An Art Lover's Guide to Florence

Epilogue

EpILOGuE T he firm establishment of the ducal regime in Florence under Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici brought the city a stability and continuity in government that it had lacked, historically, but it also sounded the death knell for Florence as the capital city of the Italian renaissance . Although Cosimo had the brilliant Bronzino as his court painter and the services of the equally accomplished Cellini as a sculptor, many of the other artists he hired came nowhere near their level of talent. And even before Cosimo became duke, Florence had lost its greatest artist when Michelangelo departed in 1534 and never again set foot in his native city. Despite his undoubted political acumen, Cosimo made a major aesthetic mistake when he appointed Giorgio Vasari as his artistic impresario. Vasari was a talented researcher and writer (it’s difficult to imagine what historians of Italian art would do without his Lives of the Artists), but he was only a modestly talented painter. He directed a large studio of assistants and either supervised or created a considerable body of work in Florence, most of it mediocre in quality. He’s responsible, among other works, for the gaudy tomb of Michelangelo in s. Croce and for the enormous cycles of frescoes glorifying the Medici that cover so many of the walls inside the Palazzo Vecchio. In addition to the ubiquitous Vasari and his followers, Cosimo also commissioned sculptural works from Baccio Bandinelli, whose lumpen marble creations—including a seated statue of Duke Cosimo’s father now located in front of the church of s. Lorenzo—the critical Florentines often ridiculed. Michelangelo’s definitive departure from Florence and his permanent transfer to rome was far from the first sign that Florence had lost its status as a major center of the arts. Well before Duke Cosimo established himself as the ruler of Florence, the focus of artistic energies had begun the shift to 256 aN arT LOVEr’S GuIdE TO FLOrENCE rome, beginning as early as 1503, the first year of the papacy of Julius II. Like a magnetic force field this aggressive and ambitious pope drew artists into his orbit. After Michelangelo completed his stupendous statue of David, we might expect that the artist would have remained in Florence, and that he soon would have received further commissions there, but instead he went to rome in 1506 to work on Julius’s tomb and subsequently on the sistine Chapel ceiling. raphael—not a native, but well established and popular in Florence—soon followed. The subsequent Medici dukes descended from Cosimo presided over a declining city, and they failed to distinguish themselves as art patrons. Although several added to the family’s art collections through works that came to them through their marriages, others were indifferent or downright hostile to the arts. One, Duke Cosimo III (1670–1723), was so fanatically puritanical that he ordered Michelangelo’s David covered with a tarpaulin. Monuments of the later Medici dot the city, but the only one that receives much attention is the enormous gloomy mausoleum known as the Chapel of the Princes, part of the architectural complex of the Medici family church, s. Lorenzo. Begun in 1604 from a design provided by Duke Cosimo I’s illegitimate son Giovanni, it’s a monument to Medici excesses, an overdecorated monstrosity lined with dark-colored marbles and glittering with lapis lazuli, mother-of-pearl, and semiprecious stones. six Medici grand dukes are buried there, in elaborate tombs. The construction proved so costly that none of the dukes could ever see it to completion, and work continued into the late nineteenth century, well after the ducal regime had died out. The floor wasn’t finished until 1962. When no heirs could be coaxed from the last, utterly dissolute Grand Duke Gian Gastone, who died in 1737, the final Medici heir was his sister Anna Maria Luisa. To her eternal credit, she made a will that left all the accumulated properties and treasures of the House of Medici to the Florentine state, on the condition that nothing from that collection was ever to be removed or sold. Thanks to her farsighted stewardship, the priceless collections of earlier generations of the Medici became the common artistic heritage of Florence and they—along with so many other artistic treasures—remain among the glories of the city. To this day Florence is the ultimate art lover’s paradise. ...