Patronage of the Arts (Renaissance and Reformation)

Introduction
Ever since Georgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, revised and enlarged 1568), the study of Renaissance art has been inextricably tied to the concept of patronage. The slow economic rebirth of Italy in the fifty years following the devastation of the 1348 plague resulted in a population shift from countryside to commune. In the new civic economy that resulted from the influx of the populace from country to city, wealthy merchants, craftsmen’s guilds, and the burgeoning mendicant orders, as part of their administration of a growing urban clientele, commissioned and paid for civic buildings, churches, palaces, frescoes, statues, paintings, and hosts of luxury goods, all of them embodying the new humanistic ideals of individual greatness that had resulted in this new prosperity. The governance structures that supported and protected this economic growth—aristocrats, guilds, and monastics—used artistic patronage to reinforce social structures fundamental to civic sustainability: loyalty to family, church, and city/state. Kings, popes, princes, cardinals, poets, and humanists, as well as cathedrals, convents, and monasteries—all sorts of patrons shaped Renaissance artistic culture by engaging artists to fulfill their commissions. A continual supply of patrons ensured a continual supply of artists and artistic workshops, and craft flourished. When Jacob Burckhardt wrote his formative social history of the Renaissance in 1860, he emphasized the role of the enlightened patron as the originator of Renaissance art. Patrons, through their ingenuity and growing apprehension of the virtues of Antiquity, and driven by the nobility of civic purpose inspired by ancient Rome, provided artists with hope and opportunity. In Vasari’s view, artists actually gained much more through patronage than patrons did—patronage was a social mechanism and economic engine that elevated the anonymous practices of mechanical crafts to the realm of the liberal arts. Through patronage, the Renaissance “rise of the individual” elevated the artist to a new level of social and cultural importance.

General Overviews
Early studies on patronage, such as Chambers 1970, tend to reiterate the Burkhardtian endorsement of the use of culture to project an intellectual affinity on the part of a learned patron, such as Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, with the agendas of humanism and enlightened creativity, or mecenatismo (derived from the name of the ancient Roman patron Maecenas). In Burckhardt 2014 (first published in 1860), it was Lorenzo’s greatness as an individual that induced him to privilege the virtues of the Roman past as emblematic ideologies for Renaissance emulation. That ideology was propagated through art. Artists were merely the means through which patrons reaffirmed their power, amanuenses of enlightened greatness. The properly instrumentalized artist was one who had found a worthy patron through which to express the Renaissance zeitgeist. The major challenge to this general view of patronage as a capitalist tool for reinforcing existing power structures came with the advent of Marxism and an increased emphasis on the class struggle of artists themselves, as well as a more nuanced understanding of the economic and social structures of the European Renaissance. Some historians, following Tracy Cooper (Cooper 1996), prefer to characterize the patron-artist relationship in the Renaissance in terms of clientelismo, implying a distinctly preferential system of quid pro quo in which patron and artist jostled for advantage, a view more consistent with the narratives of reciprocity recorded by Georgio Vasari (Vasari 1996). Other historians, such as Creighton Gilbert (Gilbert 1998), argue that the patron’s role in the development of Renaissance art has been overstated in the literature. Burke 2014 examines the problem of patronage from the point of view of social relations, exploring cultural commissions as a means by which the emergent merchant class of Florence could begin to appropriate the cultural privileges of the socioeconomic elite. Kempers 1994 focuses on how patronage served to “professionalize” artists, moving them up the social ladder from nameless craftsmen to prized practitioners of distinctive liberal arts, and Baxandall 1988 looks at art production in 15th-century Italy as the result of patron-client transactions in the context of social and commercial deposits and exchanges. Hollingsworth 2014 takes a geographical view of the phenomenon of patronage, from Florence to the Veneto, traversing the Italian courts of the centre and periphery and reaching its apex in the early 16th century in High Renaissance Rome. More-recent currents of scholarship have focused on individual women patrons and on female religious corporations as cultural agents. Renaissance “patrons” can also be broken down into broad categories: private patrons, civic agencies, and corporate entities, although these categories all tend to overlap. The evidence for patronage exists in the relationships that can be established between and among people and things. Scholars rely on the study of primary archival and documentary sources and the physical examination of extant buildings and objects that can be linked to those relationship networks. Ideally, patronage relationships are reconstructed both from subjective and objective primary documentary sources, ideally from letters exchanged between patrons to artists and vice versa, through narrative accounts of objects and their makers made to secondary correspondents (e.g., humanist advisors, court secretaries, household staff, ambassadorial or mercantile agents), or from information on contracts, inventories, and wills found in notarial archives.

Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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A social primer on art, providing what have become fundamental insights into artistic commissions, the artists’ trade, the “period eye,” and the effects of social contexts on the creation and reception of visual culture.

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Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Dover Books on History, Political and Social Science. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2014.

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First published in 1860 as Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, Switzerland: Schweighhauser), now the classic introduction to the theory of the “Renaissance” as a distinct period of progress toward modernism. Burckhardt traces the origins of the Renaissance to the rise of the individual and the cradle of modernity and focuses on the key roles played by great men as patrons and makers of art and culture.

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Burke, Peter. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy. 3d ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

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An updated version of a classic in the social and cultural history of the Renaissance, important for exposing patronage and artistic practice as functions determined by larger social constraints, conventions, and codes; a decentering of Burckhardt’s theory of individual primacy.

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Chambers, David S. Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance. History in Depth. London: Macmillan, 1970.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-00623-6Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A study of patronage that predates later refinements seeking to articulate varieties of meaning implicit in the definitions both of “patron” and “artist”; an unproblematic view of artistic projects wrought by great men and great artists.

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Cole, Alison. Virtue and Magnificence: Art of the Italian Renaissance Courts. Perspectives. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1995.

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An overview of the most-important patronage centers during the Renaissance, from Florence to Naples to Rome; concisely summarizes the vast literature on individual courts and patrons. Synthesizes the most-important works associated with aristocratic patronage throughout Italy.

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Cooper, Tracy E. “Mecenatismo or Clientelismo? The Character of Renaissance Patronage.” In The Search for a Patron in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Edited by David G. Wilkins and Rebecca L. Wilkins, 19–32. Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1996.

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An important contribution to the literature because it emphasizes the degree to which patronage was a social negotiation among unequal parties, all of whom stood to benefit from the quid pro quo of cultural and economic exchange.

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Esch, Arnold, and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, eds. Arte, committenza ed economia a Roma e nelle corti del Rinascimento (1420–1530): Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma 24–27 ottobre 1990. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi 630. Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1995.

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Excellent essays by prominent international scholars on patronage at the various Italian courts, from the conference of the same name held 24–27 October 1990 in Rome.

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Gilbert, Creighton. “What Did the Renaissance Patron Buy?,” Renaissance Quarterly 51.2 (1998): 392–450.

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A seminal essay in the development of patronage studies, Gilbert broke the trope of patronage as a direct relationship between patron and artist, demonstrating varied degrees of control exercised in the dynamic relationship between purchase and production and in accordance with the nature of the commission. For example, patrons were rather fussier about family history than fidelity to Biblical accounts. Offers nuanced insights into the processes of communication involved in commissioning works of art and glimpses into the tensions between economic and content control on the one hand, and artistic creative control on the other.

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Hollingsworth, Mary. Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century. London: Thistle, 2014.

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Hollingsworth provides a comprehensive synthesis of patronage activities undertaken by the mostly standard roster of Burckhardian individuals in the context of their cities and courts across Italy. The interpretive focus in often on artistic and architectural patronage as the manifestation of personal or dynastic status and power, and the demonstration of wealth and faith. The emphasis is on aspirational activities and on the assumption of an audience conditioned to associate visual objects in the public arena with patrons rather than artists.

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Kempers, Bram. Painting, Power and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional Artist in the Italian Renaissance. Translated by Beverly Jackson. London: Penguin, 1994.

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Translated from the original Dutch. Kempers synthesizes the broad realm of Renaissance artistic patronage with broader social developments linked to urbanism, linking patronage to the gradual professionalization of artists within the cultural economies of Italy.

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Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. 2 vols. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. Introduction and notes by David Ekserdjian. Everyman’s Library 129. New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

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Based on the 1912 English translation by de Vere, with updated notes to the text. Vasari first published the Lives in 1550 and issued an expanded version in 1568. The authoritative modern version is still the seven-volume Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, edited by Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885), but this Everyman’s version offers a comprehensive translation of the text and is well annotated. Vasari’s observations about relationships between patrons and artists are often cited in the context of patronage studies.

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Patronage in the Italian Renaissance I: Princes and Power
As a distinct field of inquiry, patronage studies originated in the historiography of the Italian Renaissance. Following the devastation wrought by the Black Death in Italy in the 14th century, civic agencies in Florence, such as the Operaii of Florence Cathedral, were largely responsible for initiating major patronage projects, such as the new baptistery doors and the dome of Florence Cathedral. Individual guilds of craftsmen funded statues to populate the niches of Orsanmichele, which became a central fixture of the renewal of Florentine civic life. By the early 15th century, the scions of successful banking families, most notably the Medici, had adapted the patronage model to facilitate their entrée into the arena of civic power, as well as to establish aristocratic privilege in order to support their bid for political power. Cultural patronage signified political agency, helping new rulers consolidate their power through architectural and artistic self-fashioning, following the example of ancient Rome. Civic embellishment elided with personal luxury for the social elevation of individuals and families. The political power of the Medici in Florence, achieved through their economic dominance, was matched by the militaristic rule of the Visconti and then the Sforza in Milan, who exercised considerable cultural influence, particularly during Leonardo da Vinci’s residence there in the 1490s (Welch 1995). Naples, a flourishing center of early Renaissance patronage under the Aragonese kings of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, suffered enormous damage in the bombardments during World War II, leading to the devastation both of monuments and archives. At the same time, nouveau-riche condottieri were granted land and privilege by various entities (e.g., the pope, the Republic of Venice) in exchange for military service and used cultural patronage to consolidate and demonstrate their authority and power. Among the condottieri princes, the most cultured was Duke Federico da Montefeltro, Lord of Urbino (d. 1482), who amassed an enormous library of classical and contemporaneous manuscripts (the most important of which were concerned with the new science of perspective) and remodeled the medieval stronghold into the living exemplar of the perfect Renaissance princely palace (Clough 19). When Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini (d. 1468), employed Leon Battista Alberti (d. 1472) to superimpose a classical facade onto the medieval church of San Francesco, he ushered in the Renaissance refashioning of the past in the guise of Roman Antiquity as the hallmark of cultural erudition. The Este dynasty also made its mark on the city of Ferrara through extensive architectural renewal and invention (Rosenberg 1997). The Este dukes were also keen musical patrons, sponsoring the work of early composers such as Guillaume Dufay (d. 1474) and Josquin Desprez (d. 1521), both of whom restructured musical harmony in much the same way that architects of the period restructured buildings (Lockwood 2009). The Gonzaga of Mantua exercised continual patronage influence from the mid-14th through the early 18th centuries, employing artists from Pisanello (d. c. 1455) to Peter Paul Rubens (d. 1640), and they are the signal family for patronage studies due to the completeness of their surviving archive (Chambers and Martineau 1982).

Chambers, David, and Jane Martineau, eds. Splendours of the Gonzaga: Catalogue. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1982.

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The full sweep of Gonzaga patronage from the rise of the Gonzaga in the mid-14th century to the end of the ducal line in 1707 is covered in this catalogue to the 1982 exhibition. Over the centuries, this small marquisate rose to the height of an international dynasty, hosting artists from Pisanello to Andrea Mantegna and from Giulio Romano to Rubens. The huge collections they amassed are traceable through the surviving family archive, and the extensive inventories drawn up with the bulk of statues and paintings were sold to Charles I of England in 1628.

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Clough, Cecil H. “Federigo da Montefeltro’s Patronage of the Arts, 1468–1482.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 129–144.

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Clough was the first scholar to firmly establish the reputation of the condottiero turned princely patron Duke Federico da Montefeltro (d. 1482) among the most avant-garde of 15th-century culture brokers, from the establishment of his astonishing humanist library of manuscripts, to the creation of the Renaissance courtyard in the old medieval castle, to his exquisite studiolo within the castle walls. The main theme is the deployment of patronage to legitimate princely power. Clough’s essays on Federico and his patronage were gathered and republished in his The Duchy of Urbino in the Renaissance (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981).

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Howarth, David. Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Examines the employment of portraiture, architecture, and decorative arts by successive Tudor rulers and the succeeding Stuart kings up until the public execution of Charles I in 1649, as a visual rhetoric of power. Demonstrates the extent to which patronage studies can subordinate artists and artistic agency to the analysis of the visual as a constituent of political rhetoric.

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Lockwood, Lewis. Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth Century. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195378276.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

While there is much emphasis in patronage studies on visual art, the Este dukes, from Borso to Ercole d’Este—and especially in the period of Leonello d’Este (Marquis of Ferrara, Duke of Modena and Reggio Emilia, 1441–1450)—were enthusiastic patrons of music, at the center of musical developments in Ferrara and beyond. Sponsors of composers for court, chapel, and cathedral, the Este helped shape 15th-century musical developments in Europe.

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Prevenier, Walter, and Wim Blockmans. The Burgundian Netherlands. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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The Valois dynasty celebrated the Gothic legacy of Europe through the liberal patronage of exquisite manuscripts, sculpture, altarpieces, and all forms of luxury items, produced for them by artists of unprecedented ability, from the Limbourg brothers to Jan van Eyck. Valois patronage created the art of dynasty and was the exemplar for later European rulers.

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Rosenberg, Charles M. The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance Ferrara. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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An examination of public statuary monuments commissioned by four successive Este dukes of quattrocento Ferrara, only one of which still survives. The others are reconstructed through archival sources, and each is examined in terms of its specific symbolic meaning and its contribution to the controlled Este development of the urban landscape as civic monument to princely power. An examination of the fine art of self-representation in the form of persuasive public art.

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Welch, Evelyn S. Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

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A fascinatingly detailed and lively analysis of artistic patronage in Milan under Visconti and Sforza rule. The dukes of Milan were savvy civic patrons who used public commissions to mythologize their own past in order to legitimate their power through the celebration of the virtues of Milan itself. Incorporates new archival discoveries related to major architectural projects such as the famous cathedral and Sforza castle, and provides important insights into Leonardo da Vinci’s activities within the intellectual and social life of city and court.

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Patronage in the Italian Renaissance II: Republics and Corporations
As a republic, Venice fits less satisfactorily into the mold of dynastic patronage, perhaps in part due to the arrangement of its state archives, organized according to its instruments of government rather than primarily by family. Brown 2004 and de Maria 2010 use the Venice archives to illuminate patterns of patronage in the respective contexts of the Venetian ruling elite and among the scions of immigrant families who wielded patronage in order to achieve status and recognition as Venetian citizens. The papacy, in general, may be counted as a “corporate” entity, although certain popes were important as individual patrons, most notably Nicholas V (ruled 1447–1455), who was primarily responsible, again with Leon Battista Alberti, for the renovatio of Rome in the 15th century (Westfall 1974). Julius II (ruled 1502–1513), known as the “warrior pope” for his campaigns to regain the papal territories, was patron of the new Basilica of St. Peters (cornerstone laid 1506) and of Raphael (d. 1520) and Michelangelo (d. 1564), as detailed in Rotondi Terminiello and Nepi 2005. Patronage studies with a corporate focus, in the sense of examining modes of group patronage, include Wisch and Ahl 2000 (on the many patronage projects undertaken by Italian confraternities throughout Italy), Hills 2004 (on female monastic patronage in Naples as an architectural expression of identity in the context of Tridentine enclosure), and Bourdua 2004 (on the patronage of the Franciscan order in northern Italy as a distinct vehicle for regional stylistic expression influenced by local patrons).

Bourdua, Louise. The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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A study of Franciscan church and monastic patronage in the Veneto, which often proceeded along lines independent from the mother church in Assisi in accordance with more-regional styles and in response to the influence of local patrons. The case studies reveal the tensions between friars and independent patrons, and variable patterns of influence across a range of commissions.

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Brown, Patricia Fortini. Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

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A study of the cultural patronage of Venetian families, with a particular emphasis on the intersections among private identities, family life, and the public representation of patrician values. This study of domestic patronage follows Brown’s foundational study of the civic-cultural activities undertaken by the Venetian scuole in her Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

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de Maria, Blake. Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

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Highlights the cultural contributions made by immigrants to Renaissance Venice who deployed artistic, architectural, and literary patronage as part of an agenda to become official members of the Venetian cittadino class. De Maria broadens the scope of Renaissance patronage studies by drawing attention to cultural patronage as a form of brokering among merchants and artists in their struggle for social and political identity, in contrast to courtly studies that perpetuate narratives of class privilege and cultural domination.

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Hills, Helen. Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Neapolitan Convents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Examines the role that aristocratic Neapolitan families played in the creation of female monastic communities in late Renaissance and baroque Naples, and how these monasteries shaped the development of the modern city. An insightful look at how the determined proliferation of these female communities, which were partly intended to harbor and shield family wealth through monastic curatorship, determined aspects of urban planning.

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Rotondi Terminiello, Giovanna, and Giulio Nepi, eds. Giulio II: Papa, politico, mecenate; Atti del convegno, Savona, Fortezza del Priamar, Sala della Sibilla, 25-26-27 marzo 2004. Genoa, Italy: De Ferrari, 2005.

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Essays by international scholars that were selected from papers delivered at a conference held in Savona in 2004, in connection with the sesquicentenary of the beginning of the papacy of Julius II. The essays (most in Italian, some in English) cover Giuliano della Rovere’s ecclesiastical and political career from his time as Archiepiscopal See in Avignon (1474–1503) to the height of his patronage activities in Rome as pope from 1503 until his death in 1513. A comprehensive but also detailed inquiry into all his major patronage projects.

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Westfall, Carroll William. In This Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–55. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974.

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The collaboration between Pope Nicholas V and Leon Battista Alberti to renovate the old borgo around the Vatican in order to reestablish Rome as the center of the Christian Church in Europe. Westfall demonstrates the intellectual and philosophical integrity of the papal plan and clearly delineates Alberti’s opportunism as the author of a newly invigorated Roman classicism deployed in the service of reviving the Italian papacy: Renaissance self-fashioning in the context of urban renewal.

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Wisch, Barbara, and Diane Cole Ahl, eds. Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Italian confraternities mobilized patronage in the service of public piety, both to encourage and reflect charitable giving within the civic realm. A kind of patronage by committee, art and architectural projects were brought about through the interactions between lay members and religious authorities, often to the specifications of prominent private patrons, for the glorification of charitable giving but also the expression of social control and authority in the urban context.

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The Patron’s Patron: Lorenzo de’ Medici
Jacob Burckhardt (Burckhardt 2014, cited under General Overviews; first published in 1860) considered Lorenzo de’ Medici the consummate “Renaissance man” because of his erudition, taste, and sponsorship of artists. While time and study have worked to extricate Lorenzo from works long attributed to his sponsorship (for example, Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus), there is no doubt that Lorenzo’s patronage activities were extraordinarily diverse and important. While his father, Cosimo de’ Medici, was the true “architect” of Medici cultural identity, commissioning Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to build the Medici Palace, Filippo Brunelleschi to design San Lorenzo and the Old Sacristy (and Donatello to decorate it), and Fra Angelico to fresco the monastery of San Marco (Ames-Lewis 1995), Lorenzo extended Medici influence to the creation of a host of luxury goods, from pietra dura vessels and vases to extraordinary engraved gems, and to the “discovery” of the talents of Michelangelo (Fusco and Corti 2006). It was under the protection of Lorenzo that individual artists began to be credited with independent invenzione in the creation of their works, opening the door to the elevation of the artist from the status of medieval craftsman to individual practitioner of an art beyond the mechanical, embracing intellect and genius. Ultimately, Lorenzo’s greatest legacy was his sponsorship of Michelangelo, who went on to paint the Sistine ceiling for Julius II in Rome, a monument to the startling inventiveness that resulted from the pairing of artist and patron.

Ames-Lewis, Francis, ed. The Early Medici and Their Artists. London: University of London, 1995.

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Based on a series of lectures the author gave at Birkbeck College in 1994, the book is a consolidation of his many publications on the Medici as patrons in Florence. While the fact of Medici patronage has become a commonplace in any study of the Italian Renaissance, much of the glory has gone to Lorenzo “il Magnifico” at the expense of his Medici predecessors and contemporaries. Also recommended are the essays in Cosimo “il Vecchio” de’ Medici, 1389–1464: Essays in Commemoration of the 600th Anniversary of Cosimo de’ Medici’s Birth, edited by Ames-Lewis and with an introduction by E. H. Gombrich (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).

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Fusco, Laurie, and Gino Corti. Lorenzo de’ Medici: Collector and Antiquarian. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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A comprehensive study of Lorenzo’s acquisition of antiquities and small luxury items, including 173 previously unpublished letters from the Medici archives in Florence. Valuable insights into the acquisition of, competition for, and study and display of antiquities and all’antica objects in the emerging commodities market.

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Women Patrons
Women became an emergent class in the study of Renaissance patronage as early as Julia Cartwright’s two-volume biography of Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua (Cartwright 1903). A distinct scholarship around “women patrons” as a category became prevalent only after the mid-1970s, with the rise of feminist critique found in the work of Linda Nochlin, Ann Sutherland Harris, Griselda Pollock, and others. San Juan 1991 examines the patronage and colleting of Isabella d’Este within the politics of female identity formation in the Renaissance. The ability to conceptualize patronage beyond direct transactions that occurred between a patron and an artist stimulated scholarship highlighting women’s use of social networks to generate agency in their realization of patronage objectives. King 1998 provided pioneering insights into the unique patronage power of widows in early modern Italy. Women patrons are the subject of a special volume of Renaissance Studies (Anderson 1996), and in the anthology by Reiss and Wilkins 2001. A further development in this context are studies of conjugal patronage, such as that of Eleonora of Toledo and Cosimo de’ Medici and of Isabella d’Este and Francesco II Gonzaga, discussed in essays in Reiss and Wilkins 2001.

Anderson, Jaynie, ed. Special Issue: Women Patrons of Renaissance Art, 1300–1600. Renaissance Studies 10.2 (1996).

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An important synthesis of the previous ten years of conference papers and published articles dedicated to the study of women’s patronage in the Renaissance. In her article “Rewriting the History of Art Patronage” (pp. 129–138), Anderson identifies that the lack of secular women patrons of famous male artists had been largely disregarded by feminist scholars rooted in the study of more-marginalized female social actors and had somewhat concentrated on decorative arts production. A renewed focus on female patrons, and thus female agency, provided a means for reframing the study of the Renaissance.

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Cartwright, Julia. Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, 1474–1539: A Study of the Renaissance. 2 vols. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1903.

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The first biographical patronage study devoted to a Renaissance woman, Cartwright drew extensively from Isabella’s own letters in the Mantua state archives, providing scholars with the first comprehensive corpus of these documents in English. Much of the subsequent 20th-century scholarship on Isabella was derived from Cartwright’s work, which was published in English at roughly the same time that the Mantuan archivist Alessandro Luzio was publishing the same primary documents in Italian in his series of essays published in the journal Archivio Storico Lombardo (Luzio’s papers are found in the Archivio di Stato di Mantova). Cartwright’s book was republished most recently in 2010 (Charleston, SC: Nabu).

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King, Catherine E. Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy, c. 1300–1550. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

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This pioneering work redefined women’s patronage by considering their increased buying power and cultural influence in the context of both marriage and then as widows. In a series of case studies, King defines widowhood as a unique parameter for determining increased economic and cultural freedom among Italian laywomen and a period during which their influence often intersected with the needs and interests of female religious communities.

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Reiss, Sheryl E., and David G. Wilkins, eds. Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 54. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001.

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A series of essays examining individual women patrons active in various cities and their involvement in private and domestic, as well as public and civic, projects; encompasses noble and middle-class women and considers privilege, agency, and opportunity in accordance with social condition—as wives, mothers, and widows.

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San Juan, Rose Marie. “The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance.” Oxford Art Journal 14.1 (1991): 67–78.

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As a woman engaged in art patronage and the collecting of antiquities, Isabella d’Este was treading on what contemporaries considered male territory. San Juan highlights the similarly gendered response of modern scholars, who tended either to diminish Isabella’s accomplishments by focusing on objects and preoccupations considered more properly feminine, or chiding her perceived transgressions of the properly socialized feminine ideal of the Renaissance past and, more troubling, the misogynist present. Feminist scholarship has done much to reveal the misogynist subtext of some early scholarship.

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Valone, Carolyn. “Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560–1630.” Art Bulletin 76.1 (1994): 129–146.

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Based on archival sources and grounded firmly in women’s studies, Valone’s article reveals the extraordinary number of late Renaissance church projects commissioned by Roman matrons, many of them widows, in the post-Tridentine period. The major contribution by Valone, who coined the phrase “matrons as patrons,” was to combine patronage studies with women’s studies, opening up a new field of inquiry that allowed scholars to move beyond the recuperation of female artists to more-complex issues of female social agency and urban development.

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Patronage and Economic History
Next to the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century, patronage is the most important phenomenon in the history of European economics. Goldthwaite 2010 surveys patronage in the context of commerce, examining the economies of patronage within the larger context of an emergent European monetary system. Patronage was not only a system for demonstrating wealth, but it also created wealth, and the resulting market economy is theorized to have been the driving force of the Renaissance economic engine (Welch 2005). O’Malley 2005 studies Renaissance contracts for works of art, revealing the intricate sequence of transactions forged between artists and patrons, and helping to quantify payments and costs. Artists actually earned only small profits from their works, since they were expected to bear all the costs of materials, labor, transport, and all aspects of production (including extended terms during which they were required to attend to repairs or repainting). The study of contracts provides further insight into the highly negotiated nature of art production under the patronage system and emphasizes the constant power struggles that underlay early modern artistic labor.

Goldthwaite, Richard A. Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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A foundational text for patronage studies, first published in 1993. Goldthwaite analyzes the economic benefits of patronage to demonstrate that investments in art and architecture on the part of wealthy patrons created a trickle-down effect that helped sustain and grow the Florentine economy of the Renaissance. Goldthwaite’s arguments ran counter to the conclusions of earlier economic historians of Renaissance Florence, who saw patronage as crisis inducing, widening class divide by reinforcing inequities of wealth distribution. Instead, the Renaissance gave birth to modern consumer society.

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O’Malley, Michelle. The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

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O’Malley reads artists’ contracts across time and space (three centuries and all across Italy) during the Renaissance to produce “big data,” from which emerges new insights into common practices and exceptional circumstances. Her focus is on the actual circumstance of making art and meeting expectations and thus on the transactional action of patronage. This emphasis on the legal and practical mechanics of how art got made and the expectations of artists and those who commissioned art offers new possibilities for the study of the patronage system.

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Welch, Evelyn. Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

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Informed by Goldthwaite’s research and by material culture studies, Welch takes an original look at the consumer economy of the Renaissance around luxury as well as household and everyday goods by following consumers to the burgeoning marketplaces of Italy. She defines the marketplace; its vendors, suppliers, and consumers; its economies of gender; and how shopping carved out its own urban space to redefine Renaissance cities.

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Patronage and Social Economies
In the early 21st century, work on patronage has tended to focus equally both on the monetary and social economies of patronage. Far from being a disinterested act of exercising aesthetic preference or cultural acumen, the patronage of art was constituted equally by financial and social economies. The evolution of the patronage system depended on the constant negotiation and renegotiation of civic, corporate, social, and personal relationships and identities, through the commission, creation, purchase, ownership, and display of art objects and various other forms of material culture. In turn, these commercial and social exchanges negotiated identities, status, and reputation among the various agents involved, as in the signaling, signposting, and stretching described in Nelson and Zeckhauser 2008. While early scholarship tended to characterize patronage as a simple form of direct exchange—that is, in terms of artists who “worked for” an aristocratic patron such as Lorenzo de’ Medici, Federico da Montefeltro, or Isabella d’Este—these transactions were seldom so straightforward. Instead, they often took the form of negotiated forms of exchange among and between a network of intermediaries: humanists, artist-advisors, secretaries, and merchants, all of whom could play some role in determining the substance, creation, progress, completion, acceptance, and success of a commission. Further, the expanded field of patronage takes into account not just “major” works or “major” patrons, but the full scope of cultural sponsorship across classes and economies undertaken to signal identity and citizenship, as in Burke 2004.

Burke, Jill. Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Florence. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

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Examines the patronage of various members of the Nasi and Del Pugliese families of Florence and their use of art and cultural patronage to negotiate their family and personal identities in relation to Florentine civic life.

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Nelson, Jonathan K., and Richard J. Zeckhauser, eds. The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

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Proposes that art patronage can be best understood through the mechanisms of information economics, specifically as signaling, signposting, and stretching to signify wealth. The emphasis is thus on the intention, perception, and reception of commissioned objects within the social economies of Renaissance Italy.

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Patronage and Intellectual Economies
Allegorical and mythological works were particularly susceptible to negotiated forms of intellectual exchange, an important aspect of the patronage exchange for the period between private patrons and their artists. For example, when Isabella d’Este, considered the greatest female patron of the early Renaissance, wished to obtain an allegorical painting from the painter Pietro Perugino, the program for the work was written by Paride da Ceresara. The resulting painting, therefore, had to satisfy not only Isabella, but the requirements of a program that, for a painter not steeped in allegory or mythological imagination, were so detailed as to overwhelm any spontaneous pictorial invention that might occur to him. Although Isabella accepted the final product, the Battle of Love and Chastity (1503, now in the Louvre), neither she nor the humanist who composed the program were at all satisfied with Perugino’s efforts, although its general themes fit into the overall allegorical program contained in her studiolo (Campbell 2004). In the absence of such detailed written instructions for most mythological pictures of the Renaissance, we can only guess at the underlying subjects of various works, many of which were actually destined to be esoteric puzzles intended for decipherment among a closed social group (such as Giorgione’s La Tempesta, made for Gabriele Vendramin in Venice and intended for his private collection, as discussed in Campbell 2003). In trying to fully comprehend the content of these mythologies, modern art historians are often working against the grain of spontaneous interpretation that informed both the creation and enjoyment of such works among a learned audience of viewers. A work such as Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1482, Uffizi), deliberately designed to be engaged with as a puzzle to be solved, probably has no definitive, final, or complete meaning. It is, in fact, sustained as a work of art through its ability to continually generate an endless series of possibilities (Dempsey 1992). This game of decipherment implies that contracts drawn up between artists and patrons were also forms of negotiated and sustained intellectual exchange and were valued as forms of social currency, not merely instructions for the creation of material objects.

Campbell, Stephen J. “Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture, and the Renaissance Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 56.2 (2003): 299–332.

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Giorgione`s source and inspiration for the subject of his famous The Tempest have long been debated by scholars. Campbell convincingly reads the painting in the context of contemporaneous literary interest in the writings of the Roman writer Lucretius and the rise of the phenomenon of the private studiolo as a locus for humanist interaction. He thus connects the painting directly to the sociocultural ambient of its Venetian patron.

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Campbell, Stephen J. The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

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Interpreting mythology and allegory in the context of paintings intended for the erudite domesticity of Isabella’s studiolo in Mantua. Campbell emphasizes the art of sustained interpretation and painting as a nexus for intellectual exchange.

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Dempsey, Charles. The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

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Painting as philology—a discourse on time past and time present and a commentary on the limits and possibilities of painted poetry. Dempsey links the Primavera to the literary culture of Lorenzo’s court and demonstrates how the work remained simultaneously old and new as it was contextualized and recontextualized by language, extending the possibilities of patronage beyond the limits of ownership and outside the image itself.

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Patronage Studies beyond Italy
Because the study of patronage mainly originated in historiography of the Italian Renaissance, early studies in the field beyond Italy tended to be largely focused on relationships between individual aristocratic patrons and Italian artists. Thus, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (d. 1490) is seen to have principally brought the Renaissance to Hungary by collecting exquisitely illuminated manuscripts by Italian artists, which he amassed into an impressive humanist library (Farbaky and Waldman 2011). King Francis I (d. 1547) deliberately imported Italian Renaissance style to France by employing artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (d. 1519), Andrea del Sarto, Francesco Primaticcio, Rosso Fiorentino, Giulio Romano, and Benvenuto Cellini (Knecht 1996). Studies of Habsburg patronage focus to a great extent on Philip II (d. 1598) and the Ovidian mythologies painted for him by Titian, but, given the dearth of documentary evidence, there is, as of yet, no truly definitive study of Philip as a patron. The situation is slightly different for Rudolf II at the court of Prague (d. 1612), who employed artists of primarily Dutch, Flemish, or German extraction and whose court was largely, before the fall of communism, studied only by eastern European scholars, and on whom the definitive expert is Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Kaufmann 1988). The focus beyond Italy and Italianate art has led to new avenues of research in the study of art in Tudor and Jacobean England. Once grounded heavily in the study of royal portraits, patronage studies of visual art in the English Renaissance have been considerably broadened by the study of luxurious tapestry art as a key patronage activity at the court of Henry VIII (d. 1547), as discussed in Campbell 2007, as well as through the study of portrait patronage among the emergent class of urban elite in Renaissance England (Cooper 2012). The field continues to move toward more-nuanced considerations of variables within the social, material, economic, and political economies of patronage in nationalist and internationalist contexts.

Campbell, Thomas P. Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

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While Italian princely patrons lavished money on frescoes, altarpieces, statues, and sacred as well as secular paintings, the Tudor kings preferred to commission luxurious historiated tapestries on classical and mythological subjects as glosses on contemporaneous political events. The dispersal, degradation, and disappearance, through wear and tear, of most of the tapestries listed in court inventories, published here by Campbell, have created a gap in a material culture that was once the glory of kings.

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Cooper, Tarnya. Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

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Cooper studies the penchant for portraits among the Tudor and Jacobean middle classes striving for upward mobility within the new culture of professions; the hallmark of self-identification within this new professional culture was the commissioning of portraits. Emulating the habits of princes and aristocrats, the emergent elite became patrons of portraits intended to reflect and reward their social and cultural ambitions.

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Farbaky, Péter, and Louis A. Waldman, eds. Italy and Hungary: Humanism and Art in the Early Renaissance. Papers presented at an international conference held 6–8 June 2007 in Florence. Villa i Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies 27. Florence: Villa i Tatti, 2011.

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Corvinus had a rich and impressive library of manuscripts, many on humanist themes, beautifully illuminated by outstanding Italian artists. Much of that library has been dispersed outside Hungary, and individual works have thus been widely studied, but some access to archives and works of art (although little survives in Hungary) was limited before the fall of communism. Here, the most recent Magyar scholarship is available in English, combined with other contributions in English and Italian, in a book of proceedings from a conference held at Villa i Tatti in 2007.

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Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

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Kaufmann is the world`s leading expert on Hapsburg patronage and on Rudolf II, whose true tastes were for curiosities and wonders at the nexus of science and art, reflected in his patronage of the Italian mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and in the extraordinary contents of his Wunderkammer. This volume offers a systematic catalogue of the painters who worked at the Rudolphine court, and an analysis of their work in the context of imperial patronage.

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Knecht, R. J. Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I. Rev. ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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As a young man the French king developed his artistic tastes through residency in Italy. He also absorbed the lessons of patronage as wielded by the Italian elite, and he marked his kingship through the emulation of these models, luring Italian mannerist artists north to design and decorate his princely palaces. His greatest achievement was to have been the final patron of Leonardo da Vinci, who died in residence at the French court.

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