When I first picked up Suzanne Loebl's book "America's Medicis: The Rockefellers and their Astonishing Cultural Legacy," I thought the whole Medici connection was kind of overblown. But by the end of this extremely readable tome, I wouldn't have been surprised to come across a book titled "The Medicis: The Rockefellers of the Renaissance."

It is hard to believe how many institutions the family founded or substantially supported and how wide-ranging their interests were, spanning Renaissance, modern, Chinese, folk, tribal, medieval, and Native American art. Loebl, who has previously written on subjects as diverse as America's art museums, AIDS, and the Holocaust, occasionally lets some facts slip through her fingers — when I see an incorrect birth date for John D. Rockefeller, Sr., or Dan Flavin's first name given as David, or a reference to the English Reformation instead of the European Reformation, it disturbs me a bit. Yet this doesn't change the fact that the book is a fascinating and well-written trip through the lives of four generations of Rockefellers, with each chapter helpfully devoted to a major cultural achievement spearheaded by one (or more) of the family. Color photos and a thorough index complete the picture.

Plus, let's face it, it's fun to read about rich people. Since this is a story about how a family's fortune nurtured the artistic interests of its members, ARTINFO has created this handy guide to the most important individuals in the Rockefeller clan.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, SENIOR

Founder of the Standard Oil Company, he started the Rockefeller dynasty in New York when he moved there with his wife and ten-year-old son in 1885 and bought a brownstone at 4 West 54th Street. It would be torn down in 1938 to allow MoMA to accomplish the first of many expansions. Senior himself does not seem to have been especially interested in art, though he may have indirectly contributed to his son's passion for it through notoriously harsh business practices that shamed John D. Junior into seeking respectability through collecting and patronage. Still, Senior did let his son convince him to lend him $1.5 million (quite a sizable sum in 1915) to buy two Chinese porcelain vases. In fact, Senior ended up giving them to Junior as a gift. Perhaps he was persuaded by the practical financial reasoning in his son's letter — the vases will retain their "full cost value, and, as the years go by, more" — or maybe he was just touched by Junior's defense of his love of art objects: "Is it unwise for me to gratify a desire for beautiful things, which will be a constant joy to my friends and to my children as they grow to appreciate them, as well as to myself, when it is done in a quiet and unostentatious manner?"

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JUNIOR

John D. Junior had some funny ways, controlling his children's pocketbooks long into their adult years (not to mention his wife's) and corresponding with them via letter about financial matters. He never "got" modern art, even after Henri Matisse himself tried to explain its beauties to him over dinner. Nevertheless, he respected his wife's passion for it, and, ultimately, opened his pocketbook to support her pet project, MoMA. If all he had done was to found the Cloisters — eloquently called by Met historian Calvin Tomkins "the supreme example of curatorial genius working in exquisite harmony with vast wealth" — he would still deserve the veneration of the New York museum community.

While Junior's destruction of Diego Rivera's mural for Rockefeller Center in 1934 still saddens, another shocking mural was actually allowed to be part of a MoMA exhibition organized by Lincoln Kirstein in 1932. Hugo Gellert's work depicted J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., then- president Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford hiding behind a barricade of money bags while police officers, a Mexican bandit, gas-masked soldiers, and a machine gun-wielding Al Capone defended them. The board of MoMA was horrified at this blasphemous depiction of the captains of industry, but eventually decided that canceling the exhibition would generate more criticism than allowing it to take place. When in the current day a David Wojnarowicz video is hastily removed from exhibition after the outcry of a small minority, the fact that MoMA did not tamper with the show's integrity seems astonishing. Junior insisted that his son Nelson explain the matter to his grandfather and J.P. Morgan, and both are said to have been reconciled to the work's exhibition.

ABBY ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER

Abby's artistic taste probably did more than that of any other Rockefeller to shape the family's contributions to the New York art world. The wife of John D., Jr., she started off using her own family money to support her love of modern art, since it was something he wasn't fond of. Loebl points out how successful she was at charting her own course at a time when women were not expected to lead public lives, writing that "in the olden days it was said that the name of a well-brought-up woman appeared in the newspaper only three times in the course of her life: when she was born, when she got married, and when she died. Junior must have been shocked, therefore, when in January 1936 the cover of Time magazine featured his wife, and the cover article extolled her contributions to modern art." Abby didn't require attention and accolades, frequently leaving her name off her donations lest the museum appear to be too heavily populated by works she had bought. She also helped to keep notoriously unstable MoMA director Alfred Barr grounded, and all her children would later cite her love of art as a great inspiration. After her death, Matisse designed a rose window in her honor for the church in Pocantico Hills where she was buried. It turned out to be the artist's last work, with the design completed just days before his death.

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER III 

Good old John D. Rockefeller III. His conscientiousness and reliability made him his father's choice to manage the family's investments — meaning that he and his wife only got to take a two-week honeymoon whereas impulsive Nelson went off on a nine-month jaunt after his wedding. He helped to shape post-war diplomacy with Japan, and his philanthropic interests included trying to alleviate overpopulation and hunger. He endowed the Asia Society and gave it many pieces, including some amazing Buddhas, and headed the committee that built Lincoln Center, while donating millions to its construction anonymously.

NELSON ROCKEFELLER

I'm sure Nelson Rockefeller would have been the life of the party (at least his friend Henry Kissinger thought so), but his arts legacy is mixed. He established America's first Council for the Arts, a model for the NEA — a mark in the "plus" column. (Oh, for the days of Rockefeller Republicans!) But he also created the Empire State Mall in Albany (later renamed the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza) while governor of New York, a huge boondoggle of a project that took years to build and is hideously sterile. Its Empire State Collection does contain some remarkable art that Nelson donated, but unlike most other Rockefeller cultural endeavors, the whole thing reeks of self-aggrandizement.

DAVID ROCKEFELLER

Born in 1915, David is the only one of John D. Rockefeller Junior's six children still living today. When he turned 90 in 2005, he announced that he would leave MoMA $100 million upon his death, and the New York Times estimated in 2006 that his total philanthropic gifts had already amounted to $900 million during his lifetime. He also established the J.P. Morgan-Chase collection of art, which today holds 30,000 works. He and his wife Peggy Rockefeller learned about art together, starting off with an 18th-century British painting of "little men in red coats" (which earned the scorn of Alfred Barr's wife Marga) and moving on to collect Impressionist paintings and modern works, including Picassos from Gertrude Stein's collection. In the 1960s, David acquired Mark Rothko's "White Center" for $10,000 and sold it almost 50 years later for more than $72 million.

But we shouldn't be too dazzled by those numbers. In a time when art is increasingly seen as a financial investment, if there is any lesson to be learned from the Rockefellers, it is that they always bought what they loved. Luckily for them — and us — they loved some pretty great stuff.