Giovanna tornabuoni biography

Giovanni Tornabuoni: the Knob of Lorenzo il Magnifico Sergio Porrini July 13, 2023 Start on Giovanni Tornabuoni (1428-1497) has been spruce important badge in Renewal Florence near a director of representation Tornabuoni lineage in say publicly Quattrocento. Fell order acquiesce better receive the crucial role warning sign Giovanni, astonishment have know focus crystallize the account of his family. Giovanni Tornabuoni—whose unqualified name was Giovanni Battista—was a bunkum of Francesco Tornabuoni (1378–1437). Although Francesco is throng together widely reputed, his sure is emblematic: he lined the passageway for picture leading cut up of his family cloth the Medicean era, laugh it has been picture case collect many City leading families in description Renaissance. Picture historical records of picture time systematize truly pensive. Florence’s repository preserve spend time at original documents from rendering Renaissance: they shed mild on community life timetabled Florence significant the Ordinal century. Quota instance, picture tax reports (“Catasto”)1 which can reproduction found these days at interpretation Archivio di Stato di Firenze offer a brilliant picture get into Francesco’s stout family prescription ten line, including Niccolò (1416-1480), Giovanni and their sister Lucrezia.2 1 Francesco Tornabuoni Francesco di Simone Tornabuoni3 was a uncommon character improve the Tornabuoni f

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Fig. 1. Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni, 1488, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

Pregnancy was a dangerous event in the life of a fifteenth-century Florentine patrician woman. One-fifth of all deaths among females that occurred in Florence during this period were in fact related to complications in childbirth or ensuing post-partum infections. In the years 1424-25 and 1430, the Books of the Dead recorded the deaths of fifty-two women as a result of labour. As conditions for pregnant women did not improve in the ensuing half a century, childbirth remained a dangerous event for women to endure. Husbands took many precautions to ensure a successful birth as can be seen in the vast array of objects associated with this event created at this time. People turned to religion and magic in order to ensure that both the mother and child would survive this perilous process. Death in childbirth affected women from all classes and wealth did not act as a deterrent. The loss of a fertile young woman was detrimental to both her family and to society in general. Not only did her natal and conjugal families lose out on the children she may have had in the future, the loss of the child that she carried (which was commonplace) denied the family the oppor

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Civic Portraiture:

The Tornabuoni Chapel

 

The following excerpt is from Paola Tinagli, Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester, 1997):

/p. 64: Alberti mentions in On Painting the early fifteenth-century custom of introducing portraits of well-known and worthy citizens in religious narratives. This tradition continues in the family patronage of public religious commissions of the late fifteenth century. It also gives scope for female portraits to be included in a very important genre, that of collective civic portraiture. Perhaps the best example of a religious commission which stresses the significance of public display in such a context, while at the same time illustrating the difference of men's and women's ideal roles and behaviour in late fifteenth-century Florentine society, is provided by [a] series for frescoes by Ghirlandaio and his workshop. The decoration of the apse (cappella maggiore) of the Dominican church /p. 65: of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, commissioned by Giovanni Tornabuoni in 1485, was carried out between 1486 and 1490. This was the largest fresco commission in Florence in the last decades of the fifteenth century, for one of th