Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons via ThoughCo.

Combining many differing sources into a single curriculum is one of the many benefits of homeschooling. So far this school year, I have been attending classes at my local community college through dual enrollment (named Running Start in Washington State). While last quarter was a lab credit (chemistry), this quarter I am having a blast studying Medieval and Renaissance art history! So far the class has been genuinely enjoyable! I’ve been studying a plethora of new facts and learning something I really love! One of my favorite parts of this class is the biweekly creative projects. To curb the “rampant” use of ChatGPT last quarter, my professor has exchanged some writing assignments in favor of creative projects which are both fun to create, fun to grade, and help regulate plagiarism.

These assignments are graded fairly loosely and are a great way to do work on something fun during the week. In the class syllabus, my professor even endorsed doing an interpretive dance, if we could manage both proving we’ve done the textbook reading and making a higher insight (rubric requirements). This week, I was assigned a prompt regarding the façade of a 15^th-century Florentine palace and how it reflected laws in the city which forbade extensive displays of wealth. For this assignment, I decided to go all out, and made a fake Twitter post from none-other than 15^th-century aristocrat, banker, and de facto ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici.

For some quick context and a brief history lesson, The Medici were a powerful family of bankers who, through political and economic leveraging, became the indirect leaders of the city-state of Florence during the Renaissance. By paying off citizens’ debts, funding politicians, networking diplomatic relationships, and straight-up bribing, they were able to control every lever of the republican/oligarchical democracy which governed the city. Through their esteemed position, the Medici family used their immense wealth to fund beautification projects in Florence along with widely patronizing the arts. Without the Medici, the grand masterpieces of the Renaissance may never have been created.

Lesson to take away: Trust political lobbyists. Without them, we would still have ugly paintings.

And now, without further ado… a tabloid news article on Cosimo de’ Medici’s home.