Evelyn Welch

Making and marketing medicine in renaissance Florence

What did you do when you fell ill in fifteenth-century Florence? How did you get the medicines that you needed at a price you could afford? What would you find when you entered an apothecary’s shop? This richly detailed study of the Speziale al Giglio in Florence provides surprising answers, demonstrating the continued importance of highly personalised medical practice late into the fifteenth century.

Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan

Milan was one of the largest and most important cities in Renaissance Italy. This study explores the city itself, showing how the allegiances of the town hall and the parish related to those of the servants and aristocrats who frequented the Visconti and Sforza court.

Galeazzo Maria Sforza and the Castello di Pavia, 1469

A unique group of documents allows a precise reconstruction of two floors of the Visconti-Sforza castle in Pavia as it existed in August 1469. The building itself has been badly damaged, but these records include a survey of the condition of the ground floor and piano nobile, an elaborate program of new fresco decorations, and an estimate of their cost. The new painting scheme was designed by the fifth duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, and called for both the traditional iconography of courtly hunts and games and unusual scenes such as the duke getting dressed. Numerous portraits are specified, demonstrating the political nature of this large-scale project of redecoration. The Milanese evidence suggests that surviving frescoes such as Andrea Mantegnas Camera degli Sposi in Mantua were not as unusual as they now appear.

The art of expenditure: the court of Paola Malatesta Gonzaga in fifteenth‐century Mantua

The paper draws on four surviving account books to examine the way a female court functioned during the first quarter of the fifteenth century. The documents, which have never received detailed attention, record Paola Malatesta Gonzagas income and expenditure over an almost twenty-year period, revealing her close attention to her land, estates, and the welfare of her famiglia. They also provide considerable new information for Paolas important, and now almost entirely lost, patronage of religious institutions in Mantua. From her previous historiographic role as the wife of Mantuas first marquis, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, or as the mother of Ludovico and Cecilia Gonzaga, Paola emerges as an energetic, ambitious and culturally sensitive figure whose biography deserves re-examination.