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

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 dblocker@berkeley.edu. 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.

In his life of Jacopo Rustici, Vasari gives us a poignant, though veiled, description of his position vis-à-vis the Medici rulers of Florence by whom he was employed, constrained, for reasons of family obligations, to play the role of courtier/painter at the court of Cosimo deí Medici, to the detriment of his own artistic ambitions: " Giovan Francesco, besides being of a noble family, had the means to live hon ourably, and therefore practiced art more for his own delight and from desire of glory than for gain. And, to tell the truth of the matter, those craftsmen who have as their ultimate and principal end gain and profit, and not honour and glory, rarely become very excellent, even although they may have good and beautiful genius; besides which, labouring for a livelihood, as very many do who are weighed down by poverty and their families, and working not by inclination, when the mind and the will are drawn to it, but by necessity from morning till night, is a life not for men who have honour and glory as their aim, but for hacks, as they are called, and manual labourers, for the reason that good works do not get done without first having been well considered for a long time. 1 " He has become, in service to his Medici masters, a mere coverer of walls, a decorator.

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.