelle, uno coltrice di panno lino biancho e pieno di bambagia usato,
una sargia fiandrescha e tela dipinta e a figure usata, uno tappeto de br. 5 per lettuc-
cio, 2 coltre da lettuccio lavorate una a penne e una anticha usate di br. 41⁄2 l’una, uno
cortinaggio di tela di Gostanza a detto letto e a padiglione
Dua forzieri dipinti e messi a oro usati
Una Vergine Maria messa e oro e riccha, dua forzieri dipinti ad <. . . . .> coll’arme.
Nell’antecamera di detta camera

Una lettiera da letto di br. 4 di noce sanza tarsie, una coltrice di penna e piuma ratop-
pata, una matterassa di capecchio, uno sacchone di paglia, uno coltrone biancho
pieno di bambagia, una sargia di fiandra a tela e figure usata e testa, uno cassonamo
da libro di braccia 2
Una lettiera nell’antecamera di sopra di lino sotile
Uno paio di guanciali grande da lettuccio con federa darosato
Uno paio di guanciali di chuoio alla brocata, 6 guanciali da letto sfoderati, 2 in busti
di panno biancho da dorme di parto
Uno sacchetto entrovi piu cenci e calcetti, 20 libbre d’accia biancha e grossa, 2 paia di
forzieri di pannolino,
214 appendix
2 capelletti pelosi alla francese, uno cappelletto biancho raso foderato di taffeta cher-
misi, uno libricino di donna fornito d’ariento da donna novella, uno mezzo lenzuolo
tristo
[273v] Inventario della masseritia si truovano nella camera di Filippo Nasi per suo
uso e della donna sua
Uno paio di lenzuola a 4 teli una colla mezza mandorla e uno lavorato e l’altro non,
uno paio di lenzuola coll’orlo spiccato co’ reticella, 5 paio di lenzuola a 4 teli di br. 9,
40 braccia di tela di gintura da sopanni, 40 br. di panno lino da camice
5 sciugatoi, 6 sciugatoni grossi da piedi in uno filo, 8 sciugatoi da cappellinaio mez-
zani colle verghe bianche in uno filo
6 sciugatoi sotile da cappelinaio verghe nere, 6 sciugatoi da viso verghe bianche, 4 sci-
ugatoi in uno filo, 12 benducci con le verghe nere in uno filo, 24 fazoletti da mano in
1o filo, 19 fazoletti da mano in uno filo mezzani, 8 chamice di panno nostrale sottile
da donna, ii chamice di rensa nuove di Philippo, 3 br. di rensa mezzana, xii chamice di
rensa per uso di Philippo usate e vecchie, viii chamice di panno lino nostrale usate
della Bartholommea, xii chamice di pannolino nostrale per uso di Philippo usate, x
chamice di panno lino nostrale grossette della Bartholommea
vi chamice di detto panno della Bartholommea, 6 chamice di panno lino nostrale non
charate di Philippo, 22 federe da guanciale da letto usate, 4 federe da guanciali dal let-
tuccio con reticella, 6 sciugatoi larghi da forzieri, 4 sciugatoi grossi da piedi, 6 sciuga-
toni grossi da stropicciare el chapo, 3 sciugatoi da rasciugare el viso, 4 sciugatoi da
chapellinaio verghe nere usate, 1ª ciopppa di domaschino nero della Bartholommea
usata, 1ª c[i]oppa di panno paghonazzo chiaro della detta usata, 1ª c[i]oppa di panno
tanè usata della decta, 1ª c[i]oppa di panno nero usata, 1ª c[i]oppa sciura di rascia
nera, 1ª c[i]oppa di panno perpignano <. . . . .> usata, 1ª c[i]oppa di rascia nera vec-
chia e trista, 1ª chotta di raso paghonazzo usata, 1ª chotta di velluto verde usata trista
1ª chotta di raso isbiardito usata e trista, 1ª chotta di domaschino biancho usata e
trista, 1ª cotta di ciambellotto paghonazzo, 1ª gammurra di seta azurra, 1ª gamurra di
panno pagonazzo schura, 1ª giachetta di taffeta chrema usata, 1º guarnello biancho
usato, 1ª saia di fiore di lino trista, uno mantello rosato usato e buono di Philippo, 1º
mantello paghonazzo chiaro usato di Philippo
[274r] Uno mantello nero usato, uno catelano rosato usato
Uno catelano di paghonazzo schuro di panno venezziano
Uno catelano di panno pagonazzo tristo, uno catelanuzzo rosato usato, una cappa bigia
usata trista, uno capperone usato foderato di verde usato, una robetta di panno pago-
nazzo foderata di dossi usate, dua robetta di panno pagonazzo foderata d’indisia, una
robetta di panno tanè foderata d’indisia trista, una robetta nera foderata d’indisia trista
Una robetta di panno nero scempia usata, una robetta di ciambellotto pagonazzo
sopannata di taffeta trista, tre gonellini sanza maniche di piu colori vecchi, 3 gonellini
rosati e rotti a uso di Filippo gran tempo fa, una c[i]oppetta rosata foderata di golpi
trista, uno [l]uccho rosato foderato di litizi usato, uno [l]uccho rosato foderato di
taffeta chermisi usato, 6 cappucci di piu colori usati, 2 farsetti di raso nero usati, uno
farsetto di panno pagonazzo, uno farsetto di guarnello
Uno c[i]oppone bigio foderato di pelle bianche, una fodera da roba da donna di dossi
usata, una fodera di roba da donna di panna usata, piu fodere di martore <. . . . .> usate
Una cintola verde d’ariento dorato e anellato con 48 cignitoi peso in tutto di denari 8,
una cintola biancha fornita d’ariento dorato lavorato con filo con 92 cignitoi di peso
di denari 11, una cintola di velluto nero fornita d’ariento dorato con 82 cignitoi col
puntale rosso di peso di denari 13 in tutto, una cintola di raso nero stretta con 86 cig-
nitoi fornita d’ariento di peso di denari 7, una cintola verde e nera con cignitoi d’ari-
ento dorato e col puntale e fibbia di peso di once 1 in tutto, peso di denari 8, 2 paia di
coltellini forniti d’ariento colle maniche d’ariento, uno paio di coltellini colle maniche
bianche forniti d’ariento, uno pendente per uso della Bartolommea entrovi uno
rubino ciotolo e 3 diamantuzzi e uno smeraldo con 3 perle di sotto di stima di denari
220 in circa, una perla di denari 5 legata in anello giabbetta di stima di denari 40, uno
diamante tavola legato in anello stima di denari 50, dua rubinuzzi tristi legati in
anello di stima di denari 12 in circa in tutto, uno smeraluzzo legato in annello di stima
di denari 20, una perluzza di denari 21⁄2 legata in anello di stima di denari 6
[274v] Uno mezzo sciugatoio d’accia sotile e nero per uso della Bartolommea costo di
denari 4, uno mezzo sciugatoio d’accia sotile rotto e usato, un mezzo sciugatoi di fiore
rotto e tristo, 4 berrette di domasco e di raso lavorato, 4 fazzoletti sottili da capo cioe
quadrucci, 2 sciugatoi lavorati da capellinaio coverti di rensa, una filza di coralli 110
con uno bottone di perla e x d’ariento, 2 libbre d’accia sottile, 25 libbre d’accia grossa,
30 libbre di lano di pezzuolo e nostrale
Uno libbricino di donna da donna novella che lavoro la Bartolommea
250 br. di benda, uno borsotto d’oro lavorato d’oro filato
12 fazzoletti da mano usati per uso di Filippo, 12 benducci usati per uso della
Bartolommea, 6 convercieri usati di rensa per uso di Filippo, 4 paia di maniche di seta
trista e di piu colori, 2 becche di velluto nero, 6 grembiuli di panno lino nostrali sotili
con una freggia dappie usati e tristi, uno grembiule di rensa, 4 paia di calze vecchie di
Filippo, 6 veletti da collo per uso della Bartolommea usati, 2 veletti da capo usati della
Bartolommeo, una lettiera da letto con lettucio apiccato insieme di noce cogli rovoli
d’oro
Una coltrice di piuma e penna con ii piumaccie. Una matterassa di cappecchio, uno
sacchone di pagli, uno materassino da lettuccio di capecchio, una sargia fiandrescha a
216 appendix
tela dipinta a figure e trista, 2 coltre da lettuccio, una apine e una anticho, uno corti-
naggio di tela di Gostanza a padiglioni
Una tappeto da lettuccio usato, dua forzieri dipinti e messi adoro
Una Vergine Maria
Uno specchio di legno messo a oro, 6 berrette sciempie di piu colori usati, 2 berrette
da notte

Una lettiera da lecto di noce sanza tarsia, una coltrice di penna e piuma con 2 piu-
maccie, una materassa di capecchio, uno sachone di paglia, uno cassone intarsiata,
uno armadiuzzo di beto, una forzeretta adivise, 2 paia di lenzuola piccole da lecto del-
l’antecamera di pannolino forestiero usate
Nell’antecamera di sopra
Una lettiera d’albero sottile che non si usa a nulla, uno fornimento d’ariento da
scarsella, una giachetta cioe robetta di taffeta non usata di Filippo, 2 pettini di aivorio,
uno piccolo e uno grande, 6 guanciali da lecto sfoderati, 2 guanciali grande da lettuc-
cio sfoderati, 2 guanciali di chuoio pagonazzo
[275r] Le masseritia si truovono a Villamagna
In camera dove dorme Bernardo

Una lettiera da lecto di br. 51⁄2 con uno lettuccio apiccati insieme d’albero lavorato di
noce con predella e cassette intorno, una coltrice con 2 piumaccia di piume e penne,
una materassa di cannocchio piena di capecchio, uno sacchone di paglia, uno mat-
erassino in su lettuccio di capecchio

Una lettiera d’albero con uno lettuccio apiccato insieme di br. 8 in tutto, uno saccone
di paglia, una materassa piena di lana
Una coltrice rossa con una piumaccia di penne, uno materassino di capecchio, una
coltre da lecto biancha di bambagia trista e rotta, 4 sciugatoi grossi in uno filo da
piedi, 4 sciugatoi grossi usati, una camice da huomo usata, uno paio di guanciali
grandi da lettuccio di penna di pollo colla federa usati e vecchi
Una coltre dal letto sottile vecchia e rotta
Uno paio di guanciali di quoio paghonazzo, 2 coltrice dal lettuccio di guarnello vec-
chio usate, una arghetta da tenere pane
Uno forziere vecchio e anticho, una coltre di lana dal lecto grande e usata e trista
In camera dove dorme Bartolomeo

Una lettiera d’albero e una dal lettuccio appichate insieme regolate di noce, uno sac-
chone di paglia, una materassa piena di lana, una coltrice piena di piume e penne con
dua piumacci e uno matterassino dal lettuccio di capecchio, 5 sciughatoni e 12 sciuga-
toi grossi da piedi in un filo, 3 federe da guanciali usati, 5 sciugatoni grossi, 2 sciugatoi
da viso colle verghe bianche, 2 guanciali grande dal lettuccio colle verde federe usate,
2 guanciali da lecto colle fodere, dua guanciali di chuoio pagonazzo usati, una coltrice
da lettuccio di guarnello vergata
Nella camera della loggia

Una lettiera da lecto e una da lettuccio appicate insieme del Bartolommeo reggolate
di noce
[275v] Una coltrice piena di piume e penne con dua piumacci
Uno materassino da lettuccio di bordo pieno di lana
Uno forziere vecchio usato
Una coltrice di lana usata, una coltrice sottile di bambagia usata, una coltre sottile di
bambagia usata e legere
Una coltre da lettuccio di guarnello vergata
Una coltre di bambagia da lettuccio ripezzata e trista
Dua guanciali colle federe dal lettuccio usate
Dua guanciali di quoio pagonazzo da lettuccio
Nell’antechamera della detta camera

Una lettiera da letto d’albero con uno da lettuccio apichate insieme
Uno sachone di paglia
Una materassa di chapecchio
Una coltrice di piume e penne usata
Uno materassino di chapechio da lettuccio
Uno materassino di bordo da lettuccio pieno di lana
In chamera dove dorme Filippo

Una lettiera d’albero da letto con una da lettuccio apichate insieme regolate di noce
Uno sacchone di paglia
Una materassa di chapecchio
Una coltrice piena di piuma e penna con dua piumacci
Uno matterassino da lettuccio
Una Vergine Maria anticha
Una coltrice piena di lana da letto usata
218 appendix
Tre panni bianchi alla chatelana usati e stigniati

Uno paio di guanciali senza federe da lettuccio
In camera di sopra a letto dalla camera dove dorme la Gostanza vedova

Una lettiera d’albero di braccia quattro
Una lettiera da lettuccio d’albero anticho
Uno sacchone di pagli
Una cassa a dua serrami trista
[276r] Uno forziere
In chamera della serva sul verone

Una lettiera d’albero vecchia con dua chasse vecchie e sotto dua forzieri tristi e
antichi
Una materassa piena di lana, una coltrice piena di penna usata e trista, dua piumacci
vecchi e tristi, uno coltrone rosso rotto e tristo
In camera in sulla sala di sopra dove dorme el famiglo

Una lettiera d’albero trista, una lettiera da lettuccio trista
Una materassa piena di lana rotta
Una coltriciuzza trista
In sala terena insu l’aquaio

Uno bacino con una misciroba d’ottone coll’arme addivisa
Uno bacino d’ottone sanza arme con una misciroba all’antica
Uno bacinetto piccolo con una misciroba
Una secchia di rame d’aquaio, cinque candellieri d’ottone
3 lucerne d’ottone, uno candelliere da lucerna d’ottone
Una tavola d’albero regolate di noce, 2 trespoli a detta tavola
Una tavoletta di braccia 4 d’albero per la famigla
2 trespoli a detta tavola, 8 deschetti di faggio selvatichi
Uno paio di alari, 2 paia di molli da camino
2 paletti da camino, 6 paia di lenzuola a 3 teli e mezzo di panno forestiere, 3 paia di
lenzuoletti da famiglia tristi, uno paio di lenzuoletti a reticella scempia trista, uno
lenzuoletto straccato, 6 sciugatoi da capellinaio verghe nere usate
Una tovaglia di rensa mezzana di br. 12 in circa
4 tovaglie [e] 4 guardanappe usate lavoro parigino di br. 8 l’una
Una tovaglia di br. 12 in circa capi a buchi trista
Una guardanappa con mandorla stretta usata all’anticha
2 tovaglie [e] 2 guardanappe mandorle strette doppia triste di br. 8

Una guardanappa di br. 8 in circa trista
Una tovagliuola capi di buchi di br. 8 in circa trista
Una tovigliuola capitata di br. 21⁄2, 20 tovagliolini usati
[276v] 4 tovaglie da stangha, 8 mantili da famigli tristi di piu ragione, dua ragne da
uccellini vecchie
Uno ragnetto da ucellini, 3 ragne da tordi di br. 55 l’una usate e triste, 3 ragne da tordi basse
Uno bacino d’ottone da lavare e’ piedi
In camera
Una caldaia di rame di tenuta di libbre uno
Dua pauioli di rame piccoli usati, uno pauiolo mezzano
Una padella, uno pauiolo di rame, una catena da camino, dua schidoni, uno grande e
uno piccoli, tre teghie di rame, dua grande e una picola, uno catino di rame da rigov-
inare, una paletta una paio di molle, uno treppi[ed]e di pauioli, uno treppi[ed]e da
teghia, uno catino di rame da casalata
Una teghia d’avoria affogata, 19 scodelle di stagnio, 29 scodellini di stagno, 12 piatel-
letti piani di stagnio, undici quadretti di stagno, 3 piatelli grandi di stagno
Uno forziere vecchio in che stanno gli stagni
Una madia da fare pane, uno lettuccio di pane
Uno botticello d’acieto, 6 lucerne di ferro, uno romaniolo e una mestola di ferro, una
tavola di br. 61⁄2 sanza trespoli
Nella volta
7 botti da vermiglio di tenuta di libbre 5 once 10 usata e trista
2 scure di ferro da fare legno, una becchastrino di ferro, una marra, una mazza di ferro
da rompere saxi, uno palo di ferro grande, una vangha lombarda, una vanga nostrale
Orcie 34 da tenere olio usate tra buone e trista
28 barili di vino vermiglio
Masseritie e cose si truovano a Barberino da Mugello

Una lettiera d’albero tinta di verde con una cassa a 3 serrami trista e vecchia, uno let-
tucio selvatico d’albero
[277r] Una materassa di lana, una coltrice usata e trista e dua piumacci, uno panno
bigello da tenere sudetto lecto
3 paia di lenzuola rotte e triste, una coltricetta trista quasi vota e vecchia, 2 togavlie, 2
guardanappe usate e triste, quatro tovagliolini tristi, dieci pezzi di stagno e poi rami
vecchi, sei candelleruzzi piccoli d’ottone, una secchia di rame piccola d’aquaio
220 appendix
Una madia, tre lucerne di ferro, uno paio di molli

Una paletta, uno paio d’alari, dua lettiere selvatiche da lecto senza nulla suvi
Dua lettiere selvatiche senza nulla suvi [sic]
Sei botte da vino in nella volta da biancho e da vermiglio di tenuta di barile 20
A Montegirone
5 botti da vino biancho di barile 3 insino in barile 8
20 orcie da olio
Libri ci troviamo
Uno Davit è ornamentato lettera di forma legato in asse
Una Bibbia legata in asse lettera di forma
3 Deche di Livio in uno volume lettera di forma legati in asse
Uno libro di Vangeli di forma legato in asse
Una Storia Fiorentina di forma legata in asse
Uno Piero [C]rescentio di forma legato in asse, uno Plinio di forma legato in asse
Uno Voragine della vita de’ Sancti di forma legato in asse
Segue inventario di grano vino e olio

Grano staia 880 in circa tra in Mugello e Furecchio e in Firenze e a Villamagna, olio
barili 38 a Girone e Villamagna, barili 40 vino in Firenze, barili 120 tra biancho e ver-
miglio
d o cument 2
A Statute of the Commune of Gangalandi About Patronage Rights at Santa Maria a
Lecceto
ASF, C. Strozzi. Ser. V, 1185, folder entitled “Varie Notizie e ricordi spettanti alla
chiesa di S Maria di Lecceto”
Unnumbered insert:“Copia di una donagione di staiora 25 di terra fatta il comune di
gangalandi a frate Domenico Guerrucci a Lliceto”
In dei nomine amen anno domino nostri jesu cristi ab eius salvestria incarnatione
millesimo quadrigentesimo octuagesimo die vero vigesimo mensis aprilis
E prudenti huomini cioe:
Matteo di Gaccio di Marcho
Matteo di Pagnio Balducci
Fabbiano di Francesco Cambini
Simone di Guido di Lorenzo

tutti del comune di Gangalandi contado di Firenze absente domino Baldo di Marcho
Dicone, lor conpagnio eletto e absunti dal venerando ufici de’ dodici del comune di ganga-
landi affare certi capitoli e conventioni sopra il romito di santa Maria del licceto del detto
comune e insieme e dacordo statuirono e ordinorono i sopradetti statutarii e ordinatori.
In primo danno e consegniano a detto romitoro staiora venticinque in circa achorda
come sara terminata per sopra detti statutarii. E veramente donano a frate Domenico
Guerrucci da Ffirenze dell’ordine di frati predicatori di Sancto Domenico per edificare
uno romitoro e chiesa permettendo detto frate Domenico per se e per suoi successori
dare ongni anno all’ufficio de’ dodici del comune di Gangalandi una libra di candele di
cera nuova del mese d’agosto incomincando nel presente anno per ricognitione del
benifitio di detto comune recevuto. E cosi danno il detto luogo a detto frate Domenico e
a frati che lui vorra in sua compagnia alloro vita e dipoi venendo la morte di detto frate
Domenico e de’ detti frati che fussino in detto luogo quando detto frate Domenico
morissi cioe sua compagnia che allora il reverendo uficio de’dodici del comune di
Gangalandi habbi approvedere di nuovi frati habitatori di quello luogo di quella medes-
ima religione e ordine con quello medesimo incarico. Intendendosi sempre non vi si
possa mettere prete secolare. E per che detto luogo sia augumentato e riguardato
qualunche persone che contro a quello facesse o noiasse o impedisse la muraglia di detto
romitorio e chiesa sia privato di detta provisione che non si possa trovare amettere nuovi
frati in detto luogo. E tutte le sopra dette cose furono fatte per sopradetto statutarii e
ordinatori nel comune di Gangalandi sotto gli anni del nostro signiore Giesucristo dalla
sua salvestria incarnatione mille quattrocento ottanta inditione tredecima e a dì venti del
mese d’aprile presente detto frate Domenico di Piero Guerrucci e consentiente e
aprovante e ratificante a tutte le soprascritte cose. E nella presentia di Piero d’Antonio
Gini e Nerico di Nanni Compari ambo del comune di Gangalandi contado di Firenze
testimoni alle soprascritte cose avuti chiamati e pregati e piu altri testimoni.
d o cument 3
Contract Between the Lenzi Family and the Hospital of the Innocenti About the
Decoration of Their Chapel in the Church
aif, cl. x, no. 2 (“Contratti rogati di Ser Masetto di Ser Andrea da Campi e di Ser
Niccolò da Romena dall’anno 1476 al 1502”), fol. 132v (transcribed in modern script,
fols. 464r–65r)
“Licentia cappelle negli innocenti data da Lenzi allo spedale di poterla rimnovere
della sua forma e a ridarla alla similitudine del altra al rincontro”
222 appendix
Item postea dictis anno [1490]. Indictione et die xxvi mensis novembris. Actum flo-
rentie in Populo S. Marie supra porta, et presentibus testibus Johanne Andree de
Carnesecchis et Arrigo Pieri Domicelli.
Cum certum esse dicitur qualiter Laurentius, et Pierus fratres, et filii olim
Ampheronis de Lenzis cives Florentine essent et sunt legiptimi et veri patroni cap-
pelle Sancte Chatherine site in ecclesia Sancte Marie de Innocentibus civitatis flo-
rentie, et Dominus Franciscus hospitalarius et operarii dicti hospitalis desiderent
dictum situm cappelle rimovere [sic for “rinovere”] in alia forma ut ecclesia remaneat
magis espedita, et volentes dicti de Lenzis dicti petitioni favere libenter, et spontes
dederunt et concesserunt plenam authoritatem, et baliam dictis operariis, et hospita-
lario, cum salvis, et condictionibus infrascriptus quatenus possint dictam cappellam
mutare, videlicet, in alia forma ad omnes expensas dicti hospitalis et reaptare et redi-
ficare illam fulcitam, et competentem adeo ut videatur potius meliorata, qua deterio-
rata stantibus firmis semper eorum patronatu dominio et funeralibus iuribus, quae,
et quos dicti de Lenzis semper apud se retinverunt, et esse voluerunt modo et forma,
et prout, et sicut erant, et ad presens sunt et ante dictam reaptationem, et redifica-
tionem fiendam ut supra, adeo quod nullo modo non intelligantur in aliquo eis
pregiudicare, et talem cappellam de novo construendam ut supra sit in eo modo, et
forma, et statu prout videbitur dictis operariis, et hospitalario, in hoc aggravando
conscientias cuius libent eorum, et promiserunt dicto Domino priori presentibus
contra ea que fierunt per eos, non contrafacere, vel venire sub hypotheca dictorum
bonorum.
Poems Written About the Portrait of Piero del Pugliese by Filippino Lippi
1. alessandro braccesi
In Picturam
Vix sibi tam similis Petrus est Puglisius ipsi,

Quam similis vero est picta tabella Petro,
Expressit mira quem nobilis arte Philippus
Sic ut iure queas dicere Apellis opus.
Atque simul sese tabula sic pinxit eadem,
Protinus a picto distet ut ille nihil,
Ut pictos siquis cum veris conferat, horum.
Pictus uter fuerit, non bene nosse queat.
p oems abou t the p ortriat of piero del pugliese 223
In Eundem
Tam veris similes sibi Philippus

Et Petro simul aurea tabella
Expressit facies manu perita
Quam vultus resident utrique veri:
Ut pictis nisi vox et aura desit,
Nec vivi careant nisi tabella.
Hoc si fiet, erunt pares utrique.
From Alessandro Braccesi, Carmina, ed. A. Perosa (Florence: Bibliopolis, 1944), 122.
2. ugolino verino
Laus eiusdem pictoris (after a poem in praise of Filippino’s Cenacolo)
Siquis picta Petri Puliensis viderit ora

Hic Petrus est! et non dicet imago Petri est!
Artifici cessit natura! ut verior ars sit!
Spirantem superat picta tabella virum.
From H. Brockhaus, ed., “Lob der Florentiner Kunstwelt: Gedicht das Ugolino
Verini,” in Festschrift zu Ehren des Kunsthistorischen Institut von Florenz (Leipzig: A. G.
Liebeskind, 1897), iv.
notes
Introduction 11. Mateer, Courts, Patrons, and Poets, ix, taking his
1. The original injunction by G. M. Young was lead from Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance
to “go on reading till you can hear people talking.” I Italy, 1–2.
first came across it in Kent and Kent, Neighbours 12. D. Wilkins, preface to the fourth edition of
and Neighbourhood, 1. Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 6. See also
Marchand and Wright, “The Patron in the Pic-
2. Ginzburg, The Cheese and The Worms was first
ture,” in With and Without the Medici, 11.
published as Il formaggio e i vermi in 1976 and has
become a classic study of microhistory and mentalité. 13. See Ianziti, “Patronage and the Production of
History,” in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art and
3. There were, of course, important exceptions Society. For reviews of this book that confirm the
to this, most importantly the work of Richard importance of this separation, see Chambers in Jour-
Goldthwaite, for whom, see below. nal of Ecclesiastical History (1989): 115, and Baxandall,
4. See F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage, 258–59, English Historical Review (1990): 455.
and idem, “Più superba de quella di Lorenzo,” 14. See, for example, Spencer, Andrea del Castagno,
Renaissance Quarterly (1977). and Wallace,“Michelangelo in and out of Florence,”
in Hager, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, 54–88.
5. See, for a discussion of this, P. Burke, The
European Renaissance, 1–17. 15. I discuss the problems with these terms fur-
ther in Chapter 5. See also D. Kent, Cosimo de’
6. Ciappelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family. Medici, 8 and n. 64.
7. Richard Goldthwaite was making this point 16. Translated as The World of the Florentine
in 1987: see “The Empire of Things” in Kent and Renaissance Artist. See, in particular, 277–78.
Simons, Patronage, Art and Society, 154–75, and his 17. Gombrich, Norm and Form, 35.
1993 book Wealth and the Demand for Art. This
approach has recently become more popular. See, 18. Lopez, “Dal mecenatismo del Medioevo,”
for example, Jardine, Worldly Goods. Evelyn Welch Quaderni Medievali (1992): 125.
manages the Material Renaissance project, an 19. See Warburg,“The Art of Portraiture,” in his
umbrella for many scholars working on Italy in this The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, 187 (first published
field. The website is www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/ as Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum).
arthist/matren/. Her Shopping in the Renaissance is 20. For one art historian’s explanations of the
forthcoming from Yale University Press. need to “re-create” an artwork to understand it, see
8. Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, passim, Panofsky,“The History of Art,” esp. 17–19.
but esp. 12–36. 21. The bibliography is vast. See, for work on
Medici patronage in general: Ames-Lewis, The
9. D. Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, 39–128.
Early Medici and Their Artists, and Gombrich,“The
10. See Weissman,“Taking Patronage Seriously,” Early Medici,” in his Norm and Form, 35–57; for
in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art and Society, Cosimo, the fullest study is now D. Kent, Cosimo
25–26, for the definition of Mediterranean patron- de’ Medici, but see also Ames-Lewis, Cosimo de’
age relationships that I use here. For a broader Medici, Jenkins, “Cosimo de’ Medici’s Patronage of
anthropological definition, see Eisenstadt and Architecture,” JWCI (1970), and Rubinstein, “Lay
Roniger, Patrons, Clients, and Friends, 48–50. Patronage,” in Verdon and Henderson, Christianity
226 notes to pages 6–11
and the Renaissance; and for Piero, Beyer and 31. Baxandall, “The Language of Art History,”
Boucher, Piero de’ Medici il Gottoso, and Gnocchi,“Le New Literary History (1978). The ideas expressed in
preferenze artistiche,” Artibus et historiae (1988). The this article are dealt with more fully in his Patterns
most extensive survey of Lorenzo’s patronage is of Intention.
now F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici; my thanks 32. See Trexler, Public Life, for the most extensive
to the author for allowing me to read this manu- discussion of Renaissance Florence as a locus of
script before its publication. See also the essays in civic theater.
Garfagnini, Lorenzo de’ Medici, idem, Lorenzo il
33. For a discussion of these issues, see the edi-
Magnifico e il suo mondo; and Mallett and Mann,
tors’ introduction in Bryson, Holly, and Moxey,
Lorenzo the Magnificent. For Filippo Strozzi and the
Visual Culture, xv–xvii.
family in general, see Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi,
and Craven, “Aspects of Patronage”; for Giovanni 34. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 119.
Rucellai, see Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, 35. Chartier, “Popular Appropriations,” in his
vol. 2. Forms and Meanings, esp. 90–97, provides a useful
investigation of the tensions between the rhetoric
22. See Blume, “Giovanni de’ Bardi,” Jahrbuch
of ideal behavior and the way this rhetoric was
der Berliner Museen (1995), and Nelson, “The Later
understood and manipulated in the way people
Works of Filippino Lippi.”
actually behaved.
23. Gombrich, Norm and Form, 42. 36. For a discussion of the link between “cultural
24. Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, 1:15–16. Dis- capital” and social difference albeit in a very differ-
cussed in Kemp, “From mimesis to fantasia,” Viator ent milieu, see Bourdieu, Distinction, 2–7.
(1977): 358–61. There is now a study of female art 37. Cooper,“Mecenatismo or Clientelismo,” in D. G.
patrons that also takes this basic approach. See and R. L. Wilkins, The Search for a Patron, 23.
King, Renaissance Women Patrons. 38. F. W. Kent’s work on Lorenzo reveals the
25. O’Malley, “The Business of Art.” Honelore extent of his interests in architecture and sculp-
Glasser’s dissertation, “Artists’ Contracts of the ture; see his forthcoming Lorenzo de’ Medici. By
Early Renaissance,” remains a key contribution to contrast, Patricia Rubin has shown that Vasari had
this field. his own reasons for stressing the importance of
being a good patron. See Rubin, Giorgio Vasari,
26. Thomas, The Painter’s Practice, and Callman, 200–202.
Apollonio di Giovanni.
39. Marchand and Wright’s introduction to their
27. See, for example, Hope, “Altarpieces and the With and Without the Medici (1–18) contains a useful
Requirements of Patrons,” in Verdon and Hender- summary of the literature on Florentine patronage
son, Christianity and the Renaissance. studies and addresses the emphasis on the Medici
28. Gilbert, “What Did the Renaissance Patron family, and F. W. Kent, in Lorenzo de’ Medici,
Buy?” Renaissance Quarterly (1998): 446. considers the impact of Medici historiography on
our understanding of the Renaissance in general
29. Caglioti, Donatello e i Medici, 265–81. D. Kent, (chap. 1).
Cosimo de’ Medici, discusses the new documents, yet
40. The Nasi family were briefly considered
goes on to treat the Uccello paintings as Cosimo
by Alison Luchs in her thesis, “Cestello,” and
de’ Medici’s commissions.
by Alessandro Cecchi in his investigation of the
30. Warburg’s work has enjoyed a recent revival patrons of Raphael (in his contribution to the
in interest, in part because it seems to echo the exhibition catalogue Raffaello a Firenze, 41). The
concerns of recent art historiography. See also Del Pugliese are mentioned in the monographs of
Michael Baxandall’s now classic Painting and Experi- the painters they were associated with, though the
ence, and his discussion of the difficulties in align- major consideration of the family itself is Horne,
ing the concepts of “art” and “society” expressed in “The Last Communion of St. Jerome,” Bulletin of
“Art, Society and the Bouguer Principle,” Represen- the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1915), with useful
tations (1985). archival additions in Cecchi, “Una predella e altri
notes to pages 12–20 227
contributi,” Gli Uffizi, Studi e ricerche (1988): 59–60, 6. For a discussion of this, see Klapisch-Zuber,
and Carl,“Das Inventar,” MKIF (1987). “Family Trees,” in Maynes et al., Gender, Kinship,
41. For a recent survey of the literature on Renais- Power, esp. 101–5.
sance women and gender, see Welch,“Engendering 7. For a contemporary’s account of this status
Italian Renaissance Art,” Papers of the British School at differentiation, see Piero Guicciardini’s comments
Rome (2000). For art patronage in particular, see published in Rubinstein, The Government of Flo-
the special edition of Renaissance Studies edited by rence, 368–69, and recently discussed by Brown,
Jaynie Anderson (no. 10, 1996); King, Renaissance “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s New Men,” Renaissance Stud-
Women Patrons; Reiss and Wilkins, Beyond Isabella. ies (2002): 115–17.
42. Indeed, in a recent article, Roger Crum has 8. See, for example, Benedetto Dei’s considera-
made a case for reevaluating Renaissance patron- tion of the Florentine lineages that would have
age as a whole along gender lines. See his “Control- been included in a Venetian-style Great Council in
ling Women,” in Reiss and Wilkins, Beyond Isabella. La Cronica, 144–45, and Ugolino Verino’s list of the
noble families of Florence in De Illustratione Urbis
43. For an examination of confraternities as art
Florentiae, book 3.
patrons, see contributions to Eisenbichler, Crossing
the Boundaries, and Wisch and Cole Ahl, Confrater- 9. See, for example, Molho, Marriage Alliance,
nities and the Visual Arts. esp. chap. 5; D. Kent, “The Florentine ‘Reggi-
mento,’” Renaissance Quarterly (1975), and Pesman
44. The History of Man series is extremely prob- Cooper, “The Florentine Ruling Group,” Studies in
lematic as the evidence is very scarce. For its origi- Medieval and Renaissance History (1985).
nal iconographic interpretation, see Panofsky,“The
Early History of Man,” in his Studies in Iconology, 10. ASF, Carte Dei, 400 (Nasi), fols. 57r–v; BNF,
and for a critique of this, Fermor, Piero di Cosimo, Passerini (Nasi), unfoliated.
81. For Fra Bartolommeo, Fischer, Fra Bartolommeo, 11. See for this Brucker, Renaissance Florence,
170–79. 94–95.
45. See particularly the work of Amanda Lillie, 12. As already noted in the introduction, Jacopo
including “Florentine Villas,” “The Patronage of di Lutozzo was a member of the Dodici Buonuo-
Villa Chapels,” in Marchand and Wright, With and mini three years previously, and a gonfaloniere for
Without the Medici, and “Memory of Place,” in Ciap- Scala, Santo Spirito, in 1374. For these dates, see
pelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family. ASF, Raccolta Sebregondi, 3755a (Nasi), unfoli-
ated. For a comparative list of all the Florentine
families on the Great Council, and the first time a
family member appeared on the priorate, see Pes-
Chapter 1
man Cooper, “The Florentine Ruling Group,”
1. Preyer, “Florentine Palaces,” in Ciappelli and 131–48. Gene Brucker suggests that those families
Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family, 176–94. entering the Tre Maggiori after 1343 would be con-
2. Quoted in F. W. Kent, “La famiglia patrizia,” sidered as “gente nuova” (see Florentine Politics and
in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, 70. Society, 40–41).
3. The locus classicus of these opinions are in 13. As reported in his will, ASF, NA 2195, folder
Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, and F. W. Kent, House- 12, no. 10 (unfoliated). For the awarding of privi-
hold and Lineage. For a summary of these debates, leges to Medici friends on this balìa, see D. Kent,
see Connell, “Libri di famiglia,” Italian Culture The Rise of the Medici, 36–37.
(1990). 14. For a list of appointments, see ASF, Raccolta
4. See F. W. Kent,“La famiglia patrizia,” in Lam- Sebregondi, 3755a (Nasi), unfoliated, and for Nasi
berini, Palazzo Strozzi, 71–74. appearance on Medicean balìe, see Rubinstein, The
Government of Florence, 244–311.
5. See particularly Kuehn, Law, Family and
Women, 129–42, and Bizzocchi, “La dissoluzione,” 15. Tognetti, Il Banco Cambini, 268.
ASI (1982). 16. Ibid., 245, 299–300.
17. ASF, NA 2881 (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi 4 maschi Sandro, Filippo, Giunta, Simone: che
1495–1507), fols. 390v–91v. This may well be con- non c’e persona. Siche di questa Famiglia non c’e
nected with Alessandro Nasi’s right to bear the oggi altri che Jacopo, Francesco e Agostino di
French lilies on his coat of arms, which must have Lutozzo di Naso, di Luti di Giunta di Guido.” For
been granted about the same time; see below. the date of this ricordanze, see fol. 350. The Conti
18. Raccolta Sebregondi 3755a. Guidi did, in fact, live in Tuscany from the tenth
century and owned twelve castles in the area of
19. Ibid., and Rubinstein, The Government of Flo-
Casentino. See Pandolfi, Quota, 18–19.
rence, 199–202.
30. BNF, Magl., Cl. xxvi, 151, fols. 381–83.
20. The circumstances of Piero’s sudden death
are discussed by his notary at the court of Naples 31. For Lutozzo di Jacopo’s marriage to Ginevra,
in a letter to the Otto di Pratica of 23 November see ASF, NA 2195 (Ser Giovanni Beltramini,
1491. See ASF, Sig. Leg. 25, fols. 58r–v. 1405–56), folder 12, no. 10, unfoliated.
21. See ibid., 345 and 353, for the balìe, and 359 32. See Mallett, The Florentine Galleys, 41–52, for
and 362, for the Council of Seventy in 1480 an overview of how the galley system worked, and
and 1489; F. W. Kent, “Lorenzo . . . ‘Amico degli 78, 80, 98, 124, 161–75, for the Nasi’s involvement in
Uomini da Bene,’” in Garfagnini, Lorenzo il Mag- the trade.
nifico e il suo mondo, 50, for the prominence of Piero 33. Quoted in Santini, Firenze e suoi Oratori, 223:
di Lutozzo. Most of the letters come from Piero’s “nè comodo alcuno in suo profitto o acconcio, o di
time as ambassador, or vicario, outside Florence. sua amici o parenti.”
See esp. ASF, Sig. Leg. 26, and C. Strozzi, Ser. i, 3,
34. Trexler, Public Life, 291; Mallett, “Diplomacy
nos. 104 and 105.
and War,” in Holmes, Art and Politics, 153–54, dis-
22. The description of Bartolommea Nasi is cusses the types of ambassadors chosen in the lat-
taken from Guicciardini, History of Florence, 174. ter part of the century. See also Alison Brown’s
Her approximate age (10) was given in the 1469 cat- analysis of changing fifteenth-century attitudes to
asto (tax records); see ASF, Catasto 905, fol. 171r. clothing in her “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s New Men,”
23. De Roover, The Rise and Decline, 257–60. Renaissance Studies (2002): 121–30.
24. ASF, Raccolta Sebregondi 3755a (Nasi), 35. Trexler, Public Life, 292–97.
unfoliated. 36. ASF, Sig. Leg. 25, fol. 21v: “di questa mia
25. BNF, Magl., Cl. xxvi, 151 (“Storia della fam- venuta pare si sia rellegrata tucta questa citta, che
iglia de Nasi scritta da fr. Gabriello Nasi osser- allo ismontare mio il molo era caricho di gente, et
vante, 1580”), fol. 355. le vie per dove mi condixe a casa erono tucte calcate
26. The latter is now lost, but the painting of the di gente.”
Florentine entry is now in the Uffizi. See for this, 37. See Trexler, Public Life, 291–94, and for ambas-
Cecchi,“L’ingresso di Carlo VIII,” Paragone (1986). sadors’ clothes, Bridgeman, “Aspects of Dress and
27. BNF, Magl., Cl. xxvi, 151, fols. 329, 336–37. A Ceremony,” 181–93. For a discussion of the com-
family tree and brief history drawn up by Fra plexities of diplomatic language, see Bullard,
Gabriello in preparation for this manuscript can “Lorenzo and Patterns of Diplomatic Discourse,”
also be found among the loose papers of ASF, in Mallett and Mann, Lorenzo the Magnificent.
Carte Dei, 400 (Nasi). 38. Villani, Cronica, 1:372–73.
28. BNF, Magl., Cl. xxvi, 151, fol. 340. 39. Hill, “Notes on Italian Medals xi,” Burlington
29. Ibid., fol. 365: “Guido di [ ] ebbe un figliolo Magazine (1911): 143, and idem, “Notes on Italian
che ebbe nome Giunta. Giunta di Guido, uno che Medals XII,” Burlington Magazine (1911–12): 207.
ebbe nome Luti; Luti di Giunta ebbe Naso e 40. This medal is catalogued in Pollard, Italian
Simone: Naso di Luti fece Lutozzo e Nicolo che si Renaissance Medals, 1:514, no. 297.
fece frate di S. Agostino. Di Simone di Luto vi
masono 4 figliuoli, che ne son vivi Jacopo 41. Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, 25.
Francesco e Agostino di Simone di Luti rimasono 42. Parenti, Storia Fiorentina, 1:200.
43. Hill,“Notes on Italian Medals XI,” Burlington 58. See Goldthwaite, “The Economic Value,”
Magazine (1911): 143. in Banks, Palaces and Entrepreneurs, 2–3; for the tax
44. See Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 36–37, declarations, ASF, Catasto 910, fols. 341r–42r, and
for a discussion of the legendary foundation of the Catasto 1001, fols. 212r–v.
city. For an example of the use of this Florentine 59. The main branch of the Del Pugliese family
legend in polemic, see Francesco Altoviti, Defen- bought five “botteghe di farsettaio” and “di lana”
sione contro all’archa, unpaginated:“sono nati da quelli between 1460 and 1475 in Orsanmichele and San
fortissimi cavalieri Romani: che Silla Catalina et Martino, two from members of the cadet branch of
Cesare condusse a pie di Fiesole in questo fortis- the family. See ASF, Catasto 910, fol. 341r, and Cat-
simo luogo.” asto 1001, fol. 212r.
45. For Florence’s mythical links with Charle- 60. Dei, La Cronica, 85.
magne, see Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence, 61. For the 1480 declaration, see ASF, Catasto
38–40. 999, fol. 259r; for 1495, Dec. Rep. 8, fols. 148r–v.
46. ASF, CRS 122, 75, fol. 2r. See also ASF, 62. ASF, NA 13982 (Ser Michele di Guaspari,
Ceremelli Papiani 3887 (Del Pugliese) for a men- 1527–30), fols. 123r–26v.
tion of this man in 1251. 63. For rent prices, see Goldthwaite, The Building
47. No longer extant, this is recorded in ASF, of Renaissance Florence, 343.
CRS 113, 13 (“Libro de’ Padronati delle Cappelle e 64. The contract of transfer for this chapel is par-
Sepolture della Chiesa della Beatissima Vergine tially transcribed by Carl, “Das Inventar,” MKIF
Maria del Carmine di Firenze”). (1987): 380.
48. See ASF, Raccolta Sebregondi, 4358 (Del 65. This chapel was almost completely destroyed
Pugliese), unfoliated, and Eckstein, The District of in the fire in the church in 1771. For the church’s
the Green Dragon, 193–94. former appearance and furnishings, see Procacci,
49. Cambi, Istorie, in de San Luigi, Delizie, 21:387 “L’incendio,” Rivista d’Arte (1932).
(September 1463). 66. That this policy worked is suggested by the
fact that until relatively recently, it was generally
50. Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon, 194,
assumed that Starnina had been commissioned by
233–34.
the Del Pugliese family. Creighton Gilbert was
51. ASF, Raccolta Sebregondi 4358, Del Pugliese. the first to cast doubt on this hypothesis in “The
52. Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon, 192. Patron of Starnina’s Frescoes,” in Studies in Late
Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honour of Mil-
53. I am grateful to Bill Kent for discussing this lard Meiss. Given Piero’s interest in the visual arts,
issue with me: he has noted no significant sus- the decision to retain the Starnina frescos could
tained contact between the Del Pugliese and the also have been an aesthetic one.
Medici during his researches on Lorenzo. The
1466 balìa is significant in including several people 67. For Piero’s matriculation in the Arte della
who were not renowned Medici supporters, and Lana and other biographical information, see Cec-
even some opponents of Piero di Cosimo. See chi,“Una predella e altri contributi,” Gli Uffizi. Studi
Rubinstein, The Government of Florence, 167–68. e ricerche (1988). For the silk guild, ASF, mss 543,
“Matricole della Seta 1225–1532,” unfoliated.
54. ASF, Catasto 25, fol. 23r.
68. These details are mentioned by Alessandro
55. Molho, Marriage Alliance, 402–3. Cecchi in his brief biography of Piero in “Una pre-
56. ASF, Catasto 992, fol. 111r. See Goldthwaite, della e altri contributi,” Gli Uffizi. Studi e ricerche
The Building of Renaissance Florence, 317–42, for a dis- (1988).
cussion of the earnings of Florentines. 69. Cambi, Istorie, in de San Luigi, Delizie, 21:417.
57. They are not mentioned in Benedetto Dei’s 70. Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Pluteus
list of Florentine merchants abroad: see his Memo- xxxix, 17, fol. 168v, for Piero del Pugliese’s writing
rie Notate (Warburg Institute), 115–28. the manuscript himself. Copying texts, especially
portions of texts into zibaldoni, or commonplace Botti family, in ASF, Libri di Commercio e di
books, was not an unusual practice; see D. Kent, Famiglia 228, fols. 2r–7r.
Cosimo de’ Medici, 69–75. However, Piero’s copy is 83. I discuss this chapel at greater length in
so carefully and skillfully executed that he has been Chapter 7.
mistaken for a monastic scribe. See De la Mare,
84. Casali, “Il gonfalone Drago Verde,” in
“New Research,” in Garzelli, Minatura Fiorentina,
Franchetti Pardo, Drago Verde, 38.
1:440.
71. These were found in the Badia archive by
Levi d’Ancona, Minatura e Miniatori, 95.
Chapter 2
72. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual, 1. For individual palaces, see, for example,
283–309. Preyer, Il Palazzo Corsi-Horne; eadem,“The Rucellai
73. Barocchi, Il Giardino di San Marco, 98. Palace,” in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2,
74. See for a very useful discussion of Florentine and essays in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi. Metà mil-
fatherhood, including indications of further litera- lenio. For the Medici Palace: F. W. Kent, “Più
ture, Kuehn, Emancipation in Late Medieval Florence, superba de quella di Lorenzo,” Renaissance Quarterly
55–71. (1977), Hatfield, “Some Unknown Descriptions
of the Medici Palace,” Art Bulletin (1970), and essays
75. Translated in Trexler, Dependence in Context, in Cherubini and Fanelli, Il Palazzo Mediceo. For
184. For the original of this passage, see Morelli, more general analyses, Goldthwaite, The Building of
Ricordi, 278. Renaissance Florence, F. W. Kent, “Palaces, Politics
76. G. Johnson,“Family Values,” in Ciappelli and and Society,” I Tatti Studies (1987), Preyer,“Planning
Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family, 221–29. for Visitors,” Renaissance Studies (1998), and D. Kent,
77. Filippo’s will giving guardianship of his son to Cosimo de’ Medici, 215–304.
Piero can be found in ASF, NA 14416 (Ser Fran- 2. Goldthwaite,“The Economic Value,” in Banks,
cesco di Piero Moletti, 1460–69), fols. 528v–29v. Palaces and Entrepreneurs, 1–4.
78. First noted in Horne,“The Last Communion 3. See Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue,
of St. Jerome,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of 23–29, Shepherd, “Giovanni Sabadino degli Ari-
Art (1915): 73. enti,” 179–217, Jenkins, “Cosimo de’ Medici’s
79. Villari, La Storia di Girolamo Savonarola, Patronage of Architecture,” JWCI (1970), Rubin,
2:clxxi, cvi, clxxxiii, ccxxii, cclxxiv, and ccxlvii–viii. “Magnificence and the Medici,” in Ames-Lewis,
The questions asked during his examination of The Early Medici, and now eadem, Images and Iden-
1498 are published in ibid., ccliii. Carl publishes the tity, chap. 1.
answers in “Das Inventar,” MKIF (1985): 390. 4. Perhaps the most forceful proponent of this
80. He acted as a guarantor of the contract for view is Martines, Power and Imagination, 191–217
the Fraternity of the Purification of the Virgin and esp. 214–15. See also Goldthwaite, “The Flo-
Mary and of San Zanobi in 1505, and as a Monte rentine Palace,” in American Historical Review (1972):
di Pietà official from 1509 to 1512. See Polizzotto, in 990–91. For a questioning of these views, see Bur-
The Elect Nation, 193 and 234–35. roughs, “Florentine Palaces,” Art History (1983):
361–62.
81. See Cambi, Istorie, in de San Luigi, Delizie,
23:28, for an account of his insult (“il Magnifico 5. Baron,“Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth,”
Merda”), an opinion probably shared by many Speculum (1938).
other Florentines at this time, and ASF, Otto di 6. See esp. Rosenwein and Little,“Social Mean-
Guardia 157 (“Partiti e Deliberationi”), fols. 3r, ing,” Past and Present (1974), Lesnick, “Dominican
24v–25r. Preaching,” Memorie Domenicane (1977–78), and
82. There are two later descriptions of the con- Wilson, Music and Merchants, 16–24.
tents of the palace, one from the 1590s in Bocchi and 7. On the composition and poor relief of con-
Cinelli, Le Bellezze, 172, and the other a 1565 inven- fraternities, see Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, and
tory of the goods of the palace’s later purchasers, the Henderson, Piety and Charity, esp. 354–410.
8. Becker, “Aspects of Lay Piety,” in Trinkhaus l’uso de’ pari a llui che insieme liberalmente vivono
and Oberman, The Pursuit of Holiness, 189. nella propria città.”
9. For foreigners coming to see Florentine festi- 20. Dei, La Cronica, 91–92: “una via da Mariotto
vals, and the supposed jealousy with which they Lippi a la piaza di Santo Spirito . . . una via d’Antonio
witnessed the spectacle, see Dei, La Cronica, 92–93, Fantoni a Matio Clari a le Chonvertite in Ghus-
Piero Cennini’s description of the festival of San ciana . . . una via dal ponte a Santa Trinita a Nanni
Giovanni in Mancini, “Il bel S. Giovanni,” Rivista Bello a’ Paghoni a Ghuic[i]ardini.”
d’Arte (1909): 220–27, and Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, 21. Palmieri, Vita Civile, 194–95.
1:3–7 and 60–63, for the descriptions of Abraham
22. As noted by Rubin, “Magnificence and the
of Souzdal of the Annunciation and Ascension
Medici,” in Ames-Lewis, The Early Medici, 37.
sacre rappresentazioni.
23. See particularly on this F. W. Kent, “Palaces,
10. Masi, Ricordanze, 16.
Politics and Society,” I Tatti Studies (1987): 44–49.
11. Landucci, A Florentine Diary, 43–44, 52, and 65.
24. Caggese, Statuti, 2:101. Discussed in Murphy,
12. Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, 1:67–79 and 2:530–39. “Piazza Santa Trinita,” chap. 1.
13. Quoted in Mancini, “Il bel S. Giovanni,” Riv- 25. Elam, “Piazza Strozzi,” I Tatti Studies (1985):
ista d’Arte (1909): 223: “Primoque die fit ostentatio 132.
opum frequentioribus urbis locis. Namque opi-
26. Eadem, “Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Art History
fices et tabernarii fere omnes qui talibus in locis
(1978): esp. 43–51, and her “Lorenzo’s Architectural
agunt si quid pretiosum habent, eo die depro-
and Urban Policies,” in Garfagnini, ed., Lorenzo il
munt.” Translated and discussed in Trexler, Public
Magnifico e il suo mondo.
Life, 247–49.
27. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Flo-
14. Altoviti, Defensione contro all’archa, unpagi-
rence, 301–50, for the financial impact of palace
nated: “con li sacrificii, con livoti et con le solenni
building.
allegreze et adornamenti di sua popolo idio iocun-
dissimo diventa placabile amico et benefactore alle 28. First quoted in F. W. Kent,“The Making of a
gran citta.” Cf. Palmieri, Vita Civile, 195. Renaissance Patron,” in Giovanni Rucellai, 2:14:“Due
cose principali sono quelle che gl’uomini fanno in
15. Altoviti, Defensione contro all’archa, “Et fra
questo mondo: La prima lo ‘ngienerare: La seconda
Girolamo, quando ando imparadiso dice pur che vi
l’edifichare.”
trovo Fiori, uccelletti, et gioie, et perle, et veste di
porpora et di seta dogni colore, et che vera suoni 29. See, for example, F. W. Kent’s comments in
balli, et canti, e hora per carita civvole reducere alla “Palaces, Politics and Society,” I Tatti Studies (1987):
primitiva poverta, et non vuole che noi quaggiu 46–47.
in terra balliamo ne soniamo ne cantiamo con la 30. For the financial problems palace building
pudicitia castamente a similitudine deglangeli del could cause, see Goldthwaite, “The Economic
cielo.” Value,” in Banks, Palaces and Entrepreneurs, 1–4.
16. Ugolino Verino’s comments on painters are 31. ASF, Carte Dei 400 (Nasi), fols. 57r–v.
most easily found in Gilbert, Italian Art, 192–93. This information is repeated by Passerini (BNF,
Dei, La Cronica, 79, and Memorie Notate, publ. Passerini, Nasi).
Romby, Descrizioni e Rappresentazioni, 70–73. 32. Crollalanza, Dizionario storico-blasonico, 2:497–98;
17. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le Vite, 2:193:“ne’ tempi the Nasi inheritance went through marriage to
sua questa arte degli scultori alquanto venne che gli Antonfrancesco di Piero Alamanni.
erano poco adoperati”; translation from Memoirs, 33. ASF, Catasto 15, fol. 741r, and Catasto 16,
224. fol. 89r. All these properties were destroyed when
18. For a discussion of this, see Burke,“Form and the Costa Magnoli collapsed in 1547.
Power,” chap. 8. 34. ASF, NA 2195, fil. 12, no. 10. This was normal
19. Palmieri, Vita Civile, 196:“in ogni parte si con- practice. See Klapsich-Zuber, Women, Family, and
formi all’aprovato costume degli altri, servando Ritual, 121–23.
35. ASF, NA 2195, fil. 12, no. 10, and Catasto 905, 55. Many thanks to Harriet McNeal, who kindly
fol. 615r. supplied the information regarding the 1452 build-
36. See Thiem and Thiem, Toskanische Fassaden- ing work from her research into Maso di Bar-
Dekoration, 72–73. tolommeo’s account books. For the 1450 purchase,
ASF, Catasto 910, fols. 342r and 341v.
37. ASF, Catasto 992, fol. 230v.
56. See NA 14418 (Ser Francesco di Piero
38. Raffaello Nasi wrote an account of this disas- Moletti, 1470–77), fols. 316v–17r.
trous day, which can be found in ASF, C. Strozzi,
Ser. i, cccxxv, fols. 1r–4v.
58. See the undated census of c. 1513–27 in
39. Thiem and Thiem, Toskanische Fassaden Deko-
BNF, Nuovi Acquisti 987 (“Descrizi dei quatri
ration, 72.
Quartieri”), unfoliated.
40. For the details about this house, see Francesco’s
59. Vasari-Bettarini/Barocchi, 4:117. There is
tax declaration in ASF, Catasto 905, 302r, and that
now no trace of the tabernacle, and I have been
of the heirs of Ridolfo Bardi in ibid., 691r.
unable to find a more recent description.
41. Ginori Lisci, I Palazzi di Firenze, 2:684. 60. See Nuttall, “Early Netherlandish Painting,”
42. ASF, Catasto 905, fols. 169r, 171r, and 302r. 89–102.
43. Ibid., fol. 169r: “Tutte le dette possessioni 61. See Marquand, Giovanni della Robbia, 155–57,
sono nelle mani de nostri sindachi e creditori e for a catalogue entry for this work, commonly
lloro inpigliarno le rendite e nulla habiamo noi ne called the Biliemme Tabernacle. David Rosenthal
nulla possa diamo e chosi ogni nostro bene posseg- discusses the social background to this tabernacle
gono.” I am very grateful to Sergio Tognetti for dis- in his forthcoming article, “Plebeian Ritual,” in
cussing the financial advantages for the purchaser Crum and Paoletti, Re-Visioning the Renaissance City.
of properties in these circumstances. I am grateful to him for pointing out the connec-
44. He married Costanza di Ruberto Martelli in tion between the two works.
1468. See BNF, Passerini (Nasi). 62. Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon,
45. Vasari mentions the project; see Vasari- 29–30.
Bettarini/Barocchi, 4:611, as does Ginori Lisci, in I 63. See Trexler, Public Life, 97, for the use of
Palazzi di Firenze, 2:675. images placed in public places to attract devotees.
46. Cambi, Istorie, in de San Luigi, Delizie, 64. Mantini, Lo spazio sacro, 157.
3:110–11. 65. Rucellai, Zibaldone, 15–17. Rucellai’s tips to his
47. Ginori Lisci, I Palazzi di Firenze, 2:684. sons on spending are discussed in Kuehn, Emanci-
pation, 61–62. For a similar opinion, see Alberti,
48. Preyer, “Florentine Palaces,” in Ciappelli and
Della Famiglia, 23, discussed by Goldthwaite, “L’in-
Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family, 176–94.
terno del Palazzo,” in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi,
49. ASF, Catasto 905, fols. 148r and 660r. 162–63.
50. For a discussion of the importance of retain- 66. Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, passim.
ing ties to an ancestral neighborhood, see Preyer, The domestic interior is a vibrant area of research
“Florentine Palaces,” in Ciappelli and Rubin, Art, at the moment, particularly in British studies due
Memory, and Family. to the recent founding of the AHRB Centre
51. As discussed in Murphy, “Piazza Santa for the Study of the Domestic Interior at the Vic-
Trinita,” chap. 1. toria and Albert Museum. Schiaparelli, La Casa
Fiorentina, remains fundamental to the study of the
52. Discussed in F. W. Kent, Household and Lin- Florentine domestic interior, as does Lydecker,
eage, 195–97. “The Domestic Setting.”
53. ASF, Catasto 24, fol. 781v, and Catasto 25, 67. These documents are respectively: ASF,
fol. 22r. NA 2879 (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi, 1484–91),
54. ASF, Catasto 910, fol. 341r. fols. 263r–77r; NA 2880 (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi,
1491–95), fols. 58v–64v; and NA 7545 (Ser Bar- 80. In the inventory document, the name
tolommeo da Radda, 1507–11), fols. 181v–91r. The “Alamanno” is frequently crossed out, and “Bar-
earliest of these inventories is transcribed below in tolommeo” is written in. For this practice, see
the Appendix, doc. 1. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual,
68. ASF, NA 14723 (Ser Andrea Nacchianti 300–302, and Herlihy, Women, Family and Society,
1487–89), fols. 40v–41r. 339–41.
69. She does not appear in the 1480 catasto: it was 81. ASF, NA 7545, fols. 181v, 184v, 186r, and 189r.
likely that she was still of a childbearing age when 82. Lydecker,“The Domestic Setting,” 21–22.
Bartolommeo died. For the pattern of young 83. See, for example, ASF, Pupilli 178 (Filza
mothers renouncing their guardianship to return d’inventari dal 1484 al 1496), fols. 77r–78r,
to their birth families, see Klapisch-Zuber, Women, 180r–84r, 220r–22v; ibid., 187 (Filza d’inventari dal
Family, and Ritual, 117–31. 1511 al 1523), fols. 30r–v, 48r–52r.
70. As explained in the preamble to the inventory. 84. This is true of the inventories in the Pupilli
See ASF, NA 2879 (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi, archive and those taken privately. Alessandro
1485–91), fols. 258r–59v. Nasi’s immovable goods are listed in a totally sepa-
71. His death is recorded at the end of the vol- rate document, ASF, NA 21124, fols. 43r–v.
ume of letters sent by him to Lorenzo from Naples 85. I took as a guide Preyer’s article in Giovanni
in that year. See ASF, Sig. Leg. 26, fol. 94l. Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, esp. 171–75.
72. For the last of Piero’s three wills, see ASF, 86. See Appendix, doc. 1, fol. 275r, for Bernardo’s
NA 2874 (Ser Bartolommeo di Domenico Bindi, room in Villamagna.
Testamenti 1472–1512), no. 12. Margherita’s death is
87. Goldthwaite, “The Economic Value,” in
mentioned in BNF, Passerini, Nasi.
his Banks, Palaces and Entrepreneurs, 8, and idem,
73. As named in his will. See ASF, NA 21124 (Ser “L’interno del Palazzo,” in Lamberini, Palazzo
Lorenzo Violi, 1511–19), fol. 27r. Strozzi, 164–65.
74. Ibid., fols. 26r and 27v–28r. 88. See family tree, Appendix, Table 1. Compar-
75. Ibid., fol. 40v. ing Bartolommeo’s will to the information in the
catasto shows that his wife, Lisabetta, had five chil-
76. Palmieri, Vita Civile, 159.
dren by him between 1480 and 1488.
77. Roger Crum considers this previously sel- 89. ASF, Catasto 992, fol. 111r.
dom-discussed image in his “Controlling Women,”
in Reiss and Wilkins, Beyond Isabella. 90. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual,
174.
78. This is the case in the inventories published
in the appendix of Lydecker, “The Domestic Set- 91. For servants’ status in the catasto, see Herlihy
ting,” and Shearman, “The Collections of the and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 12.
Younger Branch of the Medici,” Burlington Maga- 92. Once again, Klapisch-Zuber has probably
zine (1975): 22–27. Complete published inventories, done the most work on this subject, though only in
aside from that of Lorenzo de’ Medici, are quite relationship to female servants. See her Women,
rare. With help from Patricia Rubin, I have found Family, and Ritual, 165–77.
three: Merkel, I beni della famiglia di Puccio Pucci, 93. ASF, Catasto 992, fol. 111r.
170–205, the goods of Pierfilippo Pandolfini, tran-
scribed by Verde in Archivio Storico Italiano (1969): 94. Compare Appendix, doc. 1, fol. 266r, and ASF,
307–24, and Bombe, Nachlass-Inventare des Angelo da NA 2880, fol. 63r.
Uzzano und des Lodovico di Gino Capponi (invento- 95. Appendix, doc. 1, fol. 266r; ASF, NA 2880,
ries from 1430 and 1534). fol. 61v; and NA 7545, fol. 188r.
79. This is also true of many of the inventories in 96. The allocation of rooms to servants in the
the Pupilli archive in this period. See, for example, Nasi household does not accord with Callman’s
ASF, Magistrati dei Pupilli 178 and 187, passim. view that these members of the household always
had to sleep anywhere they could. See her Beyond 113. ASF, NA 7545, fol. 184v: “Uno quadretto
Nobility, 66–67. in panno lino con uno crocifixo alla fiamingha”;
97. ASF, NA 7545, fols. 186r and 189r. fol. 183r: “Uno quadro drentrovi una Santa Chate-
rina conforni inoro dorato.”
98. For a discussion of the education of children in
schools and at home during this period, see Martines, 114. Appendix, doc. 1, fol. 267v.
Lawyers and Statecraft, 78–91, esp. 78–79. Giovanni 115. See on this, F. W. Kent, “La famiglia patrizia
Rucellai mentions the maestro he employed to teach fiorentina,” in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, 70, and
his children in Zibaldone, 121. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual, 37.
99. She was not living in her brother’s house in 116. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual,
1480; see ASF, Catasto 992, fol. 111r. The date of her 183.
marriage is in ASF, Passerini, Nasi. 117. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 146.
100. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual, 118. ASF, NA 2880, fol. 58v, and NA 7545, fol.
117–31, and see also Calvi, “Reconstructing the 182v.
Family,” in Dean and Lowe, Marriage in Italy. 119. For the idea that images could influence con-
101. Appendix, doc. 1, fol. 266r. This is also true of ception, see G. Johnson, “Family Values,” in Rubin
the room at Villamagna, where the lettuccio was and Ciappelli, Art, Memory, and Family, 221, and
“anticho” and the chest was “trista”; fol. 275v. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 299.
102. See Callman, Apollonio di Giovanni, 78. 120. For a Florentine preacher’s condemnation—
103. Another pair of cassoni, now in the Nieder- and description—of various types of sinful sexual
sächsische Landesgalerie in Hanover, were painted behavior, see BNF, Fondo Principale ii.iii. 409
for the Nasi family by Apollonio. They present the (Prediche sopra i Vangeli, Lent 1489), fols. 75v–76r.
story of Dido and Aeneas, which, as Cristelle Compare with Matteo Palmieri’s condemnation of
Baskins has shown, betrays the ambivalence this “most vile” act in Vita Civile, 159. Klapisch-
toward remarried women at this time. Unfortu- Zuber discusses the ritual of the consummation of
nately, I have not been able to link this securely marriages in her Women, Family, and Ritual, 187–91.
with Costanza’s second or third marriages, though 121. Dei, La Cronica, 79: “ell’à gra’ numero di
such a subject would have been most suitable for a popolo e richo e ben vestito.”
previously married woman. See Baskins, Cassone 122. Frick, “Dressing a Renaissance City,” 16–82,
Painting, 50–74, and Callman, Apollonio di Giovanni, and Bridgeman, “‘Pagare le pompe,’” in Panizza,
68–69. Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society,
104. Appendix, doc. 1, fols. 266r–68r. 216–18.
105. For a discussion of the meaning of spalliera, 123. BNF, Magl. xxxv, 98 (“Sommario delle
see Lydecker,“The Domestic Setting,” 43–44. Prediche di Maestro Mariano Romano . . . fatto da
Madonna Margherita de Soderini”), fols. 63r–v.
106. It seems probable that Bartolommeo’s cham-
ber was the first one inventoried: see Appendix, 124. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 162.
doc. 1, fols. 268r–70r. 125. Bridgeman,“Aspects of Dress and Ceremony,”
107. ASF, NA 2880, fols. 58v–60v. esp. 29–46 and 93–161. See also Frick, “Dressing a
Renaissance City,” 16, on the way that clothes could
108. Ibid., fol. 62r.
be “visually eloquent” about social status.
109. ASF, NA 7545, fol. 182r.
126. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le Vite, 2:313: “andassi
110. Ibid. con tanta pompa . . . et per la persona sua infinite
111. Ibid., fols. 183r, 184r, 184v, 186r, and 188v. veste e gioie.”
112. Spallanzani and Gaeta Bertelà, Libro d’Inven- 127. Masi, Ricordanze, 19–20. Both these passages
tario, 33: “una tavoletta di marmo, di mano di and others along the same lines are discussed in
Donato, entrovi una Nostra Donna chol banbino Trexler, Public Life, 292–93.
in chollo.” 128. Frick,“Dressing a Renaissance City,” 38–39.
129. See Bridgeman’s analysis in “Aspects of Dress Spirito included the Pitti in 1466 and the Corsini
and Ceremony,” 181–93, and now Brown, “Lorenzo and Nerli in 1494 (Rubinstein, The Government of
de’ Medici’s New Men,” Renaissance Studies (2002): Florence, 176–86 and 270).
115–17.
6. For the development of the gonfalone system
130. Appendix, doc. 1, fols. 269r and 273r. and a description of how it worked, see D. Kent and
131. See also ibid., fol. 272v. Klapisch-Zuber dis- F. W. Kent, Neighbours and Neighbourhood, 13–23. The
cusses the swapping of rings in her Women, Family, gonfaloni boundaries I use are those suggested by
and Ritual, 231–34. Carocci,“Le antichi divisioni,” L’Illustratore Fiorentino
(1909): 82–83.
132. Trexler, Public Life, 249; Frick, “Dressing a
Renaissance City,” 36–37. 7. For the poverty and independence of this gon-
133. Preyer, “Planning for Visitors,” Renaissance falone of woolworkers, see Eckstein, The District of
Studies (1998). the Green Dragon, 1–17, and Franceschi, Oltre il
“tumulto,” 141–45 and 276–77.
134. Palmieri, Vita Civile, 195: “E cittadini privati
sommamente fanno le città gloriose.” 8. It was founded specifically to help “Christ’s
poor”: see Berti, La chiesa di Santa Maria del Car-
mine, 60.
Chapter 3 9. See F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage, 195–97,
1. Transcribed by Fabriczy, “Brunelleschiana,” and Eckstein, The District of the Green Dragon,
Jahrbuch der Königlich Preuszichen Kunstsammlungen xi–xiv.
(1907): 49–50: “che fusse tanto accepto adio e alla 10. For a detailed analysis of chapel allocation,
sua sancta madre quanto e adornare e compiere i see below.
loro sacratissimi tempi, e oltre alla laude e honore
che ne segue alla citta, sene debbe sperare chel 11. I gained my information on chapels in the
nostro signore idio per sua clementia e per inter- Carmine from a seventeenth-century description:
cessione della sua gloriossima [sic] madre ne con- ASF, CRS 113, 13 (“Libro de Padronati delle cap-
cedera pace tranquillita e bene si alla comunita e si pelle e sepolture della Chiesa della Beatissima
aqualunche in particularita, che ne dara favore e Vergine Maria del Carmine di Firenze”).
cosi piaccia adio che sia, si provede.” 12. Quoted Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, 1:160:“Per-
2. See below for Nasi involvement in Santo ché fu una magnificentissima fabbrica che a man-
Spirito; for the Del Pugliese in the Carmine, Carl, tenerla sarebbe stato di spesa grandissima a detto
“Das Inventar,” MKIF (1987): 380, and Chapter 1 monasterio, la Repubblica si riservò il dominio et
above. alla Religione concesse l’uso.”
3. For individual chapel studies, see, for exam- 13. There is an account of the fire transcribed in
ple, Borsook and Offerhaus, Francesco Sassetti and Botto, “L’edificazione,” Rivista d’Arte (1931): 483–84.
Ghirlandaio, Friedman, “The Burial Chapel of Fil- The most recent and fullest reconstruction of the old
ippo Strozzi,” L’Arte (1979), and Simons,“Patronage church is Quinterio,“Un tempio,”in Bozzoni, Saggi in
in the Tornaquinci Chapel,” in Kent and Simons, Onore di Renato Bonelli. It seems that masonry was
Patronage, Art and Society. I discuss the mechanics of taken directly from the old church to construct the
chapel patronage in greater detail in Chapter 6. new one.
4. Jonathan Nelson has recently considered the 14. Transcribed in Botto, “L’edificazione,” Rivista
allocation and cost of church space in the fifteenth d’Arte (1931): 480: “quod Operai S. Reparate
century using some material from Santo Spirito. teneantur inter quinque annos edificare unam
See Nelson and Zeckhauser, “Private Benefits Ecclesiam Fratribus Heremitanis S. Augustini sub
to Secure Support for Nonprofit Institutions,” in nomine et signis dicti Comunis, quod edificium sit
Glaeser, The Economics of Not-for-Profit Organizations. onorabile et perpetuo duraturum pro memoria
5. As discussed in F. W. Kent, Household and Lin- dicte Victorie et Ecclesiam facere fieri, edificari,
eage, 195–97. Anti-Medicean figures from Santo ornari et fulciri prout et sicut viderint convenire.”
236 notes to pages 66–7 1
15. The 1434 document is transcribed in Fabriczy, 32. Haines and Ricetti, Opera. The other most
“Brunelleschiana,” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preuszichen important general contribution is Goldthwaite,
Kunstsammlungen (1907): 43–45. The 1425 opera is The Building of Renaissance Florence, 90–97. As well
listed in ASF, CRS 122, 60, fol. 1r. as the essays in the Haines-Ricetti volume, studies
16. For a detailed account of events, see D. Kent, of individual opere include Murphy, “Piazza Santa
The Rise of the Medici, 289–351. Trinita,” 200–271, Elam, “Cosimo de’ Medici and
San Lorenzo,” in Cosimo “il Vecchio,” 157–80, F. W.
17. Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, 1:171, 175, and
Kent, “Lorenzo de’ Medici at the Duomo,” in Ver-
D. Kent, The Rise of the Medici, 167–68, 355.
don and Innocenti, La cattedrale e la città, Hegarty,
18. D. Kent, The Rise of the Medici, 237–38. “Laurentian Patronage,” Art Bulletin (1996), and
19. Manetti, Life of Brunelleschi, 122–25. Haines, “Brunelleschi and Bureaucracy,” I Tatti
20. Fabriczy, “Brunelleschiana,” Jahrbuch der Studies (1989).
Königlich Preuszichen Kunstsammlungen (1907): 46–48. 33. See particularly Ottokar, “Intorno ai Reci-
21. Ibid., 45 (ricordanze of Francesco di Tommaso proci Rapporti,” in his Studi Communali, and the
Giovanni). See Chapter 1 above for the Nasi’s alle- discussion of this work in Haines and Ricetti,
giance to the Medici. Opera, X–XVI.
22. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, 347–48. 34. For San Giorgio, see ASF, NA 1310 (Ser Piero
Baldini, 1425–39), no. 18; for the opera of Sant’Agnese,
23. Botto, “L’edificazione,” Rivista d’Arte (1931): ASF, Compagnie Religiose Soppresse incamerate nel
494. Bigallo, Compagnia di Santa Maria del Laude detta
24. The ricordanze of the opera of Santo Spirito S. Agnese 127, fols. 117r–19v.
from this date are retained in ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. 35. ASF, CRS 122, 67, fols. 172v and 197v:“veduto
ii, 93 (“Libro di Debite e Credite dell’Operai di che detti seranno portati bene furono raformati.”
Santo Spirito, 1445–91”).
36. For the foundation of the opera of the Inno-
25. Account in Newbigin, Feste d’Oltrarno, 1:205–6. centi, and copies of the laws regarding the opere
26. Transcribed in Botto, “L’edificazione,” Rivista of Santa Reparata and San Giovanni, see AIF,
d’Arte (1931): 485: “E più si provvede che gli Operai Ser. v, no. 1 (“Liber Artis Porte Sanctae Marie”),
di detta Chiesa faccino porre l’arme del popolo fols. 33r–37r. See also Goldthwaite, The Building of
e Comune di Firenze nel corpo della chiesa di Renaissance Florence, 93.
Sto Spirito e nella faccia di fuori del luogo più 37. Transcribed in Fabriczy, “Brunelleschiana,”
preminente.” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preuszichen Kunstsammlungen
27. For a discussion of the legal and ethical rela- (1907): 43–45.
tionships between church and laity signified in 38. Ibid., 43: “constituerunt ipsos pietrum et
coats of arms, see Chapter 5 below. stoldum ambos simul in concordia sindacos procu-
28. Landucci, Diario Fiorentino, 41. The new ratores factores et nuntios spetiales.”
church was “finished” in 1481, according to the ricor- 39. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Flo-
danze of the chapter of the convent. See ASF, CRS rence, 399.
122, 67, fol. 130v.
40. Ibid., 164–66.
29. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fol. 51v:“si sgombri laman-
41. See, for example, ASF, CRS 122, 128, fol. 57v.
dorla della faccia dell’opera dove sono l’arme del
popolo e comune di firenze per metterle in luogho 42. ASF, CRS 122, 67, fol. 86r.
degno per contentare quegli della compagnia del 43. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 76v and 223r respectively.
pippione acci chiesta da Lorenzo di Piero di 44. For a list of these men, see Appendix A in
Medici, huomo degnissimo.” Burke,“Form and Power,” 202–3.
30. Botto, “L’edificazione,” Rivista d’Arte (1931): 45. Very little work has been done on the opera of
505. the Carmine, possible because the main source of
31. See for this Rubinstein, The Government of information about this body is not to be found in
Florence, 199–263. the church’s archives but in the notary books of the
notes to pages 7 1–77 237
Dieciaiuti family, where there are several lists of 55. This happened on numerous occasions. See,
operai names from this period, all from Drago fam- for example, ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 51v–52v, 55v,
ilies. See, for example, ASF, NA 6086 (Ser Gio- 64v, 106r, and 212v.
vanni di Ser Paolo Dieciaiuti, 1485–86), fol. 129r; 56. ASF, CRS 122, 67, fol. 198v.
NA 6087 (Ser Giovanni di Ser Paolo Dieciauti,
57. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. ii, 93, fol. 12v.
1486–90), fols. 158v–59r and 203v; NA 6094 (Ser
Paolo di Ser Giovanni Dieciaiuti, 1501–6), fol. 69r. 58. ASF, CRS 122, 67, fol. 86r:“colla sua prudentia
accresciuta lentrata di detta opera.” Compare with
46. Transcribed in Fabriczy, “Brunelleschiana,” C. Strozzi, Ser. ii, 93, fol. 12v.
Jahrbuch der Königlich Preuszichen Kunstsammlungen
(1907): 45. 59. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 219v and 224r.
60. Capretti, “Antefatti della Controriforma,” in
47. To find out the gonfaloni and street of the
Forlani Tempesti, Altari e Immagini, 46.
operai, I have examined their 1480 catasto entries.
As well as the Nasi catasti, cited in Chapter 1, see 61. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, 340, claims that
ASF, Catasto 994, fol. 107r (Bernardo di Tom- the design of Santo Spirito “accorded with Flo-
masso Corbinelli); Catasto 995, fols. 135r–36v rence’s most cherished political myth, namely that
(Niccolò di Giovanni Capponi), 239r–40r (Rug- of a community of equals, in which no family, no
gieri di Niccolò Corbinelli), 249–50v (Stoldo di individual could claim special power of distinc-
Lionardo Frescobaldi), 324r–25r ( Jacopo di Piero tion.” Antal (Florentine Painting, 293–94) claimed
Guicciardini); Catasto 996, fols. 25r–27r (messer that the arrangement of chapels was the “equivalent
Antonio Ridolfi), 177r (Bertoldo di Giovanni expression in architectural terms of the oligarchical
Corsini); and Catasto 998, fols. 144r–45v (Niccolò democracy of this generation”; this interpretation
di Luigi Ridolfi). has been cited with agreement by Capretti, “La
pinacoteca sacra,” in Lucinat, La Chiesa di Santo
48. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 119r and 218v. Lorenzo
Spirito, 230, and reprised by Blume,“Studies in the
was first mentioned in the records of the opera
Religious Paintings,” 74.
when he requested that the arms of the Councils
of the People and Commune of Florence on the 62. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fol. 212v.
facade of the building be replaced. For the connec- 63. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. ii, 93.
tion of some members of the opera with Lorenzo 64. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fol. 212v for the allocation
de’ Medici, see Blume,“Giovanni de’ Bardi,” Jahrbuch of these chapels. The Della Palla chapel is included
der Berliner Museen (1995): 170. in the list of chapels in the old church in ASF,
49. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fol. 217v. Giuliano was, Manoscritti 622 (“Sepoltuario di tutto il quartiere
anyway, closely associated with Lorenzo; see F. W. di Santo Spirito”), fol. 17r.
Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici, chap. 2. 65. For the earliest chapel prices, see ASF,
50. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fol. 222r. C. Strozzi, Ser. ii, 93, fols. 12v–15r. For later chapel
prices, CRS 122, 128, fols. 212v (Petrini and Della
51. F. W. Kent, “Lorenzo de’ Medici at the Palla) and 233v (Segni).
Duomo,” in Verdon and Innocenti, La cattedrale e la
città, and Hegarty, “Laurentian Patronage,” Art Bul- 66. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 66v and 92v.
letin (1996). 67. See, for example, Markowsky, “Eine Gruppe
bemalter Paliotti,” MKIF (1973), Capretti, “La cap-
52. The 1505 opera is listed in ASF, NA 20706
pella e l’altare,” in Lucinat, La Chiesa di Santo Spirito,
(Ser Ugolino di Vieri, 1472–1515), fol. 247v, and
Thomas, “Neri di Bicci,” Arte Cristiana (1993): 23,
again in CRS 122, 89, fol. 15r.
and Blume, “Studies in the Religious Paintings,”
53. For the date of the Soderini’s involvement 87–89.
with the high altar at the Carmine, see ASF, CRS 68. The Raffaelino panel in the Nasi chapel is
113, 13, fol. 15. 187 × 197 cm; the Botticelli altarpiece of 1485 in the
54. For the Nerli, see ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 222r Bardi chapel was 180 × 185 cm; the Del Mazziere
and 231r, and Goldthwaite, The Building of Renais- altarpiece in the Corbinelli chapel 157 × 174.5 cm;
sance Florence, 165. the Filippino altarpiece of about 1494 in the neigh-
boring Nerli chapel, 160 × 180 cm; and the Piero di 82. I discuss the relationship between allies of
Cosimo altarpiece for the Capponi family chapel, Soderini and Raphael in my “Form and Power,”
of 1490, 184 × 189 cm. chap. 8.
69. ASF, CRS 122, 128, fols. 77r and 94r:“per loro
partito vinsono che nella chapella de Velluti si facci
la sepoltura chome nel altre chapelle.” Chapter 4
70. Ibid., fol. 96r. 1. Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 1.
71. ASF, NA 14723, fol. 40v:“domus et familia de 2. See, for example, Glasser,“Artists’ Contracts,”
Nasis in dicta ecclesiae Sancti Spiritus de Florentia O’Malley,“The Business of Art,” and Thomas, The
habent cappellam nuncupatam cappella de Nasis Painter’s Practice, 101–48, 182–96.
que civet finistra vitria tabula et sepulcro . . . ele- 3. Perosa,“Un Opera Sconosciuta,” Rivista d’Arte
gavit que in charico suis heredes in annum adne (1942).
mortis dicti testatoris teneantur et debeant . . . ficti 4. These poems can be found in the Appendix.
facere finestram di cappella de vitro et unam tabu-
lam per altari de cappella pictam et fulcitam . . . 5. Denver Art Museum, inv. E-it-18-xv-390
con decentia dicte cappelle et in dicto in perpetua (1955.88). This identification was first made by
facti fare unum sepulcrum iseu sepulturam cum Gamba, Filippino Lippi, 88–89.
lapida marmoria.” 6. Tom Henry tells me that the portrait of Luca
72. Catalogued in Buschmann, Raffaellino del Signorelli and his patron in Orvieto is almost cer-
Garbo, 144–45. tainly a sixteenth-century fake.
73. See ASF, Manoscritti 111 (“Libro di Conti e 7. See the catalogue entry for this panel in
Ricordi di Raffaello di Ruberto Nasi”), fol. cxxviiv. Nelson and Zambrano, Filippino Lippi, vol. 1. My
thanks to Patrizia Zambrano, who was kind
74. For a discussion of these panels, see Capretti, enough to discuss this work extensively with me
“La pinacoteca sacra,” in Lucinat, La Chiesa di Santo before the publication of her research.
Spirito.
8. See Nelson and Zambrano, Filippino Lippi,
75. Eadem, “Antefatti della Controriforma,” in
vol. 1. The positioning of portrait busts is discussed
Forlani Tempesti, Altari e Immagini, esp. 46–51.
in Johnson, “Family Values,” in Ciappelli and
76. The Segni altarpiece measures 285 × 283.5 cm. Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family.
77. ASF, CRS 122, 77, fols. 54r–60v:“unam tabu- 9. Zambrano, in her examination of the physi-
lam pictam per ornamento dicti altaris et cap- cal state of the painting, has noted later interven-
pella . . . cum una finestra a vitrea supra dictum tions and varnishes but makes a strong case for its
altare . . . in memoriam sancti bernardi.” autograph status.
78. For the history of this painting, see Riedl,“Raf- 10. See the recent work by Cranston, The Poetics of
fael’s Madonna del Baldachino,” MKIF (1957–59). Portraiture, for the relationship between poetic dis-
The results of the recent restoration and technical cussions of portraits and paintings in the sixteenth
analysis have been described in detail in Chiarini, century. A brief history of the relationship between
Ciatti, and Padovani, Raffaello a Pitti. poems and portraits for an earlier period is given in
79. It should be noted, however, that the upper Shearman, Only Connect, 108–48. See also for this,
strip of the panel on which the vaulting is painted Rogers, “Sonnets on Female Portraits,” Word and
was added in the seventeenth century: see Chiarini, Image (1986), and Cropper, “Problems in the
“Paintings by Raphael,” in Shearman and Hall, The Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture,” in Ferguson,
Princeton Raphael Symposium, 83. Quilligan, and Vickers, Rewriting the Renaissance. For
80. For a discussion of High Renaissance altar- Petrarch, see Mann, “Petrarch and Portraits,” in
pieces and their relationship with the viewer, see Mann and Syson, The Image of the Individual.
Shearman, Only Connect, 59–107. 11. Shearman, Only Connect, 112.
81. For details about the Dei, see Raffaello a 12. Filippino’s relationship with literary men is
Firenze, 44. discussed in Barocchi, Giardino di San Marco, 98.
13. The identity of this portrait bust was first 27. D. Kent, The Rise of the Medici, makes it clear
discussed in ibid., 97. that she is discussing instrumental rather than
14. Lightbown, Mantegna, 459–60. Another par- emotional friendship, and elides the former with
allel could be drawn to the later portrait of Andrea patronage; see esp. 83 and 92; the same can be said
Navagero and Agostino Beazzano by Raphael, dis- of Lowe, “Towards an Understanding of Goro
cussed in Nesbitt, “Multiple Figure Portraiture,” Gheri’s Views on amicizia,” in Denley and Elam,
44–53; see also the examples given in Cranston, Florence and Italy, 91. For a discussion of this issue,
The Poetics of Portraiture, 62–78. see Fitch Little, “Friendship and Patronage,” in
Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art and Society.
15. Alberti, On Painting, 60–61:“ut quod de amici-
tia dicunt, absentes pictura praesentes esse faciat.” 28. ASF, CRS 78, 316 (Archivio Familiarum: Dei),
16. Ficino, Letters, 2:55–56. fol. 205r:“et risposemi piu brusco che non harei cre-
duto non havevo sua pratica molta parmi huomo
17. Carl,“Das Inventar,” MKIF (1987): 384. che sia di se e non dellamico.” Partially quoted in
18. Scharf, Filippino, 89–90, publishes Filippino’s F. W. Kent, Bartolommeo Cederni, 11. My thanks to
1488 will; see Nelson, “The Later Works of Filip- Bill Kent for alerting me to this reference.
pino Lippi,” 21, for the house purchase.
29. Zeri, Italian Paintings, 133–35.
19. As noted in the ricordanze of Tommaso di
Zanobi Ginori: ASF, Carte Bagni 65, fasc. 15, 30. Simons, “Women in Frames,” in Broude and
fol. 188r. My thanks to Jonathan Nelson for this Garrard, The Expanding Discourse.
reference. 31. See Wright,“The Memory of Faces,” in Ciap-
20. This is the earliest list of operai I have as yet pelli and Rubin, Art, Memory, and Family.
been able to find: see ASF, NA 6087, fol. 159r. The 32. For example, Trexler, Power and Dependence,
Del Pugliese had been connected with the opera of vol. 2.
the Carmine from at least 1450, when Giovanni di
Jacopo was the provveditore of the opera (ASF, CRS 33. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 87–194.
113, 17, fol. 13r). For the chapel, see Carl,“Das Inven- 34. For an application of the new findings about
tar,” MKIF (1987): 380. homosociality to portraiture, see Simons,“Homoso-
21. The roof was leaking at this point, damaging ciality and Erotics,” in Woodall, Portraiture.
some of the paintings in the church. See ASF, NA 35. Rucellai, Zibaldone, 1:10.
6086, fol. 25r.
36. Trexler, Public Life, 135, and D. Kent, The Rise
22. For a discussion of the dating of this work,
of the Medici, 84.
see Chapter 7 below.
23. Vasari-Bettarini/Barocchi, 3:563. Vasari 37. Vasari-Bettarini/Barocchi, 3:568: “fu tale in
describes Piero del Pugliese as an “amicissimo” of tutte le sue azzioni, che ricoperse la macchia . . .
Filippino. lasciatagli dal padre . . . non pure con l’eccellenza
della sua arte . . . ma con vivere modesto e civile, e
24. The tondo for Filippo di Piero is mentioned sopra tutto con l’esser cortese e amorevole; la qual
in Filippino’s inventory. See Carl, “Das Inventar,” virtù, quanto abbia forza e potere in conciliarsi
MKIF (1987): 386, item 70. gl’animi universalmente di tutte le persone.”
25. Examples of this are discussed below. Entries
38. Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, 343–55.
to the poetry competition of 1441, the Certame
Coronario, are published in Bertolini, De Vera 39. Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence, 286
Amicitia. and passim for part 4 of the treatise (246–317).
26. As well as the literature cited below, see 40. Pliny, Chapters on the History of Art, 125.
Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship; Bolton, “Friendship
41. Vasari’s reading of Pliny is discussed in
in the Renaissance,” F. W. Kent, Bartolommeo Ced-
Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, 149–50, and Mitchell, “The
erni, Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual,
Patron of Art,” 85.
68–93, Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood, 26–34, and
Trexler, Public Life, 131–58. 42. Mitchell,“The Patron of Art,” 66–104.
43. Neri di Bicci rented property from the Nasi. 57. See Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Rit-
See Neri di Bicci, Le Ricordanze, 298–99, 379, ual, 89.
391–92, and 407. 58.Vasari-Betterini/Barocchi, 4:67–68:“Era molto
44. Vespasiano di Bisticci, Le Vite, 2:193–94: “Fu amico di Piero lo spedalingo degli Innocenti . . . la
molto amico di Donatello et di tutti e’ pittori e allogò a Piero . . . ma prima fece disperare lo
scultori . . . Usava Cosimo di queste liberalità a spedalingo, che non ci fu mai ordine che la vedesse
uomini che avessino qualche virtù, perché gli se non finita; e quanto ciò gli paresse strano e per
amava assai.” Vespasiano wrote his biographies l’amicizia e per il sovenirlo tutto il dí di denari.”
between 1482 and 1496 (see ibid., 1:v–vi). This pas- 59. Discussed by Janson, “The Birth of Artistic
sage was discussed by Gombrich, Norm and Form, License,” in Lytle and Orgel, Patronage in the Renais-
40–41, and see Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, 343–55. sance, 344–53.
45. Gaye, Carteggio inedito, 1:192: “amicho mio 60. This correspondence was originally published
singhularissimo.” Gozzoli, of course, included his by Gaye, Carteggio inedito, vol. 2, and has been more
portrait along with the Medici in the train of the recently discussed—though not in terms of the sta-
Magi in his frescoes in the chapel of their palace. tus of artists—by Gatti, “Delle cose de’ pictori
46. See his Lorenzo de’ Medici, chap. 2. et sculptori,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome
47. Gaye, Carteggio inedito, 1:300: “la quale ha por- (1994).
tato al lanimo mio dispiacere et molestia assai, così 61. I discuss the relationship between Michelan-
perchè era molto mio.” gelo and Soderini in my M.A. thesis, “Politics and
48. Elam, “Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sculpture Gar- Public Space,” chap. 2. The quotation is from Con-
den,” MKIF (1992). Caroline Elam has identified divi, Vita di Michelangelo, 32, and later correspon-
the location of this celebrated garden, admirably dence between the two men is published in
negotiating the controversies that surrounded its Michelangelo, Carteggio, 1:88, and 2:2, 15–17, 29, and
existence that were put forward by Chastel and 323.
Gombrich. 62. Quoted in Gatti, “Delle cose de’ pictori et
49. The closeness of the relationship is repeated sculptori,” 442:“come voi sapete delle cose de’ pictori
in another extant letter about Bertoldo’s death. et sculptori, si può mal promettere cosa certa.”
Both are discussed in F. W. Kent,“Bertoldo Sculp- 63. Ibid., 442–43: “la quale non è molto certo
tore,” Burlington Magazine (1992), and in his Lorenzo atteso e cervelli di simili genti.”
de’ Medici. 64. Ibid., “non si puo . . . per la natura dell’homo
50. That Michelangelo’s early Hercules sculpture et la qualità della cosa expedirla in pochi dì.”
was made for Piero di Lorenzo was first suggested
in Hirst, “Michelangelo, Carrara and the Marble
for the Cardinal’s Pietà,” Burlington Magazine (1985): Chapter 5
155. For the artist’s early training, see Hirst and 1. Psalm 55:“Elongavi fugiens et mansi in solitu-
Dunkerton, Making and Meaning, 13–24. dine.” Guerrucci repeatedly quotes this phrase to
51. F. W. Kent,“Lorenzo . . .‘Amico degli Uomini explain his decision. See ASF, Lecceto,“Copia sup-
da Bene,’” in Garfagnini, Lorenzo il Magnifico, 50 plicationis . . . fratris Dominici;”“Copia Memorie,”
and 52–53. fol. 4v. An abbreviated version of this chapter
52. Dale Kent also makes this point. See Cosimo appears as “Patronage and Identity,” in Rogers, Fash-
de’ Medici, 8. ioning Identities.
53. Craven,“Aspects of Patronage,” 42–43. 2. The story of the building of Lecceto and the
vacillations in the rights of patronage over the
54. As discussed in a paper given by Alison
church have never previously been explained fully.
Wright at Villa I Tatti in the spring of 1997; Gaye,
The earliest secondary source dealing with the
Carteggio inedito, 1:341.
history of Lecceto is the interestingly inaccurate
55. Craven,“Aspects of Patronage,” 107. Serafino Razzi, “Breve Discrizione del Luogo
56. Vasari-Betterini/Barocchi, 4:66–67. chiamato Santa Maria di Lecceto,” a handwritten
copy of which I consulted in the Biblioteca di San 12. AAF, VP 3 (1509–12), unfoliated, “Directo-
Marco in Florence. In this chapter, I am particu- rium pro visitatoribus.”
larly indebted to the work of Borsook,“Documenti 13. Borghini, Storia della Nobiltà Fiorentina, 55,
relativi,” Antichità Viva (1970), who publishes sev- quoted in Bizzocchi, Chiesa e potere, 51.
eral documents relating to Filippo Strozzi’s
involvement with the project, and Romagnoli, 14. Quoted in Borsook, “Documenti relativi,”
Santa Maria a Lecceto. These are supplemented by Antichità Viva (1970): doc. 24.
additional documents in Carocci, “Chiesa e con- 15. See ASF, Lecceto (1793); Biblioteca di San
vento,” L’Illustratore Fiorentino (1904), the appendix Marco, Razzi,“Breve Discrizione,” 4.
to Craven, “Aspects of Patronage,” 163–65, Teubner, 16. See Simons, “Portraiture and Patronage,”
Zur Entwicklung der Saalkirche, 564–66, and Lillie, 190–92, 195, and for the relationship of burial
Florentine Villas, 207–8. rights to foundation, 213–15.
3. Appendix, doc. 2: ASF, C. Strozzi., Ser. v, 1185, 17. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 242.
folder entitled “Varie Notizie e Ricordi Spettanti
alla Chiesa di S Maria di Lecceto,” hereafter “ASF, 18. Antoninus, Summa Theologica, 3: col. 550; Lan-
Lecceto.” Most of the inserts in this folder of loose dau, Jus Patronatus, 117; Bizzocchi, Chiesa e Potere, 48.
papers are unnumbered and will be identified by 19. The 1310 constitutions about ius patronatus are
title. Another copy of this contract exists in ASF, mainly concerned with the usurpation of bene-
Statuti delle Comunità Autonome e Soggette 350 fices, and in 1336 the constitutions were modified
(“Comune di Gangalandi, 1417–1562”), fols. 443r–v. to control this tendency. That this continued, how-
ever, into the beginning of the sixteenth century is
4. Several commentators have seen the need for
shown by the visitation records of this period. See
work on patronage rights. See Sale, Filippino Lippi’s
Trexler, Synodal Law, 12 and 263–64, and Bizzocchi,
Strozzi Chapel, 102, Simons,“Portraiture and Patron-
Chiesa e potere, 52–53.
age,” 206 n. 63, and Chambers, review of Kent and
Simons in Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1989). 20. Antoninus, Summa Theologica, 3:556, and
Trexler, Synodal Law, 264.
5. New Catholic Encyclopaedia, s.v., “Patronage
Rights.” 21. ASF, Lecceto,“Informatio Filippo Strozzi.”
6. See Landau, Jus Patronatus, 3–4 and 11. 22. Appendix, doc. 2.
7. See Brucker, “Urban Parishes,” in Morrogh, 23. ASF, Lecceto, “Informatio Filippo Strozzi.”
Renaissance Studies, 18–19, and Bizzocchi, Chiesa e This sheet can be dated to 1484–85 because it
potere, 49–50. mentions Fra Domenico Guerrucci was dying at
the time the patronage rights were given to Filippo
8. Quoted in Landau, Jus Patronatus, 128–29:
Strozzi. The friar died in 1485 (Teubner, Zur
“Tria enim quedam in iure patronatus continentur:
Entwicklung der Saalkirche, 285).
honor, onus et emolumentum, sc. persone electio,
rerum ecclesie ne dissipentur provida sollicitudo et 24. ASF, Lecceto, “Informatio Filippo Strozzi”:
fundatoris egestate laborantis sustentatio.” “Presupponiam etiam quod in residuo quod con-
pleri debet eam circa domumque circa ecclesiam
9. Antoninus, Summa Theologica, 3: col. 549: predictam et hornamenta earum inpendi opertet et
“Patrono debetur honor, onus et emolumentum. impendendis intendit ad huc ipse filippus id totum
Praesentet, praesit, defendat, alatur egenus.” Roberto quod expeherit, dum modo auctoritate apostolica
Bizzocchi, in his important discussion of patronage concedatur sibi suiusque heredibus et sucessoribus
rights, stresses the importance of the leading of pro- in perpetuum ius patronatus dicte ecclesie magne
cessions in Florence in political terms. See his Chiesa et secondi loci hedificate . . . et apponendi in ipsa
e potere, 33–36. ecclesia et in domo et bonis predictis et apposita
10. See Landau, Jus Patronatus, 4, and Canons and detinendi arma et insignia sua et sue famiglie in
Decrees of the Council of Trent, 241–43. signum veri.”
11. Trexler, Synodal Law, 264, and Antoninus, 25. The first two examples are from Brucker,
Summa Theologica, 3: col. 549. “Urban Parishes,” in Morrogh, Renaissance Studies,
19. For the Medici at San Lorenzo, see Bizzocchi, 39. Quoted by Bizzocchi, Chiesa e potere, 40. See
Chiese e potere, 91. also Trexler, Public Life, 96–97.
26. Interestingly, Filippo Strozzi was involved in 40. Francesco da Empoli also mentions this; see
another patronage dispute at Santa Maria Novella, Bizzocchi, Chiesa e potere, 40. Giovanni d’Angelo
where he obtained papal authorization for his Bardi’s will of 1487 asked that his arms be placed in
takeover of the rights to the chapel of San Gio- Cestello “ut aliis benefaciendi sint esemplo.” See
vanni Evangelista. See Sale, Filippino Lippi’s Strozzi Luchs,“Cestello,” doc. 18.
Chapel, 103–4. 41. See Trexler, Public Life, 96–97, for the impor-
27. As I pointed out in Chapter 3, sometimes tance of patrician families attracting devotees.
scholars’ emphasis on family political and social
42. Borsook, “Ritratto di Filippo Strozzi,” in
motivations can undervalue the continued power
Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, 7.
of religious institutions; I would question the
emphasis, for example, in Lowe, “Patronage and 43. ASF, Lecceto,“Copia quondam allegationum,”
Territoriality,” Renaissance Studies (1993), and Cohn, fol. 4r.
Death and Property in Siena, 102–3 and 107. 44. Ibid., “Copia memorie,” fols. 5r–v: “Et merito
28. ASF, Lecceto, “Informatio Filippo Strozzi,” dicti officiales primari debent omni honores et
discusses his right to elect friars, and the gifts of patronatum dicti loci qua non fuerunt patrones
wax are detailed up to the eighteenth century:“lib- sed destructores. Tunc omnipotens deus misereat
bre unum candelare cere albe in signum cristi eis et reddat eis verum iurem et cognitionem et
patronati et in memoriam edificationis.” protigat locum istum a filiis iniquitatis et malis
29. Ibid., and Lillie,“Florentine Villas,” 208. hominibus per merita beate marie virginis et inter-
cessionem sanctorum omnem et benedicat omni-
30. ASF, Lecceto, “Informatio Filippo Strozzi,” bus benefacientibus et amantibus istum locum
C. Strozzi, Ser. iii, 204, fol. 113r, and 133, fol. 154r, amen amen.”
and see below.
45. ASF, Catasto 1000, fol. 412v. The Guerrucci
31. See quotation above from ASF, Lecceto,
owned land in Gangalandi, which probably explains
“Informatio Filippo Strozzi.” The Strozzi arms can
why Domenico chose this location for his her-
still be seen on the church today.
mitage. For the will, see NA 14416 (Ser Francesco di
32. Carocci, “Chiesa e convento,” L’Illustratore Piero Moletti, 1460–69), fol. 528v.
Fiorentino (1904): 64. This is a passage from the
46. Carrocci, “Chiesa e convento,” L’Illustratore
ricordanze of Guerrucci, which I have not been able
Fiorentino (1904): 64.
to locate in the original. Published by Carocci and,
with some minor differences of transcription, by 47. ASF, Lecceto, “Copia intitulationis dicti libri
Zucchi,“Ospizi Domenicani,” Memorie Domenicane et codicis Fratris Dominici,” fol. 6r: “[La chiesa] fu
(1947): 53. Frustratingly, neither cites his source. fundata e cominciata del prezzo e danari duna
33. Trexler, Synodal Law, 41. vigna laquale dono el magnifico huomo Piero del
Puglese a frate Domenico Gurrucci . . . Sua piacere
34. Trexler, Public Life, 95. didio ricievere questo sacrificio a benedire lasua
35. ASF, CRS 78, 333, fol. 297r. habitatione e tempio. Et noi fare del numero de sua
36. Ibid., fols. 305v–6r. eletti.”
37. See also Simons,“Portraiture and Patronage,” 48. For mercantile mentality and especially men-
51–53, who mentions the “quasi-legalistic” nature of dicant ideas of“spiritual credit” leading to salvation,
placing arms in chapels. Perhaps the desire to clar- see Rosenwein and Little, “Social Meaning,” Past
ify and retain rights of patronage is an additional and Present (1974), Lesnick,“Dominican Preaching,”
explanation of the use of inscriptions in chapels Memorie Domenicane (1977–78), and Wilson, Music
cited by F. W. Kent, “Individuals and Families,” in and Merchants, 16–24.
Brown, Language and Images, 188–90. 49. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. v, 36 and 39–48, cited in
38. See Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to Lillie, “Florentine Villas,” 207–8, and Romagnoli,
the Middle Ages, 73–75, 84. Santa Maria a Lecceto; ASF, Lecceto,“Quadernuccio
delle ricordanze dell’opera” and “Copia intitula- 59. There are some disagreements as to whether
tionis dicti libri et codicis Fratris Dominici,” this scene can be securely attributed to Sebastiano
fols. 6r–21v, the latter partially transcribed in Mainardi or not, although this is not an issue of
Craven, “Aspects of Patronage,” 163–65; C. Strozzi, great importance here. For the identification of the
Ser. v, 1768 and 1769, cited in Romagnoli, who scene, see all sources listed above, and Borsook,
gives the most detailed breakdown of the process “Ritratto di Filippo Strozzi,” in Lamberini, Palazzo
of decoration in the church. Strozzi, 9 and 14.
50. Borsook, “Documenti relativi,” Antichità Viva 60. Borsook, “Documenti relativi,” Antichità Viva
(1970): 4, for the founding of this chapel. Money (1970): 5 n. 49.
was given for the whitewashing of the interior on 8
61. Carocci, “Chiesa e convento,” L’Illustratore
September 1480 (ASF, Lecceto,“Copia intitulatio-
Fiorentino (1904): 64. For accounts of this painting,
nis dicti libri et codicis Fratris Dominici,” fol. 19r),
most of which assume Francesco del Pugliese is the
confirming Lillie’s view that the church was fin-
patron and none of which mention Lecceto as a
ished by the end of that year (“Florentine Villas,”
possible location, see Rathbone, “The Madonna
207).
Enthroned,” Bulletin of the City Art Museum of St Louis
51. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, 69 n. 77, and Lil- (1940), Douglas, Piero di Cosimo, 47–48, Bacci, Piero
lie, “Vita di Palazzo,” in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, di Cosimo, 69–70, Fermor, Piero di Cosimo, 121–23,
171. Fossi,“Grandi casati,” in Berti, ed., La chiesa di Santa
52. ASF, Lecceto,“Copia Memorie,” fol. 5r:“inten- Maria del Carmine, 331 and 338, Desloge, “Piero di
dit facere cappellam quam iam fundata est ad Cosimo’s Virgin and Child with Saints,” St. Louis Art
instar cappelle sancte marie de ughis de florentia.” Museum Bulletin (winter 1988), and Forlani Tem-
pesti and Capretti, Piero di Cosimo, 96–97. In a
53. Gregory,“Chi erano gli Strozzi,” in Lamberini,
much ignored footnote, Stephanie Craven first
Palazzo Strozzi, 17; Borsook, “Documenti relativi,”
suggested Lecceto as a location for this altarpiece,
Antichità Viva (1970): 4, and Romagnoli, Santa
although she gives no reasons for her supposition.
Maria a Lecceto, 12.
See her “Aspects of Patronage,” 154 n. 28.
54. Goldthwaite, Private Wealth, 68; Paatz and
62. The date of Guerrucci’s death is noted on
Paatz, Die Kirche von Florenz, 3:72.
his tomb in the church and in a list of death dates
55. Borsook, “Ritratto di Filippo Strozzi,” in of friars at Lecceto in Biblioteca Laurenziana,
Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, 7–8. Archivio di San Marco 869, fol. 2v. Piero di
56. Romagnoli, Santa Maria a Lecceto, 14. Cosimo paintings are notorious for being difficult
to date because only three have documentary
57. ASF, Lecceto, “Processo Verbale (1843)”: “un
sources relating to them, and because his style was
quadro dipinto in tavola della maniera di Fra Bar-
erratic. For a useful discussion of this, see Gris-
tolommeo della Porta esprimente la Vergine col
wold,“The Drawings of Piero di Cosimo,” 18–25.
Santo Bambino in Gloria d’Angioli, ed al disotto
S. Giovanni, ed un S. Jacopo con cornice scornici- 63. Horne,“The Last Communion of St. Jerome,”
ata e dorata in cattivo stato esistente nella già Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum (1915): 72.
chiesa di Licceto, e precisamente all’Altar Mag-
64. See esp. Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and
giore.” A panel removed at the same time, “rappre-
Ritual, 283–309, and Herlihy, Women, Family and
sentante la vergine,” may well have been that from
Society, 330–52.
the Del Pugliese chapel, discussed below.
65. This is not the first time this comparison
58. Borsook, “Documenti relativi,” Antichità Viva
has been made. It is mentioned by Bacci, Piero di
(1970): 6. This panel has also been discussed in
Cosimo, 70, and Carl,“Das Inventar,” MKIF (1987):
Zeri, “Aggiunta a una predella Ghirlandaiesca,” in
373.
his Diari di Lavoro, 1:56–58, Van Os and Prakken,
The Florentine Paintings in Holland, 78–79, and Gre- 66. Savonarola, Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria,
gori, Paolucci, and Lucinat, Maestri e Botteghe, 1:309. Translated in Gilbert, Italian Art 1400–1500,
143–44. 157.
67. For a discussion of this panel, see Rubin, Day 1488. See BNF Magl. xxxv, 98 (“Sommario
Images and Identity, chap. 1. delle Prediche di Maestro Mariano Romano . . . da
68. Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration,” 74. Madonna Margherita de Soderini”), fols. 63r–v.
69. Trexler, Public Life, 423–24, and Hatfield, 84. My thanks to Jennifer Fletcher for pointing
“The Compagnia de’ Magi,” JWCI (1970). For this this out.
practice in paintings, see idem, Botticelli’s Uffizi 85. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. iii, 204, fol. 113r (7 Octo-
“Adoration,” 71–99, and Simons, “Portraiture and ber 1490):“pregovi che voi diate qualche cosellina a
Patronage,” 57–59. frate Bartholomeo per mectere qualche opera. Io
70. As Charles Hope has pointed out, this made sopraffettato per una buona parte questi orti come
them particularly appealing to wealthy banking una perla, . . . io trovo che frate Martino si affaticha
families. See his “Altarpieces and the Requirements molto fatichamente per lo luogo. Mi parrebbe che
of Patrons,” in Verdon and Henderson, Christianity vostra M. facessi uno pocho di bene.”
and the Renaissance, 546–47. 86. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. iii, 133, fol. 154r (20
71. Jacobus da Voragine, The Golden Legend, 1:21. October 1490): “Domenicha passata ebbi alla
messa piu che 20 cittadini. Sono ci stati persone
72. Ibid., 21–22. This story gives Nicholas the
assai in questo tempo e homini dabene saremo
attribute of three gold balls.
avuto gran piacere di quello luogo, molto laudando
73. Quoted by Carocci, “Chiesa e convento,” iddio e vostra magnificenza. . . . In questi pochi
L’Illustratore Fiorentino (1904): 64: “non voleva fumo dì che io disono stato sono alloggiati piu che
e ne anche vana gloria mundana quia ipse est homo cinquanta frati. Non credo avere speso 4 grossoni
a coscientiatus.” di vostro per loro e sono stati recevuti bene, e
74. For the date of his marriage, see Ammirato, molto laudatio elluogo.”
Delle famiglie nobili fiorentine, 114. 87. See Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 45–57.
75. Supino, “La Capella del Pugliese,” Miscellanea
d’Arte (1903): 2.
76. Borsook rightly points out that this portrait Chapter 6
“non è un ritratto idealizzato: mostra un gentilu- 1. AIF, Ser. x, no. 2 (“Contratti rogati di Ser
omo pieno di rughe nell’anno 1488” (“Ritratto di Matteo di Ser Andrea da Campi e da Ser Niccolo
Filippo Strozzi,” in Lamberini, Palazzo Strozzi, 9). da Romena dall’anno 1476 al 1502”), fol. 132v, and
77. See her letter in Art Bulletin (1996): 370–71; an eighteenth-century copy on fols. 464v–65r. The
and for the commission more generally, Rohlmann, full untranslated text is in the Appendix, doc. 3.
Auftragskunst und Sammlerbild, 53–65. 2. Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration,” 20–21.
78. Goldthwaite, Public Wealth, 65–67. 3. For the development of family chapels within
79. Zeri, “Aggiunta a una predella Ghirlandai- churches, see Höger, Studien, esp. 10–37.
esca,” in Diari di Lavoro. 4. Gardner, “Altars, Altarpieces and Art His-
80. There are too many instances of this practice tory,” in Borsook and Gioffredi Superbi, Italian
in altarpieces of the period to need to cite individ- Altarpieces, 19. See also now for female access to
ual examples. Indeed, Borsook sensibly suggested church space, Randolph, “Regarding Women,” in
that scenes from the life of Saints Philip and James Johnson and Grieco, Picturing Women.
would be the likely subjects for the missing pre- 5. Arlotto, Motti e Facezie, 45.
della panels (“Documenti relativi,” 5). 6. Landucci, A Florentine Diary, 11–12 (December
81. As Zeri himself pointed out:“Aggiunta a una 1473).
predella Ghirlandaiesca,” in Diari di Lavoro, 1:57–58. 7. ASF, NA 6103 (Ser Paolo di Ser Giovanni
82. For a discussion of this ritual, see Weissman, Dieciaiuti, 1489–1518), fols. 536r–v.
Ritual Brotherhood, 99–105. 8. The first example, from ASF, NA 14416,
83. The role of the shepherd was discussed in a ser- fol. 335r, is partially published by Carl,“Das Inven-
mon by Fra Mariano da Genezzano on Christmas tar,” MKIF (1987): 380, and the second from the
notes to pages 12 1–12 4 245
will of Filippo di Lutozzo Nasi, in NA 3693, 14. Gaston, “Liturgy and Patronage in San
fol. 161v. For other examples of the use of this term Lorenzo,” in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art and
relating to chapels, see, perhaps most famously, the Society, 113–20 and passim.
debates over patronage rights to the cappella mag- 15. For the testaments of Filippo di Lutozzo
giore at Santa Maria Novella in Simons,“Patronage Nasi about the chapel at San Francesco al Monte,
in the Tornaquinci Chapel,” in Kent and Simons, see ASF, NA 3693, fols. 161r and 165v–66r; Bar-
Patronage, Art and Society, and eadem, “Portraiture tolommeo di Lutozzo about the decoration of the
and Patronage,” 195; and also the transferal of the chapel at Santo Spirito, NA 14723, fols. 40r–v;
patronage rights of the altar of Saint John the Alessandra del Pugliese and her chapel at Santa
Evangelist in San Pancrazio di Vallespesa from one Lucia, NA 5439, fol. 137r; and Francesco del
Del Pugliese brother of the cadet branch to Pugliese’s first and second wills, the first unpub-
another, in NA 1229, fols. 27v–28r; Sale, Filippino lished in NA 2874, no. 26, fol. 119r, and the second
Lippi’s Strozzi Chapel, 102–8, and Seidel,“The Social published by Polizzotto,“Dell’Arte di Ben Morire,” I
Status of Patronage,” in Borsook and Gioffredi Tatti Studies (1987): 71–73.
Superbi, Italian Altarpieces, 122.
16. ASF, CRS 113, 13, fol. 36r.
9. ASF, NA 14416, fol. 335r: “Que donatio fece
17. Gardner, “Altars, Altarpieces and Art His-
fuit predicti Bernardus et Antonius dicti Filippo et
tory,” in Borsook and Superbi Gioffredi, Italian
Piero delicentis consensus et voluntate reverendi in
Altarpieces, 5–10.
christo fratris et domini domini [sic] Johannis
Neronis de Detisalvis dignissimi archiespiscopi 18. AAF, VP 3: “Si in dicta ecclesia sint libri, cal-
florentie de quo licentis constare dixerunt presen- ices, paramente, crucis et reliquie et alis iocalie
tibus instrumentis.” This was also the case in the ecclesia et que sunt et quot solite fuerunt est.”
1497 transferal of patronage rights between del 19. AIF, Ser. cxx, no. 9, fol. 82r. Once again,
Pugliese brothers at S. Pancrazio di Vallespese thanks to Patricia Rubin for this reference.
(NA 1229, fol. 27v). 20. For bequests of ecclesiastical garments in
10. See Sale, Filippino Lippi’s Strozzi Chapel, 104. wills, see, for example, Filippo del Pugliese’s gift of
The full arguments over the chapel’s patronage are 120 florins for various cloth furnishings and gar-
contained in AAF, Notari, Atti Straordinari 050, 1 ments in 1527 (ASF, NA 13982, fol. 123r). For inven-
(Ser Domenico da Figline, 1482–89), fols. 325r–33v. tories of this kind of material in the archives of
Santo Spirito, see ASF, CRS 122, 60, fols. 31v–39r.
11. See AIF, Ser. cxvii, 29, no. 5ff. My thanks to
Patricia Rubin for this reference. 21. AAF, Notari, Atti Straordinari 050, 1, fol. 325r,
and Sale, Filippino Lippi’s Strozzi Chapel, 105.
12. There is very little published work done on
22. For Bernardo del Bianco, see Craven,“Aspects
the function of capellani (chaplains), although I
of Patronage,” 117; the vicissitudes at Santa Maria
believe Gene Brucker is presently working on the
Novella are discussed in Simons, “Portraiture and
subject. The documentary sources are: for the Del
Patronage,” 195–212; see also the “contract” for
Pugliese at San Jacopo Oltrarno, ASF, CRS 140,
chapel construction that Hatfield sees in the will
119 (“Cappelli e Rettori poste in San Jacopo
of Guasparre del Lama, Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration,”
Sopr’arno”), fol. 38r; Alessandra del Pugliese’s
22–23.
chapel at Santa Lucia, ASF, NA 5439, fol. 137r; and
for the Nasi at Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli, NA 3693, 23. Respectively ASF, NA 3693, fols. 166r–v, and
fol. 161v. In an early (1365) chapel contract, Taddeo NA 14723, fol. 40v, and see Chapter 3 above for
di Vanni Canigiani provided a bed for the cappel- Santo Spirito.
lano of his chapel in Santa Felicita; see Höger, Stu- 24. Supino,“La Cappella del Pugliese,” Miscellanea
dien, 189. d’Arte (1903): 2, and Chapter 7 below.
13. See, for example, the last wishes of Mona 25. Quoted in Wilson, Music and Merchants, 185:
Checca Nasi, as stipulated in ASF, Dec Rep 1, “Ut imagines Ecclesiae fiunt supra altare. Praecip-
fol. 207v, and the will of Filippo di Lutozzo, NA imus, ut in unaquaque Ecclesia ante vel post vel
3693, fols. 159v and 161v. super Altare sit imago, vel sculptura, vel scriptura,
246 notes to pages 12 4–129
vel pictura espresse designans, et cuilibet intuenti San Lorenzo,” Burlington Magazine (1978): 358–61,
manifestans, in cuius sancti meritum et honorem and Saalman,“San Lorenzo,” in ibid.
sit ipsum Altare constructum.” 39. Bulman, “Artistic Patronage at SS. Annunzi-
26. Francesco del Pugliese founded a chapel in ata,” chap. 4, 1 and 27–30 and chap. 8, 12–13.
Cestello dedicated to the same saint twenty-five
40. Discussed in Van Os,“Painting in a House of
years later and was to commission the Last Commu-
Glass,” Simiolus (1987).
nion of Saint Jerome from Botticelli for his oratory at
Sommaia. Filippo Strozzi, too, “gained a new 41. Humfrey, “Co-ordinated Altarpieces,” in
patron saint,” Saint John the Evangelist, on his tak- Humfrey and Kemp, The Altarpiece in the Renais-
ing over of his chapel at Santa Maria Novella: see sance, 192, 199–201.
Sale, Filippino Lippi’s Strozzi Chapel, 108. 42. Rinuccini, Ricordi Storici, cxxxviii: “perchè si
27. Supino,“La Cappella del Pugliese,” Miscellanea giudicava che coprissono e occupassino grande
d’Arte (1903): 1. parte della bellezza di detta chiesa, si dovessino al
28. For a discussion of this panel, see Luchs, Ces- tutto levare e mettere in altro luogo, e similemente
tello, 83–85, and Chapter 3 above. si levassino molte tavole, e dipinture e imagini che
erano appiccate alle colonne o pilastri di detta
29. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. v, 1425, unfoliated
chiesa, acciò rimanesse netta ed espedita, e parve
insert, and see Chapter 8 below.
facesse grande dimostrazione di bellezza, che
30. See ASF, Manoscritti 111 (“Libro di Conti e prima era occupata, benchè a molti anche dispi-
Ricordi di Raffaello di Ruberto di Bernardo acesse.” See also Landucci, A Florentine Diary,
Nasi”), fol. cxxvii. 40–41.
31. F. W. Kent, Household and Lineage, 264. 43. Antoninus, Summa Theologica, 3: col. 546:“‘Pul-
32. Hope, “Altarpieces and the Requirements of cra: Maxime sacerdoti hoc conventi ornare templum
Patrons,” in Verdon and Henderson, Christianity Dei honore congruo, ut etiam hoc cultu aula Dei
and the Renaissance. resplendeat.’ Non tamen dicit, quod fiant superflui-
33. Long, Bardi Patronage at Santa Croce, 285–86. tates, pompae, et multae vanitates armorum, pic-
For the identical architectural form of the ten turarum, vasorum aureorum et huiusmodi.”
chapels in Santa Croce, see Colvin, Architecture and 44. Alberti, On the Art of Building, 220.
the After-Life, 190.
45. Cavazzini,“Dipinti e Sculture,” in Sandri, Gli
34. See Simons, “Patronage in the Tornaquinci Innocenti e Firenze, 115.
Chapel,” in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art and
Society. 46. See Bellosi, Il Museo, 21–49, for an inventory
of a nineteenth-century sale of effects from the
35. See Capretti,“La cappella e l’altare,” in La Chiesa
church.
e il Convento di Santo Spirito; Van Os, “Painting in a
House of Glass,” Simiolus (1987): 34–35, Schmidt, 47. Gavitt, Charity and Children, 152.
“Filippo Brunelleschi,” Arte Cristiana (1992), and 48. See Cavazzini,“Dipinti e Sculture,” in Sandri,
Gardner von Teuffel, “Lorenzo Monaco, Filippo Gli Innocenti e Firenze, 117–26.
Lippi und Filippo Brunelleschi,” Zeistschrift für Kunst-
geschichte (1982). 49. See Bruscoli, L’Adorazione, 13–24, and Küp-
pers, Die Tafelbidler des Domenico Ghirlandajo, 86–87.
36. Payments for curtains for altarpieces in the
Innocenti can be found in AIF, Ser. cxxii, no. 33, 50. Bruscoli, L’Adorazione, 16–17 and 23.
fol. 102r, and Bruscoli, L’Adorazione, 21. See also in 51. Ibid., 16–17: “secondo l’adornamento della
general, Nova,“Hangings, Curtains and Shutters,” in tavola ch’è al presente nella chiesa degl’Igiesuati
Humfrey and Kemp, The Altarpiece in the Renaissance. all’altare maggiore . . . cioè: tabernacolo per Corpo
37. Quoted and discussed in Schmidt, “Filippo di Cristo, candellieri da lato, e’l cornicione o con
Brunelleschi,” Arte Cristiana (1992): 457. mensole o sanza.” See also Albertini, Memoriale,
38. For a transcription and discussion of this unpaginated.
document, see Ruda,“A 1434 Building Program for 52. AIF, Ser. cxxii, no. 30, fols. 186v–87r.
53. For Lenzi gifts to the chapel, see AIF, Ser. acadranno . . . e l’azurro abbia a esse oltramarino di
cxx, no. 9, fol. 82r, and AIF, Ser. cxvii, no. 29, pregio di fiorini quatro l’oncia in circa.”
dated 6 March 1486(5). Patricia Rubin kindly gave 68. Bruscoli, L’Adorazione, 18: “nel mezo, la nostra
me both these references. Donna col Figliuolo morto in brazo, colle Marie dal
54. See Gavitt, Charity and Children, 113; Cavazz- lato come si richiede; a piè di san Giovanni Vangielista
ini, “Dipinti e Sculture,” in Sandri, Gli Innocenti e ch’[è] nella tavola la storia quando san Giovanni fu
Firenze, 114–15. This commission was noted in the messo nella caldaia; a piè di san Giovanni Batista, el
ricordanze of the artist: see Neri di Bicci, Le Ricor- batesimo di Cristo; dua istorie di nostra Donna, cioè
danze, 160. la Purificatione di nostra Donna e lo Sponsalitio; e
55. Bellosi, Il Museo, 9: “rifacimento dell’altare e nelle teste della detta predella, da una, la Nunziata, e
de’pilastri entrano nelle mura e un archo di sopra da l’altra, l’arcivescovo Antonino quando sagrò la
iscritto in pietra.” The archival reference Bellosi chiesa del detto spedale.”
gives is incorrect. It is in fact AIF, Ser. cxx, no. 10, 69. Originally noted with the wrong archival ref-
fol. 450. erence in Bellosi, Il Museo, 12. Cited correctly by
56. AIF, Ser. cxxii, no. 32, fol. 89. Cavazzini, “Dipinti e Sculturi,” in Gli Innocenti e
Firenze, ed. Sandri, 120–21 and 147 n. 33.
57. AIF Ser. cxxii, no. 31, fol. 80:“per redipignere
il Cristo battuto, come disse Piero del Pugliese.” 70. See Johnson, “Religious Paintings,” 88–93,
Quoted in Cavazzini, “Dipinti e Sculture,” in San- who suggests Elizabeth of Hungary as a possibility
dri, Gli Innocenti e Firenze, 119. but instead decides on an identification of the
Sicilian Saint Rosalia, who died in her teens; and
58. Ibid. Forlani Tempesti and Capretti, Piero di Cosimo,
59. ASF, Seta 246 ( “Libro di Consolati del anno 111–12, who suggest that this saint is Dorothy,
1393 al 1579”), fols. 18r, 22r, 25v, and 26v; Manoscritti whose attribute is a selection of flowers rather than
543 (“Matricole della Seta, 1532”), unfoliated. simply roses and who does not have as many Flo-
rentine precedents as Saint Elizabeth (see Kaftal,
60. Gavitt, Charity and Children, 144.
Iconography of the Saints, 330–31).
61. ASF, Seta 246, fol. 42r. Piero was also a con-
71. See Jameson, Legends of the Monastic Orders,
sul in 1477 (fol. 37r), 1481 (fol. 38v), and 1496
834, Gurney Salter, Franciscan Legends in Italian Art,
(fol. 44v).
196 and 231, and Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints,
62. This terracotta is discussed by Marquand, 909–12.
Andrea della Robbia, 1:115–16. For the description by
72. Jacobus da Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:304.
Richa, see his Notizie Istoriche, 8:129.
73. Ibid., 302–18.
63. AIF, Ser. cxxii, no. 33, fol. 19r.
74. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints, 339.
64. For the arch of the Lenzi chapel, see AIF, Ser.
cxx, no. 10, fol. 450, and for the positioning of the 75. As discussed in Tomas, “Negotiated Spaces,”
tabernacle “che sta di sopra a detta tavola [di chap. 3.
Ghirlandaio],” see ibid., fol. 424. 76. Randolph, “Performing the Bridal Body,” Art
65. See, for example, the frame of Apparition of the History (1998): 188–89.
Virgin to Saint Bernard by Filippino Lippi, now in 77. Discussed and quoted in Gavitt, Charity and
the Badia (fig. 38), and the frame of the Nerli altar- Children, 75–84.
piece in Santo Spirito, by the same artist.
78. For an anthropological definition of patron-
66. These curtains were paid for respectively in age, see Eisenstadt and Roniger, Patrons, Clients, and
May 1489 and December 1493. See AIF, Ser. cxx, Friends, 48–50; and for definitions specific to our
no. 10, fol. 442, and Ser. cxxii, no. 33, fol. 102r. period: Gundersheimer, “Patronage in the Renais-
67. Transcribed in Bruscoli, L’Adorazione, 14: sance,” in Lytle and Orgel, Patronage in the Renais-
“debbe colorire detto piano tutto a sua spese di col- sance, and Weissman,“Taking Patronage Seriously,”
ori buoni e oro macinato nelli adornamenti dove in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art, and Society.
Chapter 7 and Lorenzo de’ Medici. My thanks to her for

1. Antal, Florentine Painting, 2. sharing this research.
2. The Campora papers are kept as part of the 15. Luchs publishes the documents regarding
massive Badia archive in the Archivio di Stato. their initial gifts. See “Cestello,” 254, 289, and 345.
These accounts can be found in CRS 78, 333 16. Luchs, Guida Storico-Artistica, 16 and 22.
(“Camporearum ii”), fols. 195v–200v. Supino, “La
Cappella del Pugliese,” Miscellanea d’Arte (1903), 17. Luchs,“Cestello,” 258 and 348.
publishes fols. 199v–200v, which is a summary of 18. Ibid., 258.
money spent. 19. Ibid., 50.
3. ASF, CRS 78, 333, fols. 195v, 196r, and 196v. The 20. See ibid., 18, 53, and fig. 67, 217. Luchs also
second reference is noted in Supino, “La Cappella points out that Bernardo Nasi was one of the
del Pugliese,” Miscellanea d’Arte (1903): 1:“Uno devoto operai of Santo Spirito when the Bardi got their
amico et benefactore delo nostro monastero.” chapel there.
4. Lesher, “The Vision of Saint Bernard,” 122 21. For a discussion of the popularity of these
and 143. texts and paintings of the Apparition, see Dal Prà,
5. Quoted in Supino,“La Cappella del Pugliese,” Bernardo da Chiaravalle, 48 and 53–62, and Lesher,
Miscellanea d’Arte (1903): 1: “dixe non voleva alcuno “The Vision of Saint Bernard,” 4–34 and passim.
in nostri bisogni, ma voleva che si spendesono in 22. Dante, Paradiso, 350–73 (Canti 31–33), and
alcuno ornamento in nostra chiesa de le campora.” Botterill, Dante and the Mystical Tradition, 13–64,
6. ASF, CRS 78, 334 (“Camporearum iv”), who discusses the popularity and perception of
fols. 90v–91v. Saint Bernard in late medieval Florence.
7. Scharf translated calice as “frame” (cornice). See 23. See Dal Prà, Bernardo di Chiaravalle, 54, Janke,
his Filippino Lippi, 5, 29–30, and 87. “The Vision of St. Bernard,” in Engass and Stok-
8. ASF, CRS 78, 333, fol. 198v. Partially cited in stad, Hortus Imaginum, 47–48, and Lesher, “The
Supino, “La Cappella del Pugliese,” Miscellanea Vision of Saint Bernard,” 11–18.
d’Arte (1903): 3–4. 24. Dal Prà, Bernardo di Chiaravalle, 54.
9. “Piero di Iacopo del Pugliese nostro,” ASF, 25. Lesher, “St. Bernard of Clairvaux,” Citeaux:
CRS 78, 80 (“Debitori e Creditori, 1471–87”), Comentarii Cistercienses (1984), and Rubinstein, The
fol. 339v (my italics), and for other connections, Palazzo Vecchio, 49 and 57–70.
CRS 78, 3 (“Giornale, 1483–95”), fols. 11r and 32v. 26. I am grateful to Nicholas Penny for allowing
10. ASF, Dec. Rep. 9, fol. 1140r. This property is me to see this painting during its restoration.
not mentioned in the 1480 catasto and has no
27. Lesher,“The Vision of Saint Bernard,” 39–46.
details of its purchase in the later tax declaration,
the Decima of 1495. 28. Dal Prà, Bernardo di Chiaravalle, 106. Trans-
lated, Bernard writes, “Queen [and] mother of
11. See Cecchi, “Una predella e altri contributi,”
heaven, mother of the crucified Lord, say if you
Gli Uffizi. Studi e ricerche (1988): 59–60.
were in Jerusalem when you son was taken . . . to
12. For the relationship between contado laborers which she responded,” and the reply comes from
and their Florentine employers, see Herlihy and the Virgin’s mouth: “[I was in] Jerusalem when I
Klapisch, Tuscans and Their Families, 118–20. Cecelia heard this.”
Hewlitt of Monash University is presently under-
29. See Supino,“La Cappella del Pugliese,” Miscel-
taking doctoral research on life in the Florentine
lanea d’Arte (1903): 3, for the documentation
contado during this period, and I am grateful for her
regarding the book, which probably went to the
advice on this subject.
Badia with the painting at the siege of Florence.
13. De Roover, The Rise and Decline, 257–60. It was there by the mid-sixteenth century as an
14. For the Salviati and the Medici, see Luchs, inventory shows: see Blum, La Biblioteca della Badia
“Cestello,” 59. Patricia Rubin has discovered several Fiorentina, 21 n. 33 and 128. It is now in the Bib-
Pucci marriages that were brokered by Cosimo lioteca Nazionale in Florence, Conventi Soppressi
notes to pages 1 46–158 249
B.1.2568. The Planctus Marie starts on fol. 132v. 43. See Dal Prà, Bernardo di Chiaravalle, 61, and
There is a dedication to the Campora on fol. 141v. Lesher,“The Vision of Saint Bernard,” 55–56.
30. It is now in the Accademia. See Lesher,“The 44. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, À la louange de la
Vision of Saint Bernard,” 129–32, and Dal Prà, Vierge Mère, 170.
Bernardo di Chiaravalle, 57 and 106–7. 45. Dante, Paradiso, 376–81.
31. See Bridgeman, “Aspects of Dress and Cere- 46. The dating of both these works is discussed
mony,” 95–112, and particularly 102. A similar cos- in Scarpellini, Perugino, 84–88.
tume is being worn by Tanai de’ Nerli on the 47. I discuss this more fully in Chapter 8.
altarpiece Filippino painted for him, now in Santo
Spirito in Florence.
32. Clark, “Filippino Lippi’s The Virgin Inspiring Chapter 8
St. Bernard,” Studies in Iconography (1981–82): 177, 1. As well as the scholars cited below, see
suggests that the Paradiso was an important source Hollingsworth, Patronage in Renaissance Italy, 88,
for the iconography of this painting. Hall,“Savonarola’s Preaching,” in Verdon and Hen-
33. The inscriptions on this panel were identified derson, Christianity and the Renaissance, 502–3, and
by Covi, “The Inscription in Fifteenth-Century Blume,“Studies in the Religious Paintings,” 150.
Florentine Painting,” Appendices 381a, 244, and 85. 2. These analyses are by Jonathan Nelson in his
34. This was a common motif in the late quattro- catalogue entry for the wings in L’Officina della
cento. The star on the Virgin’s mantle reappears in maniera, 84, and Friedman, “The Burial Chapel of
many of Filippino’s paintings, including the Rucel- Filippo Strozzi,” L’Arte (1979): 123.
lai altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with Saints 3. Gruyer, Les Illustrations, and Marchese, Memorie.
Jerome and Dominic, now in the National Gallery in 4. The most useful and fullest account is Horne,
London, and also the Adoration of the Kings, now in “The Last Communion of St. Jerome,” Bulletin of
the Uffizi. A star is also prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum (1915).
the Piero di Cosimo panel at Lecceto, also com- 5. The sale documents are ASF, NA 2879 (Ser
missioned by Piero del Pugliese and discussed in Bartolommeo Bindi, 1484–91), fols. 246r–47r.
Chapter 5. The text of the sermon is published in Land around the estate was bought in the subse-
French and Latin parallel texts in Bernard of Clair- quent year. See ibid., fol. 308r.
vaux, À la louange de la Vierge Mère.
35. See BNF, Conventi Soppressi B.1.2568,
7. ASF, NA 2874 (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi,
fol. 141v. The inscription is transcribed by Dal Prà,
1472–1512), fil. 1, no. 18, unfoliated.
Bernardo di Chiaravalle, 132.
8. For this sale document, see ASF, NA 2880
36. Covi, “The Inscription in Fifteenth-Century (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi, 1491–95), fols. 117r–19v.
Florentine Painting,” 261. For the Ginori, see Ginori Conti, La Basilica di
37. See Epictetus, Manuale, 58–63, for Poliziano’s S. Lorenzo, 210–11.
Latin translation of the text and his dedicatory let- 9. ASF, NA 2879, fols. 298r–v.
ter to Lorenzo.
10. Polizzotto, “Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I Tatti
38. For a discussion of the significance of light, Studies (1989): 27–68, suggests that support for
see Meiss, “Light as Form and Symbol,” in The Savonarola affected traditional neighborhood
Painter’s Choice. allegiances.
39. Biblioteca Laurenziana, Pluteus xxxix, 17. 11. Cambi, Istorie, 3:28, for an account of his
insult, and ASF, Otto di Guardia 157 (“Partiti e
40. Levi d’Ancona, Miniatura e Miniatori, 95.
Deliberationi”), fols. 3r and 24v–25r.
41. Lesher,“The Vision of Saint Bernard,” 55–56 12. ASF, NA 18275 (Ser Bartolommeo di Vetto-
and 147–53. rio del Rosso, 1514–17), fols. 229r–32v, for the sale
42. Ibid., 54. of the Castellaccio.
13. The last three wills, all from the records of 20. AAF, Cause Civile, Chiese Varie 092 6 (“Ora-
the Savonarolan notary Ser Lorenzo Violi, are torio di S. Michele a Sommaia, posto in luogo
published in Polizzotto,“Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I detto il Castellaccio”), unfoliated. For parish num-
Tatti Studies (1989): 69–87. The first is in ASF, NA bers, see AAF, VP 4, fol. 72v.
2874 (Ser Bartolommeo Bindi, 1472–1512), fil. 1, 21. “nell’anno mcccclxiiii questa chi/esa
no. 26, fols. 114r–19v. chon altari e ornati fe’ fare e do/to borgh-
14. Polizzotto, “Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I Tatti ini di niccholo di choco donati.”
Studies (1989): esp. 63–64. 22. Lamberini, Calenzano, 1:90.
15. See ASF, NA 2874, fol. 114r. 23. Ibid. See for the attribution and discussion of
the frescoes, Linnenkamp, “Opera sconosciuta,”
16. Ibid., 85. Rivista d’Arte (1958), and idem,“Botticelli,” Pantheon
(1981): 123–26, though it seems unlikely that these
17. First published by Horne, “The Last Com-
frescoes are by the young Botticelli, as Lin-
munion of St. Jerome,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan
nenkamp claims.
Museum (1915): 52–56, and again in full by Poliz-
zotto,“Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I Tatti Studies (1989): 24. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. v, 1485, no. 14. Published
69–87: “Et più lasciò alla decta cappella e chiesa di in Lamberini, Calenzano, 2:51.
Sancto Andrea da Sommaia cinque quadri dipinti 25. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser. v, 1425, no. 14.
in asse, e’ quali si truova decto testatore, cioè: uno 26. Horne, in “The Last Communion of St.
quadro dipintovi una testa di Christo facta in Fian- Jerome,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum (1915):
dra, con dua sportelli da lato, dipinti di mano di 52–56, made the latter identification, and Hatfield
Filippo di fra Filippo; et uno quadro dipintovi uno Strens the former: see “Le aggiunte di Filippino,” in
Giudicio dipintto di mano di fra Giovanni con dua Dupré dal Poggetto, Scritti di storia dell’arte (1977).
sportelli a lato, dipinti di mano di Sandro di Botti-
27. Now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. For
cello; et un altro quadro dipintovi el Transito di
diverse opinions about these paintings, see Gamba,
Sa[n] Girolamo, di mano di decto Sandro; et un
Botticelli, 165–66, Harck, “Notizen über italienische
altro quadro piccolo, di mano di Pisellino; et un
Bilder,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft (1896): 431,
altro quadro grande, di mano di decto Filippo, dip-
and Lasareff, “An Unnoticed Botticelli,” Burlington
intovi una Natività co’ Magi.”
Magazine (1924).
18. ASF, NA 2874, fil. 1, no. 26, fol. 119r. 28. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints, cols. 1021–26.
19. Polizzotto, “Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I Tatti 29. Zeri, Italian Paintings, 96–98.
Studies (1989): 71–72:“Item perché il decto testatore 30. At least by Landino in his 1481 commentary
ha una cappella al luogo e villa sua di Sommaia, on the Divine Comedy. See Gilbert, Italian Art,
chontado di Firenze, benché ancora non sia 1400–1500, 191.
sacrata, la quale vuole nondimancho che si sagri e
31. Horne, Botticelli, 174, and Fantozzi, Nuova
facci a uso di chiesa . . . lasciò e sottopose la detta
guida, 399.
cappella al convento e frati e capitolo di San Mar-
cho di Firenze e sotto la custodia di decti frati 32. Hatfield, Botticelli’s Uffizi “Adoration,” 22.
e dell’ordine di San Domenico observanti . . . 33. F. W. Kent, “Lorenzo di Credi,” Burlington
et a benefitio et uso della loro Congregatione di Magazine (1983).
Toscana. Et . . . lasciò alla decta capella e per dota 34. Cannon,“Dominican Patronage,” 77–78.
di quella, tucto il casamento che è appresso a decta
35. For a discussion of and bibliography for mag-
e con decta capella . . . cioè: uno casamento chiam-
nificence, see Chapter 2 above.
ato il castello di Sommaia, nel quale è la decta
capella, con tucti gli abituri e stanze di decto casa- 36. De Simplicitate, 206. For the dates of the
mento, e con casa da lavoratore e torre verso printed editions before 1500, see Hain, Repertorium
Chiosina, e con tucte le masseritie e con tucti e’ Bibliographicum, 2: nos. 14356–59.
beni mobili di qualunche qualità si fussino . . . et in 37. Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 1, 388–89: “Se io ti
effecto tucto el poggio di Sommaia.” dicessi:‘dàmi dieci ducati per dare a uno povero’, tu
notes to pages 168–17 1 251
nol faresti; ma se io ti dico: ‘spendine cento in una 51. Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, 192 (also discussed
capella qua in San Marco,’ tu ‘l farai per mettervi below); other instances include Parenti, Ricordanze,
l’arme tua e farailo per tuo onore, non per onore di 94, Landucci, A Florentine Diary, 130–31, and
Dio.” Cambi, Istorie, vol. 2, esp. 136–37.
38. Ruth e Michea, 1:383–84:“si edificano le case e li 52. BNF, Fondo Principale ii.iii. 409 (“Prediche
belli palazzi col sangue de’ poveri.” See also, for sopra i vangeli”).
example, ibid., 1:95 and 2:158; Prediche Italiane, 3, 53. Ibid., fol. 3r.
no. 1, 391, 405; Ezechiele, 184.
54. Savonarola was praised for not “dividing” his
39. For Antoninus, see Howard, Beyond the Writ- sermons by Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, 192.
ten Word, 208–11, and Rubinstein, “Lay Patronage,”
55. See, as well as the Lenten sermons cited above,
in Verdon and Henderson, Christianity and the
the preaching of Fra Mariano da Genezzano as
Renaissance.
recorded by Margarita Soderini in BNF, Magl.
40. Ruth e Michea, 1:95. xxxv, 98; the confraternity sermons in Biblioteca
41. Quoted in Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, 75–78. Riccardiana, Fondo Riccardiano MS 2204
(“Protesti Orazioni, epistole e Sermoni, sec. xv”);
42. ASF, NA 2874 (Ser Bartolommeo di
and sermon accounts published by Zafarana,“Per la
Domenico Bindi, 1472–1512), fil. 1, no. 26, fols. 116r–v,
storia religiosa,” Studi Medievali (1968): esp. 1093–97.
119r.
56. For the use of sermon manuals in general, see
43. Salmi, 189: “oggi si fa le figure nelle chiese con
D’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars, esp. 64–131; for
tanto artificio, e tanto ornate e tirate, che guastono
Tuscany in the quattrocento, Paton, Preaching Fri-
il lume di Dio e la vera contemplazione, e non si
ars, 38–39.
considera Iddio ma solo l’artificio che è nelle fig-
ure.” See also De Simplicitate, 193. 57. Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence, 161–71;
Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 46–56.
44. Cannon, Dominican Patronage, 77, 79–82;
Savonarola, Ezechiele, 1:358 and 2:276. 58. See the evidence given in Rusconi, Predi-
cazione e Vita Religiosa, 192–98.
45. Camporeale, “Humanism and the Religious
Crisis,” in Verdon and Henderson, Christianity and 59. Triumphis Crucis, 295–97. Steinberg comments
the Renaissance, esp. 455–57. on this passage in Fra Girolamo Savonarola, 47–48.
46. Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 1, 391:“Voi dipintori, fate 60. Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, 193: “cominciò a
male, che se voi sapessi lo scandolo che ne segue e edifichare una archa, come fe’ nel testamento
quello che so io, voi nolle dipingeresti.” vechio Noè, et in ogni predicha edifichava et com-
metteva quatro assi chon espositioni mirabili.”
47. Zafarana,“Per la storia religiosa,” Studi Medievali
(1968): 1066–67:“e’ dipintori per tocchare danaro dip- 61. Parenti, Ricordanze, 70: “Figurò etiam la citta
inghono e dipingnierebbono ongni chosa.” di Firenze chome una nave in mezzo del mare cir-
cumdata da altre navi, le quali affondando per tem-
48. Reprinted and discussed by Gilbert, “The pesta a questa nostra barca appiccare si volessino,
Archbishop and the Painters of Florence,” Art Bul- mostrando che sola la terra nostra era salda, tutte
letin (1959): 79–80. l’altre d’Italia rotte.”
49. Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 1, 413–14: “le belle ceri- 62. Zafarana, “Per la storia religiosa,” Studi
monie, le chiese piene di drappelloni e organi, e Medievali (1968): 1059: “più tosto voleva tirare le
dice:—qua non c’è forma nessuna nè culto interi- chriature a divozioni e chogitazioni interiori cholla
ore, ma solamente di fuori c’è la figura e il colore.” mente, che a ffare piangniere a llagrimare chon atti
50. Giobbe, 278–79: “hanno il cuore negli occhi e ’steriori, di fuori, di lagrime e ppianti che passono
non hanno gli occhi loro nel cuore, amano solo via presto . . . ma che delle chogitazione de’ 7
quelle cose che di fuora.” This theme is constantly schalini sono dolciezze e ppensieri interiori e men-
repeated; see, for example, Giobbe, 131; Prediche Ital- tali che fanno più frutto e sono più utili alla salute.”
iane, 3, no. 1, 388–89, 405; ibid., 3, no. 2, 15; Ruth e Compare with Savonarola, Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 2,
Michea, 1:95 and 2:144. 450–74.
252 notes to pages 17 1–175
63. Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 2, 449: “Io non ti voglio 74. Savonarola, Tractato . . . in Defensione (unpagi-
esporre altrimenti questa figura, perchè la conclusione nated): “non è dacercharlo ne in cielo ne in terra:
è chiara, ma quanto alle particularità, quello che sig- ma nei proprio cuore.”
nifica quella croce rossa, quella vesta, quella spada, 75. More fully discussed Chapter 1. For a discus-
quelle maschere e le altre cose particulari, esaminate sion of Alessandro Nasi’s support of Savonarola,
da voi: lascio a te questa esposizione.” see Polizzotto, “Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I Tatti
64. See Savonarola, Ezechiele, 1:357–58, 2:275–77; Studies (1989): 38.
Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 1, 127.
76. ASF, NA 7545 (Ser Bartolomeo Fineschi da
65. Pseudo-Burlamacchi, Vita Latina, 96–97: Radda, 1507–11), fols. 182r, 183r–84v, 186r, 188v, and
“una bella et devota cappella in onore della vergine 189v.
con mirabile artificio era fabbricata; imperochè fra
77. Nuttall’s figures do have to be qualified, how-
l’altre cosa vi era un altare edificato di mirabile
ever, as they are based on the assumption that the
bellezza, con una imagine della gloriosa Vergine
inventories in the Pupilli archive are representative
scolpita, la quale haveva in braccio il suo unigenito
of the Florentine population as a whole and con-
Figliuolo che dormiva, di tanta bellezza che pare-
sistent in the way they were taken. See her “Early
vano vivi, et reclinava il suo capo nel seno della sua
Netherlandish Painting,” 132–60.
Mamma et faceva stare le persone stupite per devo-
tione;”“pareva loro esser in Paradiso. . . . Et finito il 78. Strozzi, Lettere, 230, and Michelangelo as
sermone, innanzi a quella imagine della Vergine cited by Francisco de Hollanda, quoted in Klein
fece una devota et bella oratione.” and Zerner, Italian Art 1500–1600, 34.
66. See Spencer, “Ut Rhetorica Pictura,” JWCI 79. Nuttall,“Early Netherlandish Painting,” 348.
(1957), Land, The Viewer as Poet, esp. 3–24, and 80. Given the contemporary renown of Jan van
Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators. Eyck in Italy, and the fame of this particular work,
67. Pseudo-Burlamacchi, Vita Latina, 96–97: “La it seems quite possible that Filippino could have
Santa Vergine sedeva in un trono, alli gradi del seen drawings or engravings after the Ghent Altar-
quale era cinque brevi scritti a lettere d’oro . . . gli piece. The influence of placing the realistically
adornamenti del cielo et degli lati della cappella, modeled saints in sculptural niches can be seen in
d’oro et d’argento, seta et arazzi ornati.” several Flemish engravings of about 1480. See, for
68. Ibid., 51: “in chiesa non figure curiose, ma example, Der Meister der Van Eyck-Schule, plates 31,
semplice et devote, senza alcuna vanità.” 45, and 59.
69. Ibid., 127: “un tabernacolo humile et devoto 81. Discussed by Bietti, “‘Una divota figura,’” in
nel quale era dipinto l’imagine del nostro Salvatore Prinz and Seidel, Domenico Ghirlandaio, 150–51.
sedente sopra ‘l mansueto asinello.” Landucci reports how the miraculous crucifix,
owned by a poor woman in Camaldoli, had broken
70. Baxandall, Painting and Experience, 149.
into a sweat in 1473, hence the suitability of the
71. Cerretani, Storia Fiorentina, 192: “introduxe cloth of Veronica as a cover. See Burke, “Visualiz-
quasi nuovo modo di pronuntiare il verbo d’ Iddio, ing Neighbourhood,” Journal of Urban History,
c[i]oè a l’apostolescha sanza dividere el sermone, forthcoming.
non propenendo quistione, fugendo el chantare, gl’
82. Translated extract in Gilbert, Italian Art,
ornamenti d’eloquentie, solo il suo fine era exporre
1400–1500, 152.
qualchosa del vechio testamento et introdurre la
semplicità della primitiva chiesa.” 83. Quoted by Baxandall, Painting and Experience,
149–50.
72. Filipepi,“Cronaca,” 475:“La voce et la pronun-
cia del Padre era tale che da tutti universalmente 84. Vasari-Bettarini/Barocchi, 4:89.
era udito benissimo, che parea cosa miracolosa; con 85. For a discussion and possible reconstruction
tanto spirito poi, che parea un santo Paolo.” See of this tabernacle, see Francesco Caglioti’s and
also Nardi, Istorie, 1:51–52. Andrea De Marchi’s catalogue entries in Barocchi,
73. Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 23–26. Il Giardino di San Marco, 69–82.
86. Suggested by Fisher, Fra Bartolommeo, 33 and 1490. A more easily available Latin version of the text
170. is in Migne, Patrologia Latina, 22:239–82.
87. Ruth e Michea, 2:372–73: “che ti fussi spesso 99. Eusebius, Il Devoto Transito, chap. v: “sop-
innanzi alli occhi, ma non però che tu ne facessi portare voluntariamente ogni infirmita e pena cor-
uno abito di vederla, e che poi la non ti movessi porale et mentale per amor della giustitia.”
nulla.” 100. Ibid., chaps. vii, viii, xi: “onde ne ricchi,
88. On this issue, see Decker, “Reform Within nobili et possenti e la luxuria, superbia et avaritia: i
the Cult Image,” in Humfrey and Kemp, The Altar- quali sono ladroni che usurpano et consumano
piece in the Renaissance, and Nova, “Hangings, Cur- quello che e de povere. . . . Et fanno grandi edificii
tains and Shutters,” in the same volume. et honorati palatii per esser contemplati da gli
89. For Savonarola’s discussion of this, see partic- occhi humani: et stare bene adagio: et li poveri di
ularly his Tractato . . . in Defensione (unpaginated). Christo si muoiono.”
90. Michelangelo, Carteggio, 1:17. 101. Ruth e Michea, 2:362–95 (2 November 1496).
91. For the popularity and availability of Flemish 102. See Binski, Medieval Death, esp. 29–47, and
painting in Florence, see Nuttall,“Early Netherlan- Boase, Death in the Middle Ages, 119–39.
dish Painting,” 58–79, and Rohlmann, Auftragskunst 103. Ruth e Miche, 2:372: “volendoti tu preparare
und Sammlerbild, 91–124. bene all morte, tu ti facessi dipingere tre carte.”
92. The frame is discussed by Hatfield Strens, 104. See Goff, “The Four Florentine Editions,”
“Le aggiunte di Filippino,” in Dupré dal Poggetto, New Colophon (1950).
Scritti di storia dell’arte (1977): 284–85.
105. Ruth and Michea, 2:378: “fatti fare uno paio di
93. Alessandra’s sympathies to Savonarola as occhiali che si chiamino li occhiali della morte.”
shown in her testament are discussed by Poliz-
zotto,“Dell’Arte del Ben Morire,” I Tatti Studies (1989): 106. Ibid., 380: “Se tu vuoi adunque fare bene e
60–61. Her will can be found in ASF, NA 5439 (Ser fuggire il peccato, fatti una forte fantasia della
Filippo Cioni, Testamenti 1515–19), fols. 136r–37v. morte. Questi sono li occhiali che io ti dico: fa’ che
la morte ti sia impressa sempre nella fantasia, e in
94. Pseudo- Burlamacchi, Vita Latina, 189.
ogni opera tua ricordati della morta.”
95. Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 2, 12: “non è cosa più
107. Ibid., 382: “qualche cosa sensibile che ti fa
delettabile nè più soave che la contemplazione delle
ricordare della morte, perché la fantasia viene dal
cose di Cristo: qualche volta voi vi state in villa e
senso, che è mosso dalle cose sensibili.”
andatevi a spasso; sara meglio che voi contemplassi
le cose di Cristo. Voi non attendete se non per le 108. Ibid., 383:“se tu pure se’ molto fragile, doverresti
vie a cicalare: gli uomini santi non fanno così, anzi farti dipingere la morte in casa tua, e etiam portare in
vanno sempre pensando e ruminando le cose della mano una morticina d’osso e guardala spesso.”
vita del Salvatore. Mettetevi dunque innanzi agli 109. Ibid., 372–73: “La prima fu, che tu ti facessi
occhi queste cose, che saranno un fonte d’acqua dipingere in una carta el Paradiso di sopra e lo
viva, che vi condurranno in vita eterna.” Inferno di sotto . . . e guardassi molto bene questa
96. Prediche Italiane, 3, no. 2, 7–8: “Le ricchezze figura, e che la morte ti sta sempre incontro per
non vi cavan sete; gli onori non vi cavan sete; niuna levarti di questa vita, quasi dicendoti—Tu hai a
cosa terrena vi cava la sete, nè vi sazia mai.” morire a ogni modo e non puoi campare dalle mie
97. ASF, CRS 78, 316 (Archivio Familiarum: mani; guarda, dove tu vuoi andare, o quassù in Par-
Dei), fol. 213v: “mori cosi bene e contanta patientia adiso, o quaggiù in Inferno?”
e conoscimento e reverentia di Dio quanta uno 110. Ibid., 386: “La seconda carta, . . . è questa: che
optimo religioso e divino spirito con tali parole tu ti facci dipingere uno omo, cominciato a infir-
sancte in boccha che pareva uno San Girolamo marsi, con la morte che sta allo uscio e picchia per
novello.” entrare drento.”
98. The edition I used, in the British Library, was 111. Ibid., 390:“uno infermo nel letto, che era con-
printed for Ser Francesco Bonnacorsi in Florence in dotto al punto estremo a fare penitenzia.”
112. Lightbown, Botticelli, 2:86–87. One was for- 10. See F. W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici, chap. 1.
merly in the Palazzo Balbi-Senarega, Genoa; 11. See Gilbert, “Bernardo Rucellai,” JWCI
another in an American private collection (sold (1949), for a discussion of the meetings at the
Christie’s, London, 5 May 1911); and one is possibly Rucellai gardens and the importance of the
in Paris after being sold in Christie’s, London, on posthumous image of Lorenzo, and Rubinstein,
22 March 1929. “The Formation of the Posthumous Image,” in
113. Landucci, A Florentine Diary, 129. Chaney and Ritchie, Oxford, China and Italy.
114. Trexler, Public Life, 189–90 and 483. 12. See Raffaello a Firenze, 39–40. Agnolo Doni’s
wife, Maddalena di Giovanni Strozzi, was niece to
Dionigi di Piero Nasi (see BNF, Carte Passerini,
Conclusion Nasi).
1. For the objects inside their home, see Bocchi 13. See Cecchi, in Raffaello a Firenze, 40; Vasari-
and Cinelli, Le Bellezze, 172, and the inventory of Bettarini/Barocchi, 4:160; and for a letter about
1565 in ASF, Libri di Commercio e di Famiglia 228, Taddei by Raphael, Golzio, Raffaello nei Documenti,
fols. 2r–7r. 19.
2. Guicciardini, History of Italy, 3. 14. ASF, C. Strozzi, Ser i, cccxxv, fols. 1r–4v.
3. For an extended discussion of the motif of 15. Vasari-Bettarini/Barocchi, 4:160–61. Restora-
the golden age in the years after 1494, see Burke, tion work confirms that the panel was broken into
“Form and Power,” chap. 8. sixteen pieces that were glued together at some
4. Polizzotto, The Elect Nation, passim. early point in its history; see Raffaello a Firenze,
77–78.
5. David Franklin has recently published a new
synthetic interpretation of the painting of this
period (Painting in Renaissance Florence), yet com-
pared with the fifteenth century in Florence, it
remains comparatively underexamined.
6. This is not the first time the comparison
between Piero and Francesco Pugliese has been
made, though with a different question in mind.
See Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renais-
sance Artist, 121–22.
7. Catalogued in Sotheby’s, Catalogue of Highly
Important Old Master Paintings, London, 24 March
1965, and formerly in the collection at Locko Park.
See Burke, “Form and Power,” 133–34, for a longer
discussion of these paintings.
8. Though it has been dated up to a year later
than this for stylistic reasons; see Meyer zur Cap-
pellen, Raphael in Florence, 197–200.
9. The letter was originally published in Golzio,
Raffaello nei documenti, 10; John Shearman suggested
it was possibly a nineteenth-century forgery at a
public lecture given at the Courtauld Institute in
London in November 1998. His Raphael in Early
Modern Sources has just been published by Yale
University Press. See for Raphael’s drawings of
this period, Jones and Penny, Raphael, 21–47, and
Meyer zur Cappellen, Raphael in Florence, 98–141.
biblio graphy
Archival Sources Cited

Florence, Archivio Arcivescovile
Cause Civile, Chiese Varie
Notari, Atti Straordinari
Visite Pastorali
Florence, Archivio del Ospedale degli Innocenti

Ser. V
Ser. X
Ser. CXVII
Ser. CXX
Ser. CXXII
Florence, Archivio di Stato

Arte della Seta
Carte Bagni
Carte Dei (Manoscritti)
Carte Strozziane
Catasto
Ceremelli Papiani
Compagnie Religiose Soppresse incamerate nel Bigallo: Compagnia di Santa Maria del Laude detta
S. Agnese
Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese
Decima Repubblicana
Libri di Commercio e di Famiglia
Magistrati dei Pupilli
Manoscritti
Notarile Antecosimiano
Otto di Guardia
Raccolta Sebregondi
Signori, Dieci di Balìa, Otto di Pratica: Legazioni e Commissarie, Missive e Responsive
Statuti delle Comunità Autonome e Soggette
Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana

Archivio di San Marco
Pluteus
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale

Conventi Soppressi
Fondo Passerini
Fondo Principale
Nuovi Acquisti
256 biblio graphy
Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana

Fondo Riccardiano
Florence, Biblioteca di San Marco

Razzi, Serafino,“Breve Discrizione del luogho chiamato Santa Maria di Lecceto”
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index
Art works and buildings such as chapels are listed under the relevant artist or location, rather than the
patron’s name; thus the Capponi chapel in Santo Spirito is listed under Florence: Santo Spirito, not under
Capponi. Illustrations are indicated by page numbers in italics.
Alberti, Leon Battista, 17, 59, 89, 91, Bartholomew, Saint, 149 Last Communion of Saint Jerome,
94 Bartolommei, de’, Giovanni di Ser 161–62, 166–67, 181–86, 182
and church decoration, 126, 127, 138 Antonio, 72 Saint Jerome and Saint Vincent Ferrer
Albertini, Francesco, 128 Bartolommeo da Colle, Fra, 169 (wings for a tabernacle), 163,
Albizzi family, 106 Bartolommeo di Giovanni, Innocenti 163–65, 184
Andrea di Matteo, 55 altarpiece predella, 132, 133–35, 134 and Savonarola, 156, 174
Lando, 106 attributed, Trinity with Angels Braccesi, Alessandro, poems about
Altoviti, Francesco, 37, 171 lunette, 163, 182 the portrait of Piero del
ambassadors, 22–23, 59–60 Bartolommeo, Fra, George and the Pugliese, 85–86, 87, 88–89
Ambrose, Saint, 127 Dragon, 12, 32 Bridgeman, Jane, 59
amicizia. See friendship The Annunciation, The Presentation Brucker, Gene, 2
Angelico, Fra, 175, 176 at the Temple, and The Adoration of Brunelleschi, Filippo
Last Judgement, 162, 163, 184 the Child, 175, 177 church of San Lorenzo, 125
Annunciation, 151–52 Baxandall, Michael, 9, 85, 173 church of Santo Spirito, 66, 67, 74,
Antal, Frederick, 139 beauty, and civic virtue, 36–37, 61, 127, 82–83
Antinori family, 65 138 Bruscoli, Gaetano, 128
Antoninus, Saint, 102, 103, 127, 168, 169 and piety, 172–73, 176 Bulman, Louisa, 126
consecration of Innocenti church, Bellini, Jacopo, 126 Burlamacchi, Pseudo, Vita Latina,
134–35 Benci, Donato, 20 172–73, 180
Apelles, 94 Benino, del, Piero di Gregorio, 66–67,

Apollonio di Giovanni, 7, 55 n. 103 70
archival work, 1 Bernard, Saint, 144–52, 167, 170 Callman, Ellen, 7
Arlotto, Pievano, 120 and Annunciation, 146–47, 151–52 Canigiani, Domenico, 193
Arrighi, Pippa di Jacopo, 29, 114 Bernardo di Francesco, Fra, friar of Capponi family, 64, 72, 73, 74, 96
Ars Morendi, 183 the Ingesuati, 128, 133, 138 Niccolò di Giovanni, 64, 73
art patronage, historiography of, 3–8 Bertoldo, 95 Capretti, Elena, 73, 79
meaning of, 5–6 Bianco, del, Bernardo, 123 Carnesecchi, Pierantonio, 21
Renaissance notions of Biliotti family, 73, 74 Caroli, Giovanni, 168, 169
artist/patron relationship, 61, 85, Matteo di Sandro, 55 Castiglione, Baldassare, 190
93–98, 137–38, 189–90, 194 Bindi, Ser Bartolommeo, 158 Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, 136
Arte della Seta, 130, 135, 164 Blume, Andrew, 6 Cattani, Francesca di Jacopo (Monna
artistic fashion, 138 Bongiani, Jacopo, 167 Checca Nasi), 20, 40, 55, 60
Boni family, 123 Cecchi, Alessandro, 193

Bonsi, Alessandra di Domenico, 32, Cennini, Piero, 37
Badia a Settimo, 145, 146 122, 142, 143, 180 Cerretani, Bartolommeo, 169, 171
Banchi, Nera di Mariotto, 20 Domenico, 143 Certame Coronario, 91
Bardi family, 73, 143 Borghini, Vicenzo, 103 chapels, 64, 119–27. See also relevant
Angelo di Bernardo, 72, 142 Botti family, 190 church for individual chapels
Cassandra di Ridolfo, 43 Botticelli, Sandro access to, 120–21
Baron, Hans, 36 Adoration of the Magi, 112–13 allocation, 73–76
276 index
decoration of, 122–23, 125–26 Palazzo della Signoria (now

dedication, 79, 123–25 Palazzo Vecchio), 145
Eckstein, Nicholas, 27, 64
homogeneity in decoration of, Piazza Mozzi, 42–45, 46
Elam, Caroline, 39
76–83, 119, 125–27, 137, 138 piazzas, political importance of, 44
Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint, 135–36
chaplains, 121–22 political system, 18, 19
Epictetus, 147–48
charity, 36, 117–18, 135–37, 167–68 Ponte Rubaconte (alle Grazie), 44,
espedita, 126–27
children, 55–56 143
Eusebius, Pseudo, Il Devoto Transito
church and chapel patronage. See Porta San Piero Gattolini, 142
del Glorioso Sancto Hieronymo, 181
chapels; patronage rights San Donato a Scopeto, 142
Eyck, Jan van, 175
church interior, 74, 82–83, 125–27, 137, San Francesco al Monte, 123, 127
138, 174 San Frediano, 104
Ciappelli, Giovanni, 3 San Gallo, 105
family, concept of, 17–18, 33
Cistercian order, 144 San Giovanni. See Florence:
identity creation, 17–33, 58
clientelismo, 4–5 Baptistery
women’s role in. See women: role
clothing, 59–60, 136 San Jacopo Oltrarno, 122
within family
coats of arms, 58–59, 68–69, 74–75, 106 San Lorenzo, 82, 104, 122, 125–26,
fatherhood, 31
legal implications in church set- 138
Feo, Felice di Michele, 149
ting, 103, 105–7, 117–18 San Marco, 31, 101, 158, 159, 160,
festivals, Epiphany, 186–87
Condivi, Ascanio, 95 164, 167, 172, 180, 186–87; Chapel
John the Baptist, 47, 60
confraternities, 12, 116 of Arte della Seta, 164
Filarete (Antonio Averlino), 7
Archangel Raphael, 74 San Niccolò sopr’Arno, 104
Filicaia, da, Antonio di Piero, 170
Piccione, 68–69, 83 San Procolo, Valori chapel, 155
Leonardo di Leonardo, 50
Sant’Agnese, 69 Santa Lucia de’Magnoli, 121, 122
Flemish painting, 174–75, 176
Santa Barbara, 48 Santa Lucia de’Via San Gallo, 122,
Florence
Santa Caterina, 48 158, 159, 168, 180
Badia, 123, 142, 147, 149
Corbinelli family, 65, 70–71, 75 Santa Maria alle Campora, 139,
Baptistery, 126
Corella, Fra Domenico, 175 146; Del Pugliese chapel, 106, 123,
Borgo della Stella, 49
Corsi, Margherita di Bartolommeo 124, 139–42, 146–49
Borgo Pinti, 142
(Monna Tita Nasi), 41, 50, 55, 57 Santa Maria de’ Ughi, 109
Borgo San Lorenzo, 158
Corsini family, 72 Santa Maria del Carmine, 120, 144,
families of, 17–18
Corvinus, Matthias, 89 175; Brancacci chapel, 90; and
foreign relations, 22–23
Covi, Dario, 147 church of Santo Spirito, 63–65,
gonfaloni, 17, 64; Drago Verde, 27,
Cronaca, Il (Simone del Pollaiuolo), 68, 71; Del Pugliese chapel, 26,
28, 48, 64–65, 107, 158; Ferza, 28,
96 63–65, 89–90, 121, 122, 124, 143,
64; Nicchio, 64; Scala, 39, 53, 64
159; Serragli chapel, 120–21
government, and church patron-
Santa Maria Maddalena di
age, 65–69, 76, 105; changes after
Daddi, Bernardo, 144 Cestello (now de’Pazzi), 94, 127,
1494, 72–73, 80–83
Dante Aligheri, Divine Comedy, 144, 144, 159; Bardi chapel, 142, 143;
historiography of, 11
146, 150 Del Pugliese chapel, 142, 143; and
Ingesuati, friars of, 128, 138
Datini, Francesco di Marco, 93 Medici allies, 142; Nasi chapel,
Innocenti, Ospedale degli, 135,
death, 181–86 124, 139, 142–43, 149–51
136–37; cappella maggiore, 127–29;
Dei, Bartolommeo, Ser, 91, 94, 96, 181 Santa Maria Novella, 103; cappella
church, 96–97, 119–20, 121–22,
Benedetto, 18, 28, 36, 38, 59, 95, 181 maggiore (Tornabuoni chapel),
127, 127–33, 128, 134–35; Del
Rinieri di Bernardo, 72, 80–82 123, 125, 164; Del Lama chapel,
Pugliese chapel, 120, 127, 129,
Del Pugliese. See Pugliese, Del 120, 167; Strozzi chapel (formerly
131–33; Lenzi chapel, 119–20, 122,
devoto, meaning of, 173 Boni), 121, 123
124, 125–26, 127, 129, 132–33
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 173 Santa Maria Nuova, 168
palaces, 38–39; Arte della Seta, 42;
Dominic, Saint, 112, 169 Santissima Annunziata, 126
Medici–Riccardi, 42; Mozzi
Donatello, 38, 93, 94–95, 97, 176 Santo Spirito, church of, 26, 63–83,
(once Nasi), 23, 42–43, 43, 53–61;
Virgin and Child relief, 175, 176 75, 76, 77, 94, 120, 144; Capponi
Piero Nasi, 40–42, 40, 41, 53–61;
Donati, Borghini di Niccolò, 161 chapel, 65, 77, 79, 120, 124; chapel
Pugliese, Del, 46–49, 47, 48;
Niccolò di Donato, 157 allocation, 73–76; Dei chapel,
Torrigiani (formerly Bernardo,
Doni, Agnolo, 193 80–82; interior homogeneity,
Bartolommeo, and Filippo
double portraits, 86, 89, 91–94 76–83, 126, 127; Nasi chapel, 63,
Nasi), 44, 45, 53–61, 190
dowries, 50, 136–37
index 277
65, 77–80, 123, 124; old church, Giovanni d’Alemagna, 126 Landucci, Luca, 36, 120–21
65–66, 120; opera, 66–73 Giovanni, de’, Francesco, 71 Lanfredini family, 96
Santo Spirito, quarter of, 44, Goes, Hugo van der, Adoration of the Lastra a Signa. See Gangalandi, com-
64–66, 82 Shepherds, 115, 175 mune of
topography, 17–18 Goldthwaite, Richard, 35, 53, 70, 72 Lateran Council, Fourth (1215), 122,
Via de’Bardi, 193 golden age, 193 123
Via degli Serragli (formerly della Gombrich, E. H., 5, 6–7, 131 Lecceto, church of Santa Maria a
Cuculia), 48, 142 Gozzoli, Benozzo, 95 (now SS. Filippo e Giacomo),
Via del Fondaccio, 71 Granacci, Francesco, Entries of 101, 103–5, 107–10, 108, 160
Via Maggio, 71 Charles VII into Florence and cappella maggiore, 108–10, 109
florin, increase in value of, 28 Rome, 21 Del Pugliese chapel, 110–12
Foucault, Michel, 10 Gratian, 101 Lenzi, Lorenzo and Piero di
Francesco da Empoli, 106 Gruyer, Gustave, 156 Ampherone, 119–20
Franciscans, 125 Gualterotti, Lorenzo di Niccolò, 43 Leonardo da Vinci, 190, 193
Frescobaldi family, 45, 65, 71–72, 73, Guerrucci family, 107 Lesher, Melinda, 149
74, 75 Domenico, Fra, 101, 103–4, 105, lineage. See family, concept of
Stoldo di Lionardo, 66–67, 70, 73 107–9, 111 Lippi, Filippino, 89, 90, 96, 174
Frick, Catherine, 59 Guicciardini family, 71–72, 73 Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi), 142,
friendship, 85, 89, 90–91, 93–94, Francesco, 20, 190 191
96–98 Jacopo di Piero, 71 Adoration of the Magi (for Francesco
Guidi family, 21–22 del Pugliese), 90, 165, 165–66, 187

Apparition of the Virgin to Saint

Gamba, Carlo, 163 Bernard, 90, 96, 112, 113, 139–41,
Gangalandi, commune of, 101, 103–4, Haines, Margaret, 69 140, 145, 146–49, 152
105, 107, 114 Hartt, Frederick, 4 Crucifixion with Virgin Mary and
Gardner, Julian, 120 Hatfield Strens, Bianca, 177 Saint Francis (San Procolo altar-
Gaston, Robert, 122 Hatfield, Rab, 113, 167 piece), 155, 156, 174–75
Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Hegarty, Melinda, 72 Double Portrait of Piero del Pugliese
Magi, 112 Hope, Charles, 7, 124–25 and Filippino Lippi, 85–94, 86
Ghirlandaio, Domenico, Adoration of Horne, Herbert, 166 John the Baptist and Mary Magdalen
the Magi (Innocenti), 128, 129, Hugues de Fouillol, 168 (wings for San Procolo altar-
133–35. See also Bartolommeo di piece), 155, 157, 174–75

Giovanni Noli me tangere and Samaritan
altarpiece for Ingesuati church, 128 Ianziti, Gary, 4 Woman at the Well, 90, 161,
Birth of Saint John the Baptist, 55, 56 inventories, 49–61 166–67, 177–81, 178, 179, 184
Portrait of Francesco Sassetti and His writing of, 50–53, 57–58 and Piero del Pugliese, 89–91,
Son Teodoro, 91, 92 ius patronatus. See patronage rights 93–94, 96, 131, 165, 189–90
Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi, 87, Lippi, Filippo, Apparition of the Virgin

88 to Saint Bernard, 145
Portrait of Old Man and Boy, 90, 91 Jerome, Saint, 167, 168, 169, 181–82, 186 Long, J. C., 125
Santa Maria Novella altarpiece, 164 jewelry, 60 Lopez, R. S., 5
Virgin and Child in Glory with Saints John the Baptist, Saint, 112, 135 Lorenzo di Credi, 167
John and James (now lost), 110 John the Evangelist, Saint, 135, 136 Louis XII, King of France, 20, 21
workshop of, Adoration of the Magi Johnson, Geraldine, 31 Luchs, Alison, 142, 143
(predella panel), 115; Annunciation Luti family, 71

to the Shepherds (predella panel), Lydecker, Kent, 52, 60
110, 115–17; Taking of an Inventory, Kent, Dale, 2, 3, 8 Lyons, 20, 190
51 Kent, F. W., 2, 72, 95

Gilbert, Creighton, 7 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, 2, 55, 112
Ginori family, 157, 158 Knorr, Christina, 115 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 190
Agostino di Giovanni, 158 Maecenas, 193

Bartolommeo di Leonardo, 158 magi, 112–13, 133, 186–87
Giovanni di Francesco, 157 Lama, Del, Guasparre, 120, 167 magnificence, theory of, 35–36, 39,
Ginzburg, Carlo, 1 Landino, Cristoforo, 175 167–68
278 index
Maiano, da, Giuliano, 95 Morelli, Giovanni, 31 Newbigin, Nerida, 67

Manelli, Jacopo, 36 Nicholas, Saint, 112, 114–15, 135–36

Manetti, Antonio, 67 Nuttall, Paula, 174
Mantegna, Andrea, Portrait of Janus Nasi family, 1, 11–12, 73, 94, 189, 190

Pannonius and Galleotto Marzio da Agostino and Jacopo di Giovanni,
Narni, 89 44 O’Malley, Michelle, 7
Mantellate, nuns of, 74 Alessandro di Francesco, 21, 22, 60, Open University, 4
manuscripts, 30, 146–47 97; follower of Savonarola, 57, opere, 63–64, 69, 70
Marchese, Vincenzo, 156 174; inventory of goods, 50, Duomo (Santa Reparata), 66, 70
Marchi, Francesco di Piero, 121 52–61, 174 Innocenti, 69, 70, 120–21
Martelli, Costanza di Roberto, 232 bank, 20, 190 Santa Maria del Carmine, 71, 90
n. 44 operai of Santo Spirito, 72, 83 Santo Spirito, 66, 69–73, 77
Martial, epigrams on portraits, 87 palaces, 39–47, 49–61 Ottokar, Nicolai, 69
Mary Magdalen, 178–81 Bartolommea di Lorenzo, 20

Masi, Bartolommeo, 36, 60 Bartolommea di Piero, 143
Maso di Bartolommeo, 46 Bartolommeo di Lutozzo, 20; palaces, 35, 38–49, 168
Master of the Legend of Saint inventory of goods, 50, 52–61; interiors, 49–61
Ursula, Head of Christ, 161, palace with brothers, 44–45, 50, Palagio, del, family, 22
177–81, 178 53–61; provision for chapel in Ginevra di Piero, 20, 22
Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, Santo Spirito, 77–78, 123 Palla, della, family, 73
Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Battista di Giovanni, 44 Marco di Mariotto, 74
Bernard, 144, 145–46 Battista di Lorenzo, 194 Mariotto, 74
Mazzei, Lapo, 93 Bernardo di Lutozzo, 20, 24–25; Palmieri, Matteo, 38, 51, 61
mecenatismo, 4–5 palace with brothers, 44–45, 50, Parenti, Piero di Marco, 60, 171
Medici family, 10–11, 20, 82, 104 53–61; portrait medals of, 23–26 paterfamilias, role of, 31–32
Averardo, 93 Checca. See Cattani, Francesca patronage, 3–8. See also art patronage
bank, 21,142 coat of arms, 22 patronage rights, 101–8, 117–18
Cosimo “il Vecchio,” 5, 6–7, 20, Costanza di Lutozzo, 55, 60 and chapels, 119, 121–22, 124, 137–38
66–67, 113; relationship with Filippo di Lutozzo, 20, 50; and and church/chapel foundation,
Donatello, 38, 94–95 church patronage, 121, 123; palace 102–3, 115–16
Cosimo I, 175 with brothers, 44–45, 50, 53–61 Pazzi, Guglielmo, 20
Francesco di Lazzaro, 158 Francesco di Lutozzo, 20, 21, 23, Piero, 60
Giovanni di Bicci, 125 43–44 Pazzi conspiracy, 95
Giovanni di Lorenzo, 36–37 Gabriello, Fra, 21–22 Perosa, Alessandro, 85
Giuliano di Lorenzo, 73 Giovanni di Jacopo, 40, 67 Perugino, Pietro, 94
Giuliano di Piero, 36 identity creation, 18–26, 33, 44–45 Annunciation, 151
Lorenzo “il Magnifico,” 5, 6, 20, 95, inventories, 49–61 Apparition of the Virgin to Saint
147; affair with Bartolommea Lorenzo di Lutozzo, 20 Bernard, 139, 141, 142–43, 149–51
Nasi, 20; and Cestello, 142; and Lorenzo di Bartolommeo, 191, 193 Pesellino, Madonna and Child with Six
church of Santo Spirito, 68–69, Luto di Giunta, 19 Saints, 164, 165
72–73, 76, 83; death of, 181; Lutozzo di Jacopo, 19, 20, 27, 40 painting in chapel at Sommaia, 165
friendship with Piero Nasi, 20; Piero di Lutozzo, 20–23; inventory Peter the Chanter, 168
as model art patron, 95, 131, 190, of goods, 50, 52–61; palace, Peter, Saint, 112, 135, 136
193; political alliances with, 20, 40–42, 50, 53–61; Raffaello, 194 Petrarch, poems about portraiture, 87
27; sculpture garden in palace, 95 Roberto di Bernardo, 44, 50 Petrini, Francesco, 74
Lorenzo di Piero, later Duke of Tita. See Corsi, Margherita di Philip, Saint, 149
Urbino, 32, 158 Bartolommeo Pienza cathedral, 126
and the Magi, 112–13 Nelson, Jonathan, 6 Piero di Cosimo, 93
Piero di Cosimo, 6, 20 Neri di Bicci, 7, 94 and Piero del Pugliese, 12, 32, 96,
Piero di Lorenzo, 21, 60, 72, 95, 158 Coronation of the Virgin, 129, 130 131
Mercanzia, Sei di, 67–68 Nerli family, 72, 79 Early History of Man, 12, 32, 96
Michelangelo, 95, 97, 174, 177, 190, 193 Tanai, 73 Virgin and Child with Saints
Mitchell, Barbara, 94 Nero, del, family, 44 (Innocenti altarpiece), 96–97, 131,
Molho, Anthony, 2 Marco di Simone, 50 131–32, 135–37
index 279
Virgin and Child with Saints tions of, 31–32, 139–40, 148–49, sacra rappresentazione, 68
(Lecceto altarpiece), 31–32, 191; and San Donato a Scopeto, Salvi d’Andrea, 70
111–15, 111, 137 142; and Santa Maria a Lecceto, Salviati family, 142
Visitation with Saints Nicholas and 101, 103–4, 107–8, 110–15; and Alamanno, 143
Anthony Abbot, 79, 80, 82, 124 Santa Maria alle Campora, 114, Samaritan woman, 178–81
Piero di Michele, 194 123, 145–46. See also Rossellino, Sangallo, da, Antonio, the Elder, 128
Pitti family, 73 Antonio; Lippi, Filippino Giuliano, 72, 82, 95, 128, 142
Luca di Buonaccorso, 71, 73, 74 Ridolfo (Messer), 26 Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, 9, 138, 186–87
Pius II, 126 attitudes toward wealth, 36–37, 39,

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 94, 96 167–68
Poliziano, Angelo, 97, 147 Quaratesi family, 41, 42 De Simplicitate Christianae Vitae,
Polizzotto, Lorenzo, 158 167–68

Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 96 Defensione dell’oratione mentale, 173
polyphony, 168 Raffaellino del Garbo, 94, 96 followers, 57, 174–75, 190
Portinari family, 115 Pietà with Saints John the Baptist, historiography of influence on
portrait medal of Bernardo Nasi, John the Evangelist, Mary visual arts, 155–56
23–26, 24, 25 Magdalen, and James, 78, 78–79 ideas about painting, 112, 167–69,
portraiture, 86–87, 91–93, 112–17, 191. Virgin and Child with Saints 171–72, 183–86
See also double portraits Catherine and Barbara, tabernacle, mental imagery, 170–72, 173–74,
preaching, 169–74 48–49 170–81, 183–85, 187
pregnancy, 114, 143 Virgin and Child with Saints John the opposition to, 37, 168, 171
Pucci family, 142 Evangelist, Lawrence, Stephen, and Predica dell’arte del ben’ morire, 172,
Pugliese, Del, family, 1, 11–12, 26–33, Bernard, 80 175–76, 183–85
189, 190 Randolph, Adrian, 136 sermons, 167–72, 180, 183–85
Alessandra. See Bonsi, Alessandra Raphael, 190, 191–94 theme of interior and exterior, 117,
di Domenico Madonna del Baldacchino, 80–82, 81 168–69, 171–72, 176, 181, 190
Buonaccorso di Filippo, 27 Madonna del Cardellino, 191–92, 192, Triumphis Crucis, 170–71
Caterina di Filippo, 157–58 194 Scharf, Alfred, 140
Costanza di Piero, 157 Renaissance, concept of, 2–3 Schiaparelli, Attilio, 60
Filippo di Francesco, 27 Ricetti, Licio, 69 Schiavo, Paolo, attributed, Virgin and
Francesco di Filippo, 32, 89, 114, Ridolfi family, 72 Child with Saints (frescoes at
156–58; and Savonarola, 32, 157, Giuliano di Pagnazzo, 142 Sommaia), 161, 162
158–59, 182, 186–87; tabernacle on Robbia, della, Andrea Scorbaccia, 70
palace, 48–49; wills, 158–60, 167, Annunciation, 132 Segni family, 74
168. See also Sommaia, Estate of Holy Innocents, 127, 132 Bernardo di Stefano, 21, 60, 80
Francesco del Pugliese Robbia, della, Giovanni, Biliemme Selve, Santa Maria alle, 106
Francesco di Iacopo, 46 Tabernacle, 49 Serragli, Nannozzo di Giovanni, 27
Giovanni di Iacopo, 27, 46, 130 Rocke, Michael, 92 Serristori, Lisabetta di Ristoro, 50
Jacopo di Filippo, 27 Rohan, Cardinal, 97 servants, 53–55
lineage identity, 28–29, 46 role models, for religious devotion, Shearman, John, 87
Niccolò di Piero, 112, 114 147, 148–49, 152 Siege of Florence (1529), 141
palace, 46–49 for sons, 31–32 Siena Cathedral, 126
Piero di Francesco, 28, 29–32, 91, for women, 135–37, 191–92 Simons, Patricia, 91
122, 175 role playing, 152, 180–81, 186–87, 191 social identity, 8–10
as art patron, 96, 190 Rose of Viterbo, Saint, 135 Soderini family, 45, 64, 72
as artistic authority, 130–31, 138; and Rossellino, Antonio, Portrait Bust of Francesco di Tommaso, 27
Badia Fiorentina, 142, 149; and Piero del Pugliese, 30–32, 30, 87 Piero, leader of Florentine repub-
decoration of Innocenti, 129–31, Rubin, Patricia, 3, 93 lic, 72–73, 83, 97, 158, 193
135–37; as donor, 146, 148–49, 152; Rucellai, Giovanni, 6, 39, 49, 93 Tommaso di Lorenzo, 104
and Filippino Lippi, 89–91, Rufinus, 102 Tommaso di Paol’Antonio, 72
93–94, 189–90; in the guise of Rutini family, 143 Sommaia, 12, 142
Saint Nicholas, 112, 114–15, 116–17, parish of San Ruffignano, 160, 161

135; and manuscripts, 30, 146, 147, Sommaia, da, family, 124, 157
149; palace, 46–48; representa- Saalman, Howard, 67 Francesco di Guglielmo, 157
280 index
Guglielmo di Francesco, 157 Thomas, Anabel, 7 visitations of Florentine churches,

Rosso, 158 Thornton, Dora, 3, 49 102–3, 121, 122
Sommaia, Estate of Francesco del Tornabuoni family, 103 Vivarini, Antonio, 126
Pugliese, 12, 156–58 Lorenzo di Giovanni, 142, 143

chapel of Sant’Andrea, 124, Trent, Council of, 102, 103
159–67, 160, 162, 175–87 Trexler, Richard, 2, 22, 31, 113, 186–87 Wackernagel, Martin, 5
spalliere, meaning of, 55–56 Warburg, Aby, 6, 9

Spigliatti, Tommaso, 125 wealth, attitudes toward, 35–39,
Starnina, Gherardo, frescos in Del Ugolini, Niccolò di Giorgio, 21, 60 63–64, 113–14, 117–18, 167–68,
Pugliese chapel, 29 Uzzano, da, Niccolò, 67 181–82, 187. See also magnificence,
Stephen of Tournai, 102 theory of

Strozzi family, 105, 109 Weissman, Ronald, 2
Alessandra, 174 Valori, Francesco, 155 Welch, Evelyn, 3
Filippo, 6, 106, 121; in guise of Vasari, Giorgio, 5, 10, 93, 175, 193, 194 widows. See women
shepherd, 110, 115–17; and Santa and idea of art patronage, 93, wings of tabernacles, 175–76, 187
Maria a Lecceto, 101, 103, 104–5, 94–95, 96–97, 98 women 12, 60, 91–92, 120, 136–37
107–10 Velluti family, 77 as audience to imagery, 9–10,
Lorenzo, 96 Venice 136–37, 172, 180
Palla, 112 San Francesco della Vigna, 126 role within family, 18, 19–20, 50–51,
Synod of Florence (1336), 105 Santa Maria della Carità, 126 158
Synod of Trier (1310), 123–24 Verino, Ugolino, De Illustratione Urbis widows, 55, 57, 136
Syson, Luke, 3, 49 Florentiae, 18, 19, 26, 38 woodcuts, 183–85
Poem celebrating a portrait of Piero del Wright, Alison, 91–92

Pugliese, 85, 89

Taddei, Taddeo, 193 Vespasiano da Bisticci, 60, 94–95
tavola quadrata, 82, 125 Vincent Ferrer, Saint, 164 Zambrano, Patrizia, 86–97
Tedaldi, Lactantio di Papi, 50 Violi, Ser Lorenzo, 158 Zeri, Federico, 115
Tesori, Francesco di Giovanni, Virgil, Aeneid, 30, 149
119–20, 126, 127–28, 133

Changing Patrons Social Identity and The Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

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01.Burke.00i-xvi.

FINALqu 4/1/04 9:48 AM Page i

Social Identity and the Visual Arts in

the pennsylvania state universit y press • universit y park, pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burke, Jill, 1971–

Copyright © 2004 the pennsylvania state universit y

list of illustrations vii

part i: Families, Neighbors, and Friends

part ii: The Individual, the Family, and the Church

part iii: Identity and Change

conclusions and questions 189

Figure 1. Anonymous Florentine, Portrait Medal of Bernardo Nasi, Florence,

viii list of illustrations

Figure 15. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Taking of an Inventory, Oratory of

Figure 29. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, Annunciation to the Shepherds,

i f i r st be c a m e acquainted with the Nasi and Del Pugliese families in 1995,

acknowled gments xiii

AAF Archivio Arcivescovile, Florence

Terminology and Chronology

Patronage and Art

The Patron as Artist

Identity, Society, and Meaning

Florence, Patronage, and the Medici

Ennobling the Lineage: The Nasi

In France they declare that amongst its citizens

rulers or courts to impress foreign potentates, it was perhaps especially important

Image not available

Image not available Image not available

Creating a Paterfamilias: The Del Pugliese

From our contado descended

was an international business, which involved contacts with Flanders in particular,

Figure 4. Antonio Rossellino,

Image not available

In the Biblioteca Laurenziana there is a manuscript copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, dating

Private Wealth and Public Benefit

However, the rhetoric of magnificence in Florence, while perhaps dressed in clas-

private wealth and public benefit 37

private wealth and public benefit 39

The Nasi Palaces

Figure 5. Former palace of

Image not available

private wealth and public benefit 41

Figure 6. Upper stories of

Image not available Image not available

private wealth and public benefit 43

Image not available

private wealth and public benefit 45

Image not available

Figure 12. View of Piazza de’

Image not available

The Del Pugliese Palace

private wealth and public benefit 47

Image not available

Figure 14. Detail of Del Pugliese arms on facade of

Image not available

private wealth and public benefit 49

the nasi inventories

private wealth and public benefit 51

Image not available

“worn” (triste), or new is reminiscent of Matteo Palmieri’s injunction to wives to be

private wealth and public benefit 53

private wealth and public benefit 55