The first book to be dedicated to the topic, Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture reappraises the creative and intellectual roles of sculptor and patron. The volume surveys artistic production from the Trecento to the Cinquecento in Rome, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. Using a broad range of approaches, the essayists question the traditional concept of authorship in Italian Renaissance sculpture, setting each work of art firmly into a complex socio-historical context. Emphasizing the role of the patron, the collection re-assesses the artistic production of such luminaries as Michelangelo, Donatello, and Giambologna, as well as lesser-known sculptors. Contributors shed new light on the collaborations that shaped Renaissance sculpture and its reception.

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.

An analysis of Italian Renaissance art from the perspective of the patrons who made 'conspicuous commissions', this text builds on three concepts from the economics of information - signaling, signposting, and stretching - to develop a systematic methodology for assessing the meaning of patronage.

Shrewd and ruthless, the Pucci were Medici loyalists whose political and cultural alignment with the most powerful family in Renaissance Florence was rewarded with wealth and influence. The Pucci family's martial support for the Medici in the ugly business of ruling Tuscany drove their transformation from a clan of minor guildsmen to a noble dynasty with three cardinals to its name. Over the next centuries, they showcased their exalted status with art and architecture that mirrored Medici tastes and reflected the values of civic humanism. The political and religious turmoil of the High Renaissance is writ large in this vivid portrait of the Pucci cardinals and their artistic patronage, a cultural biography inflected by the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, the Sack of Rome, the Reformation, and the occupation of Italy by Emperor Charles V. New archival evidence documents the chapels, palaces, and villas that were built, expanded, and decorated by the Pucci family in Rome, Tuscany, and Umbria. These celebrated projects were carried out by luminaries of Renaissance art and architecture: Michelozzo, the Pollaiuolo brothers, the Sangallo family, Baccio d'Agnolo, the Montelupo workshop, and others. A remarkable body of inventories reveals how the family's trials and tribulations shaped the fate of their estates and illustrates the role luxury goods played in the social ambitions of this newly-arrived family. Finally, a previously unknown catalogue of Palazzo Pucci tells the tale of the nineteenth-century dispersal of the family's priceless Renaissance artworks, a collection that once paralleled the splendor of the Medici court.

The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The first book to be dedicated to the topic, Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture reappraises the creative and intellectual roles of sculptor and patron. The volume surveys artistic production from the Trecento to the Cinquecento in Rome, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. Using a broad range of approaches, the essayists question the traditional concept of authorship in Italian Renaissance sculpture, setting each work of art firmly into a complex socio-historical context. Emphasizing the role of the patron, the collection re-assesses the artistic production of such luminaries as Michelangelo, Donatello, and Giambologna, as well as lesser-known sculptors. Contributors shed new light on the collaborations that shaped Renaissance sculpture and its reception.