In this study, Henk Th. van Veen reassesses how Cosimo de' Medici represented himself in images during the course of his rule. Traditionally, Cosimo is seen to be posing as a republican prince in the images made of him during the early years of his reign; as his power grew, he represented himself as a proud dynastic and territorial ruler. By contrast, van Veen argues that Cosimo represented himself as a lofty ruler in the initial phase of his regime, but that from 1559 onwards, he posed as a citizen-prince. Analyzing all of Cosimo's major commissions, both art and architecture, to support his argument, van Veen also examines historiographical and literary evidence, as well as the civic traditions, rites, and customs that Cosimo promoted in sixteenth-century Florence.

Henk Th. van Veen is Professor of Art History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. A scholar of Italian Renaissance art, he is author of Tuscany and the Low Countries: An Introduction to the Sources and An Inventory of Four Florentine Libraries and editor (with Frans Grijzenhout) of The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective, and has contributed to the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Burlington Magazine, and Prospectives.

1. Dynasty and destiny; 2. Shaping the Florentinist perspective; 3. The Sala Grande in the Palazzo della Signoria; 4. The Uffizi and the Pitti; 5. The Apparato for the entry of Joanna of Austria; 6. The Neptune Fountain and other major secular commissions; 7. Commissions in churches; 8. The Grand Ducal commissions (1569-74); 9. In praise of the city and its elite; 10. The Florentinist Perspective; 11. Cosimo the citizen prince.