This well-written and beautifully produced book presents the first comprehensive study of one of the Renaissance's most fascinating moments in the appropriation of pagan and Christian antiquity: Florence's self-representation as a successor to Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem in the fourteenth and fifteenth century. While several articles and monographs have already been dedicated to the way Florentine humanists and artists generated prestige for their city by highlighting its Roman origins, Chernetsky's book is the first to discuss the theme alongside with the city's self-image as a New Athens and New Jerusalem.
The book stands out for its successful attempt to discuss both written sources (poetry, histories, and art treatises) and visual sources (paintings, drawings, and statues) in a coherent scholarly narrative. To tackle the problem of how the diverse city images correlate, Chernetsky seeks to understand them against the background of the Florentine occupation with lineage and genealogy. In the thirteenth century, Florentine society saw the emergence of family memoirs and city chronicles, which attest to a need to document and promote one's origins and history. Given the greater social mobility between nobles and popolo in comparison with other cities, such documents are fairly numerous for Florence. Whereas ambitions to revive legendary cities from the past are also attested in other cities, the abundance of materials justifies Chernetsky's approach to focus solely on Trecento and Quattrocento Florence.
In chapter 1 (“Florence as a New Athens”) Chernetsky traces the development of Florence's self-image as the counterpart of classical Greece's main center of culture. She argues that Florence's Greek origin myths (e.g., in Brunetto Latini), and the city's interest in reviving Greek antiquity as part of the humanist project, inspired humanists and artists to compare the city to classical Athens. The second chapter (“Florence as a New Rome”) studies how Renaissance Florentines aimed to recreate the political, cultural, and artistic achievements of the ancient Romans in their own city. It mainly focuses on literary visualizations of Florence's Roman monuments, which bore witness to the city's Roman foundation in the first century BCE and its ancient splendor. In chapter 3 (“Florence as a New Jerusalem”) Chernetsky demonstrates how, especially in the wake of Girolamo Savonarola's preaching, Florence was expected to embody the spiritual center of Christian antiquity, both via religious processions and references to Jerusalem's Jewish temple and the Holy Sepulchre. The final chapter (“Florence as a New Florence: The Tornabuoni Chapel”) discusses how Domenico Ghirlandaio's frescoes in the Santa Maria Novella depict an idealized cityscape that incorporates many elements from ancient architecture.
The small reservations I formulate below do not call into question Chernetsky's main arguments, which are treated with great clarity and persuasion, but two of her discussions of humanist literature that could have received more attention.
Although Chernetsky documents several interesting moments where humanists and artists collaborated with patrons in promoting Florence's city-images, she could on occasion have been more precise as to the role that humanists have played in this process. On page 20, she writes that all humanist texts to be discussed in chapter 1 “were commissioned by the Medici and their circle.” Commissions of panegyrical poems, however, were rather rare in Florence: more often, humanist authors dedicated on their own initiative poems to the Medici to mark their (continued) interest in support. It is important to take into account the system of literary patronage—in which the content of a poem was only very rarely dictated by a patron—in order to come to a full understanding of the humanist contribution to Florence's image as revived ancient city.
Furthermore, while Chernetsky rightly stresses how Florence's fashioning as New Rome occasionally reflects how the Medici strengthened their ties with papal Rome some years after the Pazzi conspiracy (68–69), her second chapter might have also discussed a more plausible implication of the New Rome theme already proposed by Susanna de Beer in interpreting Verino's Carlias. Claiming to be a New Rome also suggests an attempt to compete with popes like Sixtus IV, who actively engaged in reviving ancient Rome on its original location through restorations of classical Roman buildings in situ. During many years of Lorenzo de’ Medici's unofficial rule, the Florentines were on bad terms with the Roman pope because of territorial conflicts, which is reflected in many contemporary humanist texts. It is therefore plausible that Florence's attempts to be a New Rome challenged papal Rome's aspiration of being a Rome revived.
Despite these two remarks on specific places in the book, Chernetsky's monograph as a whole marks a big step ahead in the study of Renaissance Florentine culture. Her fresh interpretations of a wide range of texts and artworks will interest scholars and students alike, and will stimulate further research into self-promotion strategies and uses of antiquity in other Renaissance cities.
