Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina as Pittura Infamante: Picturing the Enemy in Soderini's Florence

Sheila Barker, Director of "The Jane Fortune Research Program on Women Artists in the Age of the Medici" gave a paper at the Conference "Identity and Conflict in Tuscany" held at University College Cork, IE.  In 1503, Piero Soderini, the head of a politically and culturally fragmented Florence, undertook to complete the artistic decoration of the hall that housed the gatherings of the Republic's largest and most important governing body. Commissioning battle scenes from artists Leonardo and Michelangelo, Soderini's program of imagery was deliberately truculent and divisive.  A new reading of Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina cartoon reveals how Soderini instrumentalized state art to exclude and isolate the Medici faction. Seen from this latter perspective, Michelangelo's work follows in a long line of punitive state images, Republican and Medicean alike, used to excise individuals and their families from political sphere and communal identity.