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  • Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence by Peter Howard
  • Kathleen Olive
Howard, Peter , Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Essays & Studies, 29), Toronto, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012; paperback; pp. 173; R.R.P. US$19.00; ISBN 9780772721266.

Magnificence has long been acknowledged as a key concept in the study of Renaissance Florence. It underpinned private financing of public activities, such as the endowment of charitable institutions or palace-building booms, and lies behind Giovanni Rucellai's oft-quoted rationale for the personal dimension of his commissions: 'in part they serve the honour of God, as well as the honour of the city and the commemoration of myself.' A. D. Fraser Jenkins, Alison Brown, F. W. Kent, and Dale Kent have each made significant contributions to this field.

Yet, as Peter Howard begins this study by noting, it has long been argued that Florence's preoccupation with magnificence intensified only in the middle of the fifteenth century. It was precisely in this period that Cosimo de' Medici stepped up his patronage: at the library of the San Marco monastery, in the new family palace on the Via Larga, and in his involvement in the civic ritual of the Magi, to take only a few examples. In fact, the sheer extent of Cosimo's mid-century public and private expenditure gave rise to grumblings and veiled criticisms of his perceived magnificence, reflected in a spirited defence by Timoteo Maffei (c. 1415-1470).

An edition of Maffei's tract (composed 1454/56) is one of the useful appendices to this study, but Howard's core interest is to demonstrate that magnificence was publicly theorised and propounded earlier than has been thought. St Antoninus Pierozzi (1389-1459), Archbishop of Florence and a celebrated Dominican preacher and theologian, had in fact been developing the concept since the 1420s, through his sermons and in his Summa Theologica (1450). Howard reveals new sources for Antoninus's study of the virtues and of magnificence, and demonstrates how preachers could act as creators and mediators of a 'theology of the piazza'.

The work opens with a contextualisation of the concept of magnificence in Renaissance Florence, and this section provides a useful summary for students of art and architecture in the period. In Chapter 2, Howard investigates the increasing interest in magnificence in the 1420s and locates it in public discourse - in, for example, the Lenten sermons of Augustinian friar Francesco Mellino, which contemporaries credited with inspiring the Brunelleschian building programme later undertaken at Santo Spirito (pp. 35-40). Particularly important here is the investigation of sermon reception, as raised by Manetti's Life of Brunelleschi. Manetti's presentation of Fra Mellino's sermon gives us a sense of how public discourse was understood, remembered, and sometimes retrofitted by its audience.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 move to a discussion of Antoninus's work on magnificence, particularly in the Summa. Chapter 5 presents the crux of [End Page 198] Howard's argument, locating the preacher's discussion of the concept in a much wider debate of public interest, that of the virtues and vices. Interacting with the writings of Thomas Aquinas - and, through him, Aristotle and Cicero - and Seneca, Antoninus made an important intervention on the topic of lavish spending, which would have been particularly relevant to citizens engaged in building sumptuous palazzi. This chapter - which centres on the mid-century - would be of particular interest to architectural historians, and to those investigating constructions of virtue and vice in the fifteenth century.

The final chapter is an interesting discussion of a Renaissance preacher's auctores: who they were, where they were found, and how those who used them conceived of such interactions. As Howard argues, 'Antoninus's Summa is a record of reception as much as the transmission of texts' (p. 91). The key writer here is Henry of Rimini, whose influence on Antoninus has not been discussed previously. Henry's work on the cardinal virtues emerged from his time as prior of the Dominican convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. Howard's close reading of Antoninus's Summa - a work that relies almost verbatim on Henry's in significant passages - shows how the...

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