When power returned to the popolo grasso at the end of the 14th century, an oligarchic regime was established in Florence and a small restricted number of the merchant middle class governed the city for about 40 years.
When power returned to the popolo grasso at the end of the 14th century, an oligarchic regime was established in Florence and a small restricted number of the merchant middle class governed the city for about 40 years. However there followed a growing opposition to the oligarchy which was to ably exploit the malcontent of the populace. That part of the middle class which had been excluded from power joined arms with the people and found a leader in Giovanni de' Medici, head of the richest and most powerful company of Calimala. After the death of Giovanni (1429) the contrast was accentuated while the current of opinion favorable to the Medici continued to grow. , Giovanni's firstborn, was lord of the city, although he attempted to conceal the fact, leaving the old republican institutions intact, but emptied of any effective power. , who died in 1464, was followed by the mediochre Piero the Gouty (14641469) whose son, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was to continue his ancestor's dissimulating policy up almost to the end of the century, maintaining the traditional offices, but with no doubts as to what he was to all effects: the true lord of Florence. During the years in which the merchant oligarchy governed Florence and in the early period of Medici rule, the increasingly frequent contacts with examples of Greek and Roman antiquity gave rise to a new spirit and the city became the center in which Humanism was forged. Man considered himself the ultimate end, eager for rational knowledge and bent on affirming his dominion over the nature which surrounded him and the history which preceded him. Literary culture, the sciences, arts and human activities come to the forefront and it was a golden period in European intellect and culture. Take for example Filippo Brunelleschi; between 1420 and 1446 he created a group of works which were to represent one of the most important moments in the history of Florentine architecture and town-planning. It is then thanks first of all to Brunelleschi and secondly to the other exponents of the architectural culture of the early 15th century that Florence was to present itself from then on as the "Renaissance city" idealized by the humanists. An incredible number of artistic personalities determined the image of the Renaissance city of whom Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Beato Angelico, Michelozzo, Giuliano da Sangallo and Benedetto da Maiano are but a few.

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