Art Patronage, Family, and Gender in Renaissance Florence by Maria DePrano (review)

I have stood numerous times with students in the breathtaking Tornabuoni Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, pointing out the many figures whom contemporary Florentines might have easily identified in Domenico Ghirlandaio's cycles of the lives of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist from the early 1490s. Angelo Poliziano, Cristoforo Landino, Lorenzo de'Medici, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de'Medici—the last two, respectively, nephew and sister of the chapel's patron, Giovanni: they are all there, respectfully observing the holy scenes of saints' lives just as we are observing them. Yet now that I have read Maria DePrano's engaging book on artworks sponsored by the elite and well-placed Tornabuoni, I shall go back to the chapel with new eyes. For one thing, much of the lower sections of the two cycles where the family and their friends were featured were apparently impossible to view from almost everywhere in the church save within the chapel itself thanks to a large, obstructing ponte or screen. For another, the chapel was originally designed to house the tombs of four Tornabuoni, three of them women. It was thus constructed not simply to commemorate a family's material contributions to golden-age Florence, as is frequently argued, but to facilitate pious devotion and to keep the demons at bay from the bodies of the beloved dead.

This is just one of many takeaways from DePrano's Art Patronage, Family, and Gender in Renaissance Florence, which situates the Tornabuoni within their historical moment, their city of Florence, and the gender dynamics of the elite. In this meticulously researched book, DePrano brilliantly succeeds in placing three generations of a single family at the heart of a quiet and previously undiagnosed revolution in art and its capacity to reflect and shape family and especially matrimonial relations. The art in question, moreover, involves everything from large-scale frescoes to medals and contributions to domestic interiors. DePrano has mastered a considerable body of learning in the history of fashion, numismatics, and sculpture—to say nothing of Latin antiquity, iconography and devotional literature. Yet even as she introduces us to a complex world of artists and their patrons, her focus is very much on a single family, and the many works of art the Tornabuoni men commissioned over sixty years, inspired by the women in their lives: sisters, daughters, wives. (For an example of female patronage, see Stefanie Solum's Women, Patronage, and Salvation in Renaissance Florence: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and the Chapel of the Medici Palace [Routledge, 2016], a must-read companion piece to this volume.)

Giovanni Tornabuoni (1428–1497) is the pater familias whose sister Lucrezia marries a Medici and whose diplomatic and banking skills earn him the Medici's trust to run their banking interests in Rome. When his wife Francesca Pitti dies in childbirth, he breaks with standard convention to commission a chapel and tomb in her honor in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. His son Lorenzo, also a successful banker, follows in his father's footsteps in more ways than one, when the death of his first wife Giovanna degli Albizzi in her third trimester of pregnancy prompts him to commemorate her in portraits, frescoes, and medals. And like his father, he is close to the Medici, even too close: he was executed in 1497 under suspicion of collaborating to return Piero de'Medici to Florence during Savonarola's republic. Lorenzo's sons would take up the tradition of commissioning works to memorialize family. These Tornabuoni men took marriage seriously—not simply as a means of maintaining and enhancing their status, but as a relationship of genuine affection. Hence, their recourse to cultural artifacts becomes a way of demonstrating to their families, to their social equals, and to God, the measure of that affection, particularly in the tragic aftermath of the sudden loss of a wife.

Following her discussion in chapter 1 of Giovanni's commission for Francesca Pitti's (no...