Future Plans for the Data

Since the project described in this exhibit is part of my thesis project, I will doubtlessly continue to revisit and revise my dataset in FilemakerPro. As I discover more relevant works of art, my table will grow longer, and the gaps will be filled as I find out more creation dates and names of patrons. As I mentioned on the previous page, I am planning to add relevant PDFs and, possibly, scans of book chapters, into the table in order to have my sources separated by artworks that they address.

Moreover, as I am starting to place more and more emphasis on the entities to which the bankers were donating their art (Was it to specific clerics? Was it to churches and monasteries? If so, what religious orders did these churches and monasteries belong to and why did the bankers choose these particular venues and orders as the recpitients of their donations?) In case of Cosimo de' Medici, it is evident from his replacement of the ill-reputed Benedictine monks by the more ascetic Dominican ones after paying for the reconstruction of the Monastery of San Marco in Florence that he performed thorough research on the reputations of the recipients of his gifts. After all, if these monks were going to pray for Cosimo's soul, they better be in good standing with God! Moreover, since the bankers' donations of art were also crucial to the bankers' public images, the central location of the venue must have been important so that more people could see how pious and generous the donors were. However, in order to examine how deliberate the choices of venues were and what they meant, I would need to add locations and who those locations belonged to into my FilemakerPro table, which would leave me with two more columns than before. Although these columns would be easy to create, they would be harder to fill because many of the artworks that I am looking at are in museums, which they have entered after going from one private collection to another, making their initial location almost impossible to establish. However, this is definitely a project that I want to pursue in the future, and FilemakerPro provides an excellent venue where I could deposit and analyze the newly acquired data.