Early Florentine Research Articles

Indications for a Franciscan Role in the Philanthropic Activities of the Early Florentine Misericordia

Abstract Scholarship on Saint Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan movement, established in the thirteenth century, surprisingly tends to ignore his response to a central message of the Church: that we must love and care for the needy among our human brethren. Jesus himself said so, nowhere more explicitly than in Matthew, chapter twenty-five. Yet Francis’s writings repeatedly manifest his familiarity with Matthew, including that chapter. Conditions in rapidly urbanizing parts of Europe during the late-medieval period such as Northern and Central Italy rendered Christ’s mandate to “love one another” especially pertinent. Charitable confraternities played a major role in mitigating human suffering during that transitional era, providing various types of assistance community-wide to disadvantaged neighbors. Archival documents confirm that such actions performed by members of the Misericordia Confraternity of Florence followed Christ’s declaration in Matthew 25 setting forth the Corporal Works of Mercy. Inscriptions and pictorial details in the Misericordia’s frescoed Allegory of Mercy of 1342 underscore this point. Other details within that painting signal a Franciscan influence upon, and presence within, the Misericordia Company, reflecting the existence of a robust Franciscan community in Florence comprising not only members of the First and Second Orders—the Friars Minor and Poor Clares, respectively—but also laypersons of the Third Order. Passages in the writings of Saint Francis and his early biographers indicate the importance that works of mercy had for the Poverello, the six named in Matthew and a seventh commonly added to that list. In particular, Francis’s experiences, pronouncements, and efforts in regard to the fourth and sixth works of mercy, clothing the naked and aiding prisoners, exemplify the charitable activities both encouraged by the saint and, almost certainly with his background, words, and deeds in mind, actually implemented by members of the Misericordia Confraternity, as articulated in their inspirational centerpiece, the Allegory of Mercy.

A study of Michelangelo's David from an accountability perspective: Antecedents of dialogic accounting in the early Florentine Renaissance

This article contributes to the accounting history literature through an investigation of the realisation and placement of Michelangelo's David from an accountability perspective. Using a contextual approach to thematic archival research, we explore whether and how early dialogic accounting (DA) tools were adopted by a hybrid organisation – the Opera of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence – during the period of the statute of David's realisation (1501−1504). Through our analysis of primary and secondary sources, this study sheds light on an early Renaissance accountability system that was based on consensus building and DA. The novel contribution of this study is thus threefold. First, this article adds an early Renaissance analysis to the literature concerning DA. Second, we reveal a new strand of research for accounting historians in regard to the historical period and context of this study. Third, we extend the literature's focus to a hybrid organisation that was financed by the Republic of Florence, associated with the Church and managed by commercial guilds.

The Cosimo Medals Revisited

Whereas medals became increasingly fashionable in the 1440s and ‘50s in various parts of Italy, it was not until the later 1460s that Florentines began to experiment tentatively with medals for their personal glorification and seize their exigency to suit their political agendas. Even then, the medal did not enjoy general popularity in Florence until the final two decades of the quattrocento. Among early Florentine medals, three commemorate Cosimo “il vecchio” de’ Medici (1389–1464); one of them, which is traditionally attributed to a much later period (perhaps even the eighteenth century), may be among the earliest of the group. All three have resisted attributions to specific artists and the dates of their respective factures remain almost completely neglected. The present inquiry revises the traditional chronology of Cosimo's medals, presents new hypotheses about their authors, and suggests why three distinct medals in various sizes that maintained the same symbolism were deemed necessary in the last half of the fifteenth century.

Open Elite? Social Mobility, Marriage, and Family in Florence, 1282–1494*

This article statistically analyzes quantitative data from numerous sources in order to assess changes in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility during the period from 1282 to 1494. During this period, three systems of social stratification coexisted -- wealth, political office, and age of family -- but these contending status systems were not consistent in their rankings of families. Each status system was conservative in the sense that elite families at the top of that hierarchy married each other in order to stabilize their position. But because of inconsistency in rankings, contradiction within the elite opened up the Florentine marriage system to widespread upward social mobility by new men. In their own families, successful new men aggressively imitated their economically and politically declining status superiors. Sharp class divisions thereby blurred into continuous and negotiable status gradients. These open-elite patterns of social mobility, present throughout the early Florentine Renaissance, were most extreme during the Albizzi regime, immediately following the Ciompi Revolt.

The History of Debt Conditionality

High finance has been crucial to the development of states and economies since the early Renaissance. The abandonment of traditional constraints on money-lending in the early 1300s enabled the city-states of Italy to develop rapidly. This connection to finance was crucial to the rebirth of art, learning and science in Europe. The world that was first created by the Florentines was based upon a great mountain – the Monte Commune. In this chapter we will take a brief look at the mountains of debt created over the centuries, how states have developed ways of expanding it and ultimately the painful results of paying the debt. First, we will look at the early Florentine system of debt, second at the waves of debt that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally we will look at the development of conditionality of debt restructuring from gunboat diplomacy to IMF Structural Adjustment Facilities.

Fra Angelico and Early Florentine Renaissance Painting in the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Fra Angelico and Early Florentine Renaissance Painting in the John G. Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Towards a Chronology of the Madrigals of Arcadelt

Research Article| January 01 1987 Towards a Chronology of the Madrigals of Arcadelt James Haar James Haar Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Musicology (1987) 5 (1): 28–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/763823 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James Haar; Towards a Chronology of the Madrigals of Arcadelt. Journal of Musicology 1 January 1987; 5 (1): 28–54. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/763823 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Musicology Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1987 Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Early Florentine Designers and Engravers: A Comparative Analysis of Early Florentine Nielli, Intarsias, Drawings, and Copperplate Engravings

Early Florentine Designers and Engravers: A Comparative Analysis of Early Florentine Nielli, Intarsias, Drawings, and Copperplate Engravings

The Early Works of Paolo Uccello

Apart from some slight suggestions, mainly put forward by Roberto Longhi, critical literature on Paolo Uccello has limited itself in these last years to dealing with a few new and by no means always convincing attributions, without any effort to make clear the part played by this great master in the early Florentine Renaissance as a whole. We are still without an adequate analysis of his art as deducible from his few authenticated works, which should furnish the basis for all further knowledge of his artistic personality—a personality which, in our belief, has, as a result of erroneous attributions, been wrongly conceived during the last generation of art criticism. That most important and most difficult problem of his artistic derivation and of his earliest productions remains to be solved.1