During the course of the fifteenth century four generations of the Medici family moved from a relatively minor banking family to the de facto rulers of the city of Florence before being expelled in 1494. Among (sometimes quite ruthless) political and economic methods, male members of the family – Giovanni di Bicci, Cosimo di Giovanni and his brother Lorenzo di Giovanni, Piero di Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnificent – used the arts as potent forms of propaganda to insinuate themselves into a rulership position over a city that had a proud history as a republic. Their artistic patronage, its appearance in critical areas of the city, its transformation of traditional modes of self-presentation, its use of style and its subtle but threatening imagery all helped to insure Medici control over Florence for nearly a century. Their artists – Donatello, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Michelozzo, Verrocchio – are well known – but the consistent but subtle messages of power that underlay Medici patronage are less well known in part because they are deliberately ambiguous, leading to Cosimo’s presumed quip when asked about what he was saying: “Learn my language.” That is what we will try to do.

John Paoletti received his Ph.D in art history from Yale University. He taught the history of Italian Renaissance art and of the art of the twentieth century at Wesleyan University from 1972 to 2009, having previously taught at Bryn Mawr College and Dartmouth College. He was a William R. Kenan Professor of the Humanities at Wesleyan from 2005 until his retirement. He received the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Wesleyan in 1997 and the Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association in 2003. He was a Fellow at the School of Historical Studies, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton in the spring of 2001 and Visiting Professor at the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, in the late fall of 2008. He is currently serving as a member of the Committee on Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 1996-2000 he was the editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, the journal of record in art history in the United States. He served as guest curator for exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as at Wesleyan. He lectured on a number of occasions at the Metropolitan Museum and for the Friends of Florence. He is also a lecturer for Smithsonian tours.
His book, Michelangelo’s David: Florentine History and Civic Identity, was published in 2015; it uses the popular culture and civic history of Florence to open new ways of interpreting the David. He is the co-author with Gary Radke of Art in Renaissance Italy, now in its fourth edition. With Roger Crum he is the co-editor of and contributing author to Renaissance Florence: a Social History, (New York, 2006). He has contributed catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, the National Gallery of Art and the Nürnberg Kunsthalle. He has contributed articles on Italian sculpture and Medici patronage to a number of essay collections and festschriften, and to The Art Bulletin, the Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, Artibus et Historiae, Pantheon, and Renaissance Quarterly. He is currently at work on Medici patronage during the fifteenth century and on a monograph on the contemporary German artist Georg Baselitz.