Those Crafty Medici
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The history of the Florentine Renaissance is inseparable from the history of the Medici family. The Medici – bankers and merchants who ruled in Florence almost uninterruptedly from 1434 to 1743 – were among the greatest patrons and collectors of the arts the Western world has ever known. Michelangelo, Raphael, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Rubens, Fra Angelico, and Titian, to name just a few, benefited from their patronage.
But the powerful and wealthy Medici employed not only the best Florentine painters, sculptors, and architects to create their art and architecture but also artisans – metalworkers, engravers, jewelers, weavers, and embroiders – to create their wardrobes. In their portraits, the Medici, decked out and piled high in sumptuous velvets, gold-brocaded satins, polished armor, furs, precious stones, and fine pointed lace, at times appear less as personages than as armatures for extravagance.
Certainly while looking at a painted portrait, as in Frans Pourbus the Younger’s “Maria de’ Medici, Queen of France” (1611-3) or Jacopo Ligozzi’s “Maria de’ Medici” (1587-9), part of the pleasure is in acknowledging the glistening diamonds in their crowns, the intricate patterns of their gowns, and the jeweled buttons, pearls, and rubies that adorn their bodices.Yet there is something disturbing about the curatorial inspiration behind the inclusion of these and other paintings in the show “The Medici on Wall Street: Portraits From the Uffizi Gallery,” an ongoing exhibition of 21 16th- and 17th-century Medici family portraits.
“The Medici on Wall Street” curated by Caterina Caneva, complemented the recent Lower Manhattan festival “Splendor of Florence,” an 11-day fair meant to promote Florentine craftsmanship, culture, and cuisine, during which attendees could take in concerts, films, lectures, and the paintings. “The Splendor of Florence” is over, but the splendid Medici oil portraits remain on view in the rotunda gallery at Federal Hall.
Before I go any further, I should mention that the Uffizi has not sent to New York its Medici portraits by Raphael, Pontormo, Bronzino, Mantegna, and Titian. The Italian emissaries or “cultural brokers” in this show are followers or students of masters. Though many are not without merit – especially the portraits by Cristofano dell’ Altissimo, Alessandro Allori, Santi di Tito, Justus Sustermans, and Tiberio Titi – they are second- or third-string.
The paintings were chosen specifically for Americans as documentation of Medici-inspired craft and style. According to Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, director of the Uffizi, the exhibition was mounted to “provide first-hand historical information about the details of the fashions of the time.” The catalog and wall text, which consistently push viewers toward the “visual facts” in the portraits, present the paintings not as paintings but as indisputable “photographs” of Medici armor, textiles, furnishings, and jewelry.
The Medici, it is true, employed their portraits in their own time as “cultural [power] brokers.” Ms. Caneva points out in her catalog essay that the Medici used the portraits to document their wealth, growth, health, and power. They sent portraits of their offspring, or copies of them, as offerings to other European courts in hopes of wooing them into arranged marriages.
But it is one thing to put together a show of Medici heirlooms – gowns, jewels, furniture, weapons, and tapestries – accompanied by paintings that illustrate the objects in situ with their owners. It is another thing entirely to use paintings as factual records and representations of, or stand-ins for, actual objects – a role that, as it requires that one craft (painting) take the place of another (weaving or jewelry-making), dishonors weaving, jewelry-making, and painting. Such a scheme ignores the fact that painting (itself a craft), though it may at times reflect the natural world, is first and foremost a craft not of documentation but of invention.
In many of the best paintings on view, the subject is as much the Medici as a ruling force as it is a particular member of the Medici clan. For this reason, the most arresting portraits in the show are of children, in which the nature of ruler conflicts wonderfully with that of child. As in the many portrayals of Christ during the Renaissance, in which He must be simultaneously conveyed as Father, infant Son, and Holy Ghost, the Medici children come across as both child and god.
In Tiberio Titi’s “Francesco de’ Medici” (1597) the 3-year-old Francesco, self-assured and hand on hip, has the demeanor of a 17-year-old with the body of a boy much younger (but certainly not 3).The young girl in Titi’s “Eleonora de’ Medici” (c. 1597), as in other portraits, floats above the floor, as if she were an apparition. Her hand, though it touches the table, does not rest there. Like that of a magician’s, it appears to levitate the table beneath it, on which the dog, firmly planted, sits solidly on its plane. The sleeve of her rising, white gown echoes the shape and fall of the tablecloth. Her rosy cheeks flower forth like the red roses in the vase. Her lace “Medici collar” appears to flutter and to lift her like butterfly wings, as her long choker of pearls anchors her in the space.
This beautiful portrait of a 6-year-old girl does not inform me about the exact size of her pearls, height of her collar, or length of her sleeves. Nor does it make me believe that she owned a miniature, red-velvet-covered table or even a dog. It speaks to me of the powers of the painter to convey the symbolic stature, bearing, and position – the important lineage – of the Medici family.