Anne Leader

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Fellow at University of Virginia

In the late 1420s, Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni initiated a major building campaign to reform the Benedictine monastery of the Florentine Badia. Designed to provide its community with an orderly space in which to pursue the Benedictine Observance, the compound rises around the so-called Orange Cloister, long considered to be an early work of Bernardo...

The origins of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) have fascinated scholars for well over a century. Archival research has revealed much about Leonardo's origins and his complex family that included four stepmothers and twenty-three half-brothers and half-sisters and their offspring. One source, however, has been overlooked by scholars – a Libro dei defu...

Santa Maria di Firenze, an ancient, venerable Benedictine abbey (called the Badia) located in the heart of Florence, is the subject of Anne Leader's new book. In 1418, 17 Benedictine monks journeyed to Florence from Padua to save one of their order's oldest houses from ruin. Realizing that reformed spiritual practice alone would not save the Badia,...

The story of the bookseller Giovanni Baldini (d. 1425) expands our understanding of class, neighborhood, social status, and the construction of memory in Renaissance Florence. Investigation of his tax records, testament, and gravesite shows this stationer ( cartolaio ) to have achieved a level of wealth in the top two percent of Tuscan households a...

Offering a broad overview of memorialization practices across Europe and the Mediterranean, this book examines local customs through particular case studies. These essays explore complementary themes through the lens of commemorative art, including social status; personal and corporate identities; the intersections of mercantile, intellectual, and...

Most modern historians perpetuate the myth that Giuliano de' Medici (1479-1516), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was nothing more than an inconsequential, womanizing hedonist with little inclination or ability for politics. In the first sustained biography of this misrepresented figure, Josephine Jungic re-evaluates Giuliano’s life and shows that h...

Traces the movement of a saddler and his family from Galicia to Chicago in the early 20th century.

Book review

Since Ernst Gombrich’s 1960 article on the revival of classical theories of magnificence in conjunction with Medici patronage, numerous scholars have explored its development in Florence, Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, and other sites of Renaissance palace building. James Lindow argues that while magnificence has been well studied, “the usage and applica...

Keith Christiansen, Jayne Wrightsman Curator from the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings, gave a brilliant lecture with the deceptively simple title, “Ghiberti and Painting.” Christiansen demonstrated the clear importance of Ghiberti for the early Italian Renaissance, finally putting to rest old biases against the artist that he was tr...

Reviews "The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece,” a traveling exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from October 30, 2007, to January 13, 2008. The show provided U.S. audiences a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to intimately experience the genius of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise from the Florentine B...

For more on the Abbey of Florence see Anne Leader, The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery (Bloomington, 2012). This dissertation investigates the Orange Cloister of the Badia Fiorentina -- a Benedictine abbey located in central Florence. Between 1428 and 1441, this cloister was built and decorated with mural paintings...