Last of the Medici: More is More

By ROBERT HUGHES

It is, on all counts, a stupendous show. The exhibition of late Florentine Baroque art, jointly organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts (where it runs through June 2) and the city of Florence (which will show it through the summer in the Pitti Palace), includes some 300 works. Collected in the exhibit, which is called "The Twilight of the Medici," are paintings, drawings, sculpture, medals, furniture, reliquaries and jewelry. Most are unfamiliar; all belong to a style and period--from 1670 to 1743--that only lately has come under the scholar's gaze. The result is a dazzling feat of reinstatement.

Ever since Bernard Berenson issued his ukases against it, Florentine Baroque has been considered mostly worthless baublery. Deluged with writhing allegorical nudes, surfeited by an amoral lavishness of porphyry, onyx, rock crystal and emeralds, lost in an exuberant jungle of gratuitous decoration, the viewer is a very long way from the limpid austerities of the Florentine Renaissance. The eye must struggle to adjust itself. But once that effort is made, "The Twilight of the Medici" becomes most rewarding.

To begin with, it is a vivid lesson in how even a grossly decayed and autocratic society may still produce remarkable art. For nearly 300 years, the Medici ruled Florence, gaining more and more power until finally they were the grand dukes of Tuscany. In 1737 Giovanni Gastone de' Medici, the last son of the family, died in a bedroom from which he had hardly stirred for eight years. It had been a long fall from the wolfish and pragmatic energies of the earlier Medici, like Lorenzo the Magnificent, to this vague and dropsical old prince whose face, as it survives in his portrait busts, was pleated with fat, the eyeballs bulging like those of a boiled pug dog.

Cannon & Castles. The last 70 years of Medici control were not rich in sympathetic characters. The Grand Duke Cosimo III, Giovanni Gastone's father, was a gloomy paranoiac who ruled for 53 years, longer than any other Medici, and turned his city into a religious police state. A traveler in Florence noted in 1720 that "there were, when we were there, Spies in all Companies--by which His Royal Highness was acquainted with every thing that passed--and the Cannon in the Castle, which were pointed towards the City, were always ready charg'd, in case of any popular insurrection." One of the few activities that can be said to have prospered in Florence in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was art--that, and music too, for Cosimo's older son Ferdinando (1663-1713) was patron to both Handel and Scarlatti.

Artists belonged to a hierarchy according to their appointed positions in the grand duke's court. The favored sculptors and architects, and to a lesser extent the painters, were assured plenty of work and economic security, but they were required to do the ruler's bidding. From them Cosimo required an unparalleled mixture of crushing pomp, elaborate craftsmanship and theatricality of expression. His taste was typified by an octagonal jasper picture frame (see color spread overleaf) created in the grand-ducal workshops, then headed by the sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini. This object, riotously embellished with gilded bronze and carved fruit in pietre dure--a collective name for the semiprecious stones of which the last Medici were so inordinately fond--is certainly one of the most grandiose images of conspicuous consumption in all Western art. It makes Faberge, in retrospect, look like Mies van der Rohe. The frame embodies one of Cosimo's principles: more is more. (The refrain that hums through Florentine art theory of the time is to "enrich the simplest things.") The painting in the frame, a Madonna and Child by the court artist Carlo Dolci, sums up another theme favored by Cosimo: piety. This blend of religious sentiment and florid materialism, performed in the simultaneous interests of God and the duke, is all but incomprehensible today; but it produced its masterpieces.

Another piece, also thought to be by Foggini, is the Reliquary of Saints of the Dominican Order--a gilded bronze temple with a dome made of rock-crystal scales and figurines of the saints in rare colored stone. Such works exist on a level of technical brilliance that against all the odds keeps vulgarity at bay. In the case of the Reliquary of St. Sigismund, the richness of substances (the silver figures glittering against the ebony tabernacle) seems like a Baroque restatement of the medieval belief that precious materials could in themselves symbolize the glories of heaven.

Bronze & Baroque. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this huge show is the way in which it reveals how Florentine Baroque looks forward to the later Rococo style. The show is not all a matter of ponderous wealth, especially not the bronzes and plaques by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, Foggini and his nephew and pupil Filippo della Valle. Bronze was one of Cosimo III's favorite substances, and it was to the art of bronze casting that he looked in his effort to reverse--or at least delay--the decline of Florentine sculpture, which had been stagnating since the end of the 16th century. Foggini, who was sent to Rome to study the work of Baroque masters like Bernini, learned to mold his sculptures with lyrical sensuality. This morbidezza--a quality then much prized by Italian connoisseurs--can be seen in the ravishingly decorative terra cotta model for his bronze group of David displaying the severed head of Goliath.

As patron, Ferdinando de' Medici embraced the Rococo more directly: he had lived in Venice, and he turned to such Venetians as Sebastiano Ricci. whose sumptuous Love Punished, with its riot of firm pink nudes in the rinsed blue empyrean, scans like a prophecy of Tiepolo and Boucher. The theme of love or Cupid's being chastised or having his feathers plucked off crops up so often in late Medicean painting that one wonders whether it had something to do with the high incidence of syphilis among the nobility; Ferdinando's own death was hastened by it.

With The Rape of Europa, by Giovanni Domenico Ferretti, it seems clear that the Baroque--with its flamboyant drama--is over. Ferretti's Europa is not being abducted by the bull; she is posturing like a courtesan doll on the back of a cow that belongs, in spirit, to Marie Antoinette's palace dairy. What effect, if any, such elegant fancies might have had on the populace of Florence is unknown. But in any case, Ferretti's work, like everything else in this show, is based on the unclosable gap between art and life--and, after 250 years, is none the worse for it.

Robert Hughes

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