The Medici: Portraits and Power Proves Marquee Names Count for Only So Much

Twenty-five Bronzinos make it worthwhile, but the Met makes a muddle.

L ast week, I saw The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 at the Met, in New York City. I think there’s a big communication problem there, and it’s only partly lackluster leadership at the top. I’m told most of the program staff — the curators and designers, especially — are still working from home. I’m not sure everyone’s on the same page. Did they ever get together to swap ideas, thrash and hash things, do maquettes and models, forge stories that make sense, you know, the things we dinosaurs did when we organized shows?

It’s not a bad show. I recommend it for its 25 portraits by Bronzino (1503–1572), which makes it a Cosimo and Bronzino show, except it’s really not. It’s not a Cosimo show, either. Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–1574), Florence’s first grand duke, salvaged Florence from chaos in the late 1530s and ruled as an enlightened despot for nearly 40 years. Cosimo is the anchor Medici in the exhibition, with others putting in cameo appearances, but, midway through, he disappears.

It’s not really about politics, either. Nowhere are we impressed with Florence’s terrible situation in the 1520s and 1530s: invasion from all sides, famine, the Siege of Florence, and a plague in 1527 that killed 20 percent of Florentines. The last, big gallery compares the styles of Bronzino and Francesco Salviati (1510–1563), Bronzino’s chronological contemporary, but, to mangle an old saw, this has nothing to do with the price of mozzarella.

The catalogue for The Medici: Portraits and Politics is stellar, exceeding the Met’s already high production values and its standards for scholarship. My suggestion, if visitors aren’t going to read the book, is straightforward. By all means, see the show. Just don’t expect a cogent, compelling story.

A concise introductory panel sets the stage, as well as a grand bronze bust of Cosimo in armor by Benvenuto Cellini from 1546. Using portraiture, Cosimo “brilliantly exploited Florence’s intellectual and cultural heritage to enhance the prestige of his rule.”

Clear enough. Portraiture is a marker for Florence’s upheavals from the 1520s through Cosimo’s time. Likeness and imitation remain decisive — the patron expects flattery but also to recognize himself — but they are not the entire point of a portrait, especially a power portrait. Ideal interior qualities and exterior iconography also matter. The Cosimo style calls for armor and sumptuous clothes, suggesting military power and flash, but also allusions to Florence’s intellectual heft. Tuscany was never a world power like Venice or Rome, or at least never a military power. Its power was soft. It was a capital of humanist thinking and, as such, Florence had, well, cultural capital.

In Florence, there is an old style — severe, simple, and dry — expressing republican virtues such as moderation of appetites, egalitarianism, and probity. I’d call it the Savonarola Style but not all black, all the time, and Dominican hoodies were never in vogue. Savonarola (1452–1498) led a new-broom reform movement in Florence that in its extremism exposed the pitfalls of republicanism.

The catalogue dives deeply into this point but doesn’t persuade me, and the exhibition, in trying to make this point, briefly derails. After the bracing clarity of the introductory panel and Cellini’s commanding bronze, we enter a gallery of very modest portraits indeed. There’s a friendship portrait of two young men by Jacopo da Pontormo, from around 1523, showing the virtue of friendship unsullied by profit or exploitation. This and Portrait of a Man, by Andrea del Sarto, and two portraits by Pontormo, all from the late 1520s, are nice enough.

Entering this space, on the right, one sees a giant, empty corner that cries for something to fill it. Together, a sad corner and portraits of random twentysomethings make for not a deflating balloon but a gasping, burping zeppelin.

These portraits are meant to show the prevailing style in republican Florence. The problem is that these are portraits of everyday Joe Sixpacks like me, not mover-and-shaker portraits. The exhibition is about imperial image-making. It seems that in that category, Raphael’s sumptuous portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, from 1518, is useful, or the simpler two Doni wedding portraits by Raphael from 1504. Here we have portraits of the pinnacle of Florence’s power elite. They’re fancy. Mrs. Doni was a Strozzi, her groom rich as all get-out. There’s some measure of reserve but, let’s face it, these are Town and Country centerfold types.

In reading the labels and, later, the catalogue, I learned how little we know of the subjects of many of the portraits in the show. Were the people in this gallery republicans, and what kind, or supporters of the glitzy Medici autocracy, or, later, Cosimo’s royal, military dictatorship? There are lots of “maybes,” “possiblies,” and one “awkwardness of youth,” and together the exhibition seems tentative.

We first learn about Bronzino in this gallery via his Portrait of a Lady with a Lapdog, from around 1532. This painting “is among the works that laid the foundation for the sophisticated poetics of portraiture” later in the show. She certainly is one dazzling dame, marmoreal and haughty, the lady in red whose message isn’t “come hither” but “social distancing required.”

Pontormo’s Portrait of a Halberdier, from the late 1520s, lent by the Getty, is well known and one of the great portraits of that age for hauteur, though, in contrast to Bronzino’s woman and her lapdog, very much restrained. His oval face is good-looking but very young. He’s carrying a weapon, but he’s artfully posed and elegant. What to make of it?

The catalogue proposes that he’s Francesco Guardi, scion of an old Florentine family, in uniform serving the republican cause during the Siege of Florence from 1529 through most of 1530, and that seems to be accepted now. Many scholars think it might be a portrait of Cosimo from around 1537, after he was installed as duke.

The catalogue admits it’s a “quandary.” Is it a picture of a “poster boy for the defense of a republic,” or is it Cosimo, making fake republican cluckings after the start of his dukedom and his, in effect, “one man, royal rule”? After all, Pontormo’s 1534 portrait of Alessandro, also in the show, shows the louche, corrupt duke looking like a vicar. We don’t know. The Met got the loan and, in a distraction, shows halberds from its arms and armor collection in a big case next to the portrait.

There are three points that could have been made here. One is a comparison of this Bronzino with, say, the Sarto or the friendship portrait to show the difference between republican Florentine portraits and the new, Cosimo style, both imperial and imperious. This would mean scrapping the four or five other nice guys like the awkward youth and lute-player types, streamlining the show.

This is not the Met’s practice. The Met, in seeking loans, throws a wide net, asking for everything. Because it’s the Met, it gets everything. Then, it shows everything it gets. The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said “less is more” when it comes to design, but I think it’s guidance worth following in many other endeavors.

Or this straightforward comparison would have launched a Bronzino and Cosimo show in which Bronzino, with his 25 portraits, is presented as Cosimo’s image-making partner. I’ve always liked his work, which, like most Mannerist painting, was still out of style when I was in school. The problem with this is that the Bronzino retrospective at the Strozzi Palace in Florence in 2010, which I went to Florence to see, covers this ground. Carlo Falciani, the co-curator of the Met show, curated that brilliant show.

Uncertainty continues to rule the space, leading to perplexity.

It seems to me that, after the introductory room with the Cellini bronze, the exhibition should have simply jumped into what I’ll call the Cosimo gallery. Salon size, with deep red walls and lots of glitter, it provokes oohs and ahhs. A wall mural with genealogy explains part of the Medici storyline leading us to Cosimo.

Cosimo’s ascendence is circumstantial in the extreme. His father, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, was a condottiere working for Pope Leo X, a Medici, and a war hero who died in the War of the League of Cognac, in 1526. He was from a secondary branch of the Medici dynasty and Lorenzo the Magnificent’s cousin. Lorenzo swindled him of his inheritance. His mother, María Salviati, was descended from two great Florence banking families and was Lorenzo the Magnificent’s granddaughter.

Florence was a republic, more or less, in that an elected council ruled it with the Medici family, as citizens, though having more money than God, having sway that waxed and waned. Medici power in Florence dipped in the 1520s, but, in 1530, the Medici returned in the form of Alessandro (1510–1537), the first Medici with a hereditary dukedom. Dissolute, despotic, and murderous, he ruled for seven chaotic years. Disaster, though, loomed everywhere in what today we call Italy. When Alessandro died via tyrannicide, assassinated by his cousin Lorenzino in 1537, Cosimo, then 17, inexperienced and living in a remote castle in the country, was the only male heir to the new dukedom. All assumed that Cosimo would himself last only months.

The exhibition gets its footing here, and we actually see one great thing after another and learn something. Once Cosimo consolidated power, he hired Bronzino to fashion a new look. Armor was in. Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor, from 1545, is the most famous portrait of the duke. Bronzino and his studio produced about 30 versions — here was another new trick. Cosimo sent replicas of this portrait far and wide as his hold on Tuscany expanded and deepened. Now, from Pisa to Arezzo, and from Pistoia to Grosetto, imperial power had a face.

The women in Cosimo’s orbit are fabulous but get short shrift. There’s Eleanora of Toledo (1523–1562), Cosimo’s wife. Bronzino painted her around 1540. Eleanora was a Spanish aristocrat living in Naples whose father was deeply connected to the Hapsburg court of Charles V, which Cosimo, the new duke, wanted to cultivate. She’s dressed in lush red, gold beads and pearls, and lavender satin.

Their marriage, which produced eleven children, was a loving one. While her husband was away, she ruled Florence, and ruled well. A 1550 portrait of Eleanora and her son, Francesco, emphasizes that Cosimo had an heir, unlike Alessandro, who died having produced a gaggle of bastards. There are two nice Bronzino portraits of Cosimo’s and Eleanora’s baby sons. Bronzino excelled in the genre of fat-cheeked baby pictures.

There’s a Pontormo drawing of Cosimo’s mother, Maria Salviati, in the show, but it’s so faint that it’s impossible to see. There’s a good portrait of her at the Uffizi, on panel, so it probably couldn’t come to the Met because of condition issues. That’s too bad. She was a conniver of the first order. This drawing is part of a bigger problem manifested by lots of portrait metals mounted nicely on the walls but that, alas, are so small they’re impossible to see. These are best shown in the catalogue in expanded form.

Now that Cosimo is established and his regime stable, he practiced some territorial aggrandizement, gathering disparate parts of Tuscany under his rule. Two galleries consider his use of soft power, specifically culture, both to consolidate his power and establish Florence’s brand, which we know today, as the heart and soul of the Italian Renaissance.

Cosimo encouraged a revival of Dante, as we see in Bronzino’s portrait of the long-dead, exiled poet, launching a good review of the appearance of books in portraits coming from Cosimo’s court. These features advertised, in Cosimo’s view, his court’s erudition but also his commitment to making the Florentine version of Italian the lingua franca of the peninsula, which had more dialects than a prima patti has types of pasta.

Bronzino’s male nudes are here, and since they’re so unusual and striking, they suggest that the Met enterprise is in fact a Bronzino and Cosimo rehash. Still, in themselves, they’re worth seeing the show. Saint Sebastian, from between 1532 and 1535, was unknown until the late 1970s. Sebastian was among Florence’s patron saints but, aside from the work’s obvious identity, we know nothing about it.

It does seem to have propelled Bronzino to paint another nude, Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, in the late 1530s. This is one of the strongest parts of the exhibition, aesthetically and intellectually. When he took power, Cosimo had three immediate goals. First, he needed to calm Florence after the turbulent decade of invasion, plague, famine, siege, and the assassination of Alessandro. He needed a wife and lots of bambini. Since Tuscany was not itself among Europe’s great powers, he needed the protection of one.

Orpheus is, among many things, a faithful husband who goes to unparalleled lengths to protect his wife, Eurydice, putting aside the fact that he botches the job. Orpheus is a pacifier, too, his music appeasing ferocious beasts. Cosimo is one cultured guy, too, donning the guise of one of mythology’s most heroic and erudite Everyman figures and, to project it as strongly as it can, not donning clothes. It’s an attention-grabber. Cosimo’s nearly baring it all, and for a duke at the time, that’s rare. Bronzino quotes ancient sculpture, notably the Belvedere Torso, both to emphasize his own smarts — he was new to the court — and to demonstrate that Cosimo’s one high-brow duke.

Cosimo was pleased enough to commission another male nude depicting his son, Giovanni, as John the Baptist, upon Giovanni’s appointment as a cardinal in 1560. It was a good year for Cosimo. He finally crushed the last bits of Siena’s independence, making it fully part of his domain. After the disastrous reign of Pope Clement VII, a Medici, in the middle of which was the Sack of Rome, a Medici, and Cosimo’s son, was now back in the Roman sun. A fourth Bronzino nude of Andrea Doria, possibly as Neptune, is in the show. It has nothing to do with Cosimo, since Doria was an admiral from Genoa.

Here, The Medici: Portraits and Politics falls to pieces, a few of which are, however, shards of the first order. Cosimo’s contribution to high culture stems from his support for intellectuals in Florence. The Accademia Florentine was his doing. Cosimo’s portrait iconography makes room for books and sonnets. Art from his court is exquisite, though showy.

The boon to culture that Cosimo fomented is architectural, and this is a tiny part of the show. The Uffizi wasn’t an art gallery when Cosimo built it, but it was an architecturally significant work of art doubling as an administrative building. The Italian Renaissance garden style was his baby. The Palazzo Vecchio was turned into the ducal palace. Next to the Uffizi, it was the most lavish flat atop the shop ever. Architecturally, it cemented Cosimo’s dictatorship and merged state and persona. I know, the show’s about portraits, but if we’re thinking about Cosimo’s use of culture as soft power, architecture is essential. Cosimo’s building program was not only in Florence but in cities throughout Tuscany. His priority wasn’t churches but civic architecture.

The exhibition makes space for two sculptures by Pierino da Vinci (1530–1553), among the most famous artists who never lived to achieve the fame his talent and early work promised. His marble portrait frieze, probably of Cosimo, and his Cosimo I de’ Medici as Patron of Pisa, both from around 1550, correctly as the catalogue states, possess the quality of Michelangelo’s masterpieces. Pierino, Leonardo’s nephew, is probably the subject of a Bronzino portrait in the show. It’s a portrait of utmost suavity and from a London private collection.

The exhibition ends with a big section comparing Bronzino and Francesco Salviati (1510–1563). Cosimo disappears as a cultural or political presence, which is very odd since the show’s about him. To make one point in the Met’s favor, Cosimo does retire after the death of his Eleanora and two of his sons from malaria within days of one another in 1562. But not even a “see ya” farewell card?

Instead, we have a gallery with some nice portraits seeking to establish that while Bronzino, a saucy colorist and at times carnal, painted in a hard, uniform, courtly manner distinctive to Florence and reflecting Cosimo’s taste, Salviati painted in a cosmopolitan style. Why should we be interested in this? I don’t know.

Salviati got some work from Cosimo’s court. In 1546, he painted a beautiful, small bust of Cosimo’s father, lively and wary, considering he painted it from a death mask. We learn that Cosimo wanted a uniform look for family portraits, since he was seeking brand identity. Salviati’s style was too much of an amalgam of Venetian and Lombard looks, which means too casual and too painterly. Cosimo wanted a distinctly Florentine style, tightly finished and detailed, to evoke a kind of nationalist unity.

Though a humble Americanist, I think I know what happened. The Met got The Portrait of Carlo Rimbotti, by Salviati, in 2017. It’s nice, and it wasn’t cheap. Keith Christiansen, the head of the Met’s European paintings department and an Italian specialist, probably wanted to showcase it. An exhibition on Salviati wouldn’t fly. No one has heard of him. “Medici” is a name everyone knows — the Medici reign as dukes, potentates, or bankers to the gods spans nearly 350 years. The Met being the Met, it can get almost any loan it wants. Lorenzo the Magnificent has been done. The Medici dukes after, say, 1600 are inbred bores. So, in Cosimo, the Met had a marquee name and a muddled show.

There are star portraits in this room, among them Bronzino’s take on Stefano Colonna and Ludovico Capponi, both from the late 1540s, both handsome and imposing, and both Cosimo cronies. But they add nothing to our understanding of Bronzino’s style, first illuminated in Portrait of a Lady with a Lapdog at the beginning of the show. A pair of portraits by Bronzino from the early 1550s showing, we think, Pierantonio Bandini and his wife, Cassandra, are superb, and one was in Ottawa and the other in Turin, so it’s time for a reunion. But they have nothing to do with Cosimo.

Portrait of a Man from the St. Louis Museum of Art might not be by Salviati, and for years the Portrait of Gian Battista Salviati was thought to be by Bronzino, indicating that these attributions are sometimes very close calls and often, even in the past 30 years or so, debated and changed. Why would any of us attracted to an exhibition by the word “Medici” or wanting to know more about Bronzino and Cosimo have any interest in this sideshow?

That said, one of the best things in the exhibition is Salviati’s 1545 portrait of Bindo Altoviti (1491–1557). It’s stunning and the supreme flower of Florentine portraiture for its subject, the renowned “beautiful blond banker” painted by Raphael in Florence between 1512 and 1515. Altoviti was a rich banker who was ardently republican, but he had so much money and so many connections that Cosimo could only manage to kick him out.

The portrait has presence, both from the subject’s face, with the look of experience, and the elegant green brocade curtain behind him. Salviati gave him a touch of Titian softness though, in using the pose that Raphael used for his Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, a reference to Altoviti’s youthful portrait but also to Raphael’s Florentine heritage. It’s on marble for durability, but this is very rare.

I think all employers should demand that their working-from-home lucky duckies, or at least the creative ones, end the vacation from reality and get to the office. I know, they don’t want the party to end. You see, they’re among COVID’s constituents. First and foremost is Dr. Peewee Lab Leak, who’s on TV day and night, and please don’t let it ever end. Fauci’s the lifer public-health mediocrity looking and sounding Napoleon-big on TV rather than a smidgen over 5-foot-5 and a half. Think he really, truly wants more people vaccinated? Of course not! Delta’s only the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. There’s 20 more to come.

COVID’s comrades in arms include more than zilches like Fauci, the apocalypse press, and pols, whether cynical or craven. Millions aren’t paying their student loans, and millions aren’t paying rent. There’s the big-city, unionized public-school-teacher cohort, too, as well as confirmed introverts, and don’t forget the neurotics. Workers from home can tap ’n’ Zoom in their slippers, tutus, leather bondage thongs, or nada at all.

It’s not an efficient way for creative people to work. I don’t think it promotes thoughtful, productive communication. The constant sequels to COVID, the Plague are fatally destabilizing theater, live music, opera, and dance companies. It promotes exhibitions that lose focus and, over time, will reduce museum visitation and income if people, once again, choose to stay home. Cosimo and any number of Medici despots would have issued “basta” orders on COVID and its legion of quacks, kooks, and malingerers long ago.