In the middle years of the fifteenth century, the Florentine-born Tommaso Spinelli (1398–1472) became a prominent banker in Rome and sponsored numerous building projects and other artistic enterprises, especially in Florence. This book gives an overview of the Spinelli family, concentrating on Tommaso and discussing in detail his business activities and his donations to the church of Santa Croce, the cloister and infirmary that he built there, the palace nearby, and his villa in the hills east of the city. Some of these matters had already been touched upon by Filippo Moisè (Santa Croce di Firenze: Illustrazione storico-artistica [Florence, 1845]), who published some documents from the Santa Croce archives, and by a number of twentieth-century scholars, including Philip Jacks himself.¹ The book under review here brings much new material to all questions concerning the Spinelli because the authors, an architectural historian and a historian respectively, were able to use the newly available Spinelli Archive, acquired in 1988 by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In general, The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family is a narrative that starts in chapter 1 with “The First Spinelli” and then focuses on the family’s most famous member, weaving an account of Tommaso Spinelli’s life with discussions of his family, his businesses, his patronage of art, and his buildings. Spinelli was an important merchant, and the details now available about his life lay the basis for a fascinating and revealing study; equally, the art and architecture that he sponsored are of such beauty and interest that any new work on them is welcome. The book is very nicely produced, with excellent photographs and a good index. Thus, the combined expertise of two scholars and the new documentation might have resulted in a notable contribution to the thriving study of art and patronage in Renaissance Italy. Unfortunately, the book does not live up to its promise.

New information appears in chapter 5, on the palace, but many aspects of the treatment are confused. The authors make the improbable proposal that the palace was built from only two houses, bought for a total of 242 florins; but what then of Tommaso’s mention in his will of 1456 that he owned three houses in the area? There is the rash assertion (116) that the total cost of construction may have been about 160 florins. Here I think that the authors misinterpret a document of 1457 that refers instead to the purchase of yet another small house; one should take seriously Tommaso Spinelli’s own statement in the same will that he was prepared to spend 3,000 florins, a much more plausible figure, on building a new palace. Again, I do not believe that work on this coherent and refined building could have taken place in fits and starts and that little was done to alter the component houses (113–14). The map on page 107 keying properties with owners in 1427, which was conceived to aid the reader in understanding the site for the new palace, is misleading: the sizes given for many of the plots are arbitrary, and in the crucial matter of the relative sequence of owners in the area of the palace, the map reverses the order clearly evident in the house-by-house census of 1561 (Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Decima Granducale, vol. 3781, fols. 9–10). Finally, we are given no clear proposal for a date of construction, even though new documents establishing that Spinelli rented out some of this property in 1459 and 1460 with the proviso that he give six months notice if he wished to build would seem to indicate that construction was imminent (114), and document 26, an accounting in 1465 of door locks and other metalwork, would then signify near completion. But if the palace was built from about 1461 to 1465, one wonders why Spinelli, who was older than most palace builders, waited four or five years after assembling the site before commencing construction.

No one has ever given much attention to the interior of the Spinelli palace, especially of the main upper floor, so we might have hoped for an initial foray with the help of the inventories preserved in the Spinelli Archive. Tantalizingly, we hear of an inventory of 1465, when Spinelli was still alive, but it is not transcribed, and no archival reference is given for it (141). The two inventories that are published, from 1481 and 1490, receive only brief discussion. One of the inventories mentions a “banco” and a “fondaco del banco” (141, 310); if these allude to a commercial operation, they deserve comment, as this would be an anomaly for a palace from this period in Florence.

The chapter about Santa Croce (chapter 6) is more successful than the one on the palace, displaying a good deal of research that results in some real contributions regarding the area outside the entrance to the convent, the large cloister and its environs, and the infirmary—some of the many spaces to which Tommaso Spinelli turned his attention over a period of more than thirty years. The large cloister, usually dated about 1452, is shown to have been completed much later, though this is not stated clearly. And the authors publish in document 36 extensive accounts for the infirmary, which Spinelli started in 1471, near the end of his life.

The palace and the cloister both have been treated extensively in modern scholarship, but the villa at Rignalla has been little studied; the chapter on it, with the straightforward task of explaining how the villa was adapted from a preexisting structure, works quite well, and some of the building documents can be directly related to surviving elements. The plan of the ground floor is discussed in some detail. In all three of these chapters about buildings, Michelozzo’s name regularly appears without adequate arguments to support the attributions made to him.

The broad scope of this study involves many issues, but the authors evidently did not have complete control over all the topics they set for themselves. The book is very difficult to read because lines of argument are rarely clear, and the writing can be so sloppy and imprecise as to obscure meaning. Pennsylvania State University Press is to be criticized for—seemingly—having done little editing or adequate proofreading of the authors’ texts; in document 30 on page 314, for example, the 870 fiorini di suggello in the text become 1870 in the column at the right. There are many, many errors of fact (for one, on page 128, the Palla Strozzi involved in the Strozzino Palace was not Palla di Nofri Strozzi, who died in exile). Misinterpretations of fifteenth-century terminology also appear (as in the glossary definition of coltrice, which is not a knife but an article of bedding; the term appears frequently in the inventory, published as document 27, that is stated to date from 1480 but that must be from 1481, according to the modern style used often—but not consistently—throughout the book). Despite the collaboration of Dr. Gino Corti, some questionable transcriptions remain (in this same inventory, the second column on page 311 lists in the kitchen “2 grattug[i]e triste” [2 old graters] and then “1 spallyera d’arazzo” [1 tapestry wall hanging], probably signifying that we have moved to the sala, but either the indication of this was dropped or the situation deserves comment; the Latin in note 61 on pages 372–73 is incomprehensible). Finally, puzzling lapses sometimes occur, as on page 141, where we hear that Tommaso’s second wife was evicted from the palace after his death in 1472, but from pages 256–57 and document 47 (346), we clearly understand that she had moved out of his house by 1468. In sum, the reader is left wondering whether the text and the critical apparatus can be relied on.

While this study is hardly the final word on all the topics the authors confront, and while it is frustrating to read, The Spinelli of Florence is full of new material bringing up suggestive points, not the least about Tommaso Spinelli himself. The authors seem justified in concluding that Spinelli was an astute businessman, and they cite evidence of strong ethical and religious convictions. Little emerges, though, about what seems to have been Tommaso’s remarkable aesthetic sense, to judge from the cabinetwork he donated to Santa Croce’s sacristy, the sgraffito decoration and the sculptural detailing of his palace, as well as his words about silver vessels and other objects. In his will of 1456 he stated that he was negotiating with the father of his first wife, Luigi Peruzzi, to buy the latter’s house, but that if he was not successful, he wanted a “pulcra domus” (a beautiful house) to be built from his properties on the borgo Santa Croce; the unusual turn of phrase aptly evokes Spinelli’s aspirations and the palace itself.