User talk:Powellmb

Peer Review

Hi- here are my thoughts about your article. Good job so far and good luck completing it!

Daydreambeliever (talk) 18:01, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Formatting

All of the information you have so far seems good. However, I think that your article would benefit from some reformatting. I would recommend reorganizing your article to improve the flow. Also, the verb tense you used varied throughout the article. Frequently you used the present tense where the past tense would be appropriate. For example, "When Pope Clement is imprisoned during war, he makes a deal with..." should be "When Pope Clement was imprisoned during war, he made a deal with..."

Ideas and Resources

I have a few ideas on the direction in which your article could go:

• Cosimo I de' Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture- This is a review of a book, but it does offer a substantial excerpt (and maybe the book itself is available in one of the campus libraries). I think it would be interesting to cover how Cosimo used art to influence how others saw him.
• Historiography of Duke Cosimo I de Medici's Cultural Politics- A detailed thesis paper about Cosimo's use of cultural politics. It cites a lot of other resources which you might be interested in.
• What influenced Cosimo's interest in the arts? (From what I've read and linked to above, he was involved with the arts mainly for political reasons. You could touch on this in the article. Are there other reasons?) Does the Medici line have a history of this?
• What is the legacy of Cosimo's interest in the arts? Did he inspire the behaviors of future rulers?
• How did Cosimo influence the arts? You cover this to some extent (such as mentioning the Uffizi) but I didn't find that part of your article clear, and I think there's room for expansion. I'd also be interested in reading more about his contributions to the philosophy of art, if they exist.
• Pictures! Perhaps you could pull in a couple of pictures from the Uffizi, Boboli Gardens, or the Room of 500.
• The current article mentions that Cosimo had an interest in alchemy. Perhaps you could expand that.
• What art was made of Cosimo himself? Who painted his and his family's portraits, and why? Bronzino painted some of his portraits.

References

Your article currently lacks in-text citations. Wikipedia makes it easy to make these; look for examples throughout the article in its current form or get more information here. Those who read your article will want to know where you get your information from so as to verify it or gather more information.

Wikipedia also encourages the creation of internal links to relevant pages. I don't know how much you already know about creating these. When you talk about something in your article that has a Wikipedia page related to it, you can create an internal link to that page by surrounding it with two square brackets on either side. For instance, [[Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany]] shows up as Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany and [[Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany|Cosimo]] shows up as Cosimo.

Finally, you provided no references at all for your work. Once again, check the citations page for more information about including these. Ensure that you have a wide variety of sources that write from different points of view so as to improve the relevancy of your work.

Peer Review

The first review was great and covered a lot of major issues that I would have mentioned. Here are a few worth looking at, possibly again for another revision.

So far, there seems to be a lot of detailed factual information on your user page. However, there is not set structure to the info and it all seems to run together. Breaking up the paragraph, creating titles, and adding other divisions would greatly benefit your article.

The section of the page in the actual article is divided better, but needs more elaboration. There was a lot more info on your user page that didn’t make it into the article. The entire article on Cosimo has tons of information that can just overpower your bit of the article. To make it stand out you really need to have more information. You do have a lot of good points and connections but you have not expanded on any of them. Bring out the details that the reader may not know what exactly you are talking about. The connections to other articles through the brackets are strong points, but you cannot rely on that to inform the reader about all of those topics. You can certainly expand on a few of them to make your article flow much better.

The picture of the bronze statue is good but pictures of the artwork that he had a major influence on would be a little more relevant to your page. Maybe try and find a picture of the art gallery or something like that to go along with your portion.

A major issue is where you got your information from. There are no references or in text citations. Without these sources your piece of the article may not stay in wikipedia. Using information from wiki as the main sourse of your information is not recommended just as a heads up.

Good luck working on your article in the next couple of weeks!JLowman (talk) 14:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)