This informative and elegantly illustrated catalogue appeared in association with the exhibition Magnificenza! The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (in Italy, L’ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l’arte a Firenze, 1537–1631). The impressive scope of the catalogue covers works of art produced during the reigns of four Medici Grand Dukes: Cosimo I (r. 1537–74), Francesco I (r. 1574–87), Ferdinando I (r. 1587–1609), and Cosimo II (r. 1609–31). The curators of the exhibition, Marco Chiarini (Scientific Exhibition Commissioner for Italy, Florence), Alan P. Darr (Detroit Institute of Arts), and Larry J. Feinberg (Art Institute of Chicago), collaborated to assemble approximately forty international experts as contributors to the publication. A group of twelve essays, all illustrated with contextual examples, introduces the reader to Michelangelo, the Medici, and their cultural hegemony. The essays are followed by entries on over 225 objects. Because the entries are divided by media (paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, works on paper) and are arranged alphabetically by artist, interconnections among artists, patrons, and objects are not always readily apparent or cross-referenced. It would have been helpful to include an index of major patrons and personalities mentioned in the text, as well as a genealogical table of the Medici. A comprehensive bibliography completes the catalogue.

On the whole, the endeavor comes in the wake of the publication for the exhibition, Magnificenza alla corte dei Medici: Arte a Firenze alla fine del Cinquecento (held September 24, 1997–January 6, 1998, at the Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti, Florence). Although there is some overlap in the content and thematic focus of the two, the present catalogue is broader in both chronology and perspective. The spotlight on Michelangelo in the title (in both the English and Italian productions) may have been a “selling point” to boost public interest. Given that Michelangelo left Florence permanently in 1534, the question can be raised as to his relevance—beyond his artistic legacy—for this most recent project. Of the twelve works by Michelangelo or his circle that appear here—nine drawings and three pieces of sculpture, including the fascinating and enigmatic David–Apollo (cat. no. 80)—only three of these have a Florentine connection. Thus, while Cristina Acidini Luchinat’s essay “Michelangelo and the Medici” (9–23) reviews the artist’s famous Florentine projects, the material is not immediately germane to his works selected for the individual entries.

The lead essay by Darr, “The Medici and the Legacy of Michelangelo in Late Renaissance Florence: An Introduction” (1–7), surveys Medici Grand-ducal leadership and the cultural commissions that the family undertook to help secure the authority of their dynasty. He discusses commissions related to painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as decorative arts, gardens, and ephemeral spectacles, thus preparing the reader for the wide range of patronage under investigation. Florence’s artistic prestige owed a great deal to the Medici’s endorsement of sculpture and decorative arts. In 1588, after having transferred the Grand-ducal workshops from the Casino of San Marco to the Uffizi, Ferdinando I officially established the Galleria dei Lavori (now known as the Opificio delle Pietre Dure), famed for its production of inlaid mosaic work and sculpted precious and semiprecious hard stones. With the inclusion of Annamaria Giusti’s essay on the Medici’s works in soft-paste porcelain and pietre dure (103–11), it is rewarding to find that the catalogue does not discriminate by privileging one medium over another. Spectacular examples of porcelain, pietre dure, tapestries, and armor are examined together with well-known paintings and sculpture to reveal the breathtaking array of artistic production under the Medici.

The most significant contribution to the field of cultural politics of the Medici Grand Dukes was Cosimo I’s inauguration in 1563 of the Compagnia ed Accademia del Disegno, an academy for the arts of “design” (disegno). As Karen-edis Barzman and Zygmunt Wazbinski have shown in their own independent studies, the academy established the first discursive and institutional link among Florentine painters, sculptors, and architects. Although the research of these two scholars is touched upon in the catalogue, the impact of the Medici’s state-incorporated institution merits greater emphasis given the significance of the artists featured here. Pietro Francavilla, Jacopo Ligozzi, and Giovanni Stradano, for example, are represented by various works showing the nude body or skeletons, yet no mention is made in the entries of their deep interest in anatomy and dissections gained from their involvement with the Accademia. The formal study of anatomy, together with mathematics and natural science, helped to develop an artist’s skills and intellect. To be sure, Michelangelo’s art was a paradigm, but it was, as Barzman notes, more his “method of learning—not his style, but his combination of theory and practice, which, together with measured judgment, were held to be the source of his perfection” (The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 18]).

The reign of Cosimo I receives the greatest attention in the catalogue, with his illustrious public and private patronage summarized by Janet Cox-Rearick in her essay “Art at the Court of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (1537–1574)” (35–45). Whereas the essay casts Cosimo in a positive light, both Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (itself a state-sanctioned publication) and Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography characterize the duke as a difficult, even reluctant patron who often succumbed to external pressures from his family or members of his court. Another issue involving Cosimo that surfaces throughout the catalogue—perhaps unintentionally—is his much disputed early identity as he made the transition to duke. The entry for Jacopo Pontormo’s Maria Salviati and a Child ([?] Cosimo I) (cat. no. 33), for example, rehearses the long-standing debates over the ambiguous sex and identity of the child, and over the date of the picture, ca. 1537–38 or 1543. Not cited, however, is Gabrielle Langdon’s important article (“Pontormo and Medici Lineages: Maria Salviati, Alessandro, Giulia and Giulio de’ Medici,” RACAR 19 (1992): 20–40), in which she convincingly identifies the child as Giulia de’ Medici, daughter of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici (r. 1532–37), who came under the protection of Cosimo and his mother Maria Salviati after her father’s murder (and thus the portrait would date to ca. 1538). Pontormo’s novel portrayal of his two subjects appeared during a time of dynastic crisis and played a key role in Agnolo Bronzino’s later but equally inventive portrayals of Eleanora of Toledo (Cosimo I’s Spanish-born wife) and her sons (cat. nos. 8 and 9).

Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier (fig. 21; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) also presents a key problem regarding identity. Cox-Rearick identifies the sitter as Cosimo around 1537. Yet in light of Elizabeth Cropper’s compelling arguments in her monograph on the Getty picture (Pontormo: Portrait of a Halberdier [Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997]), which is cited in a footnote, the identification of the sitter as the young duke is far from certain. There is as much ambiguity in this portrait as there is in Bronzino’s fascinating and erotically charged Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus (cat. no. 17)—a decidedly different image of a ruler than the one chosen by his predecessor and cousin Alessandro. (The reader may be left wanting to learn more about Cosimo’s self-fashioning vis-à-vis that of Alessandro, who set the precedent for Medici ducal identity; see Pontormo’s captivating small-scale portrait of Alessandro, cat. no. 34.) Cosimo’s later official portraits by Bronzino show him in armor (cat. no. 11), whereas the brilliant marble bust of the duke by Giovanni Bandini (cat. no. 53) is modeled after Roman imperial portraiture. The catalogue further examines an exciting variety of other Medici portraits, including Giambologna’s bronze bust of Francesco I (cat. no. 77), Scipione Pulzone’s painting of Ferdinando I (cat. no. 35), and Mattias Ferrucci’s porphyry bust of Cosimo II (cat. no. 65), among others.

All of the Medici Grand Dukes were ambitious and creative in their patronage, especially in the use of theater as a means of propaganda, as the essays by Suzanne Butters (67–75), Marco Chiarini (77–83), and Anna Maria Testaverde (123–31) attest. Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti’s essay, “The Medici Grand-ducal Family and the Symbols of Power” (25–33), discusses how the various trappings of imperial ornament—crowns, robes, and jewels—displayed and defined power. Her study, as well as that of Lucia Meoni on Grand-ducal tapestry production (95–101), discusses the bustling international art world in Florence. It is interesting to learn that the tailors employed by Cosimo I earned a salary equal to that of Bronzino, the lead painter to the court, who was himself also involved in the production of tapestries. In this regard, Richard Goldthwaite’s contribution, “Artisans and the Economy in Sixteenth-Century Florence” (85–93), observes “[…] notwithstanding the heightened demand for painting in the sixteenth century and, above all, the greatly enhanced cultural value of that product as art, the market made little distinction between artisan and artist” (91). But the acceptance of modest financial gain should not be taken as a low measure of an artist’s professional worth, especially considering that Florence under the Medici dukes was not a pure free-market society. For example, the Compagnia ed Accademia del Disegno evolved essentially into a guild of its own for artists, who were subject to the Mercanzia, the supreme authority in matters pertaining to production and sale. At the Medici ducal court, benefits could be gained in lieu of financial compensation: through gifts and titles, for instance, or through privileged access to the ducal household. Still, it is worth mentioning that Giovanni Battista Armenini, writing in 1586, complained of a qualitative decline in the art of painting because an abundance of cheap labor drove even the most accomplished artists to work more rapidly (and hence poorly) and to charge less in order to undercut the competition (see Robert Williams, “The Vocation of the Artist as seen by Giovanni Battista Armenini,” Art History 18 (1995): 518–36).

The section on sculpture is a great strength of the catalogue. From Michelangelo’s shadow (“l’ombra del genio”) emerges the brilliance of the sculptors Bartolomeo Ammanati, Benvenuto Cellini, Giambologna, and Perino da Vinci, among others featured here. The latter’s River God (cat. no. 94), a mere boy encircled by both male and female putti, is arresting in its sensuality. Surely the motivation behind such novel imagery goes beyond the context of Medici land reclamation, but this is the only hypothesis offered. The sensuous forms can be seen to stand for the allure of pagan antiquity much celebrated by Medici artists. The reader can also refer to Claudio Pizzorusso’s essay on garden design and sculpture (113–21) for a broader context for such works.

A thematic undercurrent running throughout the objects selected is the connection between art and the wonders of the natural world. Larry Feinberg’s essay on Francesco I’s studiolo (47–65), built in 1569–70 in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, is the most original contribution to the catalogue. Sensitive to previous scholarship, Feinberg proposes a new and convincing arrangement for the paintings and sculpture contained in the studiolo, basing his iconographic reading on the duke’s interests in natural history and science and in industrial techniques, interests that permeated Florentine artistic culture. Empirical investigations based on direct observations of nature were the impetus behind such carefully studied colored drawings as Jacopo Ligozzi’s Horned Viper and Viper of Avicenna (cat. no. 179), and Filippo Napoletano’s discovery of pietra paesina as an artistic medium (cat. no. 30), which the entry notes is intimately linked to the production of hard stone at the Galleria dei Lavori.

The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence is an important resource. If anything, one wishes that the catalogue had explored certain themes related to the objects more in-depth (portraiture, myth, natural science), but the divisions by medium and alphabetical arrangement prevent this. Nevertheless, as a catalogue accompanying an exhibition devoted to the first four Medici Grand Dukes with venues in Italy and the United States, this publication offers both general readers and specialists a wealth of material to study, question, and develop.