ABSTRACT
The city-states of Florence, Venice, Siena and Lucca comprised the four major republics of the quattrocento, and each by then had become subject to oligarchic rule. Florence - despite its empathy for humanism - had gone one stage further and fell under veiled signorial government between 1434 and 1494 before re-adopting popular republican government, only to see this system replaced once more by undisguised signorial rule by the second decade of the sixteenth century. It is against this seemingly unpropitious backdrop that, throughout the fifteenth century, the built environment of many cities was transformed by public patrons. Rome, however, as the centre of power within the Papal States, was a major player in Italian politics and intent on territorial aggrandisement. The political development of the Tuscan republics of Siena and Lucca during the fifteenth century was far less notable than that of Florence or Venice.
