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The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence
Successful merchants and Florence's most prominent patrons of the arts and sciences, the Medici family ruled the city from the fifteenth century until the mid-eighteenth century. This beautiful and authoritative book focuses on the glorious art produced during the height of the reign of the Medici dynasty.
Eminent authorities tell us that under the grand dukes Cosimo I, his sons Francesco I and Ferdinando I, and his grandson Cosimo II, Florence experienced a great flowering of the arts. The Medici dukes gave commissions to artists such as Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, Giambologna, and, in particular, Michelangelo, whose work overshadowed much of the city's cultural and artistic life at this time. The Medici used the buildings and works of art that resulted from their patronage as a means to promote and reflect their political and cultural aspirations within their native city and throughout Europe.
This handsome book will be the catalogue for the exhibition "Magnificenza!," opening in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi on June 6, 2002 that then moves to the Art Institute of Chicago (November 9, 2002 to February 2, 2003) and to the Detroit Institute of Arts (March 16, 2003 to June 8, 2003).
- GenresHistoryArtRenaissance
381 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2002
About the author
Cristina Acidini Luchinat
91 books2 followersCristina Acidini (born 15 May 1951) is an Italian author and art historian. Her name also appears as Cristina Acidini Luchinat. She is the former Superintendent of Museum and Artistic Heritage State Board for the Florence area from 1991 to 1999.
She was named a Commander in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, a Chevalier in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a member of the scientific council of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze.
She was named a Commander in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, a Chevalier in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a member of the scientific council of the Museo di Storia Naturale di Firenze.
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August 22, 2020
This large, five-pound book catalogs the inventory (and more) of a traveling museum exhibit of the same name. Expensively bound, the book is cumbersome, difficult to read, designed perhaps with page-viewing more in mind than close reading. The plates are excellent.
The book has a dozen or so essays—typically ~3000 words each—by specialists relating their particular expertise on narrow topics, not likely to interest casual readers. The pages are packed with high-quality reproductions of the artistic output of the era, but too little of the essays (or item notes) shed as much light as I would have liked on the general constellation of ideas that animated the era.
This book catalogs what was produced in Late Renaissance Florence, but says too little about why it was produced, too little about historical context. I would have liked to read a general overview for the lay reader that described something of how late Florentine art was related to art that preceded and followed upon it.
Having registered that general complaint, I have some compliments too. Below are some excerpts from the text that piqued & illumined my interest.
==================================
Richard Goldthwaite writes in his essay, 'Artisans and the Economy in Sixteenth-Century Florence' (pp. 85-93):
The population of Florence itself, after remaining virtually stagnant at around forty thousand throughout the fifteenth century, grew to sixty thousand by 1580, up by fifty percent (although still far below its level before the disaster of the plague in the fourteenth century). Even this growth {in population} was not sufficient to meet the demand for skilled labor from the textile industries, to judge from the notable presence of both immigrants and women on employment rosters. (86)
[S]pending on religious objects, from devotional art in the home to family chapels, also increased in the sixteenth century, driven both by Counter-Reformation zeal and by an ever-increasing pace of change in artistic style. Moreover, the church's strong reaffirmation of luxury as a highly desirable attribute of its ritualistic practices, in defiance of Protestant reformers and even its own mendicant tradition, virtually lifted all limits on spending for the entire panoply of liturgical utensils and furnishings accompanying Catholic religious practice it its numerous forms. In short, the extraordinary rise in spending on clothing and on furnishings and interior decoration for both home and church greatly stimulated the internal market for luxury consumer goods. In Florence this intense demand was almost entirely satisfied by local artisans. (89)
Emblematic of the scale of consumer spending are the elaborate chapels some of the rich built for themselves.... In fact, the Salviati Chapel, built in the 1580s, cost no less than Filippo Strozzi had paid for his palace almost a century earlier, by far the largest in the city at the time, with single rooms larger than the entire Salviati Chapel. (89)
Vasari held that {painters, sculptors, and architects} shared an overriding sense of disegno, or design — the fundamental criterion in the definition of art. (91)
It is in view of this prestige {accorded to painters, sculptors, architects} the that contradictions in the art market of late Renaissance Florence are not easy to explain: rise in demand yet stickiness of prices, increased output yet modesty of earnings, and — to go outside the economic sphere — higher cultural status yet social immobility.. Clearly something was missing in the full development of the art market within a capitalist economy. The artist's product failed to trigger the normal demand-supply mechanism inherent in the modern market, or perhaps it was instead that the artist failed to behave in the market according to the prescribed ways of homo oeconomicus, In any event, these constraints are symptomatic of a structural feature of the pre-industrial economy that, as already observed, imposed parameters on the performance of craftsmen and other workers in the marketplace. (92)
The prices of the altarpieces {manufactured} by {Allesandro} Allori (1535-1607, ranging from 100 to 200 florins, fell entirely in line with those that had obtained a century earlier and remained standard throughout Italy during the sixteenth century, even as the demand for art objects rose. (91)
Whatever the explanation, Vasari, for one, clearly understood the {economic} situation, and he had this advice for his fellow Florentine artists: “If you want to do more than live like an animal day to day and desire instead to become wealthy, you must get yourself away from here and sell the quality of your works and the fame of Florence abroad . . . because Florence does with its artisans what time does with its things: once they are made it unmakes them, and it consumes them little by little.” By advising the artist to get “away from here” and go “abroad,” he meant not so much a flight from Florence itself as an escape from the market to find sanctity in a court, where the artist could depend on the magnanimity and generosity of a patron. (92) [Vasari, From the Life of Perugino.]
Although the artisan sector's overall production may have constituted only a small part of gross national product, it at least succeeded in keeping in the {Florentine} home market much of the enormous wealth increasingly being spent on luxury. (92)
==================================
Paul Joannides writes on page 331 (my emphasis):
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Design for a salt cellar
1537
London, The British Museum
Michelangelo’s achievement as a sculptor and painter of the human figure and as a supremely dynamic architect has led to a relative underestimation of his inventiveness and influence as a decorative designer. This was encouraged in part by Michelangelo himself, who in old age turned against ornament—advising Vasari, for example, not to include decorative carving in the Del Monte Chapel—and who aimed increasingly for austerity. While embellishment is not excluded in his late architecture, it is expressionistic not decorative, and even in middle age, Michelangelo’s “decorative” forms aim for meaning rather than pattern. ...
Michelangelo made few designs for the applied arts. Several slight sketches of vases and urns survive but only two finished drawings for metalwork: a study for a lamp, its purpose unknown; and the present drawing for a salt cellar, made in 1537 for the Duke of Urbino....
{In his drawing of the salt cellar} The energetic Cupid releasing an arrow on the lid is the sibling of one in a lost presentation drawing of around 1530, for which an autograph sketch survives in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. In Salviati’s copy of the lost final version, also in the Uffizi, Cupid fires an arrow outwards, while Venus, neglecting his supervision, studies herself in a hand mirror. Michelangelo’s thoughts in the 1530s remained much occupied by the vagaries of Cupid and Love’s archery, and here, with Venus entirely absent, Cupid is still more active than he was in the related drawing: to take salt is to risk his {Cupid’s} sting. Salt and love are analogous—enhancing flavor, they increase thirst—and, as the masks and the urn suspended from three lion’s legs imply, they are dangerous. Evoking tombs in general, this salt cellar’s forms suggest the fatality of love. ... Characteristically, Michelangelo’s wit is pungent, dense, and ironic.
The book has a dozen or so essays—typically ~3000 words each—by specialists relating their particular expertise on narrow topics, not likely to interest casual readers. The pages are packed with high-quality reproductions of the artistic output of the era, but too little of the essays (or item notes) shed as much light as I would have liked on the general constellation of ideas that animated the era.
This book catalogs what was produced in Late Renaissance Florence, but says too little about why it was produced, too little about historical context. I would have liked to read a general overview for the lay reader that described something of how late Florentine art was related to art that preceded and followed upon it.
Having registered that general complaint, I have some compliments too. Below are some excerpts from the text that piqued & illumined my interest.
==================================
Richard Goldthwaite writes in his essay, 'Artisans and the Economy in Sixteenth-Century Florence' (pp. 85-93):
The population of Florence itself, after remaining virtually stagnant at around forty thousand throughout the fifteenth century, grew to sixty thousand by 1580, up by fifty percent (although still far below its level before the disaster of the plague in the fourteenth century). Even this growth {in population} was not sufficient to meet the demand for skilled labor from the textile industries, to judge from the notable presence of both immigrants and women on employment rosters. (86)
[S]pending on religious objects, from devotional art in the home to family chapels, also increased in the sixteenth century, driven both by Counter-Reformation zeal and by an ever-increasing pace of change in artistic style. Moreover, the church's strong reaffirmation of luxury as a highly desirable attribute of its ritualistic practices, in defiance of Protestant reformers and even its own mendicant tradition, virtually lifted all limits on spending for the entire panoply of liturgical utensils and furnishings accompanying Catholic religious practice it its numerous forms. In short, the extraordinary rise in spending on clothing and on furnishings and interior decoration for both home and church greatly stimulated the internal market for luxury consumer goods. In Florence this intense demand was almost entirely satisfied by local artisans. (89)
Emblematic of the scale of consumer spending are the elaborate chapels some of the rich built for themselves.... In fact, the Salviati Chapel, built in the 1580s, cost no less than Filippo Strozzi had paid for his palace almost a century earlier, by far the largest in the city at the time, with single rooms larger than the entire Salviati Chapel. (89)
Vasari held that {painters, sculptors, and architects} shared an overriding sense of disegno, or design — the fundamental criterion in the definition of art. (91)
It is in view of this prestige {accorded to painters, sculptors, architects} the that contradictions in the art market of late Renaissance Florence are not easy to explain: rise in demand yet stickiness of prices, increased output yet modesty of earnings, and — to go outside the economic sphere — higher cultural status yet social immobility.. Clearly something was missing in the full development of the art market within a capitalist economy. The artist's product failed to trigger the normal demand-supply mechanism inherent in the modern market, or perhaps it was instead that the artist failed to behave in the market according to the prescribed ways of homo oeconomicus, In any event, these constraints are symptomatic of a structural feature of the pre-industrial economy that, as already observed, imposed parameters on the performance of craftsmen and other workers in the marketplace. (92)
The prices of the altarpieces {manufactured} by {Allesandro} Allori (1535-1607, ranging from 100 to 200 florins, fell entirely in line with those that had obtained a century earlier and remained standard throughout Italy during the sixteenth century, even as the demand for art objects rose. (91)
Whatever the explanation, Vasari, for one, clearly understood the {economic} situation, and he had this advice for his fellow Florentine artists: “If you want to do more than live like an animal day to day and desire instead to become wealthy, you must get yourself away from here and sell the quality of your works and the fame of Florence abroad . . . because Florence does with its artisans what time does with its things: once they are made it unmakes them, and it consumes them little by little.” By advising the artist to get “away from here” and go “abroad,” he meant not so much a flight from Florence itself as an escape from the market to find sanctity in a court, where the artist could depend on the magnanimity and generosity of a patron. (92) [Vasari, From the Life of Perugino.]
Although the artisan sector's overall production may have constituted only a small part of gross national product, it at least succeeded in keeping in the {Florentine} home market much of the enormous wealth increasingly being spent on luxury. (92)
==================================
Paul Joannides writes on page 331 (my emphasis):
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Design for a salt cellar
1537
London, The British Museum
Michelangelo’s achievement as a sculptor and painter of the human figure and as a supremely dynamic architect has led to a relative underestimation of his inventiveness and influence as a decorative designer. This was encouraged in part by Michelangelo himself, who in old age turned against ornament—advising Vasari, for example, not to include decorative carving in the Del Monte Chapel—and who aimed increasingly for austerity. While embellishment is not excluded in his late architecture, it is expressionistic not decorative, and even in middle age, Michelangelo’s “decorative” forms aim for meaning rather than pattern. ...
Michelangelo made few designs for the applied arts. Several slight sketches of vases and urns survive but only two finished drawings for metalwork: a study for a lamp, its purpose unknown; and the present drawing for a salt cellar, made in 1537 for the Duke of Urbino....
{In his drawing of the salt cellar} The energetic Cupid releasing an arrow on the lid is the sibling of one in a lost presentation drawing of around 1530, for which an autograph sketch survives in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. In Salviati’s copy of the lost final version, also in the Uffizi, Cupid fires an arrow outwards, while Venus, neglecting his supervision, studies herself in a hand mirror. Michelangelo’s thoughts in the 1530s remained much occupied by the vagaries of Cupid and Love’s archery, and here, with Venus entirely absent, Cupid is still more active than he was in the related drawing: to take salt is to risk his {Cupid’s} sting. Salt and love are analogous—enhancing flavor, they increase thirst—and, as the masks and the urn suspended from three lion’s legs imply, they are dangerous. Evoking tombs in general, this salt cellar’s forms suggest the fatality of love. ... Characteristically, Michelangelo’s wit is pungent, dense, and ironic.
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