Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai

Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai (1403–1481) was a member of a wealthy family of wool merchants in Renaissance Florence, in Tuscany, Italy. He held political posts under Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, but is principally remembered for building Palazzo Rucellai, for his patronage of the S. Sepolcro chapel and of the marble façade of the church of Santa Maria Novella, and as author of the Zibaldone. He was the father of Bernardo Rucellai (1448–1514) and grandfather of Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai (1475–1525).

Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai was the effective head of the Rucellai family. He commissioned the building of the Palazzo Rucellai, designed by Leon Battista Alberti. The son-in-law of Palla Strozzi, Giovanni di Paolo was close friends with Piero di Cosimo de' Medici and his wife, Lucrezia Tornabuoni. He served as Prior in 1463 and as Gonfaloniere di Giustizia in 1475. His eldest son, Bernardo, married Nannina de' Medici. He was well-acquainted with the classics and he kept a Zibaldone into which he copied his translations of passages from Greek and Latin authors such as Aristotle, Boethius and Seneca the Younger.

Giovanni di Paolo was an important patron of the arts, matched only by Cosimo de' Medici in fifteenth-century Florence. His most notable donation, the marble façade by Alberti for Santa Maria Novella, was but one of the family's commissions of public art. For the Palazzo Rucellai he commissioned works from Castagno, Desiderio da Settignano, Filippo Lippi, Piero Pollaiuolo, Paolo Uccello, Verrocchio, Domenico Veneziano, Vittorio Ghiberti and Giovanni Bertini.