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

Burke, Jill

ISBN 10: 0271023627 / ISBN 13: 9780271023625

Published by Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004

Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP87521468

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author: Jill Burke is AHRB Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Art History Department, University of Edinburgh. In 2000–2001, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Changing Patrons : Social Identity & the ...
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Publication Date: 2004
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good