Parution : Carla d’Arista, The Pucci of Florence: Patronage and Politics in Renaissance Italy, Turnhout, Brepols, 2020

Shrewd and ruthless, the Pucci were Medici loyalists whose political and cultural alignment with the most powerful family in Renaissance Florence was rewarded with wealth and influence. The Pucci’s martial support for the Medici in the dangerous business of ruling Tuscany drove their transformation from a clan of minor guildsmen to a noble dynasty with three cardinals to its name. Over the next two centuries, they showcased their exalted status with art and architecture that mirrored Medici tastes and reflected the values of civic humanism. The political and religious turmoil of the High Renaissance is writ large in this vivid portrait of the Pucci cardinals and their artistic patronage, a cultural biography inflected by the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, the Sack of Rome, the Reformation, and the occupation of Italy by Emperor Charles V.

New archival evidence documents the chapels, palaces, and villas that were built, expanded, and decorated by the Pucci family in Rome, Tuscany, and Umbria. These celebrated projects were carried out by luminaries of Renaissance  art and architecture: Michelozzo, the Pollaiuolo brothers, the Sangallo family, Baccio d’Agnolo, the Montelupo workshop, and others. A remarkable body of inventories reveals how the family’s  trials and tribulations shaped the fate of their estates and illustrates the role luxury goods played in the social ambitions of this newly-arrived family. A previously unknown catalogue of Palazzo Pucci tells the tale of the nineteenth-century dispersal of the family’s priceless  Renaissance  artworks, a collection that once mirrored the splendor of the Medici court.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
A note on Money and Currencies
A note on Weights and Measures
A note on Dates
A note on Spelling
Archival Sources Used in this Study
Family Tree

Introduction: ‘Beneath the Shadow of Thy Wings I Sleep’

I.    From the Beginning: Medici Loyalists
II.   The Pucci Oratory in Santissima Annunziata
III.   Antonio Pucci: Dynastic Promotion and Image-Building
IV.  Casa Pucci in Florence (1503-1537): Fashioning Social Hierarchies
V.   Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci in the Eternal City
VI.  Cardinal Antonio Pucci: A Scholarly Diplomat
VII. Roberto Pucci (1531-1547): It’s All in the Family
VIII. Reframing Ambition, Wealth, and Dishonor (1547-1612)

Epilogue (1612-1913)