Michelangelo and Botticelli did not carve and paint in a dark garret. They were patronised by Florence"s wealthiest and most powerful people who used their artworks as a display of financial and political might. In David"s original position in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, he gazed defiantly towards Rome, the seat of the encroaching Goliaths that were the Medici, an enormously powerful banking family. During the periods when they held power in Florence, it was the Medici themselves commissioning pieces like The Birth of Venus. Botticelli even included the Medici in the roles of the Three Wise Men in his paintings; and the very building that houses the Uffizi Gallery was built by the same family. These people used art to promulgate the mythology around them, consolidating their power and creating, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard said of the American Disneyland, a kind of hyperreality.