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On a barely visible table, Alessandro is shown to be sketching what appears to be a human form using a stylus. PBS has labeled him the “first black head of state in modern Europe.”)
RENAISSANCE PORTRAITURE SKIN
(Alessandro’s skin is also dark because, according to popular lore, he was the son of a formerly enslaved woman in the Medici household. Everything about the painting is dark he is shown wearing mourning attire. Jacopo da Pontormo, an artist with whom Alessandro was close, dignified him in this painting, in which Alessandro appears to be at work in a barely lit room. He had good reason for trying to rehab his image: Alessandro was hated by Florentines. The sedate, austere atmosphere of this portrait was intended to strengthen the perception of Alessandro de’ Medici as a solid leader. Jacopo da Pontormo, Alessandro de’ Medici, 1534–35.
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Unlike later, more expressive portraits of the Medici, this one is fairly straightforward, emphasizing Lorenzo’s hauteur. Raphael has paid careful attention to the puffy red linens of his sleeves, even allowing tufts of fur peeking out, indicating Paris’s slightly colder climates. Fittingly, Lorenzo is shown wearing styles that were popular in France at the time. Though this painting of Lorenzo wasn’t a part of that cache, it was of a piece with it, since it was also intended to firm up relations with France. Upon the marriage, Lorenzo sent a vast array of gifts to France’s royalty, including three other Raphael paintings, among them a famed portrait of Pope Leo X-himself a member of the family-that now resides at the Uffizi. That was certainly the case with Raphael’s 1518 painting of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, in 1518, married Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, a member of the French king Francis I’s family. Bridgeman Images/Private Collectionįor the Medici, rarely was a portrait ever just a picture of an individual-it was an image also laced with political ambitions that could aid in one’s diplomatic quests. Raphael, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, 1518. With that show set to open on June 26, below is a look at the hidden politics of four portraits of the Medici. Curated by Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani, “The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512–1570” focuses on the images of the family and its circle created by artists like Raphael, Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, and Francesco Salviati. Anyone with even a vague knowledge of politics at the time would know that the Medici, who came to power because of a fortune accrued through the family’s banking empire established at the end of the 14th century, had the means. The work they had artists produce also had a political purpose-acting as potent symbols of the family’s dominion in virtually all aspects of society in Florence and effectively boosting the city as an art center in the process.Ī new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York proposes that one kind of art-making was particularly important in that regard: portraiture. In bringing on top artists to make paintings, sculptures, chapels, and more for them, the Medici weren’t just flaunting their worldliness and their wealth.