Artful conversions: Renaissance rhetorics in the name of God and profit

This dissertation investigates the influence of the early modern banking in late medieval and Renaissance Florence. Each chapter analyzes a set of imagery---The Adoration of the Magi, The Expulsion of the Moneychangers, The Tribute Money---or a literary text---Dante's Commedia (1321), Boccaccio's Decameron (1351), Leonardo Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae Urbis (1403--6), and Leon Battista Alberti's I libri della famiglia (1435)---in order to trace shifts in economic ideology. The problem I address is that scholarship tends to conceive of the effect of commerce on Renaissance society in one of two ways: either as a part of the phenomenon of "religious secularism" or as a catalyst for the reception of classical humanism. This study bridges the divide. The central thesis is that in Florence's transformation from a medieval banking capital to a Renaissance cultural marketplace, we can locate a complicated struggle to use humanist "currencies" in order to reconcile religious devotion with mercantile ambition. To this end, I adopt the conceptual frame of "conversions," setting the stage for comparisons between artistic, literary, religious and economic discourses. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, the study maps an important new genealogy of mercantile influence on the Florentine Renaissance.