Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia

Francesco Freddolini, Marco Musillo, Francesco Freddolini, Marco Musillo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000078374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte renacentista

This book explores how the Medici Grand Dukes pursued ways to expand their political, commercial, and cultural networks beyond Europe, cultivating complex relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Islamicate regions, and looking further east to India, China, and Japan.

The chapters in this volume discuss how casting a global, cross-cultural net was part and parcel of the Medicean political vision. Diplomatic gifts, items of commercial exchange, objects looted at war, maritime connections, and political plots were an inherent part of how the Medici projected their state on the global arena. The eleven chapters of this volume demonstrate that the mobility of objects, people, and knowledge that generated the global interactions analyzed here was not unidirectional—rather, it went both to and from Tuscany. In addition, by exploring evidence of objects produced in Tuscany for Asian markets, this book reveals hitherto neglected histories of how Western cultures projected themselves eastwards.

1 Introduction

Eurasian Tuscany, or the Fifth Element

Francesco Freddolini

Jacques Callot’s print depicting Ferdinando I overseeing the fortification of the Port of Livorno visualizes a political dream in the making (Figure 1.1).¹ Engraved between 1615 and 1620, this posthumous image celebrated the creation of the infrastructures that provided Florence full access to the Mediterranean and, through a network of diplomatic and commercial relations, the oceans.² The dates are significant for understanding how this image resonates with a period of fervent interest in global networks at the Medici court. In 1612, only a few years after Ferdinando’s death, his successor, Cosimo II, received a report from his secretary, Orso D’Elci, outlining the nautical connections between the Grand Duchy, the East Indies, and the West Indies.³ The complex, ten-paragraph document revolving around the centrality of Livorno as a node within a larger maritime network aimed to obtain a license from the King of Spain for unmediated access to the oceans. A key passage in D’Elci’s text explains that

The question to ask His Catholic Majesty for the business in the Indies is to obtain a license to send ships to the said Indies, East and West. [These ships] should be able to leave from the port of Livorno, and on both ways they should be able to dock at any port in France, England, and the Low Countries, without prejudice, and there have permission to load and unload merchandises.⁴

After Ferdinando I expanded the port and the city of Livorno to grant the Medicean state full access to maritime routes, the time was ripe to explore opportunities beyond the European continent and the Mediterranean basin.

This volume explores how the Grand Dukes pursued ways to expand their political, commercial, and cultural networks beyond Europe, cultivating complex relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Islamicate regions, and looking further east to India, China, and Japan. The chapters that follow show how casting a global, cross-cultural net was part and parcel of the Medicean political vision. Diplomatic gifts, items of commercial exchange, objects looted at war, maritime connections, and political plots were an inherent part of how the Medici projected their state on the global arena.

Once again, the arts conceptualized this vision with unparalleled lucidity. In 1592, Jacopo Ligozzi signed a monumental painting on slate representing Pope Boniface VIII Receiving Twelve Ambassadors (Figure 1.2). The work was made for the Salone dei Cinquecento, the hall in Palazzo Vecchio that Giorgio Vasari envisioned as a visual journey into the formation of the Ducal (and later Grand Ducal) political identity of the Tuscan state.⁵ The subject is Pope Boniface VIII’s legendary reception, held in 1300, of twelve ambassadors from various parts of Europe and Asia. Upon realizing that all ambassadors were Florentines, the Pope defined Florence as the “fifth element” and acknowledged its role as commercial and political connector on the Eurasian scale. This episode, becoming popular in the sixteenth century, was celebrated by Michelangelo Buonarroti and Benedetto Varchi as a mark of Florentine identity.⁶

Figure 1.1Jacques Callot, Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici Overseeing the Fortification of Livorno, c. 1615–1620, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Transferred from the Library of Congress, 1986.50.112.

Source: Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Ligozzi added another layer, transporting the narrative into the temporal and geopolitical context of Grand Ducal Florence. In the background, a painting within the painting portrays Tuscany seated on a throne in an ideal dialogue with Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. Tuscany wears the Grand Ducal insignia; it is, unmistakably, Medici Tuscany vis-à-vis the continents. The visual centrality of Tuscany evokes the political ambition to become an independent and central interlocutor with the four continents—the “fifth element” of Boniface’s embassy, a node within a larger, and now truly global, network.

As Lia Markey has demonstrated, visualizing America at the Medici court became a way to conceptualize Florence’s identity within a dramatically expanding world.⁷ Colonization, either real or “vicarious,” as Markey has defined Florence’s colonizing efforts, is crucial for understanding transatlantic histories of the Medici state. Once we direct our gaze eastwards, however, we are faced with a different gamut of historical and historiographical problems. A longer tradition of interreligious tensions, dating back at least to the crusades, shaped the Medici relations to the Ottoman Empire and coexisted with commercial relations that never stopped. These were further enriched by the long-standing trade routes that had been already established with Asia, which in turn became more multifaceted through the mediation (or lack thereof) of Russia, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. As Geoffrey C. Gunn has persuasively argued, although vast peripheral areas of Asia were subjugated and radically transformed by European colonization, “in Asia the Europeans entered elaborate and mannered trading networks.”⁸

Figure 1.2Jacopo Ligozzi, Pope Boniface VIII Receiving Twelve Ambassadors, 1591, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Source: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

The connective, transnational tissue of the Eurasian cultural and geographical region has recently proven to be an extremely productive area for studying transcultural interactions. This volume contributes to this historiographical stream by exploring how the Grand Dukes promoted such connections. Exchanges were crucial for Florence when looking East, and a network of political and infrastructural relations was essential to support them.⁹ The document penned by D’Elci in 1612 could be seen as the culmination of the late-sixteenth-century strategy to connect Florence with the global world, a vision that started with Cosimo I and was fostered by the ruling family as part of a political plan. Courtly spaces articulated this strategy through images and objects on display. The maps of the Sala delle Carte Geografiche in the Medici Guardaroba (Figure 1.3), painted in two phases by Egnazio Danti (1563–1575) and Stefano Bonsignori (1576–1586), prompted the Grand Dukes, their courtiers, and their guests to understand the Ducal (and later Grand Ducal) territories in relation to the global world, metaphorically projecting the Medicean state into a growing network of exploration and colonial aspiration, as well as mobility of people, objects, and knowledge.¹⁰

Figure 1.3View of the Guardaroba Nuova, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Source: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

In a similar vein, Ludovico Buti portrayed exotic worlds on the ceilings of the Armeria (1588),¹¹ and the Grand Dukes avidly collected exotic objects from Asia, the Islamicate world, and the Americas.¹² It is well known that the aspirations to establish colonies across the Atlantic and open direct maritime routes from Livorno to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans soon vanished due to the opposition of the true global maritime powers¹³—Spain, Portugal, the Dutch Republic, and Britain—but the Medici still participated in the main networks of interactions by making Livorno a node of larger commercial exchanges. Livorno—as the chapters by Tazzara, Iannello, and Sicca demonstrate—epitomizes the ambition of the Grand Dukes, whose strategy was to find a role within exchanges that transcended the Mediterranean. Livorno, furthermore, shows that global interactions for the Medici were a political affair that required a strategy to finally turn the Tuscan state into the “fifth element.”

A growing interest in how objects and knowledge were exchanged in the increasingly complex transcultural arena of the early modern period has helped us understand the agency of things and the importance of their social life.¹⁴ Seminal scholarship by Paula Findlen and Pamela Smith, as well as more recent studies by Giorgio Riello, Anne Gerritsen, Meredith Martin, and Daniela Bleichmar among others, have helped shape this field.¹⁵ Our book also explores objects—it is the central methodological tenet that informs most of the art history and material culture approaches in the chapters that follow—but our aim is different from the one adopted in most of the aforementioned studies exploring the social lives of things along the lines of broad networks of exchange.¹⁶ As Paula Findlen reminds us, “the global lives of things emerge within and at the interstices between local, regional, and long-distance trading networks.”¹⁷ In order to delve deeply into such interstices, we have chosen to focus on a specific geopolitical entity—the Medicean state—and explore how actants—objects, networks, infrastructures, and people—instantiated its interactions with the Levant and Asia.¹⁸ Our book, in other words, is about Grand Ducal Tuscany; our aim is to situate the Medici politics during the Grand Ducal period within a larger map encompassing the Eurasian space.

With a few exceptions—for example Marco Spallanzani’s studies on maiolica and oriental carpets in Renaissance Florence, Francesco Morena’s work on porcelain, or some articles addressing focused case studies—this early modern global history of the Grand Duchy has only recently emerged.¹⁹ Studies on Florentine merchant networks in the Mediterranean Basin and Asia have paved the way to understanding the multifaceted relations between the Medici and the Orient, while work specifically inspired by the vast diplomatic correspondence in the Grand Ducal archive has recently cast new light on the relations between the Tuscan dynasty and the Levant.²⁰

One feature of Grand Ducal Tuscany that offers a distinctive lens through which to study early modern Italy in relation to global interactions is its archival repositories.²¹ A methodology of inquiry based on archival research has enabled most of the authors in this volume to delve deeply into the histories of individual objects, merchants, and political agendas. Objects, biographies, and histories of local infrastructures such as the port of Livorno enable us to connect the local (Grand Ducal Tuscany) with the global (the Eurasian context) by way of what Francesca Trivellato has recently defined as “global microhistories.”²² As Trivellato argues, this method stemming from a distinctively Italian historiographical tradition has great potential for casting light on how localized facts—for example one object, or one biography—are nodes within complex networks. A loca...