Images of Quattrocento Florence: Selected Writings in Literature, History, and Art

The Italian Quattrocento, particularly in Florence, was a period of increasing prosperity and the steady progression and dissemination of the ideals of humanism that were beginning to take root. This period of Florentine history, under the reign of the infamous Medici family, produced great masters of the visual arts and men of letters beyond compare, crafting not only a rich society but laying the footwork for the Italian and European Renaissance and great leaps in Western thought. This volume brings together over fifty sources from this period (many translated into English for the first time), which contributed to the emergence of a particularly Florentine civic ideology.