Journals About De Medichi Familys Involvment in the Arts
Critic'due south Option
For the Medici, the Final Groovy Picture Show
The sweep of Italian history and art history in dazzling portraits from the dynasty's final hurrah, on view in a sumptuous exhibition at the Met.
It's hard to imagine Florence, cradle of the High Renaissance of early mod Europe, without its avaricious, venal, culture-conscious beginning family, the Medici. Crowned and uncrowned, during periods of supposedly republican regime and not, they largely ruled the city-state, or connived to, from the mid-14th to the mid-18th centuries, using art to cement their ability.
They excelled at banking and prospered especially when their Rome branch quietly became banker to the popes. They besides populated the Catholic Church'south hierarchy with relatives, popes included, most chiefly Leo Ten — born Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici — who became Bishop of Rome in 1513, followed shortly past his cousin, Clement VII (built-in Giulio de' Medici). Both worked assiduously on the family's behalf.
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The Medici persevered through exile, pop uprisings, state of war with neighboring city states, chronic street fighting, a spasm of vehement religious fundamentalism, bouts of the plague and a devastating siege. The family unit returned to power with the rise of Alessandro de' Medici, who in 1532, became the offset hereditary Knuckles of Florence.
In "The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570," a sumptuous, vigorous exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we join the family in its final hurrah of civic luminescence. Virtually of the evidence centers on Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), plucked from a "junior" line of Medicis to get the Duke of Florence at age 17. But he knew what he was about. He reorganized the city'south bureaucracy and became the terminal of the dynasty'south three great cultural adjudicators. Before him came Cosimo the Elderberry (1389-1464), and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), both defacto rulers by dint of their wealth and cunning. The pair's combined patronage extended the length of the High Renaissance, from Donatello and Brunelleschi to Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
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The testify numbers around ninety objects: painted portraits, portrait busts and reliefs, books and manuscripts, medals and cameos, some wonderful drawings and a few weapons, including a sword that in one case belonged to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, often a Medici adversary. Organized past Keith Christiansen, retiring chairman of the Met's European painting department, and Carlo Falciani, professor of art history at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, it demonstrates the transformative upshot of Cosimo'southward patronage on the fine art of portraiture and the ascent of Mannerism, which followed the High Renaissance and countered its emphasis on grace, order and natural proportion with artifice: elongated bodies, complex poses and exaggerated perspective.
Past the time Cosimo became the second Knuckles of Florence, the city's political importance was fading as were the Renaissance ethics of residuum and rationality. The job every bit Cosimo saw information technology was to maintain the illusion of Medici power through art. And so he took advantage of several developments: the ongoing secularization of fine art and painting'due south growing attention to actual people, and its rise status every bit portable marketplace commodity. These were spurred in part by the growing use of oil paint over egg tempera, which allowed for more lavish colors and textures — all the amend to depict the one per centum. And paintings now could be copied and sent throughout Italian republic and Europe, propagandizing for Cosimo I, the Medici and Florence all at once.
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The star here is the complete Agnolo Bronzino, who became ane of Cosimo I's court painters in 1539, and fabricated more than half of the 49 paintings on view. His works appear in the prove'south six galleries, dominating whole walls.
About all his paintings are the height of Mannerist distortion and unbalanced elegance, androgynous sensuality, with an astonishingly consistent perfection of hauteur and surface. It is as if Bronzino studied the porcelainic purity of Raphael's and Botticelli's Madonnas and gave information technology to everyone, all over. His mostly nude "Saint John the Baptist" (1560-61) is a luscious young man whose peaches and cream complexion extends to his toes. Nearby a half-length painting of Saint Sebastian reimagines its subject area every bit an most foppish youth with auburn hair and a single pointer piercing his smooth torso.
The exhibition is episodic and unpredictable, in a good way. Its focus changes gallery by gallery. An impressive combination of history, art history, dorsum stories and gossip is fueled visually by continual tensions between naturalism and bamboozlement: Contrasting with Bronzino's treatment is the softer, more than forgiving style of Francesco Salviati, a bottom known Mannerist and the 2d nigh represented creative person in the exhibition. He is ane of its revelations, moving in and out of Bronzino'southward orbit, only ultimately it seems that he can't quit naturalism.
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And it'south all put together like a Swiss watch; there's naught that doesn't cantankerous-reference. Jacopo da Pontormo'south somber portrait of the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de' Medici, from 1534-35, shows him in mourning apparel for Clement Seven, who in plough is seen nearby in a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo, looking attentively to the side, equally if listening. Abreast Alessandro, an easily-missed bronze medal depicts his distant cousin Lorenzino de' Medici, whom history remembers for assassinating Alessandro in 1537, immigration the way for Cosimo I'southward rise. The murderer commissioned the medal himself in the guise of a comely Brutus.
Elsewhere you may be drawn to the slanting handwriting in the bound manuscript in which Bronzino, as serious a poet as painter, recorded his poems and those written in response by his correspondents. His beautiful script appears on the open pages of a book of Petrarch's sonnets held by his shut friend, the poet Laura Battiferri, the subject area of an especially virtuosic portrait distinguished by her aquiline profile and all-but transparent short veil.
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Bronzino'south Mannerism jumps out from the start gallery in a 1532-33 portrait of an imperious young woman in brilliant carmine with a lapdog. Its cool radiant precision is heightened by the dissimilarity with its duller, less assertive neighbour: a similarly posed woman in pink by Pier Francesco Foschi. Pontormo (Bronzino'south teacher) restates this startling refinement and apathy with more heat and pliability in "Portrait of a Halberdier (probably Francesco Guardi)," an androgynous immature aristocrat with a cinched waist and a await of sleepy snobbishness.
The Met has devoted a gallery to the all-important subject of family and succession, and introduces a welcome female discipline: Eleonora di Toledo, the capable married woman of Cosimo I, and some of her sons. (She had 11 children.) One of her gowns is also on view, impressively intact, in deep red velvet, with tied-on sleeves that announced in her portraits. Nearby, the show's first Bronzino portrait of her hubby shows him in spiky armor, looking warily to the right. A nice impact: His hand, resting on his shiny helmet, is doubled past its perfect reflection.
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The testify's big center section turns to Cosimo's interest with literature and the revival of humanism. Across from its wall of nudes — all male, all past Bronzino — are a cord of thoughtful men, by and large immature, in blackness and holding books. Virtually are members of the Accademia Fiorentina, which Cosimo sponsored. The Met's smashing Bronzino "Portrait of a Beau With a Book" (1530s), presents an arrogant youth in noticeably expensive black. The contrast of this work with a recent acquisition, Salviati'southward "Carlo Rimbotti," a smaller, far more approachable portrait, sparked the thought for this evidence, equally Christiansen recounts in his illuminating catalog introduction.
In the concluding spectacular gallery, it's just Bronzino and Salviati, duking it out, as it were. The Medici as subjects take disappeared, although both artists worked for a fourth dimension in the Palazzo Vecchio, the historic construction that Cosimo had taken for his private residence. Ultimately Bronzino'south bracing steadiness of style would prevail, every bit instantly legible equally a brand,culminating here in a showstopper like the portrait of a woman tentatively identified as Cassandra Bandini, who breaks through as a existent person without shattering the bamboozlement. Behind her, an undulant cascade of a semi-transparent cloth striped in nighttime green is nearly abstruse. Finally, in that location's Bronzino'due south portrait of the military machine leader Stefano Colonna in glamorous matte black armor earlier what looks similar purple taffeta. Next to him hangs the exquisite black-chalk study of his fragile, bearded face up.
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Facing this, Salviati's paintings can't assist but look motley, at least initially. If Bronzino's volleys land in the same place over again and once more, Salviati seems to effort a different render each time. He opts for intensely psychological, realist austerity in a portrait of Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, Clement Seven'due south major-domo. Only Salviati's "Portrait of a Swain With a Domestic dog" has many Mannerist attributes, from the elongated neck, small head and boneless fingers, to the spatial and symbolic ambiguities in the background: a croaky wall, a levitating angel and a patch of landscape.
And, to modern eyes, Salviati's "Portrait of a Man" almost seems to exist a Mannerist prank, with its appealing bailiwick— his arms akimbo, gloves in hand, little finger ring on display — and a confusing scene with an allegorical river god and a friendly Florentine lion. Verging on vamping is the swath of knotted green fabric backside him. The label says information technology signifies the bonds of love simply here it can read as a flamboyant dig at his rival Bronzino's more routine affection for green, evident in several other works in the gallery.
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Then Salviati ends on a high annotation by turning more fully to the real, not the Mannerist, world: his grand portrait of Bindo Altoviti, a wealthy banker who opposed the Medicis and had his Florentine property confiscated past Cosimo. His face has existent shadows, his oral cavity seems nearly to speak, merely equally his soft eyes are about to blink. Not a single attenuated finger in sight. He's almost one of usa. His image provides a place to pause, connect and grab your breath in this boggling, complexly choreographed show.
The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570
Saturday through Oct. eleven, Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, grand Fifth Artery, Manhattan, (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org. Currently open to members. Entry is by timed ticket or reservation.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/arts/design/medici-portraits-met-museum.html
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