From 'sacred images' to 'tourist images'? : the fourteenth-century frescoes of Santa Croce, Florence

In 2006, Cambridge University Press published a collection of essays entitled Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Many of the leading Florentine scholars working in English are represented in this volume and together they build on the historical research that has been undertaken about the Tuscan city in recent decades and extend this work by assembling a composite picture of the social life of the city from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century ce. This time frame is, of course, the three centuries synonymous with Florence’s reputation as the crucible of the Italian Renaissance. In his conclusion, Jonathan Nelson’s contribution about sacred spaces and the memorial chapels in Florentine churches notes the radical disjunction between the family chapels of the distant past – with their decorations, sacred objects and rituals – and what they have become in the present.