Particularly in the case of the early modern period, the so-called global turn in art history has tended to lionize the metropole. The urban focus of such major exhibitions as Venice and the Islamic World (2007) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Lisbon-focused The Global City (2014) at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga has helped to construct an image of European cities as the spaces par excellence for multi- and transcultural interactions in art, visual, and material culture. Despite Florence’s unquestioned centrality within the art historical tradition, its relative isolation on the broader political and mercantile stage made the city on the Arno a latecomer to this growing revisionist canon of “global cities.” Florence lacked the substantial maritime trade with Islamic lands that made first Genoa and then Venice commercial entrepôts and, like most of its Italian counterparts, it was shut out of...

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