Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

by Jill Burke

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.

Genres: Art History, Renaissance, Art

296 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2004

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

--- "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 'private' 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." (Burke: 176)
--- "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." (Burke: 83)

This book focuses on the people who paid for artworks in Renaissance Florence. It is therefore a twist in the way of doing art history, which tends to focus on the artist only. The book studies two families that are not the well-known Medici and this is great. The book also discusses women as art viewers, which is awesome.

The book shows how patrons are not as influential as we expect them to be, especially at a time when art patronage was still in its early stages. The book shows the importance of art as evidence for historical change and transmission of cultural values. That was really good.

There was too much detail in some parts, which I did not like. Also, I did not like the contradiction at the beginning in relation to the use of biography when analysing a work. However, the book gives an interpretation of small religious works and a new account of Savanorala that were very interesting in my opinion.