Folco Portinari (died 31 December 1289) was an Italian banker and several times the prior of Florence. [1] He was the father of Beatrice Portinari, the woman largely identified as the character loved by Dante Alighieri and mentioned in his works. [2]
Portinari was born at Portico di Romagna, near Forlì. He donated a large part of his assets to found the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence in 1288. [3] [4] His residence in Florence was the future Palazzo Portinari-Salviati . He was buried in the nearby church of Santa Margherita de' Cerchi.
Dante Alighieri, widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
La Vita Nuova or Vita Nova is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse.
Domenico Veneziano was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance, active mostly in Perugia and Tuscany.
Andrea del Castagno or Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla was an Italian Renaissance painter in Florence, influenced chiefly by Masaccio and Giotto di Bondone. His works include frescoes in Sant'Apollonia in Florence and the painted equestrian monument of Niccolò da Tolentino (1456) in Florence Cathedral. He in turn influenced the Ferrarese school of Cosmè Tura, Francesco del Cossa and Ercole de' Roberti.
Beatrice "Bice" di Folco Portinari was an Italian woman who has been commonly identified as the principal inspiration for Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova, and is also identified with the Beatrice who acts as his guide in the last book of his narrative poem the Divine Comedy, Paradiso, and during the conclusion of the preceding Purgatorio. In the Comedy, Beatrice symbolises divine grace and theology.
The Badìa Fiorentina is an abbey and church now home to the Monastic Communities of Jerusalem situated on the Via del Proconsolo in the centre of Florence, Italy. Dante supposedly grew up across the street in what is now called the 'Casa di Dante', rebuilt in 1910 as a museum to Dante. He would have heard the monks singing the Mass and the Offices here in Latin Gregorian chant, as he famously recounts in his Commedia: "Florence, within her ancient walls embraced, Whence nones and terce still ring to all the town, Abode aforetime, peaceful, temperate, chaste." In 1373, Boccaccio delivered his famous lectures on Dante's Divine Comedy in the subsidiary chapel of Santo Stefano, just next to the north entrance of the Badia's church.
The Chiesa di Santa Margherita de' Cerchi is a 13th-century, Roman Catholic church dedicated to Margaret the Virgin in the centre of Florence, region of Tuscany, Italy. It is among the oldest churches in Florence.
The Portinari Altarpiece or Portinari Triptych is an oil-on-wood triptych painting by the Flemish painter Hugo van der Goes, commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, representing the Adoration of the Shepherds. It measures 253 x 304 cm, and is now in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, Italy. This altarpiece is filled with figures and religious symbols. Of all the late-fifteenth-century Flemish artworks, this painting is said to be the most studied.
Ridolfo di Domenico Bigordi, better known as Ridolfo Ghirlandaio was an Italian Renaissance painter active mainly in Florence. He was the son of Domenico Ghirlandaio.
Tommaso Portinari was an Italian banker for the Medici bank in Bruges. He was a member of a prominent Florentine family, coming from Portico di Romagna, near Forlì; that family had included Dante's muse, Beatrice Portinari. His father was a Medici branch manager, and after his death in 1421, Tommaso and his orphaned brothers were taken in and raised in the household of Cosimo de' Medici. Today he is mainly remembered for two significant commissions of Early Netherlandish paintings.
The Florentine banking family of the Cerchi, minor nobles of the Valdarno, with a seat especially at Acone near Pontassieve, settled in Florence in the early thirteenth century and increased their fortunes. The family became the heads of a consortium of the prominent Guelfs that securely controlled Florence after the battle of Benevento in 1266. In Florence, the Cerchi purchased some of the ancient structures in the closely packed inner city formerly belonging to the counts Guidi, cheek-by-jowl with the proud Florentine family of the Donati, with whom their growing mutual antagonism was expressed in violent episodes that polarized Florence within a couple of decades in a virtual civil war that aligned behind two captains, Corso Donati of the Neri Guelf faction— the "Black" Guelfs of the old noble oligarchy— and Vieri de' Cerchi of the Bianchi, the moderate party that represented itself as champions of working people. The resulting violence lasted, with irruptions of tranquility, into the fourteenth century.
Benedetto Pamphili was an Italian cardinal, patron of the arts and librettist for many composers.
The Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova is the oldest hospital still active in Florence, Italy.
Dante and Beatrice is a painting dated 1883 by the artist Henry Holiday that is on display in the Walker Art Gallery, in Liverpool, England. It is considered to be Holiday's most important painting. It is executed in oil on canvas, measuring 142.2 centimetres (56 in) by 203.2 centimetres (80 in) and was purchased by the gallery in 1884.
The Portrait of Folco Portinari is a painting by the German painter Hans Memling, dating to c. 1490. It is displayed in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence.
Nestore Leoni was an Italian painter and illuminator of manuscripts (miniatore).
Rocchette di Fazio is a village in Tuscany, central Italy, administratively a frazione of the comune of Semproniano, province of Grosseto. At the time of the 2001 census its population amounted to 19.
Portrait of Tommaso Portinari by Hans Memling is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. It was made c.1470 in oil on oak panel, and measures 44.1 by 33.7 centimetres. The painting and Memling's Portrait of Maria Portinari form the wings from a since dismantled triptych; the central panel is believed to have been a now lost depiction of the Madonna and Child; perhaps Memling's Virgin and Child in the National Gallery, London.
The Benedetto Portinari Triptych is a group of three 1487 oil on panel paintings by Hans Memling. It is named after its commissioner, who is probably the subject of its right-hand panel, now in the Uffizi in Florence. The left panel of Saint Benedict and the central panel of the Madonna and Child are both now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. All three panels are set within a single loggia, with a unified landscape background across all three, which proved a major influence on Umbrian painters, Perugino and Leonardo da Vinci.
Gemma di Manetto Donati, commonly shortened to Gemma Donati, was the wife of Italian poet Dante Alighieri.