Florence and the Renaissance: 1400 - 1600

This Renaissance course will chart the relationship between Florence’s shifting power struggles and the extraordinary flowering of visual arts that emerged in the 15th century and continued under the Medici principate in the 16th century. The role of money and the city’s powerful international banking system in funding a magnificent artistic heritage will be considered, along with the rise of a single family, the Medici, to a position of supreme power over all the cities of Tuscany.
We will examine the remarkable painters, sculptors and architects who made the transformation possible, including, Donatello and Brunelleschi, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, and the bitter rivalry between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. We’ll study the emergence of a new understanding and appreciation of classical Antiquity through the poets and philosophers who formed the Platonic Academy under the patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In the 16th century the role of courtier artists such as Pontormo, Bronzino and Vasari in creating the image of a new ‘Imperial’ city under Florence’s first Grand Duke, Cosimo I, will also be explored.