ARTKABINETT collectors have been visiting Paris' musée Maillol to view the splendors of the Medici collection.
Yesterday, we explored works from the family's beginnings as pharmacist traders. Now... we take a look at their artistic pursuits during the high Renaissance.
From Cosmo II to Cosmo III: the twilight of the Medici's starts in the 17th and 18th centuries
Open minded and curious -- maybe because he benefited from having had Galileo as a tutor --, Cosmo II, during his brief reign at the very start of the 17th century , put up new buildings to receive more and more important collections.
If he provided the minor arts with a new impulse, he was the only one in Florence to encourage the Caravegesque realism that had come to light in Rome and in Naples.
Cosmo II (shown right) also encouraged his brother, cardinal Leopold de Medici, in his initiative of collecting self-portraits by prestigious artists in the Vasari corridor -- self-portraits signed Luca Giordano or Carlo Dolci -- or his re-organisation of the Palatine Library and of its 14000 manuscripts and 20 000 printed volumes.
The Grand-Duke also supported his brother in his creation in 1657 of the Academia del Cimento (Academy for experimentation), which promoted Galileo's experimental science.
An important collector of scientific instruments and of weapons, his son the Grand Duke Ferdinand II was opposed to the Holy See's decree which had obliged Galileo to retract his Copernican discoveries before the Inquisition.
The Medicis, godfathers of the Renaissance, were also the forebears of the Century of Enlightenment.
The last descendant of the Medicis, prince Jean-Gaston remembered that, who undertook, 95 years after the astronomer's death, to provide a tomb for Galileo in Florence, picking up along the way two of the great manís fingers to enclose them inside a henceforth sacred reliquary: the genius' finger points to the Medicis.
Leaving Florence and enjoying, in his villa in Poggio in Caiano, at the heart of his Gabinetto, the contemplation "of small works by all the most famous painters!", he had a theatre built in another villa in Pratolino, where he supported the new aesthetic concept of baroque opera embodied by Alessandro Scarlatti. He died of syphilis and madness in 1713 aged 50, without having ever reigned.
Libertine and liberal unlike the rigid Cosmo III (shown right), but drunk and nearly always in bed, living confined to his apartments while carrying out a ceaseless and melancholy debauchery, his young brother, Jean-Gaston de Medici marked the end of the dynasty in the night.
On his death in 1737, without successors, the Grand-Duchy left the Medici family to return into the demesne of Lorraine and of the future Emperor of the Holy Roman German Empire, Francis Ist of Austria.
The last survivor of the line, Jean-Gastonís sister, Anne-Marie Louise, princess Palatine (shown here) -- whose jewel in the shape of a cradle offered by her husband on hearing of her long awaited pregnancy, was not sufficient to give him a living heir -- handed overall the Medici collections to the city of Florence, so they could remain "at the disposal of all nations".
A testament of gold and fire, a fantastic spectacle of works and masterpieces which relate the worldís beauty, a world re-organized for the mind and feelings of the Medici family.
