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Attributing Influence: The Problem of Female Patronage in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Solum, Stefanie. The Art Bulletin 90.1 (Mar 2008): 76-100.

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Abstract
The female monastic environment has emerged recently as a vital area of inquiry, due to the work ofjeryldene Wood, Kate Lowe, Anabel Thomas, and other scholars who have contributed to a new understanding of the vitality of visual culture for cloistered women and of the specificity and particularity of images produced for the female gaze.6 While communities of religious women were important patrons of art and architecture, the extent to which nuns exercised choice is difficult to discern from surviving documents (a problem compounded by the demand, most often met, for a male guardian, or mundualdus, to act on the women's behalf in legal transactions such as commissions) .7 In the context of the secular palace, Jacqueline Musacchio's encompassing study of the gendered material culture of childbirth now allows us to link that decidedly female sphere of experience with a varied and dynamic realm of object production.8 Adrian Randolph's essay on birth trays, or deschi da parto, may come closer to articulating an argument for women's role in the production of images.9 Setting his own sights on female spectatorship within the space of the birth chamber, Randolph genders the cultural constructedness of vision in order to propose an alternative to Michael Baxandall's "normative" period eye, implying that the artists of these painted salvers were responding to a set of viewing norms that governed an exclusively female sphere of reception.

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Full Text
Among the Florentine Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale's broad holdings of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts is a small, striking codex catalogued as BNCF, Magliabechiano VII, 49. Its sole text is a Lombard Vita ai San Giovanni Battista dedicated to Filippo Maria Visconti, duke of Milan between 1412 and 1447, although the embossed circles of the original leather binding herald Medici patronage, and the patte, or balls, of Florence's ruling family reappear in a coat of arms on the manuscript's splendid frontispiece (Figs. 1-3).l The masterful illumination of this page, composed of a historiated initial set within a swirling vinestem frieze inhabited by playful putti and colorful birds, is clearly the work of an exceptionally skilled artist. The manuscript is markedly luxurious; an elegant humanist script graces its five gold-edged parchment quires. Illustrious provenance, artistic merit, and sumptuousness do not, however, make Magliabechiano VII, 49 unusual. Patrons requested a dizzying quantity of high-quality illuminated manuscripts from Florentine workshops during the second half of the fifteenth century, and the Medici were vigorous patrons and collectors.2 The Magliabechiano manuscript's contents, moreover-hagiographie verse composed in the Italian vernacular-may seem unassuming in the face of the numerous classical and patristic Latin

texts put freshly to parchment during the quattrocento. On its surface this codex is exquisite, yet not extraordinary, and that it has remained unexamined by successive generations of art historians comes, perhaps, as little surprise.3 Far less expected is the outcome of an attentive visual engagement. The Magliabechiano manuscript provides a renewed opportunity for art historical reflection on the construction of women's roles in the production of images during this period. Invoking the issue of female patronage of the arts in fifteenth-century Florence reveals a startling absence. Notable women patrons have not emerged from this period,4 and this despite the continuing torrent of literature on female patronage of the arts in Renaissance Italy.5 Other geographic centers and, generally speaking, later periods have proved remarkably lucrative fields for this area of research. The assumption arising from this peculiar situation-that quattrocento Florentine women were unique in their relatively insignificant role in the generation of objects-is both inevitable and unreasonable, although formulating a concrete basis with which to dismiss it requires more than mere intuition. Recent studies of explicitly female viewing contexts have begun to forge a connection between women and image production. The female monastic environment has emerged recently as a vital area of inquiry, due to the work ofjeryldene Wood, Kate Lowe, Anabel Thomas, and other scholars who have contributed to a new understanding of the vitality of visual culture for cloistered women and of the specificity and particularity of images produced for the female gaze.6 While communities of religious women were important patrons of art and architecture, the extent to which nuns exercised choice is difficult to discern from surviving documents (a problem compounded by the demand, most often met, for a male guardian, or mundualdus, to act on the women's behalf in legal transactions such as commissions) .7 In the context of the secular palace, Jacqueline Musacchio's encompassing study of the gendered material culture of childbirth now allows us to link that decidedly female sphere of experience with a varied and dynamic realm of object production.8 Adrian Randolph's essay on birth trays, or deschi da parto, may come closer to articulating an argument for women's role in the production of images.9 Setting his own sights on female spectatorship within the space of the birth chamber, Randolph genders the cultural constructedness of vision in order to propose an alternative to Michael Baxandall's "normative" period eye, implying that the artists of these painted salvers were responding to a set of viewing norms that governed an exclusively female sphere of reception. Roger Crum, on the other hand, claims an overt interest in female agency and patronage per se.10 Crum rightly calls for methodological reflection on the suitability of the conventional contractual, or documentary, model for the study of patronage by secular women and presents the results of his own consideration of this problem: an original new model of women's "control" that bypasses the issues of production altogether to focus, instead, on the potential power of female stewardship of objects within the Renaissance palace. Despite this body of scholarship, our understanding of women's purposeful and active roles in shaping the period's innovative and dynamic visual universe remains ill defined. A fruitful approach to filling this gap involves the analysis of image production, because art patronage

has emerged, in Renaissance scholarship, as a fundamental site for the mapping of creative agency and the expression of identity. While it could be argued that the recuperation of longneglected women belongs to a past art historical moment, I contend that this type of inquiry (as well as the very category "female patronage") retains importance in the context of the early Italian Renaissance. The artistic accomplishment of quattrocento Florence continues to guarantee it a privileged place in the history of Western art and, indeed, in the larger narrative of the "progress" of Western culture. Art historians' continued, conventional use of the very term "Renaissance," a period designation long abandoned by colleagues in other disciplines, points to a persisting conviction that early modern Italy witnessed extraordinary changes in the visual arts. The rapid development, in Florence, of visual idioms within an explosively prolific culture of image production tends to fix that city and its fifteenth-century inhabitants at the heart of this transformation. The notions of artistic genius and stylistic progress that first gave shape to the field have diminished in importance, yet invention and individual initiative continue to be invoked as period touchstones, even in less traditional accounts. A. Richard Turner's recent survey of the Florentine Renaissance-a book that deftly replaces chronology and artistic biography with a rich thematic, contextual approach-remains committed to a new visual language forged, during the fifteenth century, by the "incomparable Florentines."11 Turner introduces his subject by conjuring up the enduring idea of a Florence that "nurtured a constellation of remarkable persons, many of whom left an indelible mark on the city in the form of buildings and works of art."12 Patrons now take a natural place alongside artists in this collection of outstanding people, and, while this may be something of a shell game that imperceptibly shifts the emphasis on the individual from one place to another, the notion of the Renaissance patron as a fundamental creative force behind the production of works of art nonetheless has gained momentum.13 The paucity of archival evidence documenting instances of women's art patronage from this period serves as the basis for an assumption that individual Florentine women were not important commissioners-or designers or conceivers-of images, effectively putting this means of generative and expressive power beyond their grasp. The tendency to interpret individual works of art in light of their patrons' tastes, views, beliefs, and agendas may be giving way to an understanding of art patronage as a means of constructing and expressing individual and social identities, but it seems clear that both approaches are factors of a broader shift toward the contextualization of Renaissance art.14 A comparison of the initial claim of Frederick Hartt's classic survey text first published in 1969, the History of Italian Renaissance Art, with the equivalent introductory moment in John Paoletti and Gary Radke's more recent survey, Art in Renaissance Italy, demonstrates this fundamental reframing of scholarly investment in the Italian Renaissance. Hartt's assertion that "the first manifestations of an independent new style in painting and sculpture seem to have taken place in Tuscany" no longer represents the stakes of the field; a quest for origins has been tempered by arguments for continuity, and a pan-Italian approach now mitigates the traditional Florentine bias.15 More important to the exploration of women's patronage in

quattrocento Italy is the compelling, and very different, claim with which Paoletti and Radke open their book: "Art mattered in the Renaissance"-an assertion that immediately focuses readers' attention on the innate power of Renaissance art in its original moment and context.16 This stronger art historical commitment to the power of images for Renaissance people begs the question, however, of just how art "mattered" to women. Art historians have provided some answers to this question by turning more frequently to social history and the domestic environment and by considering the ways in which women might have been affected by prescriptive images-portraits that immortalized female virtues, for example, or narrative panels painted on a cassone (a large storage chest) that engaged gender roles governing marriage and, in turn, sustained the patriarchal order it supported.17 If we accept the notion of an inherently potent visual culture even generally speaking, it is also necessary that we explore as fully as possible women's share as agents in shaping that culture and, in the process, structuring their own identities as creators and viewers.18 In moving toward the substantiation of such a role, it is useful to consider the Magliabechiano manuscript's illuminated frontispiece, in good Baxandallian fashion, as a deposit of the connection between artist and patron-the product of a unique human relationship that operated according to cultural expectations.19 Yet positioning a woman on the patron's side of this equation presents some difficulties that need to be addressed. Because the "norms" that we have come to know (and not only by way of Baxandall) imply a male client, positing a female one makes the basic irretrievability of the specific, and nuanced, mechanics of communication between artists and patrons during this period stand out in sharper relief.20 Moreover, because Renaissance women had limited authority when it came to legal and financial transactions, they may not have been the paying clients for objects intended for them or that they themselves had requested. This situation puts the very definition of "patronage" under some pressure, calling for an expanded sense of the term to include instances in which a woman's ideas or directives had a fundamental influence on the genesis of a work despite the fact that it was paid for by someone else. Because we have no precise terminology to accommodate these distinctions, and because male patronage is commonly elided with personal influence on an object even in the absence of documentary evidence for the commission, I have chosen to use the term in its broader sense. It should be emphasized, however, that neither historical distance nor the limitations imposed by the archival record prevent physical objects from illuminating fundamental contours of the original relationships that produced them. In the case of the Magliabechiano manuscript, a close study of the illuminated frontispiece reveals the identity of both parties, while also pointing to a reciprocal and collaborative flow between them that offers a model for female viewers shaping the things they wanted to see. The Patron and Her Manuscript The Magliabechiano manuscript's original owner is readily identifiable by the heraldic disk supported by putti at the base of its frontispiece (Fig. 3). Here, the Medici arms are triply encircled by a gold band, a lush green garland, and the family emblem of the diamond ring, most commonly associated with Piero di Cosimo de' Medici (1416-1469). Piero was certainly

a conspicuous bibliophile; he collected and commissioned lavish volumes in such quantity that his personal library was among the most significant manuscript collections in Europe at that time.21 When it was produced about 1455, the Magliabechiano codex's modest size and vernacular, hagiographie content would have rendered it a rarity among Piero's many luxurious manuscripts, although the author of its text was Francesco Filelfo, the renowned humanist still working in the service of the Milanese duke.22 In addition, as Francis AmesLewis has pointed out, Piero employed a strict system of classification among his books, organizing them according to category by tinted leather bindings; the Magliabechiano manuscript retains its original binding in brown, which was not a color used in this organizational arrangement.23 That the codex did not belong to Piero's collection is confirmed by two successive inventories of his library taken in 1456 and 1464, neither of which makes mention of it.24 The strongest confirmation that this book never belonged to Piero comes from the impaled coat of arms, set within the diamond ring on the frontispiece, that combines the Medici palle with the rampant lion of the Tornabuoni, the family of Piero's wife, Lucrezia (1427-1482). Significantly, not a single one of the manuscripts identified as belonging to Piero's collection displays Tornabuoni family heraldry. And the heraldic disk of the Magliabechiano codex joins the Medici and Tornabuoni arms palewise (by a vertical line), assigning Lucrezia's natal arms to the privileged, right-hand side traditionally reserved for those of the husband. This heraldic configuration would have been a logical marker of individual, personal ownership, coming from a woman quite accustomed to identifying herself as "the wife of Piero de' Medici."25 Born into the established and powerful Tornabuoni family in 1427, Lucrezia entered the Medici household at the time of her marriage in 1444.26 This period saw the de facto control of the Florentine Republic pass through three successive generations of Medici men, from Lucrezia's father-inlaw, Cosimo il Vecchio (1389-1464), to her husband, Piero, and on to her eldest son, Lorenzo (1449-1492). This political triad also engendered the family's mythic art historical stature; their extensive and often highly calculated patronage has become a veritable subfield of Italian Renaissance art history.27 For her part, Lucrezia was a remarkably influential woman-a forceful power broker and executor of personal and family interests, a vigorous philanthropist, and an accomplished writer. And she lived the whole of her adult life at the Florentine epicenter of secular, family-based art patronage. More likely than any other woman-and, perhaps, many men-to have influenced the vital, blossoming visual culture of this art historically critical moment, Lucrezia Tornabuoni is an obvious subject of the investigation of female art patronage in quattrocento Florence. Remarkably, though, even Lucrezia has never materialized fully as a patron, despite a host of clues floating in the historical ether and a long art historical tradition connecting her to Medici commissions. The devotional subjects of Lucrezia's literary production, which obviously carried substantial personal significance for her, also had a prominent visual life in the later fifteenth century. A striking abundance of images, mainly of domestic provenance, feature the same subjects as her poetry-the Nativity and Death of Christ; Saint John the Baptist; Tobias and the Archangel

Raphael; and the biblical heroines Judith, Susannah, and Esther. Some of these works were relatively public images that can be tied to a specifically Medici context: the fresco cycle depicting Susannah and the Elders painted in the late 1450s for the Milanese branch of the family bank, for example, or Donatello's bronze Judith and Holofernes group known to have resided at the Medici Palace from at least 1464.28 Most compelling is a cluster of commissions involving Saint John the Baptist that, taken together, suggest that Lucrezia played an active role in promoting the representation and guiding the iconography of that particular saint. Specifically, art historians of different generations have linked Lucrezia with the altarpiece Filippo Lippi painted during the late 1450s for the chapel of the new Medici Palace on the Via Larga, an Adoration of the Child that features Saint John the Baptist (Fig. 4).29 Heinrich Brockhaus first proposed the connection between Lucrezia and Lippi's altarpiece for the Medici Palace in 1902, and several decades later both Marilyn Lavin and Frederick Hartt made confident claims for Lucrezia as Lippi's patron.30 Hartt's classic Renaissance survey included this "information" from its first edition (with Paoletti and Radke later following suit), but, rather remarkably, art historians never substantiated or developed these claims by Lavin and Hartt. All subsequent focused studies of the altarpiece and the domestic chapel in which it originally formed the visual and liturgical focus, in fact, have ignored or rejected Lucrezia's possible role.31 So even while the Lucrezia hypothesis is presented as fact in the most widely read introductory textbooks on Renaissance art, she remains absent in recent, serious scholarship on Lippi's picture-work that dates from precisely the years in which the study of gender gained a solid hold in the field of Renaissance art history. Curiously, historians, rather than art historians, have taken on the task of seriously investigating Lucrezia's reputation as an important patron, but the issue of written evidence has proved a major stumbling block. Kate Lowe's investigation of archival material relevant to several scholarly rumors of Lucrezia's patronage of objects, for example, yielded a "pattern" of her absence from the extant documents.32 These disappointing findings led the author to be circumspect in her conclusions regarding Lucrezia's individual role, and even her part in instances of joint commissions with her husband, as a patron of objects. Medici historian Francis W. Kent, who mined a broader range of documents related to Lucrezia in the course of his study of her son, Lorenzo, offered a more general reevaluation of her addition to the calculus of Medici politics and power and took a more optimistic stance regarding the issue of art patronage.33 Combining disparate archival traces, Kent fashioned a compelling portrait of a sharp and determined woman, powerful in the realm of social and political patronage and probably involved in the patronage of art as well, despite the absence of documentary proof to this effect. In fact, Kent is confident that evidence will eventually surface: "I am convinced," he states, "that future research will show Lucrezia herself to have been a patron of religious art and foundations."34 Despite their divergent conclusions, both Lowe and Kent remain methodologically committed to written documentation, leaving little alternative but to wait for such evidence to be found, someday, in the Florentine archives.

Some such evidence, to be sure, has already surfaced. Documents show that Lucrezia contributed at least two silver ex-votos to the church of SS. Annunziata, furnished rich vestments for the veneration of a favorite local saint, and commissioned liturgical items, including osculatories and an illuminated missal.35 According to the fifteenth-century Florentine friar and spiritual adviser to patrician women Giovanni Dominici, "things that relate to divine praise and legitimate ecclesiastical ornaments" were precisely the sort of objects that women ought to commission.36 It may be, then, that firm documents exist for Lucrezia's patronage in precisely the limited arena identified by Dominici because it was considered an appropriate one for women's independent patronage. Unfortunately, to limit focus on Lucrezia's commissioning of such objects tends to negate the possibility that she had a hand in other types of commissions and to relegate her activity to a sphere of material culture that impinges little on the broader art historical narrative. Lucrezia's commandeering of a major structural and architectural renovation of the mineral baths at Bagno a Morba near Volterra might speak more to this point, yet documents probably exist for her operations as a patron on a grand scale in this instance because she was a widow at the time, and thus enjoyed a greater degree of legal independence.37 It makes sense to assume, along with Kent, that there is more to the story of Lucrezia's patronage than the archive has revealed. In her recent study of Medici women, the historian Natalie Tomas appropriately questions the wisdom of relying on the historical record to form conclusions about female patronage during this period, noting that it is "dangerous to assume that the lack of documentation for Lucrezia's patronage activities during Piero's lifetime means that she was not active in this area."38 Citing Lavin's original connection of Lippi's painting to Lucrezia's devotion to Saint John, Tomas concludes that Lucrezia "could well have provided the creative impulse" for the altarpiece. Faced with the absence of the kind of clinching evidence that Lowe could not uncover but that Kent hopefully anticipates finding, art historians would do well to join Tomas in questioning the extent we wish to privilege the written record. But we can also go a step further by bringing images to bear on the archival void. By turning to visual evidence as an equally valid form of documentation, I mean to assert Lucrezia's influence on the visual arts as an irrefutable fact while also suggesting an object-based model by which our own discipline might begin to mitigate the problem of female patronage (and perhaps female agency more broadly) in the written history of fifteenth-century Florence. The Magliabechiano manuscript is precisely the right sort of object, because it can be simultaneously distanced from Piero and connected with Lucrezia. When subjected to a careful visual analysis, the Florentine codex delivers a surprising wealth of information regarding her centrality to the genesis of the work. While no evidence survives that identifies Lucrezia as the paying client for this particular manuscript, the archival record preserves documentation of Lucrezia engaging in a comparable act of patronage. A letter of 1476 to Lucrezia from Benedetto da Cepparello, referring in some detail to a missal in progress in Venice for Lucrezia, demonstrates that she was an involved and discriminating patron of illuminated manuscripts.39 Cepparello's letter makes it clear that Lucrezia was supplying the scribe, Ser Giovanni, with the parchment quires for the manuscript, as well as paying for his

labor and that of the illuminator, a certain Hieronimo. Cepparello writes that "you were advised in a previous letter that Ser Giovanni has begun the work to finish the missal," informing Lucrezia that the scribe "had already written a quire, and was well-disposed to do anything [she] pleased."40 Cepparello's letter affords a glimpse of Lucrezia closely supervising her missal's progress, quire by quire, as it neared completion, and conveys a sense of her authority to reject a product that did not suit her in return for the refund of her investment.41 The case of this missal is useful in the context of the Magliabechiano manuscript because it presents a documentary basis from which to posit Lucrezia as its "official" patron. The letter is suggestive but not conclusive, and thus similar to other archival hints of her patronage that fail to serve as irrefutable proof. A serious study of the visual record, however, yields much more. Most important, it makes possible an attribution of the hand that illuminated her manuscript-a fundamental step toward attributing her own "hand" in the finished product. The codex's Lombard text notwithstanding, both the format and style of its frontispiece are unmistakably Florentine (Fig. 2). The illumination frames the manuscript's first page of text with a rectangular border composed of a curling white plant form, known as blanchi girari, rendered from the negative space of the blank parchment. Artists in the orbit of Cosimo de' Medici developed the bianchi girari border, and because of the unprecedented taste for humanist manuscripts the Florentine ruler seems to have nurtured in his two sons, Piero and Giovanni, this type reached its height in both quality and popularity at midcentury.42 The Vita's frontispiece-a scrolling vine stem inhabited by figures and animals and following a rectangular gold-leaf frame around the page-is a modestly sized but particularly high-quality example of this type. Piero, during his most intense period of book collecting in the 145Os, favored an artist called Francesco d'Antonio del Chierico (ca. 1433-1484) over all other manuscript illuminators working in Florence at that time, commissioning from him numerous volumes, including the most costly and precious in his library.43 Francesco d'Antonio, who matriculated in the guild of San Paolo in 1452, soon established his own shop and secured commissions from several illustrious patrons, including Alfonso V (king of Aragn and Sicily) and Federico di Montefeltro (duke of Urbino and the renowned condottiere and patron of Piero della Francesca) .44 Visual evidence demonstrates that the Magliabechiano frontispiece is indeed the autograph work of Francesco d'Antonio and places Lucrezia in these prestigious ranks. Among the finest examples of Francesco d'Antonio's firmly attributed work from the mid1450s is the sumptuously decorated frontispiece of Saint Jerome's Epistulae (Fig. 5).45 This work illustrates the key facets of the artist's unique approach to the standard bianchi girari border and provides a documented basis for comparison with Lucrezia's contemporary Vita. While scholars of manuscript illumination tend to privilege historiated initials when characterizing an artist's oeuvre, Francesco d'Antonio's unique approach to the whole of the decorated page warrants focus, instead, on the vinestem frieze. Intricate and proliferous without becoming tangled, stylized, or overly symmetrical, Francesco d'Antonio's vine stems seem to follow a natural process of growth as they fill the border and encircle the text. On this

particular frontispiece, two thick, white stems originate in the lower margin, growing out of and away from a multicolored floral base. These twin shoots each split apart and then continue their busily scrolling course until the entire border surges with twisting, vegetative form. The vines themselves combine robust form with curvilinear grace, giving an impression of ever-shooting, generative growth. Because of the organic logic to which they adhere, Francesco d'Antonio's curling vine stems render the decorative border as a perfectly balanced living organism. The stability of this vine stem, given the energy of its inhabitants, who further activate the border with a living, breathing, and often rollicking presence, is a compositional accomplishment. Another key characteristic that sets Francesco d'Antonio's frontispiece illumination apart from that of his contemporaries is, in fact, the vivacity and playfulness of the figures. In the Epistulae frontispiece, putti leap, crouch, and turn in space while fighting, riding animals, playing music, and chasing butterflies. Birds perch, twist, and stretch toward their human and animal counterparts. Human figures and animals involve themselves in dynamic, and often humorous, exchanges: two putti spar with snails, for example (at upper right), while a bird nips another cherubic boy in the rear (above left). And the creatures inhabiting this vine stem exist in a symbiotic relation with it, reinforcing the sense of balance inherent in the plant itself. Rather than appearing mounted to the border, as though existing on a separate two-dimensional plane, these little figures read as integrated with the greater, living, composition. Moreover, Francesco d'Antonio expertly integrated the poses and actions of all his living beings into the overall composition of the vine-stem frieze. Not only do they react to, and support themselves on, the stem and its gold-leaf frame, but they also respond to the flow of the stem and the contours of the border in a way that respects and enhances the organic integrity of the frieze as a whole. Careful observation of the putti in the Epistulae frontispiece reveals Francesco d'Antonio's skillful articulation of the human form, a mastery of the brush that sets this artist apart from his contemporaries. He renders flesh and muscle structure with a delicate sfumato, preferring subtle brushstrokes and lightly tinted washes of color to crisply defined line. The resulting figures are vibrantly individualized, never ponderous or schematically rendered. Francesco d'Antonio's treatment of the birds and animals further reinforces one's sense of this artist's interest in the natural world while revealing his skill as a colorist and master of composition. Despite their naturalistic qualities, these birds are fantastically colored in hues that echo those of the border's background, a choice that minimizes the visual distinction between the two planes of depth. Even the potentially mechanical application of these conventional background colors confirms Francesco d'Antonio's sensitivity to color and composition; his precise and subtle variation of the tiny fields of pink, green, and blue creates an overall impression of a truly multicolored field that grounds, and surrounds, the scrolling vine stem. Again, we see a sensitivity to the relation between part and whole that characterizes Francesco d'Antonio's manuscript production. His work, as exemplified by the Epistulae, can be distinguished not only by the facility with which he renders form and figure and his subtle sense of color and composition but also by his tendency to marshal these skills in the service

of his conception of the vine-stem border as a vital and organic form. A comparison of this frontispiece with the work of two prominent Florentine illuminators also patronized by the Medici during the 1450s-Ricciardo di Nanni and Filippo di Matteo Torelli46demonstrates the uniqueness of Francesco d'Antonio's approach to the standard, high-end illuminated frontispiece of that moment. A luxurious edition of Pliny's Natural History,47 a manuscript to which Francesco d'Antonio and Ricciardo di Nanni each contributed, nicely highlights key differences between these two artists' work. Among the small but tour-de-force figures Francesco d'Antonio included on this manuscript's title page is an active horn-blowing cherub (Fig. 6) whose vibrant form is rendered with a wonderfully quick line, the curves and creases of his chubby body expertly modeled in pink and green-brown washes and with the subtlest of hatch marks. One notes that throughout the remainder of this manuscript, illuminated by Ricciardo di Nanni, the figures lack this subdety of wash and facility of line; they are shaded in discernible vertical fields of light to dark, the emphasis placed on the definition of the chest and shoulders and on the visible musculature (Figs. 7, 8). Ricciardo seems, moreover, more interested in creating sheer visual excitement than he is in presenting the vine stem as an organic form; a multitude of large figures, animals, and birds burst from the twisting, doubled, gold-leaf frame, spanning and blocking the whole border and preventing any sense of growth or generation.48 Similarly, an examination of Filippo di Matteo Torelli's illumination of a luxurious Medicicommissioned edition of the works of John Cassian49 affirms Francesco d'Antonio's unique style. On folio 46 verso (Fig. 9), the vine stem originates on the lower border with four thin shoots that twist away and curl chaotically back. And while Francesco d'Antonio's vine stem typically continues around the various illuminated medallions, Torelli treats these medallions as impasses, forcing the stem to stop and restart several times. There is, in other words, no single growing form. The overall effect highlights surface pattern and decoration rather than presenting a living, organic entity. In the same way, the putti are less subtly rendered and more schematic in their physiology than those of Francesco d'Antonio, and their interaction with the border, as well as its animals and birds, is less fluid and responsive. The above description of Francesco d'Antonio's work makes evident the premium the artist placed on vivacity within the standard blanchi girari frontispiece; individual figures and creatures inhabiting his decorative friezes surge with life, and he takes care that the vine stems do the same. The other major artists working in this genre of humanist manuscript illumination, despite the visual vibrancy of their work, do not share what seems to be Francesco d'Antonio's overriding priority: preserving the organic integrity of the vinestem form. Given this clear distinction, a close examination of the frontispiece of the Magliabechiano Vita (Fig. 2)-the characteristics of its individual components and the logic of its composition as a whole-allows a confident attribution of the illumination to the hand of Francesco d'Antonio del Chierico. The lively and humorous inhabitants of the Vita's vine stem are perhaps the most immediately recognizable signs of the artist's style. The eight playful putti within the border (four others act as supporting figures on the bas de page) are fully active. One dashes,

smiling, to the left; another plays a musical instrument; a third, joined by a curious bird, peeks over the illuminated initial as though observing the actions of the child Baptist within. Two others ride atop a donkey, chased by a bodiless bird, who, growing before the viewer's eyes out of the scrolling stem, pierces the border's outer edge with his beak and nips the animal in the rear end. Still more playful putti commune spontaneously with the various birds. Each of these motifs-putti dashing, making music, riding animals, and responding to the other living beings in the vine stem-can be seen repeatedly throughout Francesco d'Antonio's oeuvre. Significantly, the delicate rendering of these little figures marks them as products of his own hand, rather than of a shop assistant. Swift passes of a soft brown ink just a touch darker than that of the vine stem-lines quickly sketched, but that nevertheless manage to convey great detail-delineate their forms. Contours of musculature and flesh are modeled with the most delicate of washes, moving from a muted brown with touches of green, to suggest definition, to a translucent peachy pink that subtly blushes the flesh and increases its plasticity. All of the expertly detailed birds also correspond to Francesco d'Antonio's unique type.50 Colored exclusively in pink, green, and blue, this fantasy species typical of his work is physically characterized by slim necks, teardrop wings, and a long tail fanning out slightly at the end. These birds do not compromise the structure, or flow, of the vine stem they inhabit; rather, their long bodies supply several strong lines that cut at different angles across the border and its gold-leaf frame, providing occasional breaks from the regularity of its rectangular shape. Their coloration, identical to that of the background, prevents the birds from interrupting the vine stem's flowing form or compromising the border's uniformly multicolored field. Adhering to Francesco d'Antonio's organic logic, the birds respect the integrity of the living border while subtly serving the composition. Despite all the action and visual pull of the inhabitants of Francesco's border, then, the artist goes to lengths to preserve the integrity of the vine stem, supporting its natural growth up the page. And the swirling bianchi girari of the Magliabechiano Vita are typical of Francesco d'Antonio's frontispieces. They have a clear source in the lower border, where two thick shoots generate the remainder of the scrolling forms that fill the decorative frame. While the stem surges with movement, its course is one of logical growth that can be followed from its origin to any given point. It is a vibrant but rational plant-full of an energy that pushes the bounds of order, but that never falls into chaos. Also characteristic of Francesco d'Antonio's work is the natural diminution from the thicker, more robust sections of stem to the thinnest wisps, a tendency that enhances the impression of growth. This logic continues even in the area outside the decorative frame, where Francesco d'Antonio employs the same fluid, impressionistic line he used to create the putti, here in the service of the proliferating vine stem. While embellishing the gold-leaf disks adorning the page's edge with flourishes of ink was a common practice, Francesco d'Antonio used this standard ink work to organically integrate the border with those items extraneous to it. Not limiting himself to the customary gold disks, he unleashed sprouting flowers and leaves, animals, and even putti from the text's decorated frame. These elements, while external to the border, seem to have sprung directly from it as excess products of the vine stem's continuous growth, borne into the void

of blank parchment by Francesco d'Antonio's spontaneously calligraphic line. These external details are anything but extraneous when it comes to the issue of attribution, because they reveal the master's hand controlling the whole of the decorationdown to its most peripheral details. So while it is revealing that Lucrezia employed such a skilled and prominent artist in the Magliabechiano frontispiece, the presence of his hand even in the margins elevates the commission to another level altogether. Just how rare such a situation might have been is indicated by the fact that as early as the mid-1450s members of Francesco d'Antonio's shop were placed in charge of major commissions, including an exceptionally luxurious three-volume Livy, the so-called Deche del Re, executed for King Alfonso V about 1455.51 I offer this argument based on stylistic attribution, quality, and the trace of the master's hand with purpose and methodological self-awareness. In pursuing the origins of the Magliabechiano frontispiece, the identity of the painter, his status as exceptionally skilled and highly sought-after among elite patrons, and the fact that this relatively modest frontispiece for an obscure vernacular poem happens to be his "autograph" work are each vital bits of evidence. They allow one to position Lucrezia as the force behind a particularly "high-level" commission and to recognize that her frontispiece trumped even the illuminated pages of King Alfonso's Livy in terms of the personal attention Francesco d'Antonio lavished on it. While such knowledge is hardly relevant in the context of male patronage, acknowledging that women, too, could operate in the orbit of "great artists," and that they desired works of a certain "quality," is important in the context of an initial study of female patronage, as the recovery of female agency still retains currency in this specific scholarly field. However-and precisely because of its difficulty of access-the act of recuperation is not enough. If discovering the smoking guns that would identify women patrons of specific objects is accepted as an archival impossibility, it is crucial to consider different means by which we might begin to see this notably elusive historical picture with better clarity. The Patron's Share It is clear that Francesco d'Antonio found, in the commission for the Magliabechiano Vita, a space for creative experimentation and development of his conception of the illuminated frontispiece. The artist, in treating the conventional vinestem design as a vital, living form rather than a schematic abstraction, ironically pushed the standard decorative border of the midcentury humanist manuscript to its limits. Those limits are keenly felt in the frontispiece of the Magliabechiano Vita; the pulsing organic form seems to generate elements that can no longer be contained by the frame. Both flowers and figures spill out from the border onto the page's edge and into the bounded, internal space usually reserved for the text-a foreshadowing of the eventual breakdown of the bianchigirari type in Francesco d'Antonio's work. By 1461, in fact, the artist abandoned the curling white vine stems for a wholly new kind of border decoration, exemplified by a two-volume Plutarch commissioned by Piero de' Medici, that would occupy Francesco d'Antonio during the mature period of his career and eventually spell the end of the vine-stem border's popularity.52 The frontispiece illumination of these two manuscripts (Fig. 10) is marked by the absence of a strict format; the artist has

replaced the traditional vine-stem border with an airy and delicate frieze whose background is nothing but the blank parchment. His new decorative frames incorporate countless putti, animals, flowers, and gold disks, yet these elements no longer exist as separate from the vegetation. Rather, they merge into it, becoming the very fabric of the frieze. With this work, Francesco d'Antonio achieves the living, organic whole he seems to have been pushing toward in his earlier explorations with the vine-stem border. With the hindsight afforded by the Medici Plutarch, the elements external to the border of the Magliabechiano Vita can be understood as an early investigation, on the part of the artist, of the ways in which disparate motifs might be incorporated into a vegetative structure and allowed to work within that structure as living transmitters of its generative growth. Particularly telling is the passage flanking the text body to the right (Fig. 11). Here, the vine stem within the frame seems to have issued several curling wisps of ink. To the left, these lines grow into the stem of a blue flower, which, in turn, sprouts a golden disk. Above the flower, the lines become supports for a little winged putto, who holds onto yet more curving lines as though they were stems. These lines, in turn, generate more gold disks. A butterfly feeding on the blue flower continues this series of forms downward, linking it with further clusters of gold disks below, again placed on "stems" of ink line so that they appear to have sprung, alive, from the border. In this passage Francesco d'Antonio works outside the standard box of the frame both vertically and horizontally in order to incorporate new elements within a growing, evolving structure. The "offshoot" passage of the vine-stem border reveals Francesco d'Antonio in the process of elaborating an innovative and influential new style for the illuminated frontispiece. Not only is this glimpse of an important creative moment further evidence for the argument that Francesco d'Antonio was responsible for the whole of the frontispiece, but it also begins to provide information about the nature of the working relationship between the artist and his patron. It is clear that Francesco d'Antonio found, in this project specifically, an open opportunity to develop his conception of the decorative border from which he could move toward his complete transformation of the established blanchi girari frame seen first in the Medici Plutarch. The relationship between artist and patron comes into sharper focus with an examination of the Magliabechiano Vita's historiated initial. For if we can see, from the vine-stem border, that Francesco d'Antonio creatively nudged boundaries while working at Lucrezia's behest, a close look at the illuminated initial discloses that his inventiveness was connected quite directly to her personal interests and expectations. The real subject of the Magliabechiano Vita's illumination is, after all, Saint John the Baptist-an especial preoccupation in Lucrezia's spiritual life, as documented by her own writing.53 Saint John appears in the Magliabechiano frontispiece initial as a haloed and hair-shirted young boy walking down a rocky path that forms the bank of a blue stream (Fig. 12). By the mid-fifteenth century, the child Baptist's purposeful lateral stride through a natural setting was a well-established visual convention for invoking his precocious passage into the wildernessthe Lucan account of the young saint's renunciation of the mundane for a life of penitence in

preparation for the coming of Christ.54 The decision to make this moment the visual companion to the Magliabechiano manuscript's hagiographie poem, though, was hardly predictable; the accompanying text takes no interest in recounting the saint's childhood story and contains no precise narrative correlate to the scene chosen for its illuminated initial.55 The image's Florentine provenance throws the peculiarity of the selection of this scene into further relief. While depictions of the Baptist's youthful retreat into the wilderness were not uncommon in Florence, they had always been restricted to public narrative cycles of the saint's life.56 Isolating a single moment of Saint John's story in the context of a private, devotional manuscript that did not contain a correlate text, in other words, must have been the product of a highly specific and personal request. It is in the initial, in fact, that the Magliabechiano manuscript seems to most reflect the interests of Lucrezia Tornabuoni. When it came to Saint John the Baptist, Lucrezia was one of the most powerful original voices in later-fifteenthcentury Florence: Saint John appears in her laudi, or poems of praise, and she also penned her own Vita di San Giovanni Battista, a verse narrative of 159 stanzas dedicated exclusively to his life and death. But it should be emphasized that the connection between Lucrezia's devotional interests and Francesco d'Antonio's representation ought not be reduced to a straightforward directive about subject matter, however innovative. The central subject of the Magliabechiano Vita's illumination is more complicated than it might appear at first glance, and the artist's nuanced and powerful manipulation of narrative can be accounted for only in the context of a complex level of understanding of the proclivities and expectations of his viewing audience. The image reads as Saint John entering the desert, and this is precisely what the early-twentiethcentury art historian Paolo d'Ancona saw when he wrote his brief catalog description of the manuscript, the only instance when the frontispiece appeared in print.57 To assign Francesco d'Antonio's image to a single "scene," though, is to inappropriately truncate its potential for meaning. The artist surely intended to evoke the moment of Saint John's departure for the wilderness, but Francesco d'Antonio also expanded the narrative-and theological-possibilities of the child in motion. The Baptist, who strides purposefully to the left, points emphatically at another boy waiting just outside the vertical boundary created by the initial. The second child, easily identifiable as Christ by the cross he carries and his cruciform halo, beckons John with outstretched arms, his left hand turned palm up in a gesture, it would seem, of welcome. In not confining the action of this scene to the space of the initial, Francesco d'Antonio succeeded in denoting an additional narrative moment: the two boys' apocryphal childhood encounter during the holy family's return to Judea, through the desert, after seven years in Egypt.58 Christ's propitious meeting with John, understood as a product of both geographic coincidence and divine inspiration, had entered the Baptist's Florentine hagiographie tradition by way of yet another anonymous Vita di San Giovanni Battista.59 This text, dating from the early fourteenth century but wildly popular through the fifteenth, constitutes a treasure trove of narrative detail that more than made up for what the Gospels had left out of their accounts

of the saint's childhood. The boys' encounter, according to this text, is an instance of John's youthful recognition of Christ as savior-a sort of out-of-the-womb adaptation of the Visitation in which John runs toward Jesus, throws himself on the ground, and kisses his feet. While Christ, in this version of John's biography, receives his cousin with kisses and warm embraces, he reveals the fundamental purpose of the meeting with the blessing "peace be with you, preparer of my way."60 Christ's purpose is to provide John with a complete foreknowledge of the Passion, including an understanding of his fundamental role as Christ's precursor and baptizer. Francesco d'Antonio incorporates these two ideas in the image, too. The rocky path can be understood as a reference to John's charge to prepare the way for the coming Messiah, and the visible strip of running stream at the base of the composition alludes to the waters of Christ's Baptism (in the trecento Vita, the setting for the reunion is, in fact, the bank of the River Jordan). The historiated initial of the Magliabechiano frontispiece relies on the trecento Life for the narrative of the boys' reunion, then, but the image also reflects the specific purpose given, in that text, for their meeting: to underscore the Baptist's prophetic connection to Christ's fate as the savior of humankind. Francesco d'Antonio makes this link by connecting the figure of the Baptist visually and thematically to the space of the vine-stem border outside the initial. The young Baptist, toting a cross and clutching a banderole bearing the first letters of his weighty pronouncement, "behold the lamb of God," makes the significance of his leftward movement explicit.61 The crisp gold-leaf boundary of the initial P separates the Baptist from Christ, yet Francesco d'Antonio renders this divider a powerfully charged zone between their outstretched hands, in which the boys' individual gestures unite to form a single diagonal that becomes an extension of the Baptist's stride. Rather than using the initial to delineate the scene within, Francesco d'Antonio transforms it into a powerful threshold, and Saint John approaches its edge with every intention of crossing over-an eventuality the artist conveys beautifully by rendering the two boys as mirror images of each other in stance, gesture, and the positioning of their matching crosses. The Christ Child welcomes the young saint from the terrestrial sphere bound by the initial into a sort of paradise represented by the lush vinestem border bustling with putti and birds. A painted goldfinch (distinct among the many birds in the illuminated border for its naturalistic coloration), conspicuously perched above the initial separating these two realms, adds a premonitory note to the scene. A traditional symbol of Christ's Passion, the goldfinch infuses the boys' meeting with the promise of their adult fates; John's martyrdom, a before-the-fact imitatio Christi that reverses the natural flow of time, will seal his destined role as the precursor of Christ. The two crosses, echoing each other on either side of the border, reference not simply Christ's Crucifixion but also John's foreknowledge of the Passion and participation in it by way of his own martyrdom. Ultimately, Saint John's leftward movement evokes far more than a single narrative moment in the life of the Baptist. Francesco d'Antonio exploited the conventional format of the bianchi girari frontispiece in order to create an inventive and powerful visual meditation on the Baptist's ascetic retreat as it related to his central theological role as precursor, which in turn invoked the great drama of human salvation. Francesco d'Antonio's initial is a diminutive

composition with expansive meaning, and his achievement depended on his working outside, or beyond, the conventions of both his subject matter and format. There was no Florentine precedent for presenting a single image of the child Baptist as a complex embodiment of diverse narrative moments and essential theological tenets. And conventionally, the space of the historiated initial was a tightly bound one occupied by straightforward portraits or vignettes. So again we see Francesco pushing through boundaries in the context of his work for Lucrezia. In this instance, however, the results are intimately tied to her own knowledge and spiritual concerns. As noted, Lucrezia expressed her devotion to Saint John the Baptist in her writing. Among the several sacred narratives of biblical figures she penned, her verse life of the saint, considered her most inspired and original work,62 is the most revealing of a personal connection between author and protagonist. Lucrezia speaks of her reverence for the Baptist directly in the poem, claiming to have taken on the project of writing it "out of devotion to the gracious and worthy saint," and, in an early stanza addressing her possible detractors, she further describes that devotion as both fervent and unremitting: I realize that this enterprise is too weighty for one who knows nothing about making poetry, and that I will be corrected by those who do understand. But I hope they will use discretion, seeing how my mind burns-as I have said with constant devotion for him, and not for anything else; thus love makes me bold.63 This image of a constant preoccupation with a sacred object of desire, a mind "burning" with the sort of focused, exclusive spiritual passion one usually associates with late medieval mystical traditions, presents a rare window into the personal devotional psychology of a lay writer from this period. Indeed, Lucrezia is most likely aligning herself with just such traditions in this stanza-as indicated by her description of the poem as a "vision"-and in so doing she makes a subtle claim for spiritual authority that cleverly subverts her rather obligatory statement of poetic humility. Such authority is certainly borne out by the remainder of the poem, in which Lucrezia wields her comprehensive knowledge of the Baptist's scriptural and apocryphal traditions in order to construct her own, original version of this chapter of sacred history. Significantly, the same trecento text that shaped Francesco d'Antonio's historiated initial of the young saint is a central source for her own poem. It would be misleading to suggest that Lucrezia (or Francesco d'Antonio, for that matter) had an exclusive interest in, or claim to, the trecento Vita. This popular text was the main source for Florentines' knowledge of their patron saint's childhood, and it had already been used by artists to guide or inflect their representations of Saint John, particularly in the context of his childhood.64 It would be equally mistaken, though, to conceive of the trecento Vita as a culturally untethered narrative, on the one hand, or as a simple artist's sourcebook, on the other. This text was widely known but precisely

grounded in fifteenth-century Florence, within the rich devotional culture embodied and transmitted by personally owned manuscripts.65 The experience of reading the trecento Vita in quattrocento Florence was shaped by its readers' belief that its story influenced the health (salute, synonymous with salvation) of their souls. Chonsiglio di Michele di Cerchi made explicit notation of this conviction in his fifteenthcentury manuscript copy of the text, stating that it was intended not only "to give a good example" but also to grant "consolation to the souls that will read it."66 Chonsiglio's codex contained only the trecento Vita, but such self-sufficient versions were the exception rather than the rule. Many manuscripts brought other hagiographie material together with the story of the Baptist,67 which more often than not formed part of a varied body of devotional texts that made up an individual codex. Chosen according to the spiritual needs and tastes of the individual manuscript owner, this material ran the gamut from gospels, sermons, doctrinal exposition, prayers, and hymns of praise to prophecies, pilgrimage accounts, and Dante's verse.68 Cherucio di Pagolo Cheruci finished copying his own version of the trecento Vita in 1454, having chosen a confessional text, a sacred poem on the Crucifixion, an exposition of the Pater Noster, and the lives of three other saints to accompany that of the Baptist.69 Cherucio's notations within the manuscript give a sense of his belief in the prayerlike nature and salvific potential of hagiographie texts like the trecento Vita. "The legend of Saint John the Baptist," he noted before penning his personal copy, "as those who read it will see, is very beautiful and devout, and is to inspire great devotion."70 In his entry before the Life of Saint Francis, Cherucio was more explicit about the effects of reading saints' stories: "here begins the legend of Saint Francis, which is very devout and beautiful," he wrote, "through His love, God will have grace on him who reads it with devotion."71 Chonsiglio di Michele di Cerchi, too, understood the trecento Vita as devotional material in and of itself, referring to it as the "meditations of the blessed John the Baptist."72 Similarly, Cherucio refers to the legend of Saint Brendan as "a beautiful and devout prayer" and is quite clear on its purpose: "whichever person says this prayer for themselves or for their soul, or rather for the soul of their mother or father or friend, your sins will be pardoned; you will be saved from the punishments of hell."73 As part of the varied tissue of devotional material assisting the manuscript reader's chances for salvation, hagiographie narratives like the trecento Vita were not merely exempla for the devout to follow but spiritually potent texts whose salvific efficacy began with their reading.74 Lucrezia's poetic production, by which she made herself a vehicle for the transmission of these kinds of narratives, depended on an extreme level of absorption and participation in the devotional culture in which they were written and read. The overtly intertextual nature of the act of rewriting sacred history-a practice based on alluding to, appropriating, and recasting diverse strands of scriptural and apocryphal tradition-required its authors to be embedded within its institutions of knowledge and related conventions of spiritual practice. Lucrezia's connection to the Baptist's hagiographie tradition can be understood, then, in terms of the vast learning (or reading) required for the production of her work, but this engagement should be seen, in itself, as an active form of piety. So while an awareness of Saint John's story was

not her exclusive province, neither was Lucrezia an average reader of hagiographie texts.75 As one might expect, the imagery of the frontispiece of her personal manuscript reflects this. The complexity and originality of Francesco d'Antonio's visual fashioning of Lucrezia's favorite saint can be seen as a response to a patron whose rich hagiographie knowledge, and the act of exercising it through the writing of poetry, was central to her spiritual practice.76 It is fitting to consider Lucrezia's patronage of the Magliabechiano manuscript, in terms of the text it contains, in this context. She obviously had an interest in acquiring more of the Baptist's life than even the Florentine tradition had to offer (and Filelfo's poem added a relatively prestigious strand to the fabric of her knowledge), but possessing this text also opened up new opportunities for the devotional act of reading that was fundamental to her own spiritual practice and that of many during this period, including-and especiallywomen. The centrality of reading to Lucrezia's religious life comes into sharp focus in her correspondence with Florence's preeminent spiritual authority at midcentury, Antoninus Pierozzi, the Dominican friar and future saint who served as the city's archibishop from 1446 until his death in 1459.77 Antoninus was the confessor of Lucrezia's sister, Dianora, for whom he wrote a spiritual manual, a laywoman's version of a monastic "rule" known as the Opera a ben vivere. Lucrezia knew this work and requested a more rigorous version of it for herself; Antoninus complied, penning a new version of the text in his own hand.78 Antoninus's most pointed advice to Lucrezia regards her devotional engagement with sacred texts-more specifically, the act of reading as a springboard for contemplative prayer. As a laywoman with family obligations, Lucrezia should not, advised Antoninus, saddle herself with the consuming undertaking of the recitation of the entire Divine Office, as would be required in a monastic context. Instead, she ought to focus on "holy and devout reading" as a spiritual practice effective in maintaining an elevated state of mind-a crucial weapon in the perennial battle against worldliness, which, as Antoninus himself noted, was a particularly challenging fight for Lucrezia as a member of the worldly Medici family.79 Antoninus reinforced the linked practices of reading and mental prayer, "lezione e orazione mentale," as Lucrezia's most effective means of resisting the pull of this world. The child Baptist, whose narrative turned on a dramatic act of renunciation, was a perfect role model-or contemplative object-for these elevated pursuits. It is interesting in this regard that the Lombard poem of the Magliabechiano manuscript, while it does not approach Saint John's childhood by way of the detailed apocryphal narrative so beloved by the Florentines, focuses on the child saint, more abstractly, as a figure of abstinence and abnegation. Saint John's rejection, in this text, of specifically aristocratic pleasures-horses and hounds, falcons and hawks, brocade and embroidered finery, and luxurious food and drink-must have resonated within the princely Visconti context in which it was produced, and these courtly tastes would have struck a similarly powerful chord in the heart of Medicean Florence.80 The painted Baptist of the Magliabechiano manuscript is, in fact, a perfect exemplar for the spiritual life Antoninus advocated in Lucrezia's Opera a ben vivere, by training his thoughts completely toward God, and "always keeping his heart oriented to heaven,"81 the hair-shirted young

ascetic retains his elevated focus and steadfast rejection of the material world. It is in its evocation of this larger theme of the child Baptist's ascetic path, rather than in a precise correlation with narrative moment, that Francesco d'Antonio's illumination corresponds to the text it illustrates. The boy's leftward stride powerfully invokes his repudiation of the world, and while John's entry into the wilderness is obviously not the whole story told by the picture, his act of departure frames the scene's temporally expansive possibilities. It is, after all, his desire to connect with God that propels John into the harsh desert as a young boy; his departure is the product of his decision to prepare, penitentially, for such an encounter by turning away from the world. Francesco d'Antonio's depiction of the Christ Child, welcoming and mirroring the Baptist from the paradisiacal space beyond the boundary of the initial, brings the heavenly and earthly realms within close range of each other. Significantly, however, the connection remains incomplete: the two children are eternally suspended in the moment just before their encounter. This choice makes the threshold between the earthly and heavenly worlds-or the exposed possibility of the two merging together-the real subject of the frontispiece illumination. The viewer is left with the job of completing the circuitry, or, more precisely, she is invited to contemplate the means by which an encounter not simply between Christ and the Baptist, but also between heaven and earth, or even between life and death, could be granted. The little putto and his bird companion peering over the right border of the initial seem to thematize this active role of the viewer, and they underscore the dramatic association between the Baptist and the larger vinestem border into which he strides. Integrating the illuminated initial visually and symbolically into an overall decorative scheme falls completely in line with Francesco d'Antonio's vision of an organic and wholly integral frontispiece, while an image of Saint John the Baptist that functioned as an open container for meditative prayer would have been right in line with Lucrezia's expectations.82 The relation between the creative goals of the artist and the devotional expectations of the patron is, in this case, one of remarkable synchronicity. The visual evidence of the Magliabechiano frontispiece reveals that working on Lucrezia's manuscript produced an environment that fostered Francesco d'Antonio's originality and invention, and the imagery he produced, in turn, tapped into Lucrezia's highly specific knowledge and devotional concerns. Both parties were thus served by the relationship on a practical level, but this marked mutual benefit can also be situated in the context of identity. The commission gave Francesco d'Antonio the scope to demonstrate a combination of mastery, individuality, and innovative originality that resonated with the period's evolving cultural definition of "artist." For Lucrezia the situation was more complex; while the manuscript helped fuel her broad self-fashioning as an exceptionally devout and superliterate woman, it also had important implications for her identity as an art patron-a category that, as Jill Burke has recently argued, was itself in the process of formation in Florence during precisely this moment.83 Burke approaches the notion of "art patronage" carefully as a historically and culturally specific term that should be employed only in instances that resemble the contemporary

social system of patronage, in which relationships between patrons and clients were predicated on the assumed virtue of both parties and sustained by their mutual gain. These kinds of relationships, and not those based on business transactions alone, were, according to Burke, fundamental to the idealized definition of the "art patron" that emerged, inevitably, alongside that of the "artist." Within the framework of the category "art patron" as fifteenthcentury Florentines were coming to know it, according to Burke, mutually beneficial relationships between artists and patrons were both central and theorized within a framework of friendship, or amicizia, that tended to obliterate the inevitable imbalance of social status.84 In the case of the relationship between Francesco d'Antonio and Lucrezia, this leveling effect would have operated on the plane of gender as well. In Burke's account, it was the ennobling possibility of a "meeting of minds" cutting across social hierarchies that could transform a commercial transaction into something that Renaissance people would have understood as art patronage. Burke cites a powerful example in her discussion of the double portrait of Filippino Lippi and his friend and patron Piero del Pugliese, but she notes that such instances of "true" patronage relationships were probably the exception rather than the rule. If this is the case, the reciprocal relationship that produced the Magliabechiano manuscript was both rare and potent in its ability to accommodate Lucrezia's self-identification as a patron of art. But how does one transcend the impossibility of reconstructing the nuances, or even the basic mechanics, of this reciprocally beneficial relationship? Even the 1476 letter from Benedetto da Cepparello does not convey the slightest hint of what Lucrezia might have requested, in the first place, from the scribe or the illuminator of the missal she commissioned, or which of her concerns might have shaped the manuscript as it progressed toward completion. And in the case of the Magliabechiano codex, we have no way of knowing how Lucrezia's specific directives, desires, or proclivities were communicated to Francesco d'Antonio, or whether she was the one who ultimately paid him for his work. The irretrievability of such details is not simply regrettable; in this instance, it becomes a productive absence that forces a conceptualization of female patronage that does not privilege our knowledge of the precise circumstances that brought works of art into being. The Magliabechiano manuscript is a concrete deposit of a relationship between an artist and a Florentine woman-a connection that produced experimental, exploratory, and, ultimately, quite innovative results. Might we not allow, then, the visual traces left by artists responding to women's expectations to constitute a framework for studying their productive, and even creative, contributions to the visual arts, especially given that such a model is conspicuously missing from this period's historiography?85 The particular tenor of the imagery that resulted from Francesco d'Antonio's visual answer to Lucrezia's expectations is an important point on which to dwell when considering such a model. The artist pulled out all the creative stops to fashion for Lucrezia an image that resonated in the highly specific area of contemplative piety, which was a realm over which one can readily imagine her presiding in the context of her own family. Yet it does not necessarily follow that the manuscript was exclusively "for" her. If other members of the Medici household read its text and reflected on Francesco d'Antonio's imagery, then they

might have shared in the spiritual currency they offered and hoped to reap its rewards. Even Lucrezia's personal acts of devotion that her manuscript may have inspired need to be seen in a collective spirit, for the redemption she sought was not simply her own but that of her whole family. There is ample evidence that Lucrezia lived a religious life much in the service of others, a fact that she articulates in her own poetry; her purpose in writing a poem on the Baptist was, in her words, "so that my and others' devotion may grow!" seen in this light, Lucrezia emerges as a woman cut from the same cloth as her male relatives, whose patronage often had a corporate dimension, whether in the mechanics of the commission itself or in the message of the finished product.86 Lowe and Tomas have both discussed the joint patronage of Lucrezia and Piero,87 and, given the family's proclivity for joint commissions, one might even speculate that Lucrezia's husband, Piero, played a role in securing the text or hiring the artist, but this possibility of shared agency hardly diminishes her individual contribution to the finished product; it simply suggests that she operated much like the other members of her familywho, it could be added, have long been considered among the greatest patrons of Western art. While Lucrezia's patronage of the Lombard Vita made perfect sense given her extreme devotion to the Baptist, its highly visible dedication to the deceased father-in-law of the current Milanese duke and Medici ally, Francesco I Sforza, meant that the codex resonated beyond the individual, or even spiritual level. An allusion to Medici political allegiances in this manuscript is not as out of place as it might seem, given Lucrezia's role in furthering the reputation and ambitions of her family. Recent scholarship on Lucrezia has brought much to light concerning the effect of two other forms of family-based patronage-intercession and religious charity-on her family's power.88 Lucrezia's bustling activity as an arbiter of influence between Medici men and diverse "clients" is evidenced by numerous letters soliciting favors of all sorts. Patrizia Salvadori, the modern editor of Lucrezia's correspondence, refers to Lucrezia's intercessory role as her "personal contribution" to an aggressive, expansionist Medici family politics. Similarly, Tomas interprets Lucrezia's "clientage" as an asset to Medici power within the city's informal political networks, or sottogoverno-an unofficial realm that was a particularly conducive space for the operation of the indirect power that was available to Medici women.89 Lucrezia's charity also built her family's reputation and power base, as Salvador! asserts: as the fame of the benefactress spread by way of the words of a nun or farm manager, so widened the circle of requests, and again the name Medici appeared in new streets, different piazzas, thus expanding, if not a chain of allegiance to the family-which certainly could not have constructed itself on such fragile bases-then at least a recognition of a continually affirmed power.90 Kent pushes such analyses further, arguing for Lucrezia's importance as a "symbol of piety, charity, and reconciliation who played a significant part in her son's maintenance and strengthening of his and their family's pre-eminence in Florence."91 Despite her remarkable activity in the public sphere, Lucrezia's gender frustrated any official role, or direct participation, in it. Tomas's study, in fact, underscores these limitations as they

affected all Medici women, whose worldly influence was always mediated by their relationships with the family men, and whose activities were generally circumscribed by culturally constructed gender roles. Moving back to the Magliabechiano manuscript, one might note that the Milanese allegiance forged on its frontispiece cannot speak to any direct authority on Lucrezia's part. The image rendered within the initial, however, can do just that. The codex was, after all, primarily a devotional work that only tangentially inhabited the public realm of political power, and it is in this more private, domestic, and religious sphere that Lucreziaor, for that matter, any woman-might have been expected to wield a less mediated sort of authority. Antoninus said nothing less when writing to Lucrezia about her spiritual life in the context of the precarious mortal environment created by her family: In your house you are not comforted by the others with prayers and other good words, as we are, that would allow you to maintain a devout mind, but rather, in your situation, it is the complete opposite since, if by your hard labor you do acquire some devotion, you'll necessarily lose it, either completely or in part, because of the many things heard in your house from the entire family-hateful, dishonest, criminal, and worldly words-and because of the fact that generally each person speaks according to their own particular loyalties. Thus, my daughter, if you do not toil all on your own-stealing away time for devout reading and mental prayer-to defend yourself and keep your mind devout and quiet, I believe that you will be helped neither by your husband nor by the others in your house the way we religious are; rather, I fully believe the opposite, that the great devotion that you obtain with reading and prayer, or the comfort you have when you visit the holy monasteries, you will lose completely.92 The archbishop saw Lucrezia as the member of the Medici family most able to practice the contemplative brand of spirituality he understood as crucial to divine redemption. Her special status in this regard could even be inferred as a factor of her gender; as a woman she did not inhabit the worldly realm of power, politics, and deceit, although it necessarily (and, according to the archbishop, unfortunately) impinged on her inner world of "great devotion." If Lucrezia took Antoninus's advice and made "devout reading and mental prayer" her personal defense, then the Magliabechiano manuscript can also be seen as a weapon she helped to forge for that battle. Can we not assume that other womenLucrezia's lesser-known and welldocumented contemporaries-would have done the same? Could it not be the case that much domestic religious imagery from this period was conceived and executed according to the devotional desires and expectations of pious women? Such a hypothesis might frustrate the definition of artistic patronage to the point of rupture, but perhaps this is precisely what is necessary for art historians to open a new chapter in the history of the relation between women and visual culture on the level of creation, production, and-significantly-innovation. Beyond the Manuscript Assigning the Magliabechiano Vita to a particular moment in Francesco d'Antonio's careerfollowing his mastery of the bianchi girari frieze and preceding his development of the new border type represented by the Medici Plutarch-also provides it with a solid terminus ante quern. As Ames-Lewis has pointed out, the first datable example of Francesco d'Antonio's

new, "post-vine stem" style is a lavish Breviary, also executed for the Medici family, which was near completion in 1461.93 Thus, the illumination of the Magliabechiano Vita, transitional yet still an example of the artist's earlier style, must date from before that year. Visual evidence linking this codex to Alfonso's Livy, mentioned above, indicates a date closer to 1455. Attributing this frontispiece to Francesco's hand and dating it with this degree of precision are both factors that permit a reconsideration of Lucrezia Tornabuoni's role as a patron. On the most basic level, the Magliabechiano Vita is important as a concrete and prestigious commission, of an autograph work, from one of the most skilled, innovative, and sought-after illuminators working in Florence. Equally important, the Magliabechiano codex affords a glimpse of Lucrezia operating in a collaborative and influential situation of artistic patronage. It is also revealing that Lucrezia requested the codex not as a widow (a legal state that conferred greater independence) but as a young married woman approaching thirty years of age and on the cusp of becoming the lady of the grandest private residence in the city-the new Medici Palace, which was reaching completion precisely during the mid-1450s.94 The single work of art that scholars have most suggestively connected with Lucrezia was conceived precisely during these years. Filippo Lippi's Adoration of the Child (Fig. 4), the altarpiece for the chapel of the new Medici Palace, belongs to a group of highly innovative works that situate the Virgin adoring the Christ Child in a penitential wilderness setting that offered their viewers a virtual pilgrimage of sorts by transporting them from mundane reality to a devotional space of ascetically charged contemplation. The novelty of the Medici painting was its inclusion of the Baptist; in fact, this was the very first Florentine painting to include the child Saint John in an image of the Virgin and Child, making it the original inspiration for countless images and the source of one of the most influential iconographic invendons of religious art in the Italian Renaissance. Lippi's panel has been associated with Lucrezia for over a century precisely because it seems to reflect her veneration for the saint,95 although, as has been mentioned, the lack of firm documentary evidence connecting her to the commission has allowed recent scholarship to ignore or reject the possibility of her role in its creation.96 The Magliabechiano manuscript puts the hypothesis that Lucrezia influenced Lippi's painting firmly back on the table, and not merely because it documents her activity as a patron of imagery of Saint John the Baptist during the 1450s. Before this moment in Florence, the representation of the saint as a child was limited to narrative cycles that visually recounted his life in public spaces such as the Baptistery of S. Giovanni or the church of S. Croce; the choice to depict the young saint outside this standard narrative framework and in a private context such as the Medici Chapel was highly unusual.97 It is hardly conceivable that the extraordinary iconography of the family altarpiece would also appear as the pictorial subject of Lucrezia's manuscript by mere coincidence-especially given that each of the other artworks known to have originally displayed the impaled Medici-Tornabuoni coat of arms also depict the young saint.98 Another illuminated codex, this one a manuscript of Lucrezia's poetry, features her arms combined with those of her husband and depicts the child Baptist, together with Christ, on

the illuminated frontispiece (Figs. 13, 14).99 An even more telling example, in light of Lucrezia's connection with the Medici Palace Adoration, is Filippo Lippi's so-called Camaldoli Adoration. In 1463 Piero and Lucrezia commissioned the construction of a hermit's cell with requisite altar and altarpiece, dedicated to the Baptist, at Camaldoli, the sacred hermitage of the Camaldolese Order located in eastern Tuscany. Giorgio Vasari recalled the original location and (female) Medici patronage of the panel, which was commissioned, he thought, by the wife of Cosimo de' Medici "to put at the hermitage of Camaldoli, in a hermit's cell for his personal devotions, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist."100 Vasari's designation of Cosimo's wife as the painting's patron, was, however, off by a generation.101 It was Cosimo's son Piero who officially made the gift to Camaldoli, and the altarpiece was originally adorned with Medici and Tornabuoni coats of arms, surely to signal Lucrezia's involvement in the commission.102 Vasari's notoriously weak command of the fifteenth-century Medici family tree is apparent here; it was actually Piero's wife, rather than Cosimo's, who was traditionally associated with the painting.103 The importance of Vasari's account lies not in its error but in its implicit assumption that Lippi's patron was a Medici wife-a tradition that Vasari, who himself worked at Camaldoli while the altarpiece was still in situ, would have been in a particularly good position to absorb. Vasari referred to Lippi's Camaldoli altarpiece as "a panel with the same Nativity of Christ and Saint John the Baptist" that the artist had depicted in the Medici Palace Adoration. Indeed, so close are the two altarpieces in form and content that the Camaldoli Adoration must be understood as a rendition of the earlier painting. Both panels depict a rocky, wooded wilderness and a similar cast of characters: the Virgin, kneeling in adoration of the Christ Child, the child Baptist, a contemplative monastic saint, and the Holy Spirit descending from above as a dove (in the later painting released by a pair of disembodied hands intended as a mystical stand-in for God the Father). The final image known to have originally displayed both Medici and Tornabuoni coats of arms is the Castello Nativity, named for its provenance in the Villa Medici at Castello and attributable to artists from Lippi's shop.104 The painting retains its original Gothicizing frame with two coats of arms adorning its base. Although these stemmi have, over the centuries, been rendered illegible, an inventory of the villa taken in 1638 identifies the original patrons, recording "a panel painting two and one-half braccia tall by one and two-thirds braccia [wide], with adornments and a carved, gilded pediment, on which is painted a Nativity with Our Lord with the Madonna who adores Him, a choir of angels in the sky, [and] the arms of the Medici and the Tornabuoni at the bottom."105 It is difficult to dismiss as coincidence that this painting, too, derives from the Medici Palace Adoration (in the disposition of both Virgin and Child, the bust of God the Father crowning the panel and releasing the Holy Spirit toward the Child below, and the position of the child Baptist just to the Virgin's right). Unlike its predecessor, however, the Castello painting is a proper Nativity, complete with stable, ox, and ass-details perhaps borrowed from Filippo Lippi's earlier altarpiece for S. Vincenzo d'Annalena, the convent founded by the city's most important living female spiritual role model, Annalena Malatesta (1426-1490).106 Lippi had never included the child Baptist in a

Nativity scene, though, and such an original addition on the part of the Castello artist, considering the derivative quality of the panel as a whole, must reflect a specific request of the patron. Thus, each image bearing (or known to have borne) the combined arms of the Medici and Tornabuoni families features the child Baptist. This strong common denominator suggests Lucrezia's influence on both panel paintings-the Camaldoli Adoration and the Castello Nativity-and also shores up the theory that Lucrezia played a role in determining the iconography of the Medici Palace Adoration. The dating of Magliabechiano VII, 49 to a moment in Francesco d'Antonio's career proximate to Filippo Lippi's execution of the Medici altarpiece becomes, in this regard, a crucial piece of evidence. The date of Lippi's panel is not documented but can be placed between the completion of the Medici Palace in about 1457 and the beginning of Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco decoration of the chapel in the summer of 1459.107 Thus, the child Baptist illuminating the frontispiece initial of Francesco d'Antonio's manuscript, a codex commissioned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni, may well predate Lippi's altarpiece. Regardless of whether Lucrezia's manuscript preceded or succeeded Filippo Lippi's Medici Palace Adoration, its attribution satisfies the burden of proof now necessary to connect Lucrezia with the painting. Married women in fifteenth-century Florence rarely acted-legally and on paper-on their own behalf. Given the close association between the city's patriarchal structure and the limitations of its archival legacy, it is only logical (if regrettable) that Lucrezia would not be firmly tied by traditional documentary evidence to any of the Medici family's major commissions. Original documents regarding the patronage of the family's palace altarpiece do not exist, and if they did, it is highly improbable that they would record Lucrezia's actions over, or even in addition to, those of her husband or father-in-law. It is important to note that this patriarchal logic, which translated fluidly into the historical construction of the heroic Renaissance individual, has diminished the contributions of men as well as women. Fifteenthcentury commentators referred to the chapel of the Medici Palace as "Cosimo's Chapel," despite its multiple connections with his son Piero.108 This model of privileging the family patriarch, already in place during the quattrocento, continues in modern art historical scholarship that links the chapel exclusively with Cosimo, arguably the family's most significant political figure.109 For it is clear that Piero had great influence on, and intimate contact with, the chapel. To begin with, he was charged with overseeing Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco decoration, and, once the imagery was complete, Piero was in the best place to enjoy it: his personal quarters in the palace communicated directly with the chapel.110 Paoletti's research on the corporate nature of Medici patronage is instrumental to remember here, as is Melissa Bullard's compelling argument that historians should resist the top-down model of the Renaissance "megapatron," or the "big man" approach, which, she argues, "does not significantly enlarge our understanding of the complexities of Quattrocento society."111 Making good on Bullard's advice to view Medici patronage "from the bottom or the side" might allow Lucrezia (whose spiritual influence within the space of the family chapel may well have been the most distinct and powerful) to take her rightful place in our historical

account, along the way enriching our understanding of the family's goals in commissioning art. The visual testimony of Magliabechiano VII, 49 makes it the long-awaited document of Lucrezia Tornabuoni's individual role as an art patron. The manuscript also renders concrete some of the "tantalizing clues," to use Kent's words, of Lucrezia's influence on Medici commissions, particularly those surrounding the family's domestic altarpiece, a painting with a far-reaching legacy. Lippi's image was reproduced with a frequency unusual for the period, and if positioned at the cusp of the new wave of devotional imagery figuring the child Baptist, its influence emerges as nothing short of tremendous.112 The case of the Magliabechiano Vita demonstrates that the absence of written documentation ought not to preclude an emphatic assertion of female influence on the visual arts in quattrocento Florence, and that images have much to tell us about women's relation with the visual world they inhabited. Footnote Notes This article is related to a forthcoming book project on Lucrezia Tornabuoni's influence on fifteenth-century Florentine art. I thank Marjorie Hirsch, Eugene J. Johnson, Peter Low, Adrian Randolph, Patricia Reilly, Peter Starenko, and Justin Steinberg for engaging with my argument in its various incarnations, and also Richard Powell, Marc Gotlieb, the anonymous readers for The Art Bulletin, and Lory Frankel for their careful readings and invaluable comments. Finally, I would like to thank my teachers Loren Partridge, Michael Baxandall, and Randolph Starn; this essay is dedicated to them. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 1. In Italian, on parchment, written in Italy, probably Florence, about 1455-60, 7 7/8 by 5 12 in., or 20 by 14 cm (text block 4 7/8s by 2 34 in., or 12.4 by 7.2 cm); forty-eight written leaves, numbered as 49 because the foliation skips from 29 to 31; twenty-two long lines ruled in lead point; collation, 1 + 1^sup 10^ - 5^sup 10^ + 1, no catchwords. Original binding in wooden boards covered with brown leather. Blind-stamped decoration embellished throughout with circles; traces of two clasps (both replaced during later restoration) ; gilded edges. Illuminations restricted to the elaborate frontispiece on folio 1 recto and a small decorated initial of the head of John the Baptist on a platter on folio 40 recto. The text was originally written for Filippo Maria Visconti and copied as originally written for Lucrezia Tornabuoni's manuscript. 2. For Medici book collecting, see Francis Ames-Lewis's foundational study, The Library and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici (New York: Garland, 1984). 3. The Visconti dedication and Lombard text of Magliabechiano VII, 49 caused Giuseppe Mazzatinti and Fortunato Pintor to attribute its illumination erroneously to a Lombard hand in their inventory of manuscripts housed in Italian libraries, Inventari dei manoscritti dette biblioteche d'Italia, 33 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1890-1906), vol. 13, 18. Theirs was an understandable mistake, as the Visconti were among the first large-scale lay collectors of manuscripts in Italy, with a library of 988 items already in 1426; see J. J. G. Alexander, Italian Renaissance Illuminations (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 10-11. Paolo D'Ancona

corrected this error in 1914 by including the Magliabechiano Vita in his great corpus of Florentine illuminated manuscripts, in which he briefly noted the beauty of the frontispiece's decorative frieze and the grace of the figure of the child Baptist depicted in its first initial; D'Ancona, La miniatura fiorentina: Secoli XI-XVI (Florence: Olschki, 1914), vol. 2, 310 n. 623. Since that time, the codex has gone unstudied, although such disregard is not uncommon. Quattrocento manuscript painting has always been overshadowed by its monumental sister arts, and manuscripts of vernacular devotional literature have received far less attention than those containing classical and patristic texts that are viewed as representative of the Renaissance interest in antiquity. 4. Notably, Catherine E. King's ambitious survey of documented commissions of art and architecture by Italian laywomen contains not a single example of a fifteenth-century Florentine commission; King, Renaissance Woman Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c. 1300-c. 1550 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Instances of female patronage from quattrocento Florence are also notably absent from the following studies: Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews-Greco, eds., Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Cynthia Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early Modem Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); the group of essays edited by Jaynie Anderson in Renaissance Studies 10 (1996); and the special edition dedicated to female an patronage of Quaderni Storici 35, no. 104 (2000), edited by Matthews-Greco and Gabriella Zarri. Important exceptions are two articles in the recent anthology edited by Sheryl E. Reiss and David G. Wilkins, Beyond Isabella: Secular Women Patrons of Art in Renaissance Italy (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2001); one of these, Rosi Prieto Gilday's "The Women Patrons of Neri di Bicci," 51-75, highlights the commissions from women (half of which were effected without male mediation) recorded in the painter's Ricordanze from the years 1453 to 1475 and gives a brief description of each one. Because Neri's ledger is so rare a document, further investigation into these women and the few extant paintings they commissioned seems in order for future scholarship. Even the numbers Gilday presents, which show that women constituted a significant near 7 percent of Neri's clientele during these years, should give pause, particularly since little other concrete information has emerged in the literature. For Roger Crum's important contribution to the same anthology, see n. 10 below. 5. For general essays on female art patronage in the Renaissance, see Jaynie Anderson, "Rewriting the History of Art Patronage," Renaissance Studies 10, no. 2 (1996): 129-38; the comments of Reiss and Wilkins in Beyond Isabella, xv-xx, and Wilkins's introduction to that anthology, "Introduction: Recognizing New Patrons, Posing New Questions," 1-17; Sara F. Matthews-Greco and Gabriella Zarri, "Committenza artistica feminile," Quademi Stand 35, no. 104 (2000): 283-95; and Cynthia Lawrence's comments in Women and Art in Early Modem Europe, 1-20. Notable examples of focused studies of individual women patrons include Carolyn Valone, "Roman Matrons as Patrons: Various Views of the Cloister Wall," in

The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modem Europe, ed. Craig A. Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 49-72; idem, "Women on the Quirinal Hill: Patronage in Rome, 1560-1630," Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 129-46; Beth Holman, "Exemplum and Imitatio: Countess Matilda and Lucrezia Pico della Mirandola at Polirone," Art Bulletin 81, no. 4 (1999): 637-64; and Rose Marie San Juan, "The Court Lady's Dilemma: Isabella d'Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance," Oxford Art Journal 14 (1991): 67-78. For the patronage of cloistered women, see n. 6 below. 6. See Jeryldene M. Wood, Women, Art, and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); idem, "Breaking the Silence: The Poor Clares and the Visual Arts in Fifteenth-Century Italy," Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1995): 262-86; Anabel Thomas, Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman 's Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) ; and also K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns' Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For secular art patronage in a women's religious community, see also Megan Holmes's work on Filippo Lippi's altarpieces for Le Murate, Fm Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 9. 7. Lowe, Nuns' Chronicles, 392, provides the useful model of cloistered nuns' "cultural creativity and cultural production," yet art patronage emerges as its most elusive area; as Lowe notes, crucial questions regarding nuns' input in contexts of patronage remain unanswered in her sources. A similar theme vexes Thomas's chapter on patronage, Art and Piety, chap. 20. For a preliminary survey focused on this issue, see K. J. P. Lowe, "Nuns and Choice: Artistic Decision-Making in Renaissance Florence," in With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage, 1434-1530, ed. Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998), 129-53. For the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, see Julian Gardner, "Nuns and Altarpieces: Agendas for Research," Rmisches Jahrbuch der Biblioteca Herziana 30 (1995): 27-58. 8. Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 9. Adrian W. B. Randolph, "Gendering the Period Eye: Deschi da parto and Renaissance Visual Culture," Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 538-62. 10. Roger Crum, "Controlling Women or Women Controlled: Suggestions for Gender Roles and Visual Culture in the Renaissance Palace," in Reiss and Wilkins, Beyond Isabella, 37-50. 11. A. Richard Turner, Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 166. 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Melissa Meriam Bullard has pointed out that the heroic individual patron was first formulated during the nineteenth century by William Roscoe and, more notably, Jacob Burckhardt, and that modern scholarship has-inappropriately in her opinion-retained this conception; Bullard, "Heroes and Their Workshops: Medici Patronage and the Problem of Shared Agency," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 2 (1994): 179-98.

14. For a nuanced revision of the artist-as-creator model, see Jill Burke, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). Also important is the collection of studies in Mary Rogers, ed., Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000). Indispensable recent contributions to the now vast literature on Renaissance patronage are Guy Fitch Little and Stephen Orgel, eds., Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); F. W. Kent and Patricia Simons, eds., Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and David G. Wilkins and Rebecca L. Wilkins, eds., The Search for a Patron in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Meilen Press, 1996). See also K. J. P. Lowe, "The Progress of Patronage in Renaissance Italy," Oxford Art Journal 18 (1995): 147-50; and Alison Wright and Eckart Marchand, "The Patron in the Picture," in Marchand and Wright, With and Without the Medici, 1-18. 15. Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969), 24. 16. "Art mattered in the Renaissance. People expected painting, sculpture, architecture, and other forms of visual art to have a meaningful effect on their lives, delighting and enticing them into holding or maintaining certain beliefs and engaging in specific behaviors"; John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke, Art in Renaissance Italy (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 13. 17. The bibliography on women in the Renaissance is vast; for a recent historiographical overview with bibliography, see Evelyn Welch, "Engendering Italian Renaissance Art-a Bibliographic Review," Papers of the British School at Rome 68 (2000): 201-16. Pioneering studies of the ways in which domestic images constructed female roles and identities include Patricia Simons, "Women in Frames: The Eye, the Gaze, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture," History Workshop 25 (1988): 4-30, revised version in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 38-57; and the work of Cristelle Baskins, including Cassone Painting, Humanism, and Gender in Early Modem Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 18. Baskins's Cassone Painting is particularly sensitive to issues of different viewing audiences, including but not limited to women. While I also assume a fluid relation between women and images, my goal here is to explore another aspect of this equation by exercising some level of choice with regard to the imagery that addressed them. 19. See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 1. Mine is a subtly different take on Baxandall's thesis than the one offered by Randolph in "Gendering the Period Eye." 20. As Michelle O'Malley has recently demonstrated, contracts between artists and clients, as well as other written documentation of the commissioning of works of art, tended to be extremely cursory regarding subject matter. Even the rare contract that records the subject matter in some detail, moreover, is not reliable, because of the protracted and extensive

verbal negotiations that took place after the document was drawn up. That a verbal exchange of ideas determined the subject matter of commissioned works means that the evidence of who stipulated what is, ultimately, irretrievable, although it is clear that clients often took an interest in every detail of the work. See O'Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 310, 164-83. 21. See Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, esp. 138. 22. Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481) was the court humanist to the Duchy of Milan beginning in 1440, working under Filippo Maria Visconti (d. 1447) and his successor, Francesco I Sforza. The humanist scholar's vernacular verse life of John the Baptist dates from 1445; see P. Viti, "Filelfo, Francesco," in Dizionario biografico degti itatiani, vol. 47 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997), 622b; and, for the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, MS D 73 edition, see Paul Oskar Kristellar, Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Vncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, vol. 1 (London: Warburg Institute, 1963), 282b. 23. Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, 135. 24. Both inventories are preserved in Archivio di Stato, Florence, Mediceo avanti il Principale (hereafter ASF MaP), CLXII [fol.] and CLXIII, fols. 65-66v, and reproduced in Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, 363-90. 25. Lucrezia's correspondents often address her in precisely this way, but perhaps more telling is that she often refers to herself as "don[n]a di Piero di Cosimo de' Medici," or "wife of Piero di Cosimo de' Medici." see, for example, two letters to Filippo Strozzi dated 1465, ASF Carte Strozziane, no. 131, fols. 137, 83. This practice continued after Piero's death in 1469, as in a letter of 1475 to Leonardo Spina signed "Luchrezia donna fu di Piero di Chosimo de' Medici in Firenze," ASF MaP XXVI, fol. 159. 26. Originally bearing the name Tornaquinci, the Tomabuoni family could trace its history back to the mid-thirteenth century (in 1393 Lucrezia's grandfather, Simone, changed the family name and relinquished its noble status in order to be able to participate in the city's government). For the Tomabuoni family, see Guido Pampaloni, "I Tornaquinci poi Tomabuoni, fino ai primi del Cinquecento," Archivio Storico Italiano 126 (1968): 331-62. Patricia Simons's "Patronage in the Tornaquinci Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence," in Kent and Simons, Patronage, Art, and Society, 221-50, is a seminal study of Tornabuoni family patronage. For Lucrezia's biography, see Fulvio Pezzarossa, introduction to I poemetti sacri di Lucrezia Tornabuoni, by Lucrezia Tornabuoni (Florence: Olschki, 1978), 7-36; Patrizia Salvadori, introduction to Letten, by Lucrezia Tornabuoni (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 3-9; and idem, "La gestione di una catasto: La gestione di un catasto; Il carteggio di Lucrezia Tornabuoni dei Medici," Memoria 18 (1986), 81-89; and Jane Tylus, trans. and ed., introduction to Sacred Narratives, by Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 28-38. See also Francis W. Kent, "Sainted Mother, Magnificent Son: Lucrezia Tornabuoni and Lorenzo de' Medici," Italian History and Culture 3 (1997): 3-33; Natalie R. Tomas, The Media Women: Gender and Power in Renaissance Florence

(Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003), chaps. 1-3; and Dale Kent, "Women in Renaissance Florence," in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo's "Ginevra de' Bend" and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 38-39. 27. E. H. Gombrich initiated the modern art historical investigation of quattrocento Medici patronage in 1960 with his seminal article "The Early Medici as Patrons of Art," reprinted in Norm and Form (London: Phaidon, 1966), 35-57, 142-44. The more recent bibliography is vast; see, for example, Andreas Beyer and Bruce Boucher, eds., Piero de' Medici "il Gottoso": Kunst im Dienste der Mediceer/ Art in the Service of the Medici (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993); Bullard, "Heroes and Their Workshops"; Francis Ames-Lewis, ed., The Early Medici and Their Artists (London: Birbeck College, University of London, 1995); Dale Kent, Cosimo de' Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron's Oeuvre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Maria Vitiello, La committenza medicea nel rinascimento: Opere, architetti, orientamenti tinguistici (Rome: Gangemi, 2004); and Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorerao de' Medici: Collector and Antiquarian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 28. For the Medici bank in Milan, see John Paoletti, "The Banco Mediceo in Milan: Urban Politics and Family Power," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 199-238. For Donatello's Judith and Holofernes in the Medici courtyard, see Sarah Blake McHam, "Donatello's Bronze David and Judith as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence," Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (2001): 32-47; and Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), chap. 6. 29. Lucrezia is said to have founded, during the mid-1460s, a chapel dedicated to the Visitation (a significant moment in the life of the Baptist) in the north aisle of the family parish church of S. Lorenzo. See Domenico Moreni, Delle tre sontuose Cappelle Medicee situate nell'imperiale basilica di San Lorerao: Descrizione istorico-critica (Florence, 1813), 261; and idem, Continuazione delle memorie istoriche dell'ambrosiana imperiale basilica di S. Lorenzo di Firenze (Florence: Daddi, 1816), vol. 1, 55-56. During this same period Lucrezia and her husband, Piero, are believed to have founded a penitential cell, dedicated to the Baptist, at the Holy Hermitage at Camaldoli; tradition has it that the couple paid to have this individual hermit's chamber built and furnished with its liturgical apparatus, including an altarpiece painted by Filippo Lippi. See Don Pietro Leopoldo, Notizie storiche spettanti al sacra eremo di Camaldoli e sue mirabili pertinenze, 2nd ed. (Florence: Nella Stamperia Mocke, 1795), 106, 112; Georg Pudelko, "Per la datazione delle opere di Fra Filippo Lippi," Rivista d'Arte 18 (1936): 47; and Giuseppe Marchini, Filippo Lippi (Milan: Electa, 1975), 213. The painting from Camaldoli is closely related to Lippi's earlier painting of the same subject: the Adoration of the Child commissioned by the Medici to serve as the altarpiece in the chapel of the newly built family palace on the Via Larga and long connected with Lucrezia. 30. Heinrich Brockhaus, Forschungen ber Florentiner Kunstwerke (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1902), 52-68. Lavin understood Lippi's painting to have been a product of Lucrezia's devotion to Saint John the Baptist and was the first to develop that connection,

citing as evidence Lucrezia's poem dedicated to the saint, the Vita di San Giovanni Battista, in "Giovannino Battista: A Study in Religious Symbolism," Art Bulletin 37, no. 2 (1955): 95. Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, 176-77, assumed Lucrezia's patronage of Lippi's painting and offered as further support a groundbreaking but much ignored connection between its imagery and the devotional manual known as the Opera a ben vivere that the Florentine archbishop Antoninus wrote for Lucrezia's sister and revised and recopied for Lucrezia's own use. 31. More recent studies have connected Lippi's painting with Cosimo il Vecchio, politically the most powerful Medici at the time of the commission. Nancy L. Zughaib, for example, following E. H. Gombrich's characterization of the patronage of the early Medici, attributes the patronage of the family altarpiece to Piero, acting as Cosimo's intermediary. Of Lucrezia's influence, she states only that "it is a mistake to assume that Lucrezia played a greater role than Cosimo in the commission"; Zughaib, "The Steps to Humility, the Steps to Sovereignty: Fra Filippo Lippi's Nativity Altarpiece for the Chapel" (paper presented at "The Chapel of the Medici Palace," Syracuse University in Florence, December 11, 1989), 92. Following several of Zughaib's observations, Rab Hatfield argues that Lippi's painting (as well as the rest of the chapel's decoration) held personal meaning for Cosimo over all other members of the family. Hatfield disputes the traditional association of the chapel's decoration with Piero, giving the commission of the altarpiece instead to Cosimo on the basis that he was more religious and more theologically sophisticated than his son. Hatfield also rejects Lucrezia's influence, calling claims that Lucrezia commissioned the painting "extreme" and dismissing her poetry as viable evidence; Hatfield, "Cosimo de' Medici and the Chapel of His Palace," in Cosimo "il Vecchio" de' Medici 1389-1464, ed. Francis AmesLewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 222 and n. 5, 241 and n. 95. See also Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi's problematic claim that Cosimo commissioned the altarpiece before 1447 as a gift for Pope Eugenius IV; Strozzi, "SuIl'Adorazione di Filippo Lippi, nella cappella di palazzo Medici," Artista 5 (1993): 82-95. Recent work on the Medici Chapel follows Zughaib and Hatfield in attributing the patronage of Lippi's altarpiece to Cosimo; see Cristina Acidini Luchinat, ed., The Chapel of the Magi: Benoizo Gozzoli's Frescoes in the Palaizo Medici-Riccardi Florence, trans. Eleanor Daunt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 11; and Diane Cole Ahl, Benozzo Gozzoli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 85. Megan Holmes, in Fra Filippo Lippi, 174-82, reads the painting on the whole as contemplative and devotional rather than overtly political, yet still assumes Cosimo's basic influence. Kent, who understands all Medici patronage during Cosimo's lifetime to have been mediated by the family patriarch, does not address the Lucrezia hypothesis; Kent, Cosimo de' Medici, esp. chap. 8. 32. K. J. P. Lowe, "A Matter of Piety or of Family Tradition and Custom? The Religious Patronage of Piero de' Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni," in Beyer and Boucher, Piero de' Medici "il Gottoso, " 63. 33. Kent, "Sainted Mother," 3-33. 34. Ibid., 22.

35. Lowe discusses the ex-votos in "A Matter of Piety," 61, as does Kent, "Sainted Mother," 27. For the vestments, which were for the remains of Saint Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese order to whom Lucrezia had a special devotion, see ASF MaP, 85, 49 (December 2, 1471), and MaP 85, 136 (November 13, 1474). For a letter referring to an illuminated missal, discussed below, see ASF MaP, 85, 141 (January 15, 1475), and for Lucrezia's patronage of osculatories, see ASF MaP 29, 357 (May 17, 1473) and 24, 15 (January 3, 1473). 36. Giovanni Dominici, Regola del govemo di cura familiare, ed. D. Salvi (Florence, 1860), 59. 37. For Lucrezia's activity at Bagno a Morba, see Charles R. Mack, "The Wanton Habits of Venus: Pleasure and Pain at the Renaissance Spa," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 26, no. 2 (2000): 263; idem, "Just What the Medici Ordered: Gout, Spas, and Quattrocento Building," ARRIS (Journal of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians), 13 (2002): 12, 15-19; Salvadori-Tornabuoni, Lettere, 26-27; and Kent, "Sainted Mother," 9, 16. 38. Tomas, The Medici Women, 84. 39. ASF MaP LXXXV, 141, Benedetto da Cepparello to Lucrezia Tornabuoni, January 1, 1476. 40. Ibid.: "Voi fusti avisata per l'altra chome Ser Giovanni haveva messo mano per finire el messale et di gia n' haveva scripto un quinterno et era benissimo disposto a far chosa vi fussi grata." 41. Ibid.: "And we will send you these finished quires each time as before. If the two florins that Master Girolamo has seems to you to be money badly spent ... send the illuminated quires back here to Giovanni Lanfredini and I will refund to you all of your money [Et not vi manderemo ogni volta questi quintemi scripti dissini anchora chome primo maestro girolamo e fiorini ha due ehe se vi paresse havere male speso ... voi gli rimandate qui a Giovanni Lanfredini e quintemi miniati et ch ' io vi tomera indrieto ogni vostro dinaro]." 42. By "humanist" I refer to the style of the manuscript in both script and decoration and not to subject matter, since religious tracts and liturgical texts were treated decoratively in the same manner as classical texts. For the origins of humanistic book decoration, see Otto Pacht, "Notes and Observations on the Origin of Humanistic Book-Decoration," in Frite Saxl, 1890-1948: A Volume of Memorial Essays from His Friends in England (London: T. Nelson, 1957), 184-94. Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, chap. 4, continues Pcht's analysis of its development in the Medici context. 43. Francesco d'Antonio's early work is identified in J. J. G. Alexander and Albinia C. De la Mare, The Italian Manuscripts in the Library of Major J. R. Abbey (New York: Praeger, 1969), 64 n. 9. For the artist's career, shop, and circle, see Mirella Levi D'Ancona, Miniatura e miniatori a Firenze dal XIV al XVI secolo: Document! per Ia sterna della miniatura (Florence: Olschki, 1962), 108-16; and Annarosa Garzelli, Miniatura fiorentina del Rinascimento 14401525: Un primo censimento, 2 vols. (Florence: Giunta Regionale Toscana, Nuova Italia, 1985), vol. 1, 101-70. In his discussion of Francesco d'Antonio's work for Piero de' Medici,

Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, 187-97, offers what is still the most sensitive characterization, to which I am indebted, of the artist's style and development. My own analysis takes that of Ames-Lewis as a starting point, elaborating on the construction of the vine stem itself. Works of exceptionally high quality illuminated by Francesco d'Antonio in the mid-1450s and owned by Piero de' Medici include Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, Pluteus (hereafter BL Plut.) 19.12, an Epistulae of Saint Jerome, illuminated in about 1455 and discussed in detail; and BL Plut. 82.4, a Pliny Naturalis historia, which was made to order and finished by June 1458. Francesco d'Antonio continued to work for Piero into the 1460s, executing in 1461 a Breviary (BL Plut. 17.28) that was the most sumptuously decorated of all Piero's manuscripts, and in 1463-64 a splendid two-volume Plutarch (BL Plut. 65.26-27). The inventory of Piero's library dated January 20, 1465, describes the Breviary as "breviarium pulcherrimum" and assessed it at 150 florins, the highest value assigned to any of Piero's manuscripts. See ASF MaP CLXIII, fols. 65r-66v. 44. Francesco d'Antonio's career is, in fact, marked by the high status of his clientele; in addition to working for these men he served major corporate patrons, executing works for the cathedrals of Florence and Pistoia and the Badia of Fiesole. 45. BL Plut. 19.12. See Garzelli, Minialura fiormtina, vol. 2, 204; and Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, 210-11, 213-14, 216, 238. Because it appears in the 1456 inventory of Piero's library, this codex has a solid terminus ante quern. 46. For Ricciardo di Nanni (active after about 1449, d. 1480), see Garzelli, Miniatura fiorentina, vol. 1, 55-66; and Ames-Lewis, Library and Manuscripts, 180-86. For Filippo di Matteo Torelli (1409-1468), see Garzelli, vol. 1, 33-38, and Ames-Lewis, 167-73. 47. BL Plut. 82.4. 48. BL Plut. 36.4, a Plautus that Ricciardo di Nanni decorated for the Medici, confirms this logic of the vine stem completely different from that of Francesco d'Antonio. Ricciardo's shoots and blossoms are thicker and the flowering ends have a lush, inflated quality. The stem becomes tangled in its mad course, and the logic of its development (the growth from its source out and around the frame) is impossible to follow. Ricciardo also employs different ink dividers, using two sets of parallel lines with a series of perpendiculars between them, and his deployment of background colors is different: he puts pink next to pink, green next to green, repeats the same color within several fields, and saves blues primarily for the outer edge of the frame. 49. BL Plut 16.26. 50. The exception is the naturalistically rendered goldfinch perched above the initial. A signature of Francesco d'Antonio, it is singled out in meaningful ways in several of his manuscripts, including BL Plut. 19.12. Like that of the Magliabechiano Vita, the goldfinch of the frontispiece of BL Plut. 19.12 (Fig. 5) perches motionless just outside the illuminated initial as if to comment on the scene within-here, Jerome's bloody act of imitatio Christi. (Francesco did not limit the use of the goldfinch to Christian texts; the bird appears three times on folio 4 recto of BL Plut. 82.3, a Medici Pliny, for example, as a tool to focus the reader's attention.)

51. BNCF Banco Ran 34-36, the so-called Deche del Re. For this artist (identified as the "Maestro della Deche" because of his association with these volumes) in the context of Francesco d'Antonio's shop, see Garzelli, Miniatura fiorentina, vol. 1, 163-64; and also Marco Buonocore, ed., Vedere i classid: L'iUustrazione libraria dei testi antichi datl'et romana al tarda medioevo (Rome; Fratelli Palombi, 1996), 386-91. 52. BL Plut. 65.26-27. Ames-Lewis, Books and Manuscripts, 149, charts this development in Francesco d'Antonio's style, perceptively interpreting it as "an attempt to break from the restraints of the [vine-stem] form and its lack of variability"; for Francesco d'Antonio's development, see also 192-95. 53. For Lucrezia's Vita di San Giovanni Battista, see Tylus-Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 216-63. 54. Images of the striding Baptist entering the desert wilderness had been present, for example, in the public and highly visible site of the Baptistery of S. Giovanni since at least the early fourteenth century; the saint appears in this stance, for example, in the interior mosaic program, traditionally dated between 1271 and 1325 and attributed to Coppo di Marcovaldo and other masters working under the influence of Cimabue; in Andrea Pisano's monumental bronze doors, installed in the building's east entrance in 1336; and in the precious silver altar, the dossale d'argmto, commissioned in 1366 from Leonardo di Ser Giovanni and Betto di Geri and carried out after 1377 by Cristoforo di Paolo, Michele di Monte, and others in the fourteenth century and completed by Michelozzo, Pollaiuolo, and Verrocchio in the fifteenth. 55. The small section of the poem dedicated to it (fols. 12r-12v) merely underscores the boy's biblically assigned qualities of exceptional piety and continence in the desert. 56. See n. 97 below. 57. Following his extremely concise and general description of the manuscript and its frontispiece, Paolo D'Ancona, La miniatura fiorentina, 310 n. 623, discusses the historiated initial in slightly greater detail, citing the "graceful little figure representing the young Saint John departing for the desert, represented by a green and fertile Tuscan countryside." 58. There is no biblical basis for an encounter between the two children. The Gospel of Luke is the only one to mention the Baptist's youth, and even this account is highly economical in its detail, with no such anecdotal episodes. Luke recounts the Annunciation to Zacharias (and Zacharias's punishment for doubting that message), the Visitation, the naming of the Baptist, and Zacharias's prophesy of his son's future greatness. While the Gospel mentions the child's presence in the wilderness, "And the child grew, and was strengthened in spirit; and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel" (Luke 1:80), this is all we hear of John's childhood; biblical citations are from the Challoner revision (1749-52) of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible (1899; reprint, Rockford, Ill.: Tan, 1971). 59. The text is reprinted in Domenico Maria Manni, ed., Vite di alcuni santi scritte nel bum secoto della lingua Toscana (Florence: Apresso Domenico Maria Manni, 1734-35), 184-266. 60. Vita di San Giovanni Battista, in Manni, Vite di alcuni santi, 209-10: "Ispirato da Dio conobbegli, e incontanente comincio a correre inverso di loro, ehe soleva fuggire quando vedeva 1'altra gente; e il Fanciullo Gies incominci a correre inverso di lui, e giunse

Giovanni, e gittosi tutto quanto in terra a baciare I piedi di Messer Gies; e Gies il prese per le braccia e levollo fuso, e baciollo nella fronte, e poi gli diede la pace: pace teco, apparecchiatore della via mia." 61. John 1:29. Saint John's pointing gesture further reinforces this. 62. See Tylus-Tornabuoni, Sacred Narratives, 216. 63. Ibid., 225. 64. Marilyn Lavin's pioneering work on the "Giovannino," "Giovannino Battista," cemented this particular text as a fundamental source for child Baptist imagery in Florentine art. Lavin's study followed Erwin Panofsky's lead in Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 281. 65. My research has determined that more than twenty manuscript copies of the Vita exist in Florentine collections alone. 66. Vila di San Giovanni Battista, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence (hereafter Rice.), MS 1296, fol. 50r: "Per dar buono assenpro e chonsolatione all'anime ehe llegeranno." 67. See, for example Rice. MS 1664, which includes the Vita followed by eighteen other saints' legends. 68. Giovanni di Leonardo di Frescobaldi's early-fifteenth-century copy of the Vita, for example, included the Life of Saint Catherine and a record of a pilgrim's visit to the Holy Land; BNCF Magliabechiano XXXVIII, 47 (dated 1406). Piero Capponi chose Dante's Convivio, astrological texts, and various spiritual laudi as complements to his 1457 copy of the Vita, see BNCF, Panciatichiano 11. 69. BNCF Magliabechiano XXXVIII, 10. 70. Ibid., fol. 101 r: "Qui sara iscritto per me Cherucio deno la legienda di Santo Giovanni Batists ch'e molta bella e divotta e chome vedra chi legiera ele molta bella e divotta e d'avervi gran devozione." 71. Ibid., fol. 39v: "Qui chomincia la legienda di San Franciecho ch'e molta divota e bella. ... Iddio fara grazia per Io suo amore a chi chon divozione Ia legiera." 72. Rice. MS 1296, fol. 50r (emphasis added); the text ends, "here conclude the meditations of the blessed John the Baptist, amen [finite sono Ie meditationi del beato giovanni batista amen]." 73. BNCF Magliabechiano XXXVIII, 10, fol. 2r: "Questa e una bella e divota orazione ... qualunque persona dirae questa orazione per se e per la sua anima overo per l'anima de padre overo per l'anima della madre overo per suo amicho i pecchati in voi saranno perdonatie sarae salvo delle pene del inferno." 74. Alison Knowles Frazier's recent study underscores the particularly contemplative and mystical character of the vernacular tradition, against which a new Latin model of hagiography based more generally on classical exemplarity positioned itself; Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 75. The only other quattrocento Florentine to compose original hagiographie verse with Saint John the Baptist as its subject was the prominent spiritual author Feo Belcari (1410-1484), in

his extremely popular midcentury sacra rappresentazione, or sacred drama, of the child Baptist. Belcari's work, like the Vita, Ht fluidly into the spiritual culture of quattrocento devotional manuscripts, appearing in several Florentine examples and, from 1490 on, many incunabula. Examples of manuscripts are BL Rediano 121; BNCF Magliabechiano VII, 690; BNCF Convenu Soppressi B.3.268; and BNCF Magliabechiano VII, 1163. The incunabula include BNCF Banco Rari 181.22 and Rice. Ed.R.686.9. The play exists in different editions, although a hypothetical main edition is published in Le rap/rresentazioni di Feo Belcari ed altri di lui poesie edite ed inedite citate come testa di lingua nel vocabulario degli Accademici della Crusca, ed. A. Galletti (Florence: Presso Ignazio Moutier, 1833). 76. This idea relates to Jeryldene Wood's understanding of the manuscript illumination of the fifteenth-century Poor Clare, Caterina Vigri, which the author discusses as the "melding of procees and product into a single devotional act" ("Breaking the Silence," 276). 77. Antoninus was canonized in 1523 under Pope Adrian VI. 78. Francesco Palermo published the original text, written for Dianora and preserved in the manuscript now catalogued as BNCF Banco Rari 225, in Antoninus, Opera a ben vivere di Santo Antonino arcivescovo di Firenze con altri suoi ammaestramenti e preghiere antiche (Florence: M. Cellini, 1858). The version Antoninus rewrote for Lucrezia does not have a modern edition; its only copy is Rice. MS 3834. 79. Rice. 3834, fols. 48v-49r: "Il qual tempo mi parrebbe ehe fusse questo, ehe ogni di, piu volte, voi v'occupassi in qualche santa e devota lezione. E ingegnatevi di trovare lezione, ehe voi intendiate, e ehe sia devota, e ehe abbi a recare e a conducere l'anima vostra a devozione; e ehe del continue sempre n'abbiate si' piena la mente, ehe nulla altra mala vana cogitazione ci possi avre luogo: e poi mi parrebbe ehe cosi ci awezzassi ad orare con qualche gusto e fermezza di mente. Alle quali cose pervenire, suole molto aiutare a pensare qualche devota meditazione; come se, della passione di cristo, o dell'infanzia sua; e ehe v'ingegnassi di recare Ia vostra mente, quanto potessi, a gusto di devozione." Antoninus goes on to comment on the contrast between the state of the religious "outside of the tempests of this world" as compared to her own, spiritually precarious position as a member of the Medici household or, as he puts it, "in the middle of the turbulent sea of this world" (fol. 49v). 80. On the courtly tastes of Piero de' Medici, see Gombrich, "The Early Medici," 46-52. 81. BNCF Magliabechiano VII, 49, fol. 12v: "Et sempre al ciel havea suo cor atento." 82. I would suggest that Italian women, like their northern counterparts, would have been connected to a gendered culture of reading and spirituality. 83. Burke, Changing Patrons, esp. chap. 4. 84. See ibid., 3-6, chap. 4. 85. The case of the Magliabechiano manuscript could, for example, provide additional substantiation for Marjorie Och's argument that Vittoria Colonna was the patron, rather than the mere recipient, of Titian's Mary Magdalene (Palazzo Pitti, Florence); Ochs, "Vittoria Colonna and the Commission for a Mary Magdalen by Titian," in Reiss and Wilkins, Beyond Isabella, 193-223.

86. John Paoletti's work has been instrumental in furthering our understanding of the strategically cooperative character of fifteenth-century Medici patronage; see Paoletti, "Fraternal Piety and Family Power: The Artistic Patronage of Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici," in AmesLewis, Cosimo "il Vecchio" de'Medici, 195-219; idem, "Ha fatto con volunta del padre . . . ," in Beyer and Boucher, Piero de' Medici "U Gottoso, " 221-50; and idem, "Strategies and Structures of Medici Patronage in the Fifteenth Century," in Ames-Lewis, The Early Medici, 19-32. 87. See Lowe, "A Matter of Piety," 63-65; and Tomas, The Medici Women, 84-85. 88. See the introductory essay in Salvadori-Tornabuoni, Lettere; Kent, "Sainted Mother"; and Tomas, The Medici Women, esp. chaps. 1-3. 89. On the Florentine sottogovemo, see Tomas, The Medici Women, 44-45. The argument for Lucrezia's indirect power was first laid out in Salvadori's excellent essay on Lucrezia in Salvadori-Tornabuoni, Lettere, 3-45, and was later taken up in Kent, "Sainted Mother." 90. Salvadori-Tornabuoni, Lettere, 35. 91. Kent, "Sainted Mother," 20. 92. Antoninus, Opera a ben vivere, ed. Palermo, 222-23. 93. In a letter dated September 5, 1461, to Piero, Gentile Becchi writes that "your Breviary, which was beginning to become long, is shortened: its beauty will make up for its tardiness [el vostro Breviario, ehe chominciava a diventare lungario, s'abrevia: suplir la tardit con la bellezza Y; ASF MaP XIV, 52. 94. The Medici moved into the new palace on the Via Larga, which was begun in the mid1440s, sometime before the 1458 catasto, or tax survey, according to Howard Saalman and Philip Mattox, "The First Medici Palace," Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians 44 (1985): 329-45. 95. See n. 30 above. 96. See n. 31 above. 97. The Florentine visual tradition for the child Saint John was embedded and elaborated, throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in a series of narrative cycles mainly connected with the Baptistery of S. Giovanni. These cycles, which depicted episodes of the saint's life and martyrdom, were all ambitious in scale, scope, and/or material and appeared in public spaces. While the public cycles depended, too, on texts like the Vita, their imagery did not enter the domestic sphere until the mid-fifteenth century; at the time of the execution of this manuscript, in other words, the representation of the child Baptist outside the traditional public, narrative context was extremely rare, if not unheard of. 98. Both Medici and Tornabuoni arms appear, separately, on the desco da parla painted by the artist Lo Scheggio for the birth of Piero and Lucrezia's first son, Lorenzo, in 1449. The presence of maternal and paternal arms on childbirth trays was conventional rather than a reflection of joint patronage: fathers seem to have done the purchasing or commissioning of the trays if, like the Medici example, they were made to order. see Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth, 72-79; and also idem, "The Medici-Tornabuoni Desco da Parto in Context," Metropolitan Museum Journal 33 (1998): 137-51.

99. BNCF MS Magliabechiano VII, 338, a manuscript of Lucrezia's own poetry, including the Life of Saint John the Baptist, dates from after Piero's death in 1469 (the manuscript's incipit on folio 1 recto refers to Piero in the past tense), so he could not have been involved in the commission. To my knowledge, this is the only other manuscript featuring the split MediciTornabuoni arms. 100. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' pi ecceUenti pittori, scultori ed architettari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1878-85), vol. 2, 616: "Ne fece un'altra ehe fu posta nella cappella in casa Medici, e dentro vi fece la Nativita di Cristo; lavor ancora per la moglie di Cosimo detto una tavola con la medesima Nativit di Cristo e San Giovanni Batista, per mettere all'ermo di Camaldoli, a una cella de' romiti fatta per divozion sua, intitolata San Giovanni Batista." 101. Noted by Pudelko, "Per la datazione delle opere di Fra Filippo Lippi," 47. 102. Dom Odoardo Baroncini (ca. 1654-1741), a hermit at Camaldoli for several decades, wrote extensively on the order's history and doctrine, compiling the Chronicon Camalduli ex scriptoribus eius decerplum ed ad nostra empara deductum during the 1710s (now Biblioteca Comunale, Arezzo, MS 343). Since no early documents from Camaldoli survive, Baroncini's chronicle (itself based on archival material) is an important source of documentary information. Baroncini records that the cell, inhabited by 1464, was a gift from Piero de' Medici and that the altar bore his arms as well as Lucrezia's. The document is published in Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi Life and Work (London: Phaidon, 1993), 541. 103. Vasari's inability to keep the generations of the fifteenth-century Medici straight is evidenced in his Life of Mino da Fiesole, who sculpted portrait busts of both Piero and Lucrezia. "Mino," wrote Vasari, "made such natural and lifelike portraits of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici and his wife [Mino fece il ritratto di Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici e quello della moglie, naturali e simili affatto]"; Vasari, Le vite, vol. 3, 23. In this case Vasari is off by two generations, since Piero di Lorenzo, the son of the Magnificent, was Piero's grandson. In his life of Sandro Botticelli, Vasari confuses Clarice Orsini, Lorenzo's wife, with Lucrezia, writing of a profile portrait of "Madonna Lucrezia de' Tornabuoni moglie di detto Lorenzo" (vol. 3, 22). Again Vasari has the generations confused, mistaking Lorenzo's mother for his wife. 104. The Castello Nativity was probably a devotional panel; its original location is unknown. The identity of the artist is also uncertain. Carlo Gamba, thinking the artist was associated with Fra Filippo, made an attribution to Fra Diamante; Gamba, "Due opere d'arte nella R. Villa di Castello," Rassegna d'Arte 3 (1903): 81-83. Ruda, in Fra Filippo Lippi, 424, suggests Piero di Lorenzo di Pratese, a member of Lippi's shop during the execution of the Maringhi Coronation. A youthful Baptist also appears in the 1454 altarpiece that Alesso Baldovinetti painted for the well-appointed private chapel in the Medici villa at Cafaggiolo in the Mugello. Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, Alesso Baldavinetti: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 53-55, attributes the patronage of this painting to Piero because, although Cafaggiolo was rebuilt for Cosimo by Michelozzo in 1451, it was Piero who was chiefly concerned with the villa and connected with Baldovinetti. Because of its inclusion of all the Medici saints, including Julian, Kennedy thought that the painting was

probably commissioned to commemorate the birth of Lucrezia and Piero's second son, Giuliano, in 1453. 105. Gamba ("Due opere d'arte," 82) recognized the importance of the inventory description in 1903, as the coats of arms had become illegible by his time. Gamba assumed Lucrezia to have been the patron of the painting, positing that it was commissioned on the occasion of a birth. 106. For Lippi's Annalena Adoration, see Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi, 219-21, 441-42. This painting, which dates from the mid-1450s, was probably the first of three of Lippi's altapieces with distinctly penitential wilderness background. The second two, the Palazzo Medici Adoration and the Camaldoli Adoration, were both Medici commissions, and it seems possible that the Annalena painting spurred the commission to Filippo Lippi for the Medici altarpiece. The copy of Antoninus's Opera a ben vivere written for Lucrezia notes her personal relationship with Annalena Malatesta, a connection that suggests Lucrezia's influence on the choice of both artist and iconography of the Medici family altarpiece. 107. Precisely when the chapel was completed is unclear. See Isabelle Hyman, Fifleenth Century Florentine Studies: The Palazzo Medici and a Ledger for the Church of San Loremo (New York: Garland, 1977), 85-86, 136, 140, 278. The chapel was definitely in use, however, by April 1459. see Hatfield, "Cosimo de' Medici and the Chapel of His Palace," 22328. 108. see Hatfield, "Cosimo de' Medici and the Chapel of His Palace," 222. 109. see n. 31 above. 110. see the three letters from Benozzo to Piero in Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito degli artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI (Florence: G. Molini, 1839-40), vol. 1, 191-93; Piero's accessibility was highlighted by the author of the Terze rime in lode di Cosimo de' Medici e de'figli.... , who describes the passage from Piero's antecamera to the chapel; see Rab Hatfield, "Some Unknown Descriptions of the Medici Palace in 1459," Art Bulletin 52, no. 3 (1970): 248. see also W. A. Bulst, "Die Ursprngliche Innere Aufteilung des Palazzo Medici in Florenz," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 14, no. 4 (1970): 379, 385. 111. Bullard, "Heroes and Their Workshops," 186. 112. Lippi's painting inspired one complete copy and numerous reproductions of selected iconographie components. For the copy, displayed in place of Lippi's original in the Medici Palace chapel since 1929, see Acidini Luchinat, The Chapel of the Magi, 32-34. For the selective reproductions, see ibid., 42, figs. 20, 21; Mina Gregori et al., eds., Maestri e botteghe: Pittura a Firenze alia fine del quattrocento (Florence: Silvana, 1992), 160-61; and Megan Holmes, "Copying Practices and Marketing Strategies in a Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painter's Workshop," in Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38-74. AuthorAffiliation Stefanie Solum (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is assistant professor of art history at Williams College and is currently completing a book-length study on Lucrezia Tomabuoni, art

patronange, and power in fifteenth-century Florence [Department of Art, Williams College, 314 Spencer Studio Art Building, Williamstown, Mass. 01267, ssolum@williams.edu].

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Indexing (details)
Subject Title Author Publication title Volume Issue Pages Number of pages Publication year Publication date Year Publisher Publisher Place of publication Country of publication Journal subject ISSN CODEN Source type Language of publication Document type Document feature Subfile ProQuest document ID Document URL Copyright Last updated Database Documentary films; Art Attributing Influence: The Problem of Female Patronage in FifteenthCentury Florence Solum, Stefanie The Art Bulletin 90 1 76-100 25 2008 Mar 2008 2008 New York College Art Association, Inc. New York United States Art 00043079 ABCABK Scholarly Journals English Feature Photographs Documentary films, Art 222942028 http://search.proquest.com/docview/222942028?accountid=15533 Copyright College Art Association, Inc. Mar 2008 2010-06-09 ProQuest Central << Link to document in ProQuest

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