MERCHANT IDEOLOGY IN THE RENAISSANCE: GUILD HALL DECORATION IN FLORENCE, SIENA, AND PERUGIA. (VOLUME I: TEXT. VOLUME II: ILLUSTRATIONS; NOT MICROFILMED AS PART OF DISSERTATION) (ITALY)

While some aspects of guild patronage in the early Renaissance are well-known, the imagery in guild halls has been neglected. An examination of surviving halls in Florence, elsewhere in Tuscany, and in Perugia, and of documents and literary sources which describe lost works, reveals programs of decoration clarifying works by artists such as Taddeo Gaddi, Fra Angelico, Piero Pollaiuolo, and Perugino.;The guild halls of Tuscany, once the center of Renaissance economic life, show a striking consistency in the themes chosen for decoration by the merchants, with an emphasis on the Cardinal Virtues, particularly Justice, and heroic exempla. Guild hall decoration deserves to be acknowledged as a distinct category of artistic project in the Renaissance.;The halls of the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, or Lawyers and Notaries, and of the Arte della Lana, or Wool guild, contain remains of significant fresco projects with distinctive secular iconography, the former a cycle of famous Florentine writers and a diagram of the guild system of Florence, and the latter scenes of jousting and of the manufacture of wool. The Audience Hall of the Wool Guild is decorated with a mid-fourteenth century fresco of Brutus the Roman Consul, and the four Cardinal Virtues, imagery which recurs in later works of art commissioned by the guild bodies of the Mercanzia, or high guild court, in both Perugia and Siena. The hall of the Collegio del Cambio, or Money-changers, in Perugia, formerly studied only in the context of Perugino's works, is also found to show significant relationships in its program of Cardinal Virtues and ancient heroes to earlier guild hall iconography. This study also includes the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, similar in both form and function to the guild halls, and the Palazzo della Mercanzia in Florence as well as a survey of both lost and surviving works for the halls of the lesser guilds in the city, many destroyed in the late nineteenth century. Evidence indicates that most halls, when lacking such ambitious programs as those above, were decorated at least with one or more images of the Madonna and the patron saints of the guild.