Musée Maillol Announces Exhibition of Treasures of the Medicis

Written by Fillpe Garzone Sunday, 11 December 2011 21:44

PARIS.- Men of wealth and influence, the Medicis were not just Florentine pharmacists enriched by trade who turned into the bankers of Europe, before becoming its princes. Subtle politicians, these business men were above all fervent humanists. Their enlightened patronage revealed a culture as deep as it was widespread from the 15th through the 18th centuries. The family clan, nearly always united — whether in power or removed from it —, never ceased to surround itself with artists, painters, sculptors, jewelers, musicians, poets and scientists, which they protected rather than just commissioning them.

Wishing to renew life via aesthetics and science, the outstanding Florentine family did not quite, in fact, launch the movement of sumptuous patronage that gripped Florence during the Renaissance. But it favored the avant-garde like no other before them, turning art into an extraordinary instrument of power, setting up forever the image of the magnificent patron.

Wherever the Medicis were installed, they reigned more thanks to the splendor of their taste than through the power of their bank. Inventors, in the archeological definition of the word, the Medicis « invented » modern Western art, by encouraging Fra Angelico’s art of perspective and Botticelli’s humanism, by conferring a nobility on Italian language literature, by supporting the early classicism of Michel-Angelo and Raphaël, by displaying Bronzino’s Florentine mannerism, by carrying the minor arts to their apotheosis, by always being at the forefront of new geographic and scientific discoveries, by creating the first operas in history with Peri’s and Caccini’s two “Eurydices”, as well as by underwriting Galileo’s astronomical discoveries.

To find once more the world’s harmonies while pretending to be its organizers, such was the Medicis’ overweening ambition.

A treasury in the musée Maillol
It was that personal and modern taste for new spaces, whether in the world of decorative arts, in painting, in music, in science or in poetry, that the exhibition « Trésor des Médicis », (The Medicis’ Treasures) emphasizes by regrouping nearly 150 works and objects, all of which were seen, coveted or touched by the magnificent Florentines, since all of them come from the Medici collections. The exhibition in the Musée Maillol invites one to enter into the very heart of the Medici palace, by recalling, among these very rarely loaned masterpieces, a history of the Medici taste, as exemplified over time and with the various heads of the Medici family, through various rooms, whether grandiose or intimate: reception room, studiolo, or cabinet of marvels, workshops for the hard stones, the library , the Medici theatre, a mathematics study-room and the chapel.

From Cosmo to Lorenzo : the glory of the Lords of Florence in the 15th century
If it was Giovanni di Bicci who founded the Medici bank at the very end of the 14th century, it was Cosmo the Elder who marked the advent of the future dynasty by becoming the wealthiest man in Europe. Henceforth, the banker of Popes and of Kings after his return from exile to Florence in 1434, it was the subtle and wise Cosmo, who is at the start of the treasure and of the almost limitless reign of the Medicis. He started by using his considerable financial resources to collect antiques – and even Islamic objects – as was the custom in the leading families during the Renaissance. But he also surrounded himself with works of art of every kind, commissioning the most adventurous artists like Fra Angelico, as is clear from a predella panel representing sepulchers of the Saints Cosmo and Damian. His grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent , a talented poet and subtle political strategist, even if an ineffectual banker, became « the first citizen of Florence » without bearing that title. He carried that « Republic of the Arts» to its first peak. Lorenzo devoted outlandish sums to purchasing hard-stone vases and admitted to a passion for antique cameos, like that of Poseidon and Athena, then attributed to Pyrgotele, the only artist allowed by Alexander the Great to engrave his portrait.

It was the Magnificent who invited the young Michelangelo to share his table and to sculpt in the garden in San Marco. He also corresponded with Amerigo Vespucci, the sailor who gave his name to America, and he collected exotic objects, like Chinese celadons.

Lorenzo also believed in Botticelli’s brilliant talent : employing an exacerbated chromatism In revolutionary Adoration of the Magi, Sandro did not hesitate to position, no longer in a family chapel, but this time in the heart of Florence, the Medici family in its entirety, Cosmo the Elder, Piero the First, Lorenzo and Julian de Medici, surrounded by their court, headed by Pic de la Mirandole and Politian, like the Muses gathered together around a new Apollonian Holy Family.

The irruption of Charles VIII’s French troops put a temporary end to the absolute power of the Medicis and to their aesthetic ascendancy: their palace in the Larga — which Apollonio di Giovanni did not hesitate to represent as Priam’s palace in an illuminated manuscript devoted to Virgil — was wrecked, their collections sold at auction. By conferring on Alexander de Medici the title of duke in 1532, Charles the Fifth restored the absolute power of the family over Florence.

From Rome to Paris : two Popes for two queens
An aesthete and a cultured man , John de Medici, second son of Lorenzo, became Pope under the name of Leo X, and he did his best to buy back many of the goods that had been scattered. He provided the Medicis’ patronage with a new Roman dimension, henceforth considering Florence as his private property, even sending there, with some arrogance, a rebellious Michelangelo.

A great organizer of festivities and a great collector of manuscripts, Leo X, following the example of the Magnificent, turned Rome into a paradise for artists and intellectuals. As well as Pontormo and Andrea del Sarto, he overburdened Raphaël with work.

A new visual acuity, almost Flemish in its hyperrealism, appeared in 1515 in the outstanding «Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami », Leo X’s librarian, completely dressed in a symphonic red, casting his eyes heavenwards. Gazing in awe at that painting, Bonaparte and his followers did not hesitate to borrow it momentarily from the Medici collections. Julius de Medici, illegitimate son of Julian, Lorenzo’s brother, became Pope in his turn, after his cousin Leo X, under the name Clement VII. If that tragic Pope saw the sacking of Rome and the break with Henry VIII of England, he nonetheless remained a sensitive patron.

Popes behaving like kings, the Medicis undertook a far-seeing matrimonial policy, which led two women to the throne of France. Placed under the direct protection of Clement VII, Catherine de Medici married the future king Henri II in 1533, bringing with her a dowry of 28000 écus in jewelry. Very attentive to art forms, the new queen was above all very fond of portraits : she gathered together over 700, including a portrait of herself that she sent to Florence, as a dowry for her grand-daughter Christine de Lorraine.

A gifted draughtswoman, an outstanding ballet dancer, fascinated by jewelry and endowed with a huge fortune, Marie de Medici, daughter of Francis the First, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in her turn married the king of France Henri IV in 1600. Her marriage having inspired the birth of the opera in Florence, she begged her uncle Ferdinand de Medici to allow the composer Giulio Caccini to come to Paris with his daughter Francesca, a singer but also a composer. She loved to call upon the baroque opulence of two Flemish artists, Frans Pourbus, who painted her portrait wearing all her pearls , and Rubens, who had attended her wedding in Florence.

From Cosmo II to Cosmo III : the twilight of the Medicean starts in the 17th and 18th centuries
Open minded and curious – maybe because he benefited from having had Galileo as a tutor -, Cosmo II, during his brief reign at the very start of the 17th century , put up new buildings to receive more and more important collections. If he provided the minor arts with a new impulse, he was the only one in Florence to encourage the Caravegesque realism that had come to light in Rome and in Naples.

Cosmo II also encouraged his brother, cardinal Leopold de Medici, in his initiative of collecting self-portraits by prestigious artists in the Vasari corridor — self-portraits signed Luca Giordano or Carlo Dolci— or his re-organisation of the Palatine Library and of its 14000 manuscripts and 20 000 printed volumes. The Grand-Duke also supported his brother in his creation in 1657 of the Academia del Cimento (Academy for experimentation), which promoted Galileo’s experimental science.

An important collector of scientific instruments and of weapons, his son the Grand Duke Ferdinand II was opposed to the Holy See’s decree which had obliged Galileo to retract his Copernican discoveries before the Inquisition. The Medicis, godfathers of the Renaissance, were also the forebears of the Century of Enlightenment. The last descendant of the Medicis, prince Jean-Gaston remembered that, who undertook, 95 years after the astronomer’s death, to provide a tomb for Galileo in Florence, picking up along the way two of the great man’s fingers to enclose them inside a henceforth sacred reliquary: the genius’ finger points to the Medicis.

Leaving Florence and enjoying, in his villa in Poggio in Caiano, at the heart of his Gabinetto, the contemplation « of small works by all the most famous painters!», he had a theatre built in another villa in Pratolino, where he supported the new aesthetic concept of baroque opera embodied by Alessandro Scarlatti. He died of syphilis and madness in 1713 aged 50, without having ever reigned. Libertine and liberal unlike the rigid Cosmo III, but drunk and nearly always in bed, living confined to his apartments while carrying out a ceaseless and melancholy debauchery, his young brother, Jean-Gaston de Medici marked the end of the dynasty in the night.

On his death in 1737, without successors, the Grand-Duchy left the Medici family to return into the demesne of Lorraine and of the future Emperor of the Holy Roman German Empire, Francis Ist of Austria. The last survivor of the line, Jean-Gaston’s sister, Anne-Marie Louise, princess Palatine – whose jewel in the shape of a cradle offered by her husband on hearing of her long awaited pregnancy , was not sufficient to give him a living heir – handed over all the Medici collections to the city of Florence, so they could remain « at the disposal of all nations». A testament of gold and fire, a fantastic spectacle of works and masterpieces which relate the world’s beauty, a world re-organized for the mind and feelings of the Medici family.

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