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Note: Artists and Mourners
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Under the arcades were classical busts, statues, columns, inscriptions and Roman sarcophagi including the fourth-century stone coffin used for Cosimo’s great-great-great-great grandfather’s cousin, Guccio de’ Medici, who had been Gonfaloniere in 1299. Perhaps there already, and certainly there later, were Donatello’s bronze statue of David1 and his Judith Slaying Holofernes.
LOCATION: 1269

His other statues, like all statues of his time, had been made to occupy a particular position in a building as an architectural motif or ornamentation, whereas the David was not only an astonishingly beautiful and emotive work of art, it was also a remarkable innovation, the first free-standing figure cast in bronze since classical times.
LOCATION: 1280

To Cosimo such objections seemed wholly unreasonable, obtusely at variance with those classical Greek ideals which were Donatello’s inspiration. In his own devotion to the humanist spirit, Cosimo had accepted the dedication of Antonio Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus which, in the manner of Catullus, celebrates the pleasures of homosexual love. In the same spirit he honoured the genius of Donatello and the ancient art that had inspired
LOCATION: 1284

Cosimo grew deeply attached to Donatello, for whom he assumed a kind of paternal responsibility. He saw to it that he was never short of work,
LOCATION: 1288

Donatello knocked it off the parapet into the street where it was ‘shattered into a thousand pieces’.
LOCATION: 1296

Donatello was not really interested in money. In his studio he put what he earned into a wicker basket which hung by a cord from the ceiling; and all his workmen and apprentices and even his friends were allowed to help themselves to what they needed without asking him. Nor was he interested in clothes.
LOCATION: 1298

Fra Filippo’s one virtue. He was a liar, a drunkard, a lecher and a fraud; and his superiors were profoundly relieved when he left the convent, abandoned his vows and was seized by Barbary pirates off the coast of Ancona while out sailing with some friends. On escaping from his chains he made for Naples, then returned to Florence where his lovely altarpiece for the nuns of Sant’ Ambrogio brought his remarkable gifts to the attention of Cosimo de’ Medici. Disregarding his reputation both as whoremonger and scrounger, Cosimo asked him to work for him and it was at the Medici Palace that
LOCATION: 1313

Cosimo was often heard to say thereafter that artists must always be treated with respect, that they should never be considered mere journeymen as they were by most other patrons of his time.
LOCATION: 1331

Every morning before he began work on The Crucifixion, as on every other morning before starting to paint one of those religious subjects to which he devoted the rest of his life, Fra Angelico would kneel in prayer. And each day, as on every other day when painting a picture of Christ suffering on the Cross, he would be so overcome by emotion that the tears would pour down his cheeks.
LOCATION: 1341

A visitor to Florence at this time noticed how drawn and ill and unhappy he looked; and his declining years were, indeed, clouded by sadness. His eldest son, Piero, now forty years old, had never been strong and was not expected to survive him long, if at all. Cosimo’s hopes were centred in his second, his favourite son, Giovanni, for whom Michelozzo had been asked to build the Villa Medici on the slopes of Fiesole.
LOCATION: 1352

conscientious citizen and a capable businessman, carefully trained by his father who relied on him more and more after the death of the bank’s general manager, Giovanni d’Amerigo
LOCATION: 1359

‘Oh, my lords,’ Cosimo replied, not in the least abashed, throwing his arms round the ambassadors’ shoulders. ‘Are you not also fathers and grandfathers? You must not be surprised that I should have made a whistle. It’s a good thing that the boy didn’t ask me to play it for him; because I would have done that too.’
LOCATION: 1371