The correct answer is A) educate their sons.
In addition to patronage, merchant families during the Renaissance began to educate their sons.
Merchant and wealthy families such as the Medici, in Florence, Italy, supported many artists of the Renaissance and realized the importance of educating their sons, so they started to study and hired private tutors. The Renaissance was a time were arts flourished and humans started to leave the strict religious dogma that characterized the dark ages of Medieval times.