Gender, Islam, and Artistic Performance in Grand-Ducal Tuscany
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Gender, Islam, and Artistic Performance in Grand-Ducal Tuscany. By Morten Steen Hansen. My book aims to rethink relationships between court and artists in absolutist societies as exemplified by grand-ducal Tuscany during Cosimo II (r. 1609-21) and Ferdinando II (r. 1621-70). Unlike patronage studies with their focus on specific commissions, I consider with reference to Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production how the more ambitious artists in Tuscany shaped their art and personas in relationship to the center of power by either corroborating or subverting courtly ideals. The case of Tuscany in the seventeenth century is particularly intriguing, and not only because the artists trained in the Florentine Accademia del Disegno have rarely been studied outside of Italy with the exception of connoisseurial inquiries. (Household names active in the grand-ducal capital such as Pietro da Cortona, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano were foreigners trained outside of the local art academy). Rather than being monolithic, the court offered contrasting ideals along lines of gender, according to which artists positioned themselves. While the grand duchesses used art to invent an image of sacrosanct rulership as they let themselves be portrayed as Catholic saints or Christian allegories and heroines, their male counterparts commissioned controversial erotic paintings for the Medici residences and staged comparisons between themselves and the Ottoman and Persian courts (then considered pagan by Christians) with their legendary splendor and ritual. The profound fascination of the Medici court with the Muslim "other" was communicated in stage performances and art. Unlike their female counterparts, the men of the Medici family could transgress norms of sexual and religious decorum upheld by the Counter-Reformation Church to demonstrate a gendered, superior position. The artists considered in this light include the highly insubordinate Giovanni da San Giovanni, the leading fresco painter in Tuscany until his premature death in 1636, Francesco Furini, like Giovanni da San Giovanni a writer of burlesque verse, the Neapolitan artist, satirist, and self- proclaimed neo-stoic Salvator Rosa, who upon invitation from the Medici spent the 1640s in Tuscany, and the deeply religious Carlo Dolci, who in painting polemicized against Rosa's masculinist art for being immersed in the cardinal sin of anger. During the age of absolutism, pictorial decorations of halls of state were among the European rulers' most characteristic forms of self-representation. Commissioned to glorify governance and princely families, the pictorial programs set forth notions of heroism and virtue that, like a speculum principis (the literary mirror of a prince), upheld ideals for imitation. Created with propagandistic intent, this imagery identified the historical destiny of a ruler with an abundance of wealth and the flourishing of justice and the arts under the aegis of Divine Providence. My study argues for the first time the possibility of dissent in such imagery, of resistance to the powers apparently being glorified with pictorial means exemplified by the Sala degli Argenti in the Palazzo Pitti, frescoed by four different members of the Accademia del Disegno between 1635 and 1642. Drawing on the work of Leo Strauss, I relate this phenomenon to a longstanding tradition of underhanded criticism of the Medici, which intensified after their usurpation of the Florentine Republic with the introduction of the Medici duchy in 1532. Other themes that I explore include relationships between vernacular "low" literary style and artistic production, the importance of cult images attributed miraculous powers to modern painting, and the work of art as the outcome of a virtuosic performance tied to humoral theory and bodily heat. 2 .