In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

The Intellectual Struggle for Florence is an analysis of the ideology that developed in Florence with the rise of the Medici, during the early fifteenth century, the period long recognized as the most formative of the early Renaissance. Instead of simply describing early Renaissance ideas, this volume attempts to relate these ideas to specific social and political conflicts of the fifteenth century, and specifically to the development of the Medici regime. It first shows how the Medici party came to be viewed as fundamentally different from their opponents, the 'oligarchs', then explores the intellectual world of these oligarchs (the 'traditional culture'). As political conflicts sharpened, some humanists (Leonardo Bruni and Francesco Filelfo) with close ties to oligarchy still attempted to enrich traditional culture with classical learning, while others, such as Niccolò Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini, rejected tradition outright and created a new ideology for the Medici party. What is striking is the extent to which Niccoli and Poggio were able to turn a Latin or classical culture into a 'popular culture', and how the culture of the vernacular remained traditional and oligarchic.

You are what you own. So believed many of the elite men and women of Renaissance Italy. The notion that a person's belongings transmit something about their personal history, status, and "character" was renewed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Objects of Virtue explores the multiple meanings and values of the objects with which families like the Medici, Este, and Gonzaga surrounded themselves. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the complicated relationships between the so-called "fine arts"--painting and sculpture--and artifacts of other kinds for which artistry might be as important as utility-furniture, jewelry, and vessels made of gold, silver, and bronze, precious and semi-precious stone, glass, and ceramic. The works discussed were designed and made by artists as famous as Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as well as by lesser-known specialists--goldsmiths, gem-engravers, glassmakers, and maiolica painters.

Probes the basic attitudes, the underlying values and the core convictions that Rome's intellectuals and artists experienced, lived for, and believed in from Pope Eugenius IV's reign to the Eternal City in 1443 to the sacking of 1527.