To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

One of the principal resources for study of Italian Renaissance art and artists, Vasari's Lives offers colorful, detailed portraits of the era's most representative figures. This single-volume edition spotlights 8 prominent artists.

An exploration of the influence of the charismatic Milanese art theorist on his contemporaries in the field of drawing, painting, printmaking, decorative arts, and sculpture.

Fra Filippo Lippi (1406 -- 69) was one of the greatest artists of the early Renaissance. He was a leading pioneer of psychological realism, and his richly expressive characters are a compelling revelation of Renaissance attitudes towards human experience. With a long introductory narrative, full catalogue raisonne and digest of documents, Jeffrey Ruda provides a full, scholarly study of Lippi. Superbly produced and illustrated, this important and ambitious book presents an introduction to Lippi that can be enjoyed by scholars and non-specialists alike.

Widely admired for his paintings of exquisitely beautiful Madonnas, Florentine Renaissance friar-artist Fra Filippo Lippi (c. 1406-69) gained renown also for his love affair with the nun Lucrezia who bore their son, Filippino Lippi, later a well-known painter himself. In this beautiful and compelling book, Megan Holmes shines new light on Lippi's life and career, from the first paintings he created while a friar in Santa Maria del Carmine to the later works he painted when living outside the monastery for the Medici family, their supporters, and other patrons. Focusing especially on the fascinating conjunction of Lippi's work as a painter and his experiences as a Carmelite friar, Holmes transforms our understanding of Filippo Lippi and of the way art was produced and viewed in fifteenth-century Florence. Unlike most monastic artists, Fra Filippo learned to paint only after joining a religious order. In the first section of the book, the author considers how the doctrines, rules, rituals, and practices of the Carmelites shaped Lippi's art and manner of envisioning sacred subjects. In the second section, Holmes discusses Lippi's life and painting after he left the monastery, demonstrating how his mature work broke new ground but continued to draw upon Carmelite influences. The final section of the book looks closely at three altarpieces Fra Filippo painted for monastic institutions and sets them in a broader social and religious context.