Florence and the Medici: How Patronage Built the Renaissance

Florence in the 1400s was a wealthy republic built on banking and the wool and cloth trades, and its elites competed to display status through art. In 1401 the city held a competition for new bronze doors for the Baptistery, won by Lorenzo Ghiberti. Filippo Brunelleschi then solved the problem of the cathedral's giant dome, completed in 1436 using ingenious engineering without traditional wooden centering.

The Medici banking family, dominant from 1434, funded churches, libraries and artists, including Donatello and Botticelli, and Lorenzo 'il Magnifico' gathered poets and scholars. Patronage served the Medici by displaying wealth, piety and civic loyalty while strengthening their informal political power in a republic. Not everyone approved: the preacher Savonarola denounced luxury, and his followers burned 'vanities' in 1497. Florence shows how money, politics and religion shaped Renaissance art.