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

Burke's rich and provocative Changing Patrons shows how much can be learned about lesser and less documented Renaissance patrons through an observant eye, a firm grasp of the literatures of both history and art history, and archival research of impressive breadth and depth. The patronage of the Nasi and Del Pugliese families of fifteenth-century Florence conformed broadly to a familiar pattern, including the decoration of churches; palace building; and the acquisition of objects for domestic use, and of medals, portraits, and manuscripts. Burke considers how these activities manifested their "identity and social status" in the customary contexts of the self-fashioning of the lineage, and of neighborhood, civic, and religious communities (12).

At the same time, she inverts or re-frames certain key questions about the production of art, and distinguishes current usages of "patronage" from a more "meaningful" concept of "art patronage" new to the quattrocento. Reacting against an exaggerated notion of "the patron as artist," she frequently shifts her focus from the individual activities of patrons or artists—terms that she studiously avoids—to the audience, and the cooperation of collectivities, particularly clergy and neighborhood, in ecclesiastical patronage. Her account of the important but neglected issue of ius patronatus is especially enlightening. However, she does not consider this concept as a locus classicus of the relationship between "clientelismo" and "mercenatismo" (personal and artistic patronage) as means of social and self-definition.

Lacking the personal documentation of letters and diaries illuminating Medici, Rucellai, or Strozzi patronage, Burke skillfully foregrounds visual and material evidence. Many of her suggestions—for example, that the Nasi purchased the old and imposingly sited Mozzi palace to burnish their image as an ambassadorial family—are imaginative and plausible, but necessarily speculative. Her aim to re-define patronage is not advanced by attributing agency to the object itself, though indubitably the work of art also defines the patron, but often her focus on the object and its devotional purpose, as opposed to the patron's or artist's role in its creation, yields fresh insights. She re-locates Savonarola's influence on painting from prescriptions in texts to functions of images, and observes that Pietro Perugino's Apparition of Saint Bernard to the Virgin for the Nasi, and Filippino Lippi's painting of the same subject in the same period for Piero del Pugliese, are "differing visions" because "one celebrates the potency of sight, the other of the written word" (149).

Sometimes Burke's diverse aims and complex analyses appear contradictory. She relates Piero del Pugliese's interest in collecting and copying books to their prominence in the complex and personal program of Lippi's St. Bernard altarpiece, which includes a portrait of the donor. She also discerns in the choice of saints depicted in Piero di Cosimo's altarpieces for Lecceto and the Innocenti expressions of Del Pugliese's commitment to charity, represented by St. Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Nicholas, whom she calls Del Pugliese's "alter ego" because that saint also bears his features. Nevertheless, she doubts that "meaningful" patronage relationships existed between her families and the artists who worked for them, and questions whether an individual should be considered "the 'patron' of religious 'art'" at all (137).

She also suggests, on the basis of one of the most remarkable of the many interesting objects associated with her two families—Filippino Lippi's double portrait of himself and Piero del Pugliese—that the novel concept of "art patronage" arose from a new friendship between patrons and artists that replaced "patronage" with "sincere" affection, a distinction that even Florentines found difficult to make. Several of Burke's stimulating proposals might fruitfully be tempered by anthropological insights absent from her interdisciplinary armory, a more historical evaluation of sources, language that is far more than "hyperbolic" (108), and a sharper awareness of the importance of exact dates in charting change.