The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512 – 1570
The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512 – 1570
Join exhibition curators and scholars to explore the impact of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Florence from 1537–69, on politics, literature, fashion, and culture in 16th-century Florence.
FREE
Met Museum online
October 10, 2021 | 11:00 am
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Speaker details

Keith Christiansen
Curator Emeritus, European Paintings, The Met
Elizabeth Currie
Independent scholar
Carlo Falciani
Professor, History of Modern Art, Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze
Deborah Parker
Professor of Italian, University of Virginia
Nicholas Scott Baker
Associate Professor of History, Macquarie University

How to watch

Watch on the Met Museum's YouTube channel or Facebook page. No registration required.

Presented by

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY

About The Exhibition

Some of the greatest portraits of Western art were painted in Florence during the tumultuous years from 1512 to 1570, when the city was transformed from a republic with elected officials into a duchy ruled by the Medici family. The key figure in this transformation was Cosimo I de’ Medici, who became Duke of Florence in 1537, following the assassination of his predecessor, Alessandro de’ Medici. Cosimo shrewdly employed culture as a political tool in order to convert the mercantile city into the capital of a dynastic Medicean state, enlisting the leading intellectuals and artists of his time and promoting grand architectural, engineering, and artistic projects. Through Giorgio Vasari’s famous written work Lives of the Artists, which was dedicated to the duke, Florence was promoted as the cradle of the Renaissance.

Through an outstanding group of portraits, this major loan exhibition will introduce visitors to the various new and complex ways that artists portrayed the elite of Medicean Florence, representing the sitters’ political and cultural ambitions and conveying the changing sense of what it meant to be a Florentine at this defining moment in the city’s history. The exhibition will feature over 90 works in a wide range of mediums, from paintings, sculptural busts, medals, and carved gemstones to drawings, etchings, manuscripts, and armor. Included are works by the period’s most celebrated artists, from Raphael, Jacopo Pontormo, and Rosso Fiorentino to Benvenuto Cellini, Agnolo Bronzino, and Francesco Salviati.

Image: Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano), Portrait of a Young Man (1530s) / courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art