Fusing the social and economic history with the cultural and artistic achievements of seventeenth and eighteenth century Italy, this book presents a unique and invaluable perspective on the period.

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.

"Lovell delights, astonishes, and challenges us with her insightful new readings of early American paintings and material culture objects."--"Journal of the Early Republic"

The fresco decoration of the Royal Chapel in Pyrga on Cyprus is usually dated 1421. The coat of arms featuring the Cross of Jerusalem and the lion rampant points to royal French commissioners, namely members of the Lusignan dynasty. Western, French patronage left its imprint on this chapel in terms of architecture and pictorial decoration - although within a complex Cypriot frame. The study presents iconographical and stylistic evidence supporting a much earlier dating into the first half or the middle of the fourteenth century. The choice of scenes (with French tituli) has no comprehensive model on Cyprus. Significant western additions and variations distinguish this Lusignan program from other indigenous Cypriot predecessors and contemporaries. The iconographical analysis shows that the workshop made use of earlier Palaiologan Constantinopolitan models, such as the Kariye Camii mosaics. The iconography and the emotional pathos of some scenes suggest an awareness of western, French source material, and in particular of Franciscan book illuminations, Psalters, Missals, and Books of Hours. If this revised dating is correct, the program of decoration is an outstanding testament to royal, specifically Lusignan, commission and represents the first and most faithful adoption and adaptation of Palaiologan models in Cyprus.