Sharing the Medici Archive with the World.

MAP FORUM — Tuesday, 2 December 2025 at 5pm EST / 11pm CET

This talk explores the life of the portrait of the Qing emperor Kangxi that at the beginning of the eighteenth century was received by Cosimo III de’ Medici, and which today is housed in the Uffizi Gallery. Kangxi, who reigned from 1661 to 1722, enjoyed a broad popularity among the European Catholic elites, especialy for his patronage of European sciences promoted by the Jesuit missionaries at the Beijing court. My research trajectory, that has connected the Medici Archive to the Uffizi, reveals crucial elements of the Medici imaginary of China, but at the same time evidences some missing links that in the modern epoch have concealed the portrait of Kangxi under a vaguely constructed exoticism.

Marco Musillo is a research fellow at the University of Vienna.