In recent years, the paintings by Vasari and his workshop in the Palazzo Vecchio have been characterized as products of the recycling of imagery that he had previously developed and used elsewhere. This is said to have given these paintings a rather generic character and to have left them with little specific, topical content or meaning. By examining some of the most important paintings in the Sala di Leone X, this lecture will demonstrate that rather the opposite is true. In these scenes, the recent history of the Medici was manipulated in such a way as to allude to important specific political and military positions and actions of the patron, Duke Cosimo. To achieve this, written and visual sources—which themselves were already manipulations of historical reality—were further distorted. The way each individual figure is placed in the scenes expresses the judgment passed upon that figure from the perspective of Cosimo’s regime. In a blatant distortion of historical fact, certain figures were also omitted from or added to the scenes. This procedure made it possible, within the scenes, to evoke still other historical episodes which could allude to Cosimo than the ones depicted.
Henk Th. Van Veen is professor em. at the University of Groningen. His field of research is Tuscan sixteenth-century art and culture. He wrote Cosimo I De’ Medici and His Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, CUP: Cambridge 2006 (2011). In 2022, Alessio Assonitis edited together with him, A companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici, Brill: Leiden/Boston 2022. In 2024, together with Bouk Wierda and Lotte van ter Toolen, he edited The Codex of the Anonimo Magliabechiano: Newly edited with a transcription faithful to the original manuscript and provided with an Introduction, Brill: Leiden 2024.
The Lecture is free and open to the public.
Info: education@medici.org
