Word: cosimo
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...predecessors were made of sterner stuff. Nor, despite his nickname, was Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92) the biggest patron of the clan. That honor belongs to his great-grandson, Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-74), the linchpin of this show. He was installed as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany after his uncle Allesandro de' Medici was murdered. He had an obsessive desire for magnificenza and was determined to outdo his ancestor--which, in terms of cultural spending, he did. Never had art and secular politics been brought closer together than in late Medicean Florence. Cosimo's patronage dominated...
...inclined to think of political art as a separate category, but Cosimo did not. Everything--myth, allegory, history, erotica--was assimilated to his glory. When he was barely out of his teens, and had been Grand Duke for only a couple of years, he had his court artist, Agnolo Bronzino, paint him as a peacemaker: Orpheus enchanting the wild beasts (civic discord) with his music, and naked in an allusion to his prowess as a lover. Cosimo encouraging the arts, Cosimo fostering scholarship, Cosimo bringing wealth, Cosimo subduing the city's enemies--there was nothing that Cosimo's artists...
...addition to Michelangelo, there were lesser but still extraordinary sculptors waiting pliably at Cosimo's beck and call. There was the fabulously eloquent Giambologna. There was Bartolommeo Ammannati, who made the Fountain of Neptune in the Piazza della Signoria, designed the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti and created the exquisite curve of the Sta. Trinita bridge over the Arno. Benvenuto Cellini did for Cosimo the bronze Perseus decapitating Medusa that still stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi, an allegory of the triumph of Virtue over Cosimo's enemies. Medusa's gore, solidified in bronze streams, is one of the most...
...Madrid. Naturally, the Medici had to have their own. Most elaborate of all were the pietre dure designs--fantastically elaborate inlays of jasper, lapis lazuli, serpentine and all manner of semiprecious stones, sawed into thin sheets and assembled as a jigsaw by gem cutters. Francesco de' Medici in particular, Cosimo's son, took delight in these because of his proto-scientific, alchemical interests; he was fascinated, like someone seeing pictures in the fire or Leonardo free-associating about forms made by accidental damp on walls, by how the grain of the stone suggested further pictures within the larger design...
...Madrid. Naturally, the Medici had to have their own. Most elaborate of all were the pietre dure designs - fantastically elaborate inlays of jasper, lapis lazuli, serpentine and all manner of semiprecious stones, sawed into thin sheets and assembled as a jigsaw by gem cutters. Francesco de' Medici in particular, Cosimo's son, took delight in these because of his proto-scientific, alchemical interests; he was fascinated, like someone seeing pictures in the fire or Leonardo free-associating about forms made by accidental damp on walls, by how the grain of the stone suggested further pictures within the larger design...