The Ottoman Imagery of Jacopo Ligozzi in Medici Florence

2016

Raggio, Olga. 'The Farnese a rediscovered work by Vignola'. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 18 (1960), 213-31.

2022

During the second half of the sixteenth century, Florentine artistic production and access to it became increasingly sought after across the Holy Roman Empire. An important dynastic connection between the Austrian Habsburg dynasty and the Medici family in 1565 was the marriage of Archduchess Johanna of Austria (1547–1578) to Francesco I de’ Medici (1541–1587). This was a catalytic event that brought the German-speaking dominions of Central Europe into close contact with Florence, its court and its multifaceted arts. This talk will trace the diverse artistic connections created and sustained between Florence and the Empire’s ruling elites, on the occasion of this event. More specifically, it will examine the wide-reaching artistic and cultural ramifications of this union and how it impacted the cultural landscape of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QIbe9CiZEg&t=10s&ab_channel=TheCourtauld

Between 1584 and 1588, the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti sent a whole sequence of letters from India to his friends and the grand ducal court in Florence. 1 He informed his correspondents about local Indian plants, animals, the mechanisms of commercial exchange and Indian social structures and politics. Apart from publishing and editing letters, the scholarship so far has focused on linguistic, geographic, medical and ethnographical issues related to his letters. 2 This article focuses on a set of rarely explored resources: the valuable objects sent with Sassetti's letters to the grand duke Francesco de Medici (1541-87) and his brother cardinal Ferdinando (1549-1609). 3 The letters are exceptional, since they allow one to reconstruct the origins and itineraries of the items that Sassetti describes in detail. None of the objects survived in Florence but some of them are traceable to the Medici inventories of the sixteenth century. In their eagerness for exotic novelties, the Medici brothers did not stand alone. By the end of the sixteenth century, it was a sign of erudition and power for the noblest princes of Europe to install large collections of artificialia and naturalia in their palaces. 4 The complex collections served as mirrors of the outside world and reflected the erudition and power of the "ideal" prince. 5 In order to show their young dynasty's claim to rule in the European concert of powers, the Medici used their collection as a means of propaganda. 6 The importance of exotic items within early modern princely collecting has been illustrated by various recent exhibitions. 7 The Medici brothers' quest for rarities must be viewed in this context. Sassetti was their medium of transfer to receive the coveted plants and galanterie. The Sassetti case is a prime example of a multifaceted transfer of goods and knowledge in the second half of the sixteenth century. 8 The letters written by the agent of this intercultural exchange, Filippo Sassetti, illustrate how closely interwoven the transfers of medical, social, economic, artistic and political knowledge-today largely studied separately-actually were. The documents found in the Florentine archives complement the letters and demonstrate the reception of the exotic items within the court milieu. Filippo Sassetti came from an old Florentine merchant family. Trained at the University of Pisa and a member of the Accademia Fiorentina, he was an intellectual who became a merchant out of need rather than interest. In the service of Florentine bankers linked to the grand ducal court, he travelled to the Iberian Itinerario volume XXXII (2008) number 3

This conference aims to discuss a forthcoming book : Déborah Blocker, Le Principe de plaisir: esthétique, savoirs et politique dans la Florence des Médicis (XVIe-XVIIe) (forthcoming with Les Belles Lettres in Paris, in it collection "Essais" : https://www.lesbelleslettres.com/collections/15-les-belles-lettres-essais). The book's central claims, its methods, its archival findings and the historiographical reframings it is advocating for will therefore be at the center of our debates. But we will also discuss the academic and civic culture of early modern Italy and the history of aesthetics more generally. For the manuscript purports to shed light on long-term transformations in the realm of aesthetics by closely examining the practices, discourses and ideas of a late 16th century Florentine academy, and of its aristocratic membership. The book principally focuses on understanding the Alterati’s conception of art as the source of a “praise-worthy pleasure” (lodevole diletto), analyzing in detail how this representation fits in with the social and political conceptions of the Florentine patricians who belonged to this academy, most of which stemmed from families which had fought to uphold the late Florentine Republic during the rise of the Medici. The study shows how their understandings of art, which centered on pleasure, freedom, parity and leisure, were initially at odds with conceptions of art developed under direct Medici patronage. It also studies the various ways in which, over the life of the academy, the Alterati’s hedonistic conceptions of art were progressively integrated into the culture of the Medici court. Finally, the book places the pleasure principle on which the Alterati based their aesthetic conceptions into comparative perspective, by drawing connections with 17th century France and 19th century Berlin. The central hypothesis of this study is that the pragmatic tension between courtship and defiance, which manifested itself in the affirmation of aesthetic of pleasure, amid and around an patrician academy such as that of the Alterati of Florence, was a major cultural phenomenon among the aristocracies of early modern Europe, as they adapted to the rise of authoritarian régimes — and one that has shaped understandings of art, literature and aesthetics to this day. This book is a thoroughly interdisciplinary investigation that attempts to delimit a new research field, which could be defined as the social and political history of early modern aesthetics. Aesthetic theories developed in and around German Idealism largely rejected the aesthetic discourses produced in early modern Italy and France as amateurish, irrational or lacking in historical perspective. Yet, many of the aesthetical concepts articulated throughout early modern Europe, such as that of pleasure, remain centrally important today, in our own aesthetical discourses or practices. The book attempts to understand the social and political circumstances in which these conceptions became important, in order to recover some of the early modern foundations of current understandings of art. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the project, ten speakers from a wide variety of disciplines and fields — such as social, political and/or intellectual historians of Florence (15th-18th centuries), scholars working in comparative literature and aesthetics across the early modern period, and scholars of early modern Italian literature, music and culture — have been brought together. Two of the speakers are UC Berkeley colleagues or graduate students (one of each), four are attached to other major American universities, two are from Italy (both will will be participating via Skype) and one will be coming from France. The manuscript is in French but discussions will be held in English and Italian. If you would like to receive a PDF of the manuscript prior to the conference, please email Déborah Blocker at [email protected]. With the distinguished participation of Albert Ascoli (Terrill Distinguished Professor in Italian Studies, UC Berkeley), Déborah Blocker (Associate Professor of French and affiliated faculty in Italian Studies, UC Berkeley), Tim Carter (David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Louise George Clubb (Professor Emerita of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Arthur Field (Associate Professor Emeritus of Renaissance History, University of Indiana, Bloomington), Jean-Louis Fournel (Professor of Italian Studies, University of Paris-VIII and École Normale Supérieure de Lyon), Wendy Heller (Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Italian Studies, Princeton University), Jennifer MacKenzie (PhD in Italian Studies, UC Berkeley), Francesco Martelli (curator of Medicean collections at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze and scientific coordinator of its Scuola di archivistica, paleografia e diplomatica), Diego Pirillo (Associate Professor in Italian Studies, UC Berkeley), Maria-Pia Paoli (ricercatore in early modern Italian History at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) and Jane Tylus (Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, New York University).

Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia, 2020

This essay examines the circulation of Islamic artworks at and beyond the Medici court in the seventeenth century. It will focus in particular on the types of artefact that were imported from the Islamic world, the routes that they took to reach Italy as well as the trading mechanisms that brought them to Italy. The paucity of surviving Islamic artefacts from the Medici collections and the related dearth of documentation of their provenance have thus far precluded scholarly exploration of this aspect of the Medici's seafaring activities, in particular as regards the seventeenth century. This essay overcomes these obstacles by focusing not on the Medici collection proper but on its offshoot: the Cospi Collection.

2010

San Marco. As she establishes, the thirteenth-century redecoration of the façade substantiated an Early Christian past for the Venetians, one that they simultaneously appropriated and imitated. The embellishment of the basilica with Byzantine spoils and new mosaics also declared Venice's position pertaining to their actions in the Fourth Crusade. But how did this translate to the later centuries, particularly after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453? The events of the mid-fifteenth century must be considered when examining the early modern response to the loot so proudly displayed in the city's most prominent civic space. The interpretations by citizens and foreigners alike were conditioned by the sociopolitical situation, as well as the Venetian interest in their created history, in the face of a changing political landscape in the Eastern Mediterranean. KANDICE A. RAWLINGS, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, NEW BRUNSWICK Andrea Mantegna's Saint Mark and the Origins of the Cartellino The cartellino, a fictive paper label, was popular as a vehicle for artists' signatures throughout the Veneto during the early Renaissance period, first emerging in the middle of the Quattrocento in the Paduan circle of Francesco Squarcione, teacher of Mantegna. In Venice and Antiquity, Patricia Fortini Brown characterized the cartellino as a device that through its illusionism and foreground placement blurs the distinction between the real and fictive, and thus also between the past and present. Brown acknowledges that the taste for illusionism seen in the cartellino and the local interest in epigraphy were both influential on scribes and illuminators in the Veneto. I propose, however, a more direct relationship: that painters' interaction with antiquarians inspired a motif that alluded to "paper collecting" in sylloges by humanists. By focusing on Mantegna's Saint Mark in a Niche, I will explore how its cartellino evokes the artist's relationship to the antique past. MATTEO CASINI, SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY Great Council Hall, 25 January 1475 On 25 January 1475 a great festival was held in the Great Council by a Company of the Hose, to honor the presence of Galeazzo Sforza. The festival is described by a long, detailed and wonderful letter of the Mantuan ambassador, Giovanni Benedetto de Pretis. Many things happened, from the lavish display of noble women, to the "homosocial" behavior of the Company, from the stage of dances and a momaria, to the presentation of an elaborate banquet with sculptures in sugar. Just to mention a crucial passage, when the companions led the women to dance at their pleasures, they produced "some acts of love not to much honest, in particular those who had a certain interest in them." A clear case of sexual disrespect inside an important public space, in front of high-profile spectators, and during Carnival -wedding time for the Venetian nobility. In general, the 1475 episode could open a sort of "microhistorical" discussion about many aspects of the young aristocratic social culture of Renaissance Venice -in pageantry, gender, theater, food, etc. IRINA TOLSTOY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Piety, Politics, and the Relic of the True Cross at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista The monumental canvasses that once decorated the albergo of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, painted by a group of five artists, famously document the rich social and urban fabric of late Quattrocento Venice. The paintings in the cycle of The Miracles of the True Cross celebrate the relic that was the confraternity's prize possession, donated by Philippe de Mézières in the fourteenth century. For a Venetian viewer, they offered incontrovertible proof of the relic's miraculous powers. This paper will examine how the significance of the paintings expanded beyond the purely devotional to embrace a political dimension as well. Evidence found in several publications of the period, including the incunabulum published by the Scuola itself, suggests how the painting cycle may have participated in the republic's long-standing agenda to be identified as the new Jerusalem. The portrayal of Caterina Cornaro in Gentile Bellini's Miracle at the Bridge of San Lorenzo will be considered in the context of the strong personal and political connections that seem to have bound the former Queen of Cyprus to the Scuola and its relic of the True Cross.

Bent's study is ambitious, not the least because of the state of the material that he considers. A fair number of the panel paintings that provide evidence for his analysis have been removed from their original settings, statues have been moved, and the number of guild residences that remain-only two of twenty-one structures extant in the fourteenth century-can hardly be viewed as a proper representative sample of the whole. Many of the works Bent describes are damaged or fragmentary. His analysis of context and significance frequently turns to likelihood or possibility. Moreover, the author also demonstrates a tendency to overlook elements or examples that may be significant but are, perhaps, extraneous to his interpretation of a painted figure or scene or to the system of interactions that he sees as central to the understanding of works of art. Thus, for example, he neglects to mention the inscriptions painted into the Double Intercession from the Duomo (plate xv) or an Allegorical Winged Figure from the Palazzo Arte dei Giudici e Notai ( ), though he builds his interpretations of these same works from elements seen in each. Elsewhere, he identifies various sources for the motifs and figures of Masaccio's Trinity, but fails to mention the greater tradition of Gnadenstuhl imagery that provides the essential core of that painted scene. These practices are not necessarily failings, however, but are indicative of Bent's method: he is not concerned with inherent meaning, but allows for varied and shifting significances as they relate to different audiences from among the many populations of the city. He does not seek to supplant the work of other scholars who have posited meanings for the various works that comprise his study, but supplements those other studies with his own considerations of the different populations of society and their interactions with art in the public sphere. We learn, here, not only of works of art, but of the people of the Florentine Republic-of condemned criminals, prostitutes, merchants, government officials, guild members from the Arte della Lana and the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, laudesi, plague victims, the bishop and his entourage, the families of the newly baptized, and the would-be tyrant-and of how these and others lived lives shaped by images in an urban environment before the era of art.

Parergon

Estas conferencias forman parte del proyecto de I+D+i (PID2020-117326GB-I00), FAKE-La perdurabilidad del engaño: Falsificación de Antigüedades en la Roma del siglo XVIII y el proyecto de Ramón y Cajal (2017-22131), Academias artísticas, diplomacia e identidad de España y Portugal en la Roma de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII, ambos financiados por el MICINN. This conference is part of the results of the I+D+i project (PID2020-117326GB-I00), FAKE-La perdurabilidad del engaño: Falsificación de Antigüedades en la Roma del siglo XVIII, and the Ramón y Cajal research Project (2017-22131), Academias artísticas, diplomacia e identidad de España y Portugal en la Roma de la primera mitad del siglo XVIII, both funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.