Dr. Meghan Callahan

The Medici men have been the subject of much study among art historians. But the women – those born as Medici and those who married into the family – were the reason the family line continued and flourished until the Eighteenth Century. In this course, we’ll trace the important influence of the Medici women on the family and city in Renaissance and Baroque Florence through study of letters, portraits, and architectural commissions. Strategic marriage alliances that matched Medici money with a wealth of connections from old Florentine families enabled the family to prosper. Public religious devotion through support of convents and churches by the Medici women warded off some jealous competition, but when the men were exiled, the women stayed behind to manage funds and the family.
In the Sixteenth Century, the role of the Medici women became even more important as the men negotiated marriages into the royal houses of Europe. Portraits were sent abroad, and new brides welcomed into Florence. By the Seventeenth Century the family’s transformation from bankers to princes was complete, and their artistic legacy would be preserved by Ana Maria Luisa de’ Medici, the last of the line, who donated the family’s entire art collection to the Tuscan state.

Course objectives:
• To understand the role of women in establishing and developing the Medici family
• To investigate the role of female portraiture in network building
• To consider Medici women’s patronage of architecture
• To reflect on the importance of letters as primary sources for study of women’s lives in the Renaissance and Baroque eras

Class 1: The Fifteenth Century: Establishing the Line
We’ll begin in the Fifteenth Century with portraits of Medici women, looking first at Contessina de’ Bardi, who brought an old Florentine name and military support to the upstart banker Cosimo the Elder when she married him in 1415. Similarly, the cultured and educated Lucrezia from the established Tornabuoni family, painted more than once by Domenico Ghirlandaio, married Cosimo’s son Piero the Gouty and raised Lorenzo the Magnificent with poetry and art.

Readings:
Selected Letters from Janet Ross, Lives of the Early Medici as Told in Their Correspondence, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1910), Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: the gaze, the eye, the profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop, No. 25 (Spring, 1988), 4-30.

Class 2: The Sixteenth Century: Expanding Royal Ties
We’ll then follow the sixteenth-century adventures of the young orphan Caterina de’ Medici, who became the Queen of France in a strategic power play negotiated by her uncle Pope Clement VII. Meanwhile in Florence, Eleonora di Toledo brought Spanish sophistication to the emerging court of her husband Duke Cosimo I and expanded the family real estate holdings by buying the Palazzo Pitti.

Readings: Kathleen Wellman, “Catherine de’ Medici: King in All but Name,” in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 225-273; Natalie Tomas, “Eleonora di Toledo: Regency and State Formation in Tuscany,” in Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany. edited by Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown. Essays and Studies, 36. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015, pp. 59-89.

Class 3 The Seventeenth Century:
By the Seventeenth Century the transformation of the Medici from bankers to princes was complete. Florence was ruled by the regents Dowager Grand Duchess Christine of Lorraine and her daughter-in-law Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena d’Austria, as the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici was only ten years old when his father died. The two women continued artistic and architectural commissions for convents and supported women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi. Maria Maddalena seems to have been particularly interested in ivory sculptures.

Readings: Elizabeth Currie, “Clothing and a Florentine Style, 1550-1620,” Renaissance Studies, February 2009, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 33-52; Eike Schmidt, “Cardinal Ferdinando, Maria Maddalena of Austria, and the Early History of Ivory Sculptures at the Medici Court,” Studies in the History of Art, 2008, vol. 70, Symposium Papers XLVII: Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe (2008), pp. 158-183).

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