This work provides a new narrative for Orsanmichele in the era before the Renaissance. It examines Orsanmichele from the mid-thirteenth century, as the piazza transformed into the city’s grain market. It considers the market’s tandem confraternity, with its stunning Madonnas over three successive loggias. It examines the grain market and confraternity from a social, economic, political, and artistic perspective. It provides extensive data on the Florentine grain trade, sales at the market, and the nexus between traders, political leaders, and the confraternity. The work suggests that developments at Orsanmichele during the medieval period formed the basis for the Renaissance structure.

Examines the complex relationships between religion, society and charity in private and public life in Florence - Development of confraternities.

The author, Gert Kreytenberg, a noted authority on fourteenth-century Italian art, places the tabernacle in historical and social context, and in relation to Orcagna's work as a whole. He enumerates the textual and visual sources for the iconography, and suggests possible attributions for individual sculptures.

The innovative city culture of Florence was the crucible within which Renaissance ideas first caught fire. With its soaring cathedral dome and its classically-inspired palaces and piazzas, it is perhaps the finest single expression of a society that is still at its heart an urban one. For, as Brian Jeffrey Maxson reveals, it is above all the city-state – the walled commune which became the chief driver of European commerce, culture, banking and art – that is medieval Italy's enduring legacy to the present. Charting the transition of Florence from an obscure Guelph republic to a regional superpower in which the glittering court of Lorenzo the Magnificent became the pride and envy of the continent, the author authoritatively discusses a city that looked to the past for ideas even as it articulated a novel creativity. Uncovering passionate dispute and intrigue, Maxson sheds fresh light too on seminal events like the fiery end of oratorical firebrand Savonarola and Giuliano de' Medici's brutal murder by the rival Pazzi family. This book shows why Florence, harbinger and heartland of the Renaissance, is and has always been unique.

Andrea del Verrocchio was the preeminent sculptor in late fifteenth-century Florence and one of the leading artists in Renaissance Europe. In every genre of statuary, Verrocchio made formal and conceptual contributions of the greatest significance, and many of his sculptures, such as the Christ and St. Thomas and the Colleoni Monument, are among the masterpieces of Renaissance art. A favorite artist of Lorenzo de' Medici and the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci, Verrocchio was a key link between the innovations of the fifteenth century and the creations of the High Renaissance. This beautiful catalogue raisonné is the first comprehensive and detailed study of Verrocchio's extraordinary and innovative sculptures. Andrew Butterfield has combined careful visual analysis of the sculptures with groundbreaking research into their function, iconography, and historical context. In order to explain Verrocchio's contributions to the different genres of Renaissance sculpture, Butterfield provides new and important information on a broad range of issues such as the typology and social history of Florentine tombs, the theoretical problems in the production of perspectival reliefs, and the origins of the Figura serpentinata. Furthermore, Butterfield draws on a spectrum of often overlooked texts to elucidate fundamental iconographical problems, for example, the significance of David in quattrocento Florence. In its scope, depth, and clarity, The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio will rank as one of the finest studies of an Italian sculptor ever published.

This book examines the social history of Florence from the fourteenth through to sixteenth centuries.