This dissertation analyzes the dates and artistic provenance of key architectural and decorative projects commissioned by the Pucci family for their townhomes, villas, and palaces during the Renaissance. It identifies the family’s insistent identification with prestigious Renaissance architects and artisans as a key element in a political and social stratagem that took its cue from the humanist ethos cultivated by their political patrons, the Medici. Temporally, this study is bracketed on both ends of the Renaissance by architectural commissions related to the Pucci’s long-standing patronage of Santissima Annunziata, the most important pilgrimage church in Florence. Methodoligically, it is an archival project that relies principally on previously unknown letters, wills, payment records, inventories, and notarial documents.

This dissertation focuses on the artistic and architectural patronage of the Pucci family, Medici stalwarts whose carefully constructed political and cultural alignment with the ruling family of Florence was the impetus for their rising fortunes over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. Their homes, chapels, and palaces in Tuscany and Rome were designed and furnished with paintings, sculpture, and intarsiated woodwork attributable to Michelozzo; the Pollaiuolo brothers; Botticelli; Giuliano da Sangallo and the heirs to his workshop: Francesco da Sangallo and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Baccio d'Agnolo; Pontormo; Bronzino; Baccio and Raffaello da Montelupo; Pietro and Domenico Rosselli; Michelangelo; Bartolommeo Ammannati; Giovanni Battista Naldini; Alessandro Allori; and Giovanni Battista Caccini.