Urbanism and Violence in Grand Ducal Florence
When Ferdinando I de' Medici succeeded his brother as grand duke of Tuscany in 1587, he brought a Roman vision to the north, commissioning equestrian monuments for two of Florence's most prestigious squares, portraits of himself for the major piazzas of the other cities he ruled, and a series of further significant urban interventions. To an extent, these belonged to a long Renaissance tradition of public statuary; in both their form and placement, however, they were also hostile to their environments. This talk shifts the discussion of sculpture and its setting from one of decorum — the fittingness of particular types of object to particular kinds of spaces — to one of politics, emphasizing the conflicts that early modern sculptures recorded or suppressed.
Michael W. Cole (Ph.D., Department of Art and Archeology, Princeton University, 1999) is Associate Professor at the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania.
The Art History Lecture Series is sponsored by the Cantor Arts Center Membership Board.