When Cosimo I de’ Medici became the second duke of Florence, the problems he inherited all but guaranteed he’d be the last. The treasury was decimated by warfare and plague, and his family was unpopular with everyone from the pope to the local populace. Even his relatives couldn’t be trusted. (His predecessor, Alessandro de’ Medici, was assassinated by a cousin.) Cosimo rose to the challenge by conjuring the Renaissance and situating Florence at the center of the cultural rebirth.
This supreme act of socio-political propaganda is the central theme of The Medici: Portraits & Politics, 1512-1570, a remarkable exhibition and publication of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Encompassing more than ninety works in media ranging from painting and sculpture to medals and armor, The Medici offers a stimulating balance of spectacular art and behind-the-scenes machination that played equal parts in defining one of the most famous periods in history.
From an artistic perspective, the Renaissance pre-dated Cosimo by well over a century and was hardly limited to Tuscany. Even within his own city, where art flourished under the patronage of Medici ancestors such as Lorenzo the Magnificent, and where masters including Michelangelo created some of their chefs d’oeuvre, the cultural bedrock Cosimo sought to support his reign was hardly firm. For instance, the city’s single most prominent artwork, Michelangelo’s David, was a symbol of the erstwhile Florentine Republic. (The David had been commissioned by the Republican government and placed in front of the legislature after the previous Medici dynasty was toppled.) Cosimo’s double gambit of making Florence ground zero of post-Medieval cultural revival and placing his family at the hub of the Renaissance project – giving the Medici name pride of place in a story that every Florentine could be proud about – was a shrewd act of boosterism that the young duke calculated could be achieved with the right patronage. Portraiture had the double advantage of alloying the prestige of the artists with the magnificence of their patron.
Michelangelo wouldn’t have anything to do with it. But 16th century Italy had abundant talent. In short order, Cosimo was immortalized in a masterful bronze by the great Benvenuto Cellini. Cosimo also commissioned sumptuous paintings by Agnolo Bronzino associating family members with classical and biblical figures. For instance, his son was depicted as John the Baptist.
Bronzino’s paintings, several rooms of which are on view at the Met, were both authoritative and innovative. Cosimo’s patronage also supported important painters such as Francesco Salviati, as well as the Accademia Fiorentina, all worthy contributions to the cultural life of Florence and the artistic legacy of the 16th century. The propagandistic needs of an imperious ruler have provided countless people with aesthetic pleasures. Neatly ensconced on the timeline of art history, set in the remote past, they have been politically neutralized, just as Cosimo wished when he shrewdly positioned the Medici as selfless benefactor of eternal worth.
Benvenuto Cellini. Cosimo I de’ Medici, 1545. Bronze. 43 5/16 × 38 9/16 in. Museo Nazionale del … [+] Bargello. Image: Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi, su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali e per il turismo. Photo by Francesco Del Vecchio.
Francesco Del Vecchio
But as the art historian Sefy Hendler observes in his excellent catalogue essay, even the historical timeline is not really neutral territory. Arguably more important than any of the sculptures or paintings was the writing of the painter and hagiographer Giorgio Vasari. In his classic Lives of the Artists, which he dedicated to Cosimo, Vasari coined the term Renaissance to describe the art that emerged after the alleged abyss of the Middle Ages. Vasari also, writes Hendler, “consolidated the story of the Renaissance as the story of Florence and the Medici”. By this literary turn, which even Michelangelo failed to unwind, the spirit of the age was put to work on behalf of a city and its leader.
The cliché that history is written by victors such as Cosimo – who successfully consolidated power in Florence and consolidated Florentine power in the Holy See – overshadows the irony that writing is the basis of the Medici’s triumph in the visual arts. Then again, the Medici were bankers, early adapters of innovations including letters of credit and holding companies. The biblical and classical symbolism trafficked by Bronzino looks simplistic in comparison to the Medici’s symbolic command of wealth.
By this reckoning, controlling artistic capital with the written word makes perfect sense. Even more than the art that Cosimo commissioned, it’s what made the Medici modern.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
