An Earthly Paradise: The Medici, Their Collection and the Foundations of Modern Art (review)

Christopher Fulton takes the title of this book from a letter of 1459 to Francesco Sforza in which Niccolò da Parma writes of the wonders he had seen on a tour of the Medici Palace, describing it as an "earthly paradise" (140). Despite the promise of this evocative title, chapter 1, "The Medici and their Collecting Activities," and chapter 4, "Medicean Imagery," add nothing substantive to scholarship on these topics.

Fulton's primary sources are the 1417 inventory of the casa Medici and the 1454–63, 1465, and 1492 inventories of the Medici Palace. Chapter 2, "The Collecting Enterprise," best demonstrates his use of these inventories to document the variety of objects brought together in the Medici Palace and the original locations of many of them. He uses the inventories to distinguish between the types of objects shown in the public or semipublic areas and those reserved for the private ones. The inventories confirm that the most precious objects in the collection were housed in the studies of Piero and Lorenzo.

In chapter 3, "Building the Symbolic Center," although dependent on previous studies of the architecture of the Medici Palace, Fulton again applies the inventories to an understanding of the plan and function of the interior spaces of the Medici Palace, locating examples of antique sculpture in the courtyard and garden. In assessing the significance and influence of the Medici collection in chapter 5, "The Foundations of Modern Art," Fulton indulged in amplificatio: "for it was the instigating force in a revolution that permanently altered the physical composition of art objects and habits of reception" (125).

The major flaw in this study is Fulton's failure to distinguish between works collected and works commissioned. E. H. Gombrich's observations in "The Early Medici as Patrons of Art" are apropos: "[T]he famous collections of the Medici are of relevance only as rivals to their patronage of art. It is too easily assumed sometimes that the two activities are one" (Norm and Form, 1978, 52). Fulton conflates collecting and patronage throughout the book. This tendency is demonstrated clearly in an appendix, "Catalogue of Renaissance Works of Art From the Medici Collection." He excluded from the catalogue almost all of the objects that could accurately be described as collected: "Antiques are excluded from this listing as are book covers, illuminated manuscripts, goldsmith's works, articles of furniture, medals, ceramics, and other examples of the 'minor arts'" (237). Of the seventy-four works included in the catalogue, almost all were commissioned, not collected, by the Medici.

A related study by Laurie Fusco and Gino Corti, Lorenzo de' Medici, Collector and Antiquarian (2006), was published after Fulton's book. The sharp focus of this work, supported by an extraordinary body of documents, results in a new understanding of the collecting and the collections of Lorenzo. This book would have been an extremely useful prototype for Fulton's approach to his subject.

In addition to the catalogue, there is an appendix of nine documents, several of them widely published elsewhere. The bibliography is extensive: a self-conscious mastery of the literature and copious footnotes betray the origin of the book in Fulton's doctoral dissertation. An index would have been helpful to the reader. This handsome book is printed on very high quality paper; the color plates and black-and-white illustrations are excellent. Scholars seeking an introduction to the collections and patronage of the Medici in the Quattrocento may find this book useful; scholars with some knowledge of the subject may not.