The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (review)

Reviewing a catalog without seeing the exhibition that it accompanied is like reading a menu without tasting the food. It is clear from the superb illustrations in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence that the three cities in which the works were shown (Florence, Chicago, and Detroit) were treated to a rare display of beautiful objects and elegant art. That experience is hard to capture from a book, but the publication does at least allow one to assess the scholarly concerns and explorations that underlay the exhibition (though one must lament the failure to provide either an index or the affiliations of the contributors).

The period that the show covered, from the 1530s to the 1620s, when Florence was ruled by the first four Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, has long been regarded as a time of decline from the peaks of cultural achievement during the previous century and more. With the final departure of Michelangelo for Rome in 1534, the city lost the last of a succession of artists who had created a new way of representing the world. That Giorgio Vasari, the dominant figure of the next generation, should now be remembered mainly for his history of the astonishing achievements that had begun with Giotto around 1300 merely emphasizes the sense that a great story had come to an end. Instead of looking back just to antiquity, the next generations were looking back to the giants among their immediate predecessors.

For Cochrane, in a pioneering study that sought to give this period an independent stature, the years from 1527 to 1800 were Florence's "forgotten centuries."¹ Despite considerable work in the interim on social change, on Tuscany's economy and demography, and on Grand Ducal patronage, the city's history has remained under the shadow ofthat designation ever since. Even this exhibition's attempt to trumpet the glories of the first of these "forgotten centuries" seemed muted. There are fine artists at work, both locals like Agnolo Bronzino, Cecchino del Salviati, and Vasari, and immigrants like Jacopo Pontormo, Giambologna, and Jacques Callot. But as the very theme of the exhibition announces, they were often living off the heritage of Michelangelo, developing his growing interest in active, often writing figures, not only in painting but also in sculpture, into the highly self-conscious, even artificial, style of Mannerism. The new ideas that grew into the Baroque came not from Florence but from Bologna and Rome.

That the Medici ruled over a rich court, with broad cultural interests, is apparent from the variety of artists whom they attracted (some of whose drawings, particularly of theatrical sets, are as dramatic as anything that they painted or sculpted) and also from the magnificent examples of the decorative arts that they patronized. The porcelain, tapestries, and pietro dura objects (ewers, dishes, plaques, and inlaid tabletops dazzlingly decorated with stones and such semiprecious gems as jasper and lapis lazuli) that Florence now produced became important luxury industries that help sustain the city to this day. In the end, however, there is no getting away from the fact that the Medici court had fallen largely to secondary importance among the centers of artistic work in Europe. Its pioneering role in music—and its brief moment, during Galileo Galilei's residence, as a center of science—are exceptions, not yardsticks, and they receive little more than passing mention in the catalog.

Galileo's one moment of prominence, in fact, comes in the catalog's essay on gardens, where his comparison of the gardens described in the epic poems "Orlando Furioso" by Ludovico Ariosto and "Gerusalemme Liberata" by Torquato Tasso becomes the hook on which to hang an assessment of changing landscape styles at Medici villas and palaces. By and large, the essays serve primarily as catalogs...