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Abstract
The Festival of San Giovanni, elaborately celebrated in Florence since the earliest days of the Florentine Republic, commemorated the city's patron saint. Although religious in its origin, the festival was very much a civic holiday and played a critical role in the formation of Florentine communal identity. Over the years subtle changes occurred in the celebration, some of which were the direct result of a conscious intervention by men in positions of political power.
This study focuses on the manipulation of the festival by the Medici family in their desire to usurp, overthrow and finally maintain control of the Florentine government. It begins with a general description of the cult and festival of St. John as it existed in fifteenth-century Florence. Succeeding chapters deal with specific changes in the festival instituted by Lorenzo the Magnificent, those by the restored Medici rulers in the early sixteenth-century and finally those of Cosimo I.
A series of frescoes in the apartments of Eleonora of Toledo in Palazzo Vecchio are the subject of the fourth chapter. They offer a visual depiction of the image of the festival and the city that Cosimo wished to create as he transformed Florence from a republic into a principate. The concluding chapter is a comparative study of the San Giovanni festival in Florence and the San Jacopo festival in renaissance Pistoia.