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Florentine artist Neri di Bicci (1418-1492) was one of the most prolific and financially successful artists of the fifteenth century. The hundreds of extant paintings from his workshop are a testament to his industry, which is further underlined by a close examination of the 798 entries he wrote between 1453 and 1475 in his account book, his Ricordanze. The purpose of this dissertation is to analyse the monetary and social history in Neri’s Ricordanze in order to provide a framework for an exploration of the way that paintings were constructed in Neri’s workshop, and a close examination of the evidence concerning collaboration between Neri and his contemporaries. This thesis determined that the repeated use of full-size paper patterns, known as cartoons, was a key aspect of Neri’s painting procedure. Cartoon usage was established by overlaying scaled images of paintings in Photoshop, which demonstrated that the outlines of many of Neri’s figures and architectural designs were identical. Analysing the price of Neri’s paintings also revealed trends which suggested that he used cartoons. Half of the 224 objects described in the Ricordanze cost 30 lire or less, and the average of the 40 paintings between two and four square meters was 151 lire, less than half the regional average for paintings of comparable size. Neri likely increased his profits by working faster than his contemporaries, since 15 of the 36 paintings with available completion times were finished in less than four months, and the overall average was seven and a half months. Cartoons were also shared between Neri, his contemporaries (including Fra Filippo Lippi and Pesellino), and former assistants such as Cosimo Rosselli, Giusto d’Andrea, and Francesco Botticini, since similarities in figure size were discovered using Photoshop. As a result of this study, we are left with a better understanding of fifteenth-century production methods and the movement of designs between workshops. Furthermore, we know that Neri ran his business in a highly organized manner, and that cartoons were used extensively in order to produce a large volume of affordable paintings in order to meet the growing quattrocento demand for devotional objects. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2013-08-30 02:57:55.312

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My doctorate is a study of the manuscript transmission of Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum: a twenty-book corpus comprising one book Ad M. Brutum, three books Ad Quintum fratrem, sixteen books Ad Atticum and a pseudo-Ciceronian Epistula ad Octauianum. I have made a complete reinspection and partial recollation of the eighty-odd fully extant manuscripts, and reconstructed a new stemma codicum that may be used for both historical and editorial purposes. My thesis consists of four chapters, following the transmission of the corpus of Ad Atticum from the Middle Ages down to the Renaissance and the beginning of printing. In Chapter 1 I discuss the top of the stemma: Petrarch’s (1304–74) rediscovery of these letters in the Chapter Library of Verona in 1345, and the beginning of their dissemination in fifteenth-century Italy, thanks to the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and two humanists of his circle: Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437) and Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444). Editors of Cicero’s letters believe that the top of the stemma is bipartite, and that bipartition reflects separate strands of mediaeval transmission: I argue against their reconstruction and put forward a new pluripartite stemma. In Chapter 1 I also consider manuscripts independent of the Verona archetype: these witnesses survive only in tiny fragments and scattered readings cited by sixteenth-century critics. In Chapter 2 I study the northern Italian progeny of the Veronese archetype: here too I have significantly improved on the editors’ work, thanks to collation of a larger number of independent manuscripts and a more articulated understanding of the intricate dynamics of contamination affecting this branch. In Chapters 3 and 4 I investigate the Florentine transmission of the corpus of Ad Atticum. In Chapter 3 I study the closer descendants of the copy of the Verona archetype that in 1393 came from Milan to Florence at Salutati’s instigation. In Chapter 4 I focus on the thirty-odd descendants of the manuscript that in 1408 the humanist and Papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) copied for Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464). The comprehensive stemmata that I put forward in Chapters 3 and 4 are completely new, since hitherto there has been no systematic attempt to map the genealogy of Salutati’s manuscript.

Excerpt: The political negotiations of fifteenth-century diplomats overlay an unstated, multilayered exchange of symbolic capital between states.

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Although the city of Florence lacked a cardinal for most of the fifteenth century, the city was not lacking in cardinal portraits during the same period. This paper examines two different portraits by Florentines of cardinals in the Quattrocento. In a visual portrait from the first half of the century, the painter Bicci di Lorenzo depicted the consecration of the Florentine church Sant'Egidio by pope Martin V. Within the fresco Bicci surrounded the pope with cardinals, whom Vasari claimed were painted from life. Several decades later, the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote over a dozen short biographies of cardinals, many of whom he had known personally through his bookshop. This paper will compare these visual and literary portraits of cardinals across these two works. It will also examine the social and political contexts into which both the visual and literary depictions fit. Author

Around the turn of the year 1431 the city of Lucca charged their new chancellor Cristoforo Turrettini to write a Latin letter to the Florentines decrying their recent bellicose actions against their lands. Turrettini wrote, not to the leading Florentine governmental bodies, but rather to their head secretary, Leonardo Bruni. Bruni responded on January 8 with a seemingly private Latin letter that he later placed into his humanist letter book. Around the same time Bruni wrote a public letter in the vernacular, his Defense against the Detractors of the People of Florence for their Attack against Lucca, in response to the same criticisms. This paper will examine these texts within their political and cultural contexts, with particular emphasis on questions of public and private distinctions as well as political legitimacy in humanist writing during the quattrocento.

Book Summary: The essays in this collection explore the languages - artistic, symbolic, and ritual, as well as written and spoken - in which power was articulated, challenged, contested, and defended in Italian cities and courts, villages, and countryside, between 1300 and 1600. Topics addressed include court ceremonial, gossip and insult, the performance of sanctity and public devotions, the appropriation and reuse of imagery, and the calculated invocation (and sometimes undermining) of authoritative models and figures. The collection balances a broad geographic and chronological range with a tight thematic focus, allowing the individual contributions to engage in vigorous and fruitful debate with one another even as they speak to some of the central issues in current scholarship. The authors recognize that every institutional action is, in its context, a political act, and that no institution operates disinterestedly. At the same time, they insist on the inadequacy of traditional models, whether Marxian or Weberian, as the complex realities of the early modern state pose tough problems for any narrative of modernization, rationalization, and centralization. The contributors to this volume trained and teach in various countries - Italy, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia - but share a common interest in cultural expressions of power.

Review of The Black Prince of Florence by Catherine Fletcher