Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 61

Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92) was head of the Medici family from the age of twenty, and in that role was one of the leading intellectual and political figures of the Florentine Renaissance. On his death, as was common practice (cf. IA7), his heirs had an inventory made of the family’s possessions. The inventory is well known and famous largely for showing how things which are very highly valued today, such as works of ‘fine art’, were then seen as less valuable than other objects which have since been relegated to the status of the crafts or ‘applied arts’ – including tapestries, furniture, jewellery and antiques. That is not the main purpose of the present selection, although we have included some paintings and carvings for comparison, including Brunelleschi’s important perspective rendering of the Palazzo de’ Signori and the surrounding piazza. The inventory is a long document, running to over 130 pages in a modern book, so our extracts are relatively fragmentary. What we have focussed on here is the number of exotic items included in the Medici palace. It is important to remember that this is not a dedicated ‘cabinet of curiosities’ as such but the record of a working household. It includes barrels of wine, saucepans and bolts of fabric for future use, as well as objects from distant lands including pieces of textile, diplomatic gifts and Byzantine mosaics, in addition to Lorenzo’s own collection of antiquities and exotica. The result is a picture of an interconnected world, at least for patricians, wherein porcelain from China sits beside Moorish textiles, ‘damascene’ metalwork, Turkish weaponry and natural things such as coral and ivory. Our source is Richard Stapleford, Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home: The Inventory of the Palazzo Medici in 1492, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013; the selections are from pp. 67–8, 71, 74, 76, 79, 81, 83, 88–9, 93–4, 96–8, 103–4, 107, 109–10, 112–16, 120–2, 124 and 189–90. The valuations are in Florentine florins.