This book illuminates for the first time the pivotal role of verse-writing as a cultural strategy on the part of Italian Renaissance artists. It does so by undertaking a wide-ranging analysis of poems by painters, sculptors, architects, and goldsmiths who were active in Florence under Cosimo I and Francesco I de' Medici - a milieu in which many artists were also literary practitioners and even appropriated the poetic medium to address issues primarily related to art-making.

The study thus intervenes in the burgeoning scholarly discourse on the early modern doctus artifex - the figure well versed in a variety of intellectual activities - while also challenging the traditional marginalization of poetry in comparison with artists prose writings.