This book has considered the idea, or ideas, of Florence as a city, as seen through the self-identification of the city as a New Athens, a New Rome, and a New Jerusalem. Architecture, described in words, imagined in paintings and reliefs, and realized in fact, played a critical role in the articulation of those identities and in creating the image of Florence as the ideal city. Architecture also played a central role in the formulation of Florence as a descendant of the three distinguished cities of the past – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem – an idea that fostered the growing importance of lineage and genealogy of both the family and the city.