The Medici Family’s Role in the Renaissance

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_178How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Medici Family; Banking; Renaissance; Patronage; Protestant Reformation

Abstract

When one walks through the world’s most famous art museums, names such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo always seem to attract the most attention and financial value. Indeed, Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi holds the world record for the most expensive piece of art ever auctioned at $450 million. The value of these pieces, however, is not just in their aesthetics; they also represent a fundamental shift in the form and purpose of artwork during the Renaissance. It can be tempting to explain such a change by pointing to the talent and skills of the artists mentioned above, but that would ignore the underlying cause. Undoubtedly, talented individuals did change the world of art, but it was the rise of their patrons in the fourteenth century that facilitated, or to some extent, were the true changers of it. One such family had a particularly enormous impact in this field: the Medici Family. Through their innovations in banking, the Medici accumulated a fantastic amount of wealth, enabling them to fund full-time artists and fulfill their motivations to increase their Family’s social status, beautify Florence, placate the Catholic Church’s disapproval of usury, and extend their sphere of influence. This influence enabled them to hold astonishing political power and shape European and other western governments during the Renaissance to how we know them today.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Jonas Junlang Huang
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/13
TI  - The Medici Family’s Role in the Renaissance
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 4th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1389
EP  - 1395
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_178
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_178
ID  - Huang2023
ER  -