Word: medici
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...April 18. Botticelli, from Lorenzo the Magnificent to Savonarola (Oct. 1-Feb. 22) assembles 20 Botticelli paintings and six drawings, plus a dozen works by contemporaries like Filippo Lippi and Piero di Cosimo, all working during the late 15th century, when Florence blossomed in the humanist atmosphere of the Medici court before being swallowed up by the fire-and-brimstone fervor of the Dominican monk Savonarola. Along with several of Botticelli's delicate Madonnas, the show's highlights include a colored-ink Map of the Inferno illustration for Dante's The Divine Comedy, and St. Augustine in his cell...
...what the Bush Administration euphemistically calls "regime change" occurred, they did not whine soggily about elitism when some duke or prince put up a statue in praise of himself or his relatives. And that is what the marvelous show now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, "The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence," is really about...
...Medici were not, in fact, the biggest art spenders of the Italian Renaissance, but the fact that so many people still assume they were is proof of the success of their art policies as family propaganda. Like all other dynasties, the Medici in due course fizzled out; one of the last of them was the grotesque Gian Gastone (1671-1737), a mountain of fat and wobbly wigs, who commissioned practically nothing, kept puking on the table at court banquets, stank like a polecat and spent the last eight years of his life in bed, imploring boys (vainly, one hopes...
...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...
...extracting the maximum visual punch from skilled labor: not only could they reproduce great designs at a fraction of the cost of painting, but they could also cover enormous surfaces with sumptuous effects. Monarchs loved them, setting up weaving factories in the Netherlands, France, Naples and 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...