We owe to the patronage of the Tornabuoni family some of the most glorious artworks of the late Quattrocento. In this book, primarily a work of art history, Maria DePrano situates those works within an ongoing, multi-pronged project of art patronage carried out by this notable family over a number of years and multiple generations, but also within the broader social, spatial, literary, and religious contexts in which the art they commissioned was displayed and utilized. To that end, the book follows a chronological order of exposition; but that approach is coupled in several chapters with a sense of a walk through the spaces in which the family lived and worshiped. Throughout, DePrano successfully conveys a sense of the mentalités and symbolic resonances within which the art was embedded, and of the material culture with which it was surrounded.

Chapter 1 introduces the family. Chapter 2 focuses on a painting now hanging in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, which DePrano persuasively argues is a depiction of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent and a woman of unusual influence and renown. Chapters 3 and 4 examine a number of medals commissioned by the family in the 1480s, an especially intimate form of commemoration. Chapter 5 discusses a number of spalliere—paintings on wood panels used as domicile furnishings—featuring scenes from the ancient Greek myth of Jason and Medea. Chapter 6 provides an extended discussion of the Ghirlandaio frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel (in Santa Maria Novella), their placement, and their intended audience. Chapter 7 focuses on paintings of Lorenzo Tornabuoni's first wife, Giovanna degli Albizzi, and on the theme of honoring a deceased wife—a topic that is deeply affective and yet, as DePrano points out, rarely expressed in Renaissance portraiture. Chapter 8 turns to two unusual frescoes executed by Botticelli in the Tornabuoni villa, outside of Florence. Chapter 9 briefly explores the art-patronage efforts of sixteenth-century members of the family and meditates on the vicissitudes of patronage in the time of Savonarola. A concluding chapter summarizes some of the main findings and themes of the book, primarily that the Tornabuoni oeuvre displays the importance of portraiture, incorporates both classical and Christian iconography, articulates an especially strong Christian faith and orientation toward salvation, and, perhaps most distinctively, exhibits “a dedication to celebrating and remembering their female relatives” (204).

Overall, the book strikes one as comprehensive and exhaustive. It is full of illustrations: color plates of the main works discussed, but also, even more helpfully, numerous black-and-white figures depicting works by other artists and/or works commissioned by other families, enabling DePrano to make cogent points about the precedents, and the distinctiveness, of the Tornabuoni commissions. Her analysis traverses art objects in quite different media that might ordinarily be treated separately, using the thread of family patronage to unite them. Her musings on the placement, meaning, and purpose of the Ghirlandaio frescoes is very welcome, focusing more than others on their importance for religious aims, in light of the physical arrangement of the church (138–40). In short, DePrano has done a lot of good detective work, searching out comparable works centering on comparable themes in comparable (and disparate) media. And her work is copiously annotated.

While that attention to comprehensiveness is welcome from a scholarly standpoint, unhappily the work frequently reads more like a dissertation than a book. DePrano seems compelled to account for every point ever made about these works in the existing literature. At times that becomes tedious, with rather pedestrian, blow-by-blow summaries of which scholar said what. Extensive discussions of the iconography found in the paintings are frequently illuminating, but also repetitious, especially when discussing the Christian meaning of so many images and figures (for example, the long discussion of the god Mercury in chapter 3, or the discussion of the Graces in chapter 4). Sometimes the author's own points are repeated nearly verbatim a couple of pages apart (for example, regarding the inscription on Battista Sforza's portrait, pp. 148 and 150), suggesting the book would have benefited from tighter editing. Nevertheless, those flaws are more than counterbalanced by several engaging insights—for example, DePrano's identification of Tornabuoni and Albizzi family emblems in many of the works—and by the author's effort to be exhaustive, a feature that specialist readers will greatly appreciate.