The purpose of this study is to investigate the patronage of Piero de’ Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni. My aim is to discuss and place the patronage in the complex field of the renaissance as an active conjugal partnership between the two. The study is divided in three main chapters, the introduction part where an overview of the main issues in the field of renaissance patronage and a background of the people involved; one chapter where the two religious rooms are introduced and the specific patronage described; and finally a chapter where the different procedures are discussed, compared and combined into one joint conjugal patronage for the both of them. The evidence uncovered supporting the conjugal patronage is partly the similarities between the altar paintings in the rooms. They are both made of Fra Filipo Lippi and both are portraying the Adoration of Infant Jesus. The presence of the coat of arms of both the noble houses at the Camaldoli adoration and a series of lettres between Piero and one of his painters, Benezzo Gozzoli.

The aim of this study is to investigate the role of posthumous portraits in the Tornabuoni family as a tool of positioning itself through visual rhetorics. The basis for the examination is three portraits of Francesca Pitti, Giovanna degli Albizzi and Lucrezia Tornabuoni, together with an altarpiece depicting the Visitation with Mary Jachobi and Mary Salome. The study uses iconography to analyse the images and using a rhetorical analysis to understand the visual rhetorics used by the family. The study finds that there are different hidden meanings in the portraits, Francesca is remembered by her husband by pure grief; Lucrezia is honoured as the bridge between the Tornabuoni and the Medici families, and Giovanna is remembered by her husband as the continuation of the dynasty in its time of crisis, as well as the pure loss and grief of his beloved wife and unborn child inside the walls of the palazzo. This study uses the theoretical framework of visual rhetorics, as developed by the historian Paul Zanker and adopted by art historian Johan Eriksson, to analyse the behaviour of commissioning posthumous portraits of deceased women and viewing them both in public and private spaces in churches and in the palazzo. As Alberti says: ''Through painting, the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time.''