ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the pains taken by scholars and critics to make the Florentine artistic tradition central to our vision of the Italian Renaissance. A leading figure in this movement was the Florentine Giovanni Bottari (1689-1775), who spent much of his career as a librarian in Rome to the Corsini family. Bottari insisted that what set the Tuscan arts apart from other schools was the literary record, which was produced by artists who were themselves intellectuals. Bottari believed that art historians in other countries—especially France—were hamstrung by a poverty of documents. Yet primary sources were only the first step in Bottari’s program: he and his colleagues also produced a cornucopia of erudite commentary, which was often as dense as the texts they explicated. Their publications remain essential for the scholarly study of Renaissance art today. Their narrative, too—which places Florence at the center of the Renaissance—remains intact, at least in popular culture and the huge apparatus of modern tourism. It is an indelible product of the eighteenth century.
