Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence [Hardcover]

This book examines the way common people saw and interpreted paintings produced for - and placed in - public settings in fourteenth-century Florence.This book reconstructs and interprets the decorative appearance of one of the world's greatest cities at the dawn of its golden age. For scholarly and general audiences, it focuses on the needs and interests of common people as a way of thinking about art within the broader context of history.This book reconstructs and interprets the decorative appearance of one of the world's greatest cities at the dawn of its golden age. For scholarly and general audiences, it focuses on the needs and interests of common people as a way of thinking about art within the broader context of history.Street corners, guild halls, government offices, and confraternity centers contained paintings that made the city of Florence a visual jewel at precisely the time of its emergence as an international cultural leader. This book considers the paintings that were made specifically for consideration by lay viewers, as well as the way they could have been interpreted by audiences who approached them with specific perspectives. Their belief in the power of images, their understanding of the persuasiveness of pictures, and their acceptance of the utterly vital role that art could play as a propagator of civic, corporate, and individual identity made lay viewers keenly aware of the paintings in their midst. Those pictures affirmed the piety of the people for whom they were made in an age of social and political upheaval, as the city experimented with an imperfect form of republicanism that often failed to adhere to its declared aspirations.Introduction: public painting for common people in early republican Florence, 12821434; 1. Paintings in the streets: tabernacles, public devotion, and control; 2. Images of charity: confraternities, hospitals, and pictures for the destitute; 3. Art and the commune: politics, propaganda, and the bureaucratic state; l³M