Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence : Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace Paperback / softback

by Stefanie Solum

Part of the Visual Culture in Early Modernity series

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni deâ€™ Mediciâ€™s impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay womanâ€™s contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici familyâ€™s domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippiâ€™s Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications.

Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippiâ€™s painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento.

She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo deâ€™ Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts.

Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of womenâ€™s agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence.

As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.