Biography 

Maria DePrano holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles and is currently an associate professor of art history at Washington State University.  Her research focuses on women’s life passage rituals, the domestic interior, and family art patronage in fifteenth-century Florence.  She has authored articles on early Renaissance funerary ritual, portraiture, and material culture, published in Viator, The Medal, and Renaissance Studies.  Maria’s article, “Chi vuol esser lieto sia: Objects of Entertainment in the Tornabuoni Palace in Florence,” will appear in The Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior, 1400-1700 (forthcoming 2013).

Project Summary

This project is an examination of the art patronage of the Tornabuoni family in late fifteenth-century Florence.  The Tornabuoni warrant close examination because the innovative objects they commissioned honoring female relations by marriage and by birth provide a unique opportunity to develop a more nuanced view of women’s status in Florentine society.