(somber opera music)
- Hi, my name is Keith Christiansen,
John Pope-Hennessey Curator
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I'm here with two of my colleagues,
Linda Wolk-Simon and Davide Gasparotto,
both of whom wrote for the catalog
and worked with me on the exhibition
The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570.
This is an exhibition
that will take you through Florence
at an extraordinary moment
in the transformation of its history,
when it lost its status
as a republic with elected officials
and became a Medici duchy.
The key figure in this is Cosimo I de' Medici,
who assumed power when he was about 17, 18 years old,
and formed the whole of the Tuscan state, became First Duke,
and then Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569,
created the dynasty of rulers,
and through whom the entire structure,
social, political and cultural in Florence,
was completely transformed.
(somber string music)
We're gonna look at a few objects together.
The first one is this extraordinary bust
by Benvenuto Cellini of Cosimo de' Medici
that stands at the entrance to the exhibition.
One of the greatest, if not the single greatest,
portrait busts of the Renaissance.
It's one of the most extraordinary objects,
and that the Bargello decided generously
to lend it to the exhibition was, to me,
in homage to our ambition,
which was to really show in its fullness
this complex historical moment.
Davide, you actually wrote the entry on this.
Tell us something about it.
- It's an extraordinary work.
It's really massive, it's over life-size,
it's cast in bronze.
We know that Cellini is very well known
as the greatest goldsmith of his time.
The Duke doesn't wear a contemporary armor
like in some painted portraits,
but he wears all'antiqua, an antique,
Roman-inspired armor, and recently,
with the cleaning that was undertook for this exhibition,
the eyes, it was discovered that the eyes are silvered,
and the soul, the expression,
the gaze of the Duke is even stronger now.
It's really very impressive.
So it's really Cosimo that is projecting his image
as a descendant of the great Roman rulers,
the Roman emperors.
- Cosimo eventually sent it to the island of Elba,
where the city of Portoferraio was renamed Cosmopolis,
and the Medici fortress on the top of the hill
had the entrance gate,
and this was placed over the entrance gate.
I just keep thinking of that sun
shining on those silver eyes,
and the way it would have been transfixing for anybody.
I think it's almost a terrifying portrait, don't you?
- Absolutely.
This was a very important moment in Cosimo's reign,
when he gained power at the Elba from the emperor directly,
the control of this very important strategic fortress,
Cosimo sent it and wanted it as a symbol of his power,
of his presence.
- [Keith Christiansen] One of the other busts
that came from the Bargello
is Sangallo's bust of Cosimo's father,
Giovanni dalle Bande Nere.
It's a chivalric portrait, the ideal knight,
which is very much the way
Cosimo wanted to refashion his father for the future,
because it was part of his own descendance.
- [Davide Gasparotto] The features
of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere in Sangallo's bust
are very different from the painted portraits.
Here, it seems like a really different man in some way.
So it seems here that what Sangallo is doing
is creating, really, the image of the man of arm,
with a very distinctive face.
- I think one of the most fascinating things
is the ability in the exhibition
to compare Sangallo's recreation
of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere and Salviati's portrait,
and you wouldn't imagine that they were the same person.
And it reminds us that appearance
was not the primary issue in many of these portraits.
- Even Cosimo himself probably didn't know,
or didn't remember, what his father looked like.
He only saw him three or four times in his whole life.
What's so striking about the Salviati portrait
is how he invests this kind of invented depiction
with life and liveliness,
the way the head is turned, the sidelong glance,
as though he's a man of action.
He's engaged, he's physically alert,
kind of creating the biography
and the history around this very elusive figure
of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere.
So showing him in the armor that his son then wears
bolsters this idea of dynasty and of continuity.
- You know, I love the fact
that in addition to the portrait busts,
the sculpted portrait busts,
there are also these painted images of father and son
by two different artists,
and one sees immediately how Salviati's encounter
with Venetian painting, with North Italian painting,
results in not quite the frozen character
of the Bronzino portrait,
the Bronzino portrait is very much a posed figure,
beautifully drawn, meticulously described,
but the temporal element is not as prominent.
So you have Francesco Salviati and Bronzino
competing against each other,
both getting commissions in Palazzo Vecchio,
one from the Duke, the other from Eleonora,
both painting portraits.
- I think before we leave this,
the splendid Bronzino portrait of Cosimo in armor,
that it's worth kind of comparing this portrait
with the Cellini bust that we already talked about,
because I think what you see
is the metamorphosis of Cosimo's persona,
which very much mirrors the trajectory
of his increasing political hold
and authority and establishment in Florence.
So in the first portrait he's wearing contemporary armor,
so he's taken off his helmet,
which is a device to suggest
that he is ushering in an era of peace,
but he stands alert and ready
and will take up arms to defend his city, his dynasty,
his authority, if necessary.
And then we move ahead to the Cellini bust,
where he's been transformed into an Augustus type,
as Davide said, an ancient Roman emperor,
and his authority here is absolute.
(relaxing string music)
- [Keith Christiansen] So that's a good lead-in,
I think, Linda,
to one of the other most astonishing portraits
in the whole exhibition,
because Cosimo from warrior to Cosimo as Orpheus.
- We have to really make a distinction
between the private and the public,
and that the depictions of Cosimo in armor,
be it contemporary or more ancient Roman armor,
are very much for public consumption,
and they are his public persona,
and his kind of propagandistic messaging
is encoded in those portraits.
A portrait of him nude
and seen from the rear playing his lyre
in a suggestive pose,
particularly the way and place where he holds his bow,
that this was never, whatever it was,
was never meant to be in public view
or for public consumption.
It was for a private, very limited audience
who would have understood the coded,
but overt, erotic messaging.
And it's a bit of a mystery.
- [Keith Christiansen] What it does remind us, though,
is that Florentine portraits of this date
are not straightforward portraits.
The primary purpose
was not necessarily to record the features,
but to present a vision of oneself,
and I think you couldn't be more right
in separating the public from the private.
But we should look at the young bride, at Eleonora,
because we have the picture that is usually thought
to be the first one done of Eleonora
upon her arrival in Florence.
- It certainly would have been appropriate
to wear at the wedding,
because what's striking about this extraordinary gown
is its self-evident costliness,
the quantity of pearls and gold
and the elaborate embroidered gold threads
making the pattern across the bodice,
the beautiful silk,
which was one of the sources
of the city's great wealth in the 15th century
and had sort of died out,
and was one of the acts of revival
that Cosimo effected as ruler.
He wanted to bring back,
and he did, successfully, the silk industry.
The pearls that she wears here,
the pearl earrings, and all on her clothing,
she adored pearls.
She was given a beautiful string of pearls
by him as a wedding gift,
which she wears in almost all of her later portraits,
but also pearls carried poetic associations
of female beauty.
- And then the hand gesture, her hand,
her right hand is shown next to her heart,
and on her index finger,
she has a very prominent diamond ring.
The diamond ring is cut with the four facets
that are associated directly with the Medician diamond.
That was another emblem.
And so she's presenting herself
as the bride presumptive.
- From all accounts,
they really were a genuine love story.
They do seem to have really been equal partners,
part of what enabled Cosimo
to so successfully realize his cultural politics
and to ensure the dynasty and continuity of the Medici,
which she certainly was the key agent in that mission.
(somber opera music)
- [Keith Christiansen] Talk about the way
in which Cosimo transformed Florence,
we borrowed some medals from the Bargello
to remind people that so much of what they see in Florence
was reconfigured, embellished, reimagined,
by specific monuments of Cosimo.
One of them has a column
with the figure of justice on the top,
and that was the column that he put
in the middle of Piazza Santa Trinita,
which everybody visits in Florence.
The column was a Roman column
that I think was given to him by the Pope,
but it gave Florence an imperial column
to put in a very prominent crossroads of Florence.
Another one that shows the pediment
with the pile of books
is for the Laurentian Library,
because when Michelangelo abandons Florence in 1534,
he leaves the Laurentian Library unfinished,
and Cosimo brings it to conclusion.
And then the third one
is the most familiar sight of everybody to Florence.
You can see the Palazzo Vecchio,
but you can also see the Uffizi,
the offices that Cosimo created
that over time were transformed
into the Galleria degli Uffizi.
And then there's the great Neptune fountain
that everybody knows from Florence.
They go into Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchia.
And there is Ammannati's Neptune fountain,
and behind it is the little line
of the aqueduct to bring water into Florence.
- And, you know, the idea itself
of a series of medal,
commissioned ad hoc
to celebrate the, you know,
great public works that Cosimo promoted
is just a new idea,
because I think it's the first time
in the history of European art
where we really have a complete series of medals
which obviously were portable,
it was easy to send them as gifts,
so obviously they were propagandistic and political messages
that was possible to spread out everywhere.
- [Keith Christiansen] He creates these monuments,
celebrates the monuments.
It's an extraordinary achievement,
a vision of the state as a center of culture,
but more importantly,
creating a clear identity for Florentine citizens.
- A lot of European rulers in the following centuries,
ending up with Napoleon,
use these means to promote
their sort of public works.
As many other things that the Medici did,
it was seminal for many European rulers
as an important example.
- [Keith Christiansen] We are really, really lucky
to have one of the most beautiful reliefs
of the Renaissance.
- It's an extraordinary work.
I'm so happy to have the opportunity
to see it in the exhibition,
because it's in the Vatican,
it's not something that you notice, really.
One of the old titles of this relief
was "Cosimo Expelling the Vices from Pisa,"
so he's expelling the bad things from the city.
The bad things are presented
on the right side of the relief,
and then on the other side, on the left side,
is all the positive things that are happening.
It's an extraordinary relief,
which shows, again,
how great Florentine sculptors of the 16th century
are always part of looking back to their great tradition,
especially the traditional,
the so-called rilievo stiacciato,
which was something that Donatello invented
in the previous century.
And this is something really very Florentine,
this sense that there is always a continuity
with their great artistic tradition.
There is this sense of pride
that you can do something new
but always in the footsteps
of your sort of predecessors, your ancestors.
(somber string music)
- And I think with this,
we can slip onto one of the final portraits of Cosimo,
Cosimo at the Age of 40,
when the battles of establishing the state are passed,
when he is showing himself now as truly a prince.
- He's moved beyond the man of military might
that we saw in the portrait of him in armor by Bronzino,
he's not a mythic ruler
of kind of mythical qualities or stature,
like the great Cellini bust of Cosimo in armor,
but he is, he's a prince.
He is a prince on the European stage,
and he is, as self-styled here,
the equal of any other prince of Europe,
and with his cultural accomplishments
and his military successes
in terms of consolidating the state of Tuscany
under his rule,
that isn't just hyperbole or propaganda.
That's the reality of him.
- You know, we've seen so much
of the serious side of Cosimo's project,
and Bronzino as a serious artist.
And I wonder if it's not time to have a look,
a little levity into the conversation,
and look at the court dwarf, Morgante,
and the marvelous sculpture that we have in the exhibition
and its relationship to the other side of court life,
and of the academia,
which is the satiric and the comic.
(gentle opera music)
This is the generosity of Florence to the exhibition.
The bronze Morgante is from the Bargello,
and the manuscript, the Biblioteca Nazionale,
who lent us two volumes of Bronzino's poetry,
the burlesque and then the elevated poetry.
- Morgante was the nickname
of sort of Cosimo's favorite dwarf,
the court jester of the court.
This is a joke because Morgante,
he's a literary figure
from a poem of the late 15th century by Luigi Pulci,
and Morgante was a giant,
so obviously the nickname was a joke itself.
- That gets to the essence of the burlesque sensibility,
which is paradoxical.
So these improbable pairings of opposites
into a seamlessly resolved
poetic formulation, be it literary or visual,
gets to the heart of the burlesque sensibility,
and that really is the essence
of Bronzino's burlesque poetry,
which is a side of his extraordinary artistic production
that's much less known than his paintings,
but which has been the object of study.
We have a manuscript of his burlesque poetry
in the exhibition, in his beautiful hand.
Bronzino wrote beautiful elevated poetry,
very much in a Petrarchan mode,
as did anybody of literary pretensions
or inclinations in this period,
but there was a genre that existed beside it,
which was that of the burlesque,
which is full of erotic and scatological
and subversive, transgressive puns and coded language,
but using a very elevated literary style,
but the subject matter is as base and as low
and as crude and as gross as they can get.
Bronzino was Petrarchan on the one hand
and anti-Petrarchan and subversive,
and very much in the burlesque spirit in the other,
and both of those threads, circling back,
I think we see in his paintings as well.
(lively string music)
- Working with both of you on this exhibition
has been one of the great treats of my career.
I look forward to all of us walking through it together
and discussing all the various objects in it.
I think that it's such a layered, such a rich territory,
and there are all kinds of resonances
with the world that we live in today.
So thank you.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you.