Claudia Lazzaro

The Medici Chapel was not fully completed in the state that it presently exists until nearly thirty years after Michelangelo’s departure from Florence in 1534. This gave artists, intellectuals, and patrons the extraordinary opportunity to study the sculptures close up and from different points of view, a habit that continued well after their installation through reductions and casts. Any study of the influence of Michelangelo’s chapel sculptures on Florentine artists and patrons must take into account how they were viewed, experienced, and studied. In portraits of young Florentine patricians, Bronzino and Salviati drew on the practice of copying the statues from different angles and detailed scrutiny of body parts to assemble these views and parts in images of their patrons that made overt reference to Michelangelo as well as displayed their own distinctive style. While these portraits were made for private palaces to convey both Florentine erudition and its artistic tradition, Duke Cosimo adapted the Medici Chapel sculptures for portrayals of himself in public settings, including Vasari’s tondo in the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi corridor façade together with Vincenzo Danti’s reclining nude figures, these coinciding with his association with Michelangelo in the founding of the Accademia del Disegno. The reassembled body parts in engravings of the completed tombs by Cornelis Cort in 1570 represented Florence to a wide public, but no longer functioned to signify a distinct Florentine artistic tradition and cultural identity.

... CLAUDIA LAZZARO Cornell University ... Jahrhundert," Acta Historiae Artium Academiae Scientiarum Hun-garicae, 13 (1967), 9-12; M. Kubelik, Die Villa im Veneto; Zur Typologischen Entwicklung im Quattrocento, 2 vols., Munich, '977; and MA Zancan, "Le ville vicentine del ...

My discussion of selected examples of the early portraits of Duke Cosimo from the time he acquired the ducal title also serves as a case study in the translation of resemblance into artistic representation in portraiture. Very early profile portraits, some well-known, others not, notably coins, emphasized a few principal characteristics, which remained essential to his image. The canonical representation of "Cosimo" that the early portraits constructed in physiognomy and format resonated with associations. These and the painted and sculpted portraits by Bronzino and Bandinelli that followed portrayed his progressive physical maturing, particularly in facial hair, which paralleled his political advancement. I will probe the process of fashioning a public image of power of young Duke Cosimo. I will question fixity and change, when he grew a beard, and the dating of some works, through an examination of an array of early portraits, comparative works, and little discussed evidence.

Duke Cosimo de' Medici wears ancient Roman armor in Baccio Bandinelli's little discussed marble bust in the Metropolitan Museum. Unlike its Roman imperial models and his Bargello version, the duke's muscle cuirass appears to represent a bare torso with ribs, substantial pectorals, areolas, and nipples. It recalls the muscular anatomy and ambiguity between body and armor of Michelangelo's Duke Giuliano. However, Bandinelli's bust is a recognizable portrait and the anatomy implies the duke's own robust body. A living ruler portrayed nude was a performance of masculinity and a sign of power precisely because it was audacious and transgressive, as both Mussolini and Putin were aware. That the bust is seemingly, but not actually, a naked torso parallels sixteenth-century concerns with appearing versus being. A conspicuous breast with nipple also appears in other portrayals of Cosimo and serves as a sign of and abbreviation for the nude body of the ruler.

My paper juxtaposes the nakedness of the inhabitants of the “New World” encountered by Columbus and Cortès, signifying unclothed and uncivilized, with the nudity in two portraits of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, signaling instead physical strength and moral virtue through an idealized body.  Cosimo’s two forays into self-representation with blatant nudity and explicit classical models remain puzzling to scholars and unique among his many portraits.  Although familiar conceptual and visual tropes of biblical origins and mythical Golden Age domesticated images of naked indigenous peoples, had nudity become too freighted with contradictory meanings for the representation of a living individual?

In three early portraits in sculpture, painting, and engraving from the early 1540s, Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, wears armor of a different kind—ancient Roman, Habsburg battle, and Italian parade armor. In each portrait a familiar, lifelike head contrasts with the armored body that evokes political, social, and artistic associations as well as contemporary notions of masculinity. Bandinelli’s sculpted marble bust in the Metropolitan Museum in classical muscle armor concentrates on the ambiguity between the duke’s physical body, with powerful pectorals and delineated anatomy, and the multiple layers of the armor at neckline and shoulders. The bust recalls ancient models and the idea of nudity as sign of both physical strength and moral character, but also Michelangelo’s Duke Giuliano with the inherent tension between body and body-like shield. In Bronzino’s painted portrait in the Uffizi, the body is instead encased in the steel Habsburg field armor that Cosimo owned. Nevertheless, as Aretino observed of Titian’s painted armor that it made visible the inner valor of the wearer, armor could make evident the masculine virtue of self-control. In the engraving designed by Bandinelli, the young duke wears an imaginative variation on fashionable Italian parade armor. His animated head and arms contrast with the frontal, flat armored body covered with imagery. The images allude to the history and ideas of Florence and present a ruler who incorporates and appropriates both masculine and feminine in the armor that is the mirror of his rule.

Michelangelo famously asserted his autonomy in many ways, among them his pervasive inventiveness, from the varied poses of the Sistine ignudi and the expressive grotesque heads in the Medici Chapel, to the forty epitaphs for a close friend’s cousin.  My focus is instead on little discussed manifestations of Michelangelo’s invenzione:  his designs of clothing, hair, headpieces, and jewelry.  With these he invented endless variations, distinct from either conventional biblical or contemporary styles; he confounded gender distinctions or combined opposites, male and female; and he created visual parallels to the metaphors and devices of his own poetry, among them antithesis, oxymoron, and paradox.  My examples include gift drawings of ideal heads, outside the market economy but very influential.  I will also discuss characteristics of Michelangelo’s clothing, including layers and fastenings, revealing and concealing, in some public works, such as the London Entombment, Sistine prophets and sibyls, and other paintings and sculptures.