The 15th century was a time of dramatic and decisive change for nuns and nunneries in Florence. In the course of that century, the city's convents evolved from small, semiautonomous communities to large civic institutions. By 1552, roughly one in eight Florentine women lived in …
The ducal court of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Florence was one of absolutist, rule-bound order. Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of…
