Keith Christiansen
An Overview of the Met Museum’s Exhibition: The Medici Portraits and Politics 1512-1570

Keith Christiansen - An Overview of the Met Museum’s Exhibition: The Medici Portraits and Politics 1512-1570

- So good evening from London to all our participants. It’s a great privilege and honour to have Keith Christensen with us here tonight who will be discussing the Medici portraits and politics, from 1513 to 1570. Keith Christensen is a curator emeritus at the Met Museum, where he began his career as assistant curator in 1977, and between 2009 and 2021, was the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings. During the 40 years he served at the museum, he collaborated in the organisation of over 20 exhibitions, ranging from the “Age of Caravaggio,” and “Poussin and Nature.” What a wonderful exhibition, Keith. Fantastic, just beautiful. He has taught at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and was a Clarence and Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy professor in Renaissance studies at Smith College, and guest professor at Vassar. In addition to the many acquisitions he pursued that have enriched the museum’s collection he’s published widely, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, conferred by the Ministry of Arts in France. Well, congratulations for that honour, too.

• Thank you.

• So it’s a great, great privilege and honour to have you with us here tonight, and I want to just say a very big thank you to Max Honan and to Jennifer Brown, of course, and to Ian Otovo who are all friends and colleagues, and just thank you very much for joining us here. Over to you.

• Thank you Wendy. It’s a great privilege to be here and to speak this evening. And with that, I think I will get started. So let me set up with my share screen, and there we are, yes. Forgive me. In 2017, the Met was able to acquire a modest size for the resting portrait by one of the leading painters of 16th century Italy. His name is Francesco Salviati. He’s not known to a wide public, not in the way of his colleagues, Pontormo and Bronzino, but he was perhaps even more famous in his day. However, his reputation was established in Rome, not in Florence, and that’s part of the rich and the complex story we’re trying to tell in this in the exhibition. What struck me then was the extraordinary quality the picture has of an encounter with the real person, shorn of the kinds of conventions that so often make portraits of the past seem remote and foreign to a contemporary audience.

The one emblem he has is a little book that he holds, a pocket edition of the poetry of the great 14th century poet Petrarch. Petrarch’s “Love Sonnets” had a pan-European influence right down to Shakespeare. “How different,” I thought, “was this portrait "by Francesco Salviati "from our celebrated portrait of a young man "by his Florentine contemporary Agnolo Bronzino.” Now the two artists knew each other and indeed they competed for prominence at the court of Casimo 1 de Medici. In Bronzino’s work, everything is artifice from the self-conscious pose to the architecture that anchors the figure and declares by its style and its grey Pietra Serena stone that he’s a Florentine. No less Florentine are the accoutrements of grotesque heads that ornament the chair and the table not to mention, and here you need to look quite closely, the face formed by his clothes, where you will see two eyes, a nose and two nostrils. The grotesque heads function as satirical comments on portraiture as a social mask, and they thus raised the whole question of why people choose to be portrayed in the manner in which a visual identity is created that can be passed on to later generations?

Nothing in these portraits is casual. They have been thought out and the details as carefully coded as in Kain Riley’s state portrait of President Obama, which was certainly intended to project an idea about origin, position and leadership particular to Obama. I proposed to the director a small focused exhibition of four or five works drawn from local collections in New York that would place these two works within a particular historical moment of cultural crisis in Florence and suggest the ideas behind them. To my surprise, he asked whether it might instead be a major exhibition. I said, “Yes, "but to do that I’ll have to work with someone who truly "knows the period to a variety of scholars invested in the subject.” And the person I had in mind was Carlo Falciani who has mounted extraordinary monographic exhibitions in Florence of the three key figures of this period, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and Bronzino. Additionally, he co-organized the marvellous overview of Florentine art in the 16th century which were held at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. I couldn’t have chosen a more terrific person to work with. He knows this period intimately. Indeed, he wrote the article identifying the sitter of our portrait by Salviati and outlining his literary aspirations. He helped me to structure the exhibition which unfolds in six chapters that are intended to take viewers through a tumultuous period in the history of Florence. So let me here give just the briefest historical background.

So far from being the economic, mercantile and intellectual powerhouse at the centre of European culture that it had enjoyed in the 14th and the 15th centuries. In the 16th century, Florence became a pawn in the contin continental chess game, initially played by the Pope, the King of France and the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, as well as by Spain with its huge colonial empire. Following a plague that decimated the population of Florence. By a third, the city was besieged by imperial troops with a ruler imposed upon them by the emperor Charles V who worked in concert with the Medici Pope. The resulting social and political transformation of the city took place against the further destabilising impact of the reformation on the one hand and the Copernican scientific revolution on the other. Europe began to be dominated by the larger nation states, France, Spain, the Holy Roman empire and identity within these states was increasingly based on conformity and by extension exclusion. This was true not simply of Spain with the expulsion of the Jewish and Muslim populations, but in France with the massacre of the Protestant group Huguenots, in England with a suppression of Catholicism and so on.

We sometimes think that no one has experienced disruptive and divisive political and social forces equal to ours today. But this, I hope you will see understand is very far from the truth. Alessandro de Medici, an illegitimate descendant of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was succeeded in the role of autocratic ruler by the 17 year old Cosimo de Medici. Cosimo was the presiding presence in the exhibition and we have been extremely fortunate to open it with his over life size bust by Cellini. It’s perhaps the greatest Italian portrait bust of the entire 16th century. Recent cleaning has revealed that the eyes are silvered giving the Duke’s gaze in almost terrifying quality. It was an emulation of classical ancient Roman statues. Every square inch of this bus conveys a physical tactility that takes one’s breath away. As for the Duke’s aspect, remember this is the era of Machiavelli and real politic. Casimo carved out a place for Florence in this new political landscape, succeeded in creating a Grand Duchy of Tuscany. And this Medician state received Papal recognition in 1559 and to judge by its success, it lasted with interruptions until 1859.

Now from our point of view, Cosimo’s achievement came at a significant price. The much vaunted republic with elected officials was supplanted by an autocratic ruler. The independent minded citizen became a courtier, or at least he needed to dawn the appearance of one. But the city’s independence and its place on the European stage were secured, and this was no small feat, so it was a trade off. It’s one that is worth thinking about today. Contrary to what its title suggests, this exhibition is not about the Medici and the family’s climb to power, but about the social and intellectual elite who lived through this crisis of Florentine identity. Among the leading intellectuals of his day was Benedetto Varchi.. He was a staunch supporter of the Republican values of Florence, and he went into exile in Venice when the Medici came to power. Titian’s portrait of him was painted during this time. Now, Cosimo had practised a policy of exiling or imprisoning many of his political opponents, but he realised that for his regime to succeed, he had to win over men like Varchi. And so despite Varchi’s political sympathies, Cosimo invited him back to Florence and indeed made him a central figure in his cultural programme. He commissioned Varchi to write a history of Florence and to lead discussions in the Florentine Academy, the Accademia Fiorentina.

The Accademia became Cosimo’s programme of a politics of culture that aimed at incorporating the great literary, intellectual and artistic figures of Florence’s Republican past to exalt a new absolutist state. As I’ve suggested at the centre of this transformation were questions of identity, a shared communal identity constructed around a common language and intellectual heritage. The reconfigured legacy of the city’s great Republican past. The Accademia Fiorentina was charged to promote this literary intellectual heritage which had, at its centre, the great poet Dante, who of course had himself been a victim of political exile during a period of political turmoil in the 14th century. It’s a story worth thinking about today, but this is an art exhibition, not a history lesson, and the works in it from first to last are extraordinary masterpieces that chart the ways in which some of the greatest artists of the Western tradition constructed identity in portraits of simply astonishing quality and invention. Benvenuto Cellini, Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Francesco Salviati, X , Pierino da Vinci. These are the protagonists of the story we wish to tell. I believe this is the finest group of 16th century Florentine portraits that have ever been assembled. Walking from gallery to gallery visitors encounter portraits of the social, political and cultural elite who lived through this crisis in Florentine identity, as well as the ways in which Cosimo employed a politics of culture that salvaged the great literary, intellectual and artistic figures of Florence’s Republican past to exalt his new absolute estate.

Each of the six galleries has been conceived around a specific theme and I hope the introduction and labels lead visitors to a deeper understanding about the works that fill them. But it’s a complicated story and so I would like to take a brief look at a few works that suggest the highly sophisticated poetics of painting on which they are based. Take for example this extraordinary portrait by Bronzino of Laura Battiferri. She was the wife of the sculptor architect Bartolomeo Ammannati but she was a figure of independent stature who was recognised as such by all her contemporaries who lauded her as a paragon of virtue of beauty and of intellect. She was also a close friend of Bronzino who painted this portrait of her around 1560. Now thanks to a careful restoration undertaken for this exhibition, we can appreciate its very elegant chromatic scale. In this portrait, Bronzino transforms Laura into an icon of Dantesque beauty. If I may, I would like to use this portrait as a kind of exemplary case for the rich poetic that inform many others. She’s depicted seated though we don’t see a chair and is posed against a plain, grey background. There’s no indication of place. She’s elegantly dressed in a plum coloured dress with black puffed out sleeves that she wears over a white blouse with a gathered collar, a costume of restrained elegance.

Her body is slightly angled to the picture plane so that her silhouette fills the picture space as in some religious icon or royal image. Her sloping shoulders and long neck set off a remarkably bird-like profile further enhanced by the coil of hair beneath the embroidered cloth and the transparent veil that covers her high forehead and ear. Balanced on her lap is an open book that she displays with her long, delicate fingers. The book is displayed to us the viewer, while she looks away gazing fixedly into the distance. In Bronzino’s portrait, we seem to encounter someone as remote from the world of everyday life as a regal figure from ancient Egypt. Her strict profile references those ancient goddesses or images of female beauty of an earlier century yet encounter distinction to those entrancing pictures. Her stern, aloof expression seems to give her a remote quality. The picture was greatly admired by contemporaries and no fewer that 11 poems addressed to it survive. But it was appreciated as a kind of otherworldly likeness in which the raw data of observation has been transfigured. The description makes us think of mediaeval paintings of saints set against the preciousness of a gold background. However, Bronzino was also an acute observer of the details of everyday life.

This is clear from the gold chain necklace the sitter wears, which he shows tied from the fringed transparent veil over her white blouse to the small gold pin that fixes it to her bodice. His portrait negotiates those in the most poetic fashion, the area between those two realms of description of the material world and the embodiment of ideal. In Rome, Laura and her husband belong to a circle of cultured people and when her husband, the sculptor architect Bartolomeo Ammannati, was summoned to Florence to work on projects for Duke Cosimo de Medici, they formed a new friendships with kindred spirits. Among Laura’s admiring circle was X as well as the artist X with all of whom she exchanged poetry. The first volume of Laura’s poetry was published in 1560 and that was followed by a volume of penitential psalms in 1564. They were printed by the same Duchal press that published Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” and they formed a part of the project promoted by the FLorentine Academy to use Tuscan as the vehicle of expression in the vernacular. The two models for this project were the giants of 14th century Italian literature. Dante, the author of “The Divine Comedy” and Petrarch whose “Love Sonnet” as I mentioned, became a model throughout Europe right down to Shakespeare. Now it’s often been remarked that Laura’s profile in Bronzino’s painting resembles that of Dante and it’s true. Here’s Bronzino’s painting of Dante displaying a folio size volume of the paradise, the Paradiso from the trilogy of the “Divine Comedy”.

As you can see, it’s not simply the profile but the conception of the two paintings that makes the reference clear. Like Dante, Laura Battiferri is represented as a sublime poet holding an open book. In her case it’s a book of Petrarch’s poems. But there’s more to that profile than a visual association with Dante. Dante’s Muse was a woman named Beatrice Portinari whom he met only twice, the first time when he was just nine years old. The object of Petrarch’s Love Sonnets was a woman named Laura, like Laura Battiferri . Whether she was a real person or simply a poetic conceit is not altogether certain, but in Petrarch’s imagination, she became his essential ideal of an unattainable perfection and therefore the source of persistent melancholy and sorrow, as well as the engine of his creativity. Petrarch had famously asked the great Sienese painter Simone Martini to paint Laura’s portrait so that he could have an image of her always with him. Unfortunately, the portrait does not survive, but given the conventions of 14th century painting, it would’ve shown Petrarch’s beloved in profile and perhaps we can get a hint of its character from this profile of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in a fresco Simone painted early in his career. We know how much the poet admired the portrait because he wrote two sonnets about it. In one he declared Simone’s achievement to have surpassed the great artist of antiquity and in particular, a Polykleitos. What was the nature of that achievement? It was to have represented the imagined perfection of his beloved.

A perfection that derived not from faithfulness to nature but from its evocation of an ideal. Here’s Petrarch’s sonnet number 77 about that picture. “Polykleitos, gazing fixedly a thousand years "with the others who were famous in his art, "would not have seen the least part "of the beauty that has vanquished my heart.” But Simone Martini must have been in paradise from where this gentle lady came, saw her there and portrayed her in paint to give us proof here of such loveliness. This is truly one of those works that might be conceived in heaven, not among us here where we have bodies that conceal the soul. Grace made it. He could work on it no further when he descended to our heat and cold where his eyes had only mortal signal. So in our portrait of another Laura, Laura Battiferri, Bronzino, working as both poet and as painter, has imagined his Laura as Petrarch’s beloved and himself as the heir Simone Martini. Like Patrarch, Bronzino praised Laura Battiferri in his poetry for her perfection. He shows Laura in profile as Simone had done. And he has echoed in visual terms, the lines from Petrarch that I had just read. In the open book she holds, Laura Battiferri displays two Petrarch sonnets.

You can see from the volume that the sonnets have been handwritten into it, not printed, and this is because the two sonnets do not appear sequentially in any printed edition. They have been copied so as to form a pair but not an altogether equal pair since Laura’s fingers are placed on one page visibly depressing its paper. With one finger, she indicates a specific stanza. It’s Petrarch’s Canzone number 240. The words are Petrarch’s but they’re now addressed to his modern day Laura. The poem reads as follows, “I have prayed to love and I pray again "that he’ll make you pardon me "if in perfect loyalty I stray "from the straight way. "I cannot deny lady and don’t deny "that reason that restrains all good souls has overcome "by passion and so leads me "to places where I unwillingly follow. "You, with that heart that heaven lumens with such clear wit "and with such noble virtue as ever rained down "from a fortunate star should say with pity "and without disdain, ‘What else can he do? ” 'My lips consume him. “ 'Why does he long so? ” 'Why am I so beautiful?’ “ Well, we happen to know that Bronzino was in fact deeply consumed by Laura’s wit and virtue which she demonstrated in the verses they exchanged with each other. It was a common practise among the literary elite of Florence. Brazino would pen one poem praising her virtues and lamenting her unattainable ability, the kind of exercise in Petrarchian versification. And she would respond taking the imagery he evoked and elaborating on it or perhaps even twisting it.

It was a kind of performative art and it involved role playing. After all, Bronzino was homosexual and Laura was happily married. In the poems she became Daphne to his Apollo. That is she is compared to the beloved nymph who fled her unwanted lover Apollo, the God of poetry, only to be transformed into a laurel bush. Of course, Laurel is what poets are crowned with, but there is also an obvious play on Laura’s name. Laurel is lauro in Italian and therefore indicative of Laura. In one of these poems, Bronzino describes Laura as which is to say within like iron and without all ice. The portrait has been conceived to exemplify this metaphor, enhancing the glacial reserve and detachment of this exemplary woman by employing a cool palette enriched with colours of plum and in the lower right beneath her elbow, a small triangle of hot red, the burning iron. The result is a portrait that moves beyond mere appearance to exemplify the sitter’s inner virtues. And in doing so, Bronzino also pays himself a compliment by exhibiting his own poetic imagination. There’s little doubt that this extraordinary picture takes to the extreme the poetics that informs all of Bronzino’s portraiture. But precisely because it does so in ways that we can probe in such an exceptional fashion, I think it serves as a kind of template for looking at the other portraits in which the same kinds of poetics may be less obvious at first, but are also present.

As I’ve tried to emphasise, this was a period in which the language of poetry was also the language of painting. Florentine painters sought to transform the data of appearance into images that appealed not only to the eye, but to a profoundly poetic sensibility. And they did this through visual metaphors, allegory and illusion. Another portrait in which the sitter wished to project a specific identity is that of Alessandro de Medici. What a haunting portrait Pontormo gives us of the man who in 1532 became the first Duke of Florence, thus inaugurating a new era in the city’s history. No longer republic, but a Duchy ruled by the Medici. Alessandro sits in a small room, perhaps a study or studiolo. Its walls are panelled in wood. The shutter on the window is ajar admitting a soft light. He holds a small drawing implement and is outlining the profile of a woman as he gazes out at the viewer. Were the sitter anyone other than Alessandro we would read this as a portrait constructed around the Petrarchian poetic idea of the lover and his beloved. The drawing being an image of the beloved, who although absent is nonetheless vividly present in the mind of the lover. Alessandro in fact draws without looking at the paper as if he were doing it following an ideal image present in the intellect. But of course, Alessandro de Medici was not just anyone. Of mixed race, his mother was a formerly enslaved African in the Medici household. Her name was Simonetta da Collevecchio. Although Alessandro was reputed to be the illegitimate son of Lorenzo de Medici, the Duke of Urbino, many believed that he was actually the illegitimate son of Pope Clement VII, who was himself the illegitimate son of the younger brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

As such, Alessandro nonetheless belonged to the principle branch of the Medici and was the candidate of both Clement the VII and Emperor Charles the V for the ruler Florence. Imposed upon the Florentines by outside powers it’s not surprising that he was widely regarded by the citizens of the city as a tyrant. Among his detractors he was described as someone who was so debauched that neither the daughters of patrician nor nuns in convent were spared his advances. His reign as Duke ended when lured to a promised tryst, he was murdered by his cousin Lorenzino de Medici in 1537. His assassination was justified as tyrannicide and it led to the appointment of Cosimo as Duke. We know nothing about Pontormo’s political beliefs or his feelings about Alessandro, but in his portrait he gave the Duke an air of sobriety and restraint such as were thought to befit a ruler, something the Duke would’ve wished to project when fashioning his public image. This allegorical marble relief by a young incredibly gifted sculptor Pierino da Vinci, celebrates Cosimo’s many initiatives in Piza, the key maritime port of the duchy. It’s another work in which portraiture has been stretched to incorporate allegory. Wearing a toga and a mantle the Duke stands at the centre helping a female figure who represents Piza to rise while expelling enemies laden with plunder. Behind the Duke reclines the Arno River of God.

And in the crowd we see Luca Martini Cosimo’s administrator and Pierino’s patron. We actually are able to have been able to display Pierino’s portrait of Luca Martini next to the relief from the Vatican. Luca Martini is shown holding a compass and an astrolabe, standing between two youths carrying giant vessels that may allude to Luca Martini’s work on Piza’s hydraulic system. The promise shown in this remarkable work was thwarted by Pierino’s death at the age of just 23. It’s a work of simply astonishing achievement marrying delicacy with virile strength. Unquestionably, one of the most provocative portraits of the Renaissance is this painting by Bronzino that shows Cosimo de Medici as Orpheus, the Orpheus of Greek mythology whose music charms even the beast guarding the underworld where he is gone to rescue his bride Persephone. The fires of Hades burn in the background. Cosimo’s torso recalls a famous ancient sculpture and his nudity and the bow between his legs introduced an overt eroticism. Does the picture celebrate the Duke as a lover or husband?

As a ruler committed to appeasing his city and loyal to his wife? I say this because playing or tuning an instrument often symbolised the bringing about of harmony. One of Bronzino’s first portraits of and for the Duke, it presents his new patron with the potency of the new style he had begun to promote. And I might add in an enigmatic, poetic content. Another allegorical portrait shows the young St. John the Baptist in the wilderness. The young St. John was the patrons saint of Florence. And by possibly giving him the features of Cosimo’s son Giovanni, the picture acquired a dynastic meaning. Humour was far from lacking. And this marvellous bronze fountain figure of Cosimo’s much loved dwarf Morgante is a perfect example. The pose is almost as complex as the one Bronzino gave to his painting of St. John the Baptist. But it is humorous from start to finish. Morgante whose real name was Braccio di Bartolo was like the deformed Rigoletto in Verdi’s opera obliged to play a traumatic role in life and in art. Invariably he is depicted naked. He was a famous gourmand. He had earlier been painted by Bronzino as a bird hunter in line with the artist burlesque poetic. Here Morgante rides a composite marine creature. At the hanging garden above Loggia dei Lanzi which is today the coffee terrace of the Uffizi, the work ornamented basin is part of the fountain. Water spouted from the snout of his steed while Morgante held a pinwheel of brass butterflies. There are any number of portraits that are simply astonishing either for the manner of presentation or the sheer quality of representation. Among my favourites are Pierantonio Bandini and his wife Cassandra. They were painted by Bronzino. Now Pier Antonio was a collector of antiquities and that’s the reason for that we see the ancient statue of Venus. But I’d like to ask you, what material is it made of? Is it a real object or an invention of the artist? His wife Cassandra was from a family involved in the manufacturer of silk. Is that the origin of the extravagant curtain in the background? And what about this portrait by Salviati, "A Young Man with His Dog”?

Each time I see it in the exhibition, I recall various Italian movies in which there was a youth from an old aristocratic family with highly idiosyncratic features. Salviati seems to me to have marvellously captured this youth. The allegorical figure and emblematic detail in the background suggest that this is a portrait about love. The last two works in the exhibition take up a different theme, the comparison of the arts of sculpture and painting. The so-called paragone, comparison of the arts. It may seem irrelevant to us, but in the 16th century it was hotly debated. What is the difference between painting and sculptural representations? What are their prospective limitations? Leonardo had had his point of view and so did Michelangelo. Obviously they were not the same. In the exhibition our two works depicting the same sitter, the wealthy banker Bindo Altoviti. Both were done about the same time. One, the bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini. The other, a portrait painted on marble by Francesco Salviati. Descended from an old Florentine family with strong Republican leanings Bindo Altoviti enjoyed good looks as well as wealth.

He was a great patron of the art and supported Salviati, Vasari and Cellini. And he was also a friend of Michelangelos who, like Bindo, opposed Cosimo’s regime. Bindo was one of those practical men who accommodated his political leanings to the reality of the reigning politics. He continued as banker of the Medici Popes, but with the election of a member of the Farnese family as Pope Paul III, he enjoyed protection and found it possible to drop those pretences of being supportive of the Medici. And he funded the Florentine exiles who opposed Cosimo’s domination of Tuscany. In return, Cosimo declared him a rebel and confiscated all of his property in Tuscany, including a famous painting by Rafael that Bindo owned. Salviati’s portrait is painted on marble, a symbolic reference to Imperial Rome, but also to the everlasting nature of the stone, and therefore to endurance.

There is a remarkable play visible in the fabric and their texture that takes us very far from Bronzino’s paintings. The softness of the fur that hems the robe in the emulation of fabric on the ornate cushion with the gold fringe and crimson tassel and the pattern green satin with light playing on a chain. These things are simply astonishing. The bronze robust was created by Cellini in Florence during one of the visits of Bindo there. It was then sent to Rome where was installed in a study in Bindo’s Roman residence together with a collection of antiquities. In his autobiography, Cellini recalled that Bindo had shown the bus to Michelangelo who praised it, but criticised the poor lighting it received from its placement. Cellini was therefore summon to Rome to recommend its installation in a large room with a loggia on the ground floor in which Vasari had frescoed a ceiling. It was placed over a door, a common placement for portrait busts, but presumably one that allowed better lighting. The sharply described features seemed done with a view to impact from a distance. The bust is distinguished by a sobriety coupled with an expressivity conveyed by the concentrated gaze and a few sharply defined decorative elements. Above all the perforated hat, the scuffiotto that he wears. Seen together these two portraits are a kind of summation of the achievement of portraiture in the age of Cosimo de Medici. I hope that these few examples will give an idea the different mindset necessary to enter into the world of Florentine painting at this time of enormous change.

But I want to emphasise, this is an exhibition that was created to give enormous pleasure. The quality and sophistication of the works of art is palpable. The loans are simply overwhelmingly spectacular and I hope they will give visitors as much pleasure and provoke as much interest as they do with me. And I hope that my presentation will make you curious to go online at the Mets website to explore the exhibition further. And with that, I’ll take any questions that you might have.

• Thank you so much, Keith. That was really wonderful. As many people have been saying in the Q&A, “What an enormous treat.” And I couldn’t agree more. We only have a few questions so far, so if anyone else is still listening, we have plenty of time to take your questions if you write them in.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Karen has a question. When you were talking about Battiferri. She is wondering if Ferri is referring to iron.

A: - Battiferri? Well, you know, I actually, I think that you could that within the politics of the day, absolutely. I think that Brazino was playing this game with Battiferri and the iron, the iron within her, yes.

• Great. A bunch of people are saying that this was fantastic and dazzling and thanking you for your time and your presentation. And I think that you should know that. Someone says an amazing exhibition and excellent synopsis and description. And I agree.

Q: What is your personal favourite piece from the collection?

A: - Well, I’ll tell, you know, in drawing up an exhibition like this, there was a challenge. There are, first of all those things that you know, cannot be obtained because of their importance or fragility. But nonetheless, you drop a list of certain things that you want absolutely to have. And I will, I confess the first work of art that I put down was Laura Battiferri. It’s a work that I’ve seen in Florence and simply thought, “This is such an idiosyncratic individual work "and one that takes you "into a completely different dimension. "Must have.” And then, and another one was the Pontormo portrait that I showed early on of the young boy in the red and yellow holding a . So these are among my favourite works, I have to say. Yes, absolutely.

Q: - Thank you. Rosa is wondering if it would be possible for you to talk about the handling of the hands in a portrait of that time? She says they always look too feminine, even in male portraits.

A: - Yes, I think that’s such a good observation. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer, except that the elegance of the hands with those long tapering fingers becomes an aristocratic emblem. You’ve never had hard labour. You’ve never touched anything that might create deformities or show over musculature in your hands. So I think it’s an intentional way of demonstrating your detachment from ordinary life and from being anything ordinary. It really is a noble emblem. And you find these same sorts of hands, not surprisingly, in Van Dyke’s portraits of British grandees. Where you see them sometimes in poses such as this, but with extraordinarily long, almost ridiculously long, elegant fingers. And so in this sense, these gestures with these elegant hands are themselves emblematic of being somebody apart from the hoi polloi.

Q: - Thank you. Someone is asking who, if you can remind them of the artist of Alessandro?

A: - Yes, Jacopo Pontormo, P-O-N-T-O-R-M-O. The picture is from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And it is the single most important portrait of Alessandro de Medici.

Q: - Tricia has said that the proportion of Laura’s shoulders do not match up to her head. Could you please comment on that?

A: - Oh, well, throughout the exhibition there are works in which I would say that the artist has taken certain licence with anatomical structure. And it’s one of those cases that reminds us that these works were judged by the artifice that they display rather than something like anatomical accuracy. There are other portraits in which the wrist appears almost broken to get the placement of the hand. So it’s just a different way of looking at the works of art in the same way that when you look at a Cezanne, you don’t look for anatomical accuracy. And I don’t say that these works are like Cezanne, but artifice is very key to the understanding of these pictures.

Q: - Janet wants to know, we were just talking about hands, she says the fingernails seem very dirty though. How does that fit in with the elegant fingers of people apart from the common people?

A: - So I will have to take a look at those because I don’t recall any dirty fingers, fingernails. As we know, the dirty fingernails are something that we find in Caravaggio in painting. And it really is an emblem of somebody from the working class, let’s say. I don’t recall any dirty fingernails, nor do I know about fingernail habits in the 16th century. So I plead ignorance on this case.

Q: - Brenda actually noticed. She is wondering if Laura fingernails are dirty to show that she is literate and it’s possibly ink under her nails. Is that a reasonable hypothesis?

A: - Reasonable hypothesis, yeah.

• All right.

• Yeah.

Q: - This is an important question. How long will this exhibit continue on for?

A: - Yeah, I’m sorry to say we’re on the last week. Next Monday is the last day. And on Tuesday, we then have a scholars day. when a small group of scholars will be able to discuss these works. I have to say that one of the interesting things I chose specifically the Laura Battiferri because we actually can describe the poetics that informed this picture, but in many of the cases, we really are not sure what the illusions are to, and they’re intentionally enigmatic. In other words, they’re suggestive to a small audience. And one of the great tasks of of specialists in this field is to try and unravel the kinds of meanings that may have been read into them by contemporary viewers. But next Monday is the last date.

Q: - Thank you. Yana and Alfred ask do you have any observations regarding the development of mannerism as related to the religiopolitical transitions of the period?

A: - First of all, the very term mannerism is one that is no longer in vogue, let’s say, as a designation for the period. Indeed, the idea that mannerism describes a specific moment rather than the evolution of a style. And so I, without wanting to go back to sort of classroom overview, means simply style. And it calls attention again to the fact that what was admired in these works of art was the way in which an artist displayed his command of style. Michelangelo set the bar very high on the Sistine ceiling, and particularly in his depictions of civils in the spandles each of which is shown in elaborate poses. Everybody was bowled over by the sheer quality of invention. And they then incorporated this aesthetic into their own work. Portraits by Pontormo, Bronzino, Salviati, then play on this Michaelangesque idea by embellishing it. And as I’ve tried to mention Petrarch’s poetry in the same way, was taken as a model that you then further embellish. If we take it that far, it’s not really tied to any sort of religious movement. However, eventually it came to be seen as excessive and it came to be seen excessive explicitly when it appeared in altar pieces where clergy declared that the importance of an altarpiece was conveying a story not in calling attention to the artistic abilities of the painter. And it’s at that point that mannerism becomes defined as a period style and associated with a particular moment, one that required reform. So I don’t know if that short, very, very edited down overview of where we are helps or not, but that’s, I hope it does.

Q: - Thank you. Bernard is wondering why has the reputation of these painters not lasted as well as some of the other painters of the time period?

A: - Not true. First of all, you have Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto. These are giants. Bronzino, Pintormo, I think number one, they are very distinctly Florentine painters, but they continued to be admired and collected right through the 17th, 18th, and 19th century. Degas famously studied Bronzino. famously studied Bronzino. And indeed the last two portraits that I showed of Antonio Bandini and his wife Cassandra Bandini, I think that these are two portraits that you could hang in the gallery with and you would look back and forth and say, “Oh my God, of course just looked at these.” So it’s actually not true that they were not admired continuously. They really were. They were however forgotten. They were however, less attention was paid to them when mannerism itself became a derogatory term.

Q: - Thank you. Lilly wants to know if the detail of the slashing on the fabric of Laura’s sleeve, if that showed up after cleaning or in restoration or at what point?

A: - Oh, it was always visible. The picture had a very discoloured varnish that gave it a warm tonality instead of that wonderful icy coldness. But it showed. And we actually have a costume, an extraordinary dress from the 16th century possibly belonging to Elionore or to one of her ladies in waiting, that’s an extraordinary condition and that has all the slashing beautifully, precise and intact on the sleeve. But that always did show, I believe.

Q: - Great. Mimi is wondering if the paintings are part of a private collection.

A: - Which, the Laura Battiferri or the paint? Most of the paintings in the exhibition come from museums throughout Europe and America, but there are also some from private collections. The Laura Battiferri belongs to the city of Florence.

Q: - Thank you. Tony Is wondering if there are still any Medicis alive today?

A: - Oh wow, good question. My guess is yes, but I honestly don’t know.

Q: - Me either. And our, I think our last question is from David who’s wondering if there is significance to the positioning of Laura’s fingers other than the script to which she’s pointing.

A; - So I think primarily they’re indicating the script. I don’t know, but I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer beyond that except their elegance, obviously. But we’ve talked about that already.

• Well, I’m going to jump in now, Keith, and I’m just going to say thank you for a most excellent presentation. It was an absolute treat to wander through the Met from London. I have seen that beautiful exhibition in New York. I was privileged to see it myself in person and I’m so thrilled that I was able to share this with our participants.

• Well thank you very much, Wendy. It’s been a real joy to be able to present it here and I do thank you for the opportunity to do so.

• No, well thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you New York and I want to just wish you good luck.

• Thank you very much.

• Endeavours and Lauren, as always, huge thank you to you. We would not be able to do these presentations without the outstanding contribution of Lauren and Judy you know, all of those who work together with us at University. Thank you Keith.

• Thank you, bye all.

• Well done, goodnight everybody and goodbye and good news. And thank you for joining us, bye-bye.