Meet the Medici at the Met

The Spectator, June 2021

Meet the Medici at the Met

Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness. A preview of The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Someone turned up the lights on portraiture in 16th-century Florence. Lyrical poetry went hard rock. Colors became high key. Posers now scowled at the oil-on-canvas flashbulbs, giving attitude, hands on hips, codpieces a-thrusting. Not that they even cared about looking as good as they do. Sure, they got dressed for the occasion, but notice the sprezzatura, the indifference in their eyes to the whole affair.

That was the maniera moderna, the new mannerism in art, and no one captured it better than Agnolo Bronzino. Whether it’s the ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’ (mid-1530s), his haughty painting in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or ‘Lodovico Capponi’ (1550-55), his side-eye romancer at the Frick Collection, these figures are boys interrupted. One has a finger in his book. The other fingers a medallion of a woman as he looks up, in adolescent annoyance, from the Snapchat of the day.

In The Renaissance in Italy (1875-86), John Addington Symonds called such faces ‘hard and cold as steel’. Somerset Maugham said Bronzino’s paintings showed a ‘supreme and disdainful indifference to the passion of others’. In the Florence of the Medici, this was just the point. The boys were back in town.

Bad politics often make good art. That’s especially true when the art is tasked with making sense of political senselessness, such as the fraught alliances of cinquecento Florence. Intrigues, assassinations, depositions, shifting enemies, family feuds, pandemic plagues and big money: 16th-century Florence had it all. The wonder and power of Florentine art came out of the scramble to clarify a present that was anything but clear. In Florence and beyond, there were Reformations and counter-Reformations. There was holy Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. Henry VIII wanted his annulment. Meanwhile the second of two successive Medici popes, Clement VII, had to take refuge in Castel Sant’Angelo after the mutinous troops of Charles V sacked Rome in 1527. That period around the League of Cognac and the Diet of Worms must have been hard to swallow. Even the Pope couldn’t figure it out.

Art worked on the front lines to give form to the new formulations. You had to see it to believe it. It helps when you have some of the greatest artists of the period, and arguably any period, available for hire. It also helps when you have florins to burn and the keys to the most famous bank in history. Medici money could not always buy Florentine love. But Medici millions went far in buying Florence’s greatest artists and establishing the look and feel of the Medici’s dynastic power as the family returned to the city as ducal rulers.

Bronzino, Portrait of Lodovico Capponi, 1550-55, on view at “The Medici: Portraits and Politics”

A major loan exhibition opening in June at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art looks to make sense of this artistic sense- making. The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 brings together over 90 works by artists from Raphael, Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino to Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Salviati and Bronzino. Such an exhibition at any time would be an achievement. To organize one now amid continuing pandemic closures is a triumph. At a moment when much of the Met’s staff cannot even return to work in person and must face the world remotely, these challenges must be near insurmountable. Fortunately, considering many of these paintings originally came out of a period of bubonic plague, a little coronavirus should be nothing for these portraits to shake. Art cannot live by Zoom alone, even if many of our museum executives still do.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics follows up on the Met’s 2011 exhibition The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini. It also serves as a final tribute to Keith Christiansen, the John Pope-Hennessy chairman of the Met’s Department of European Paintings. The great curator is retiring after over 40 years at the Met, and after facing a not insignificant amount of hardship following statements he made during the riots of summer 2020.

Christiansen first conceived of this show in better times, as a small conversation between a portrait of Carlo Rimbotti from 1548, acquired by the Met in 2017, and the Met’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Book’. As the scope of the exhibition grew to its current size, Christiansen brought in Carlo Falciani, a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, as guest curator. Falciani contributes many of the words to the exhibition’s weighty and not altogether sprightly catalogue.

The 1500s saw Florence devastated and divided, switching back and forth between republican rule and Medici leadership. The city’s most powerful banking family was sent packing more than once. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492, France invaded Italy, the Medici lost standing in Florence under Lorenzo’s son Piero the Unfortunate and the family went into exile for the first time. In 1497, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ignited the ‘bonfire of the vanities’. In a conflagration in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria art, books and musical instruments were burned in a censorious conclusion to the high life of the quattrocento.

Yet those Medici good times were not only a memory. The family, the money and the art would all eventually return to what should have always been a Medici town — and if you had any doubts, the art is there to prove it. Under its republican ruler, Piero Soderini, Florence continued with the austere aesthetics of Savonarola through the first decade of the 1500s, but it was about to get a shot of color and light.

The Medici’s exile lasted until 1512, when the family returned to Florence under Lorenzo’s second son, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who in 1513 became Pope Leo X. The Medici set about reestablishing dominion over Florence’s other oligarchic families through a renewed cultural campaign that sought to promote the words and look of Florence to Italy and beyond. Florence, after all, was the birthplace of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch along with Giotto and Brunelleschi. The native son Michelangelo received Medici honors in death, even though he had had little to do with the family in life.

After an anti-Medici faction again took control of Florence in 1527, the family returned in 1530, this time as a ducal dynasty for keeps. Alessandro de’ Medici clocked in as the first Duke of Florence until his assassination by a distant cousin, Lorenzaccio (‘bad Lorenzo’), in 1537. Then young Cosimo I stepped in to consolidate Medici power in a reign that continued over three decades.

For our Instagram age, the Medici’s portraits of power seem right up to date. Details are filtered, tweaked up, smoothed over and glamorized. Bringing his more Roman style to the canvas, Salviati left some crumbs of naturalistic imperfections. His remarkable ‘Portrait of a Young Man with a Dog’ (c. 1543-45), from a private collection, could have been painted yesterday. Bronzino, Pontormo’s favorite student, meanwhile licked his plate clean. His stunning ‘Young Woman and Her Little Boy’ (c. 1540-45), on loan from Washington’s National Gallery, looks like it was painted tomorrow.

The Italian art historian Giulio Carlo Argan called Mannerism ‘nothing less than the passage of art from a sphere of theology and knowledge to that of existence’. The sitters here are indifferent because they are of the moment, at once both realized and idealized. Those dynastic upstarts who manage to succeed in history often have a successful artistic program at their back. Look to the Rome of Augustus, when portraiture dispatched with the republican veneration of old age for a new smoothed out idealism of imperial youth. Or consider art under Napoleon, when the School of Paris found a new employer to pay wages and benefits after its artists ran up student debts in the Revolution.

Cosimo I was likewise an ‘authoritarian duke’, writes Christiansen in his catalogue introduction. He managed, despite his youth, to ‘upstage the old oligarchic families that had mistakenly thought they could manipulate to their advantage’ a 17-year-old who had been imposed upon them by Emperor Charles V. Here was a ruler who ‘realized the ways in which he could employ the arts — literary as well as figurative and architectural — to promote his court and elevate the cultural hegemony of Florence in Italy and beyond’. Artists under Cosimo mixed traditions old and new to create the look of the now. As in the art of Bronzino, it’s all there to see, lights on high, so you can’t miss a thing.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570 can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum, New York City from June 26. The catalogue is edited by Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani (Yale University Press, $65). This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition.

Son of a Gun

THE SPECTATOR, WORLD EDITION

Son of a Gun

On the family gun club

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns.

The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture. There was a time when riflery and marksmanship were encouraged across America, after all. Look at any high school yearbook from a century ago and you will likely find a picture of the student gun club. For Americans of Italian descent, an affinity for firearms was a patriotic necessity. The Risorgimento, the fight for Italian reunification, remained a recent memory. In the 1850s, after a first unsuccessful effort, the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi had regrouped in Staten Island, bringing with him his partisan supporters, including, so the story goes, my great-great-great-grandfather, a Piedmontese from Cuneo in northern Italy. Loyalty, combat readiness and virtù, have long remained in the blood.

In our family lore, the Papal states and the Napoleonic empire were all variously to blame for giving Italy the boot. Our quarrel with Rome went back to the tale of Ugolino della Gherardesca, the Count of Donoratico and our Pisan progenitor, who became caught up in that unfortunate Guelph-Ghibelline business of the 13th century and was framed by a Popish plot. The denouement found Ugolino deposited in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, where at least he got to nibble on his betrayer, Archbishop Ruggieri.

Such enmities were slight compared to the family loathing for the Austro-Hungarians and their incursions into Italian lands. At the outset of World War One, my great-grandfather and namesake Giacomo Panero, an American banker, voluntarily returned to Italy to join the Alpini, the mountain division of the Italian army. He successfully pushed the Germans out of the southern Dolomites— in the process, we were told, adorning his high-alpine bunker with Hun skulls. His Italian army portraits, in cloak and alpine hat, still adorn my bookshelf.

When I reached the age of 16, it was time for me to join the family ranks. My father brought me downtown to John Jovino Gun Shop to acquire my first firearm. The old gun shop was a small storefront in an alley behind the palatial former police headquarters at 240 Centre Street. An oversized pistol hung from its sign, a famous urban marker that made cameo appearances from Weegee to Serpico. Founded in 1911, the store was the oldest gun shop in New York, if not the country, before it was finally cut down by the Covid closures of 2020. Back in the early 1990s, as city residents turned to self-defense at the height of the last New York crime wave, business was booming.

Gun enthusiasts are some of the nicest people you will meet. The owners were happy to see a first-time family walk through the door. We selected a Marlin 882 SS, a .22 caliber Winchester magnum rimfire rifle. The gun’s bolt action, still to this day a joy to slide, must have reminded my father of Giacomo picking off those Germans high in the Dolomites. We mounted it with a magnifying scope. To this purchase my father added a .22 target pistol and .357 Magnum revolver.

It should be said that New York City’s gun laws are among the most punitive in the country — for law-abiding citizens, at any rate. Acquiring the license to safeguard a firearm in your home and to transport it in a locked bag to a range is an ordeal. Even during the Nineties crime wave, licensing your firearm was nearly as onerous as today, and my father did it by the book. At the time, it required months of paperwork, background checks and precise postal money orders that had to be filed with a clerk in the bowels of One Police Plaza. Unless you are in a business that transports large sums of cash or cash-equivalents, you can forget that concealed-carry license.

Fortunately at our range it was a different story. Since the owners ‘sold the bullets to the police’, the atmosphere in our tidy range, tucked two stories below the streets of Lower Manhattan, was more laissez-faire. I was more than free to practice with my father’s firearms. I could also try out any of the Glocks or other pistols they kept behind the counter. Want to test out a 12-gauge pump action shotgun against the ‘thug’ target? Fire away. The range came stocked with food catered from Chinatown and, understandably, quickly became my high-school hangout.

In his retirement, my father left the city for freer gun states. His collection came to include a vintage Browning Auto 5 and a Remington 581S. When my wife came to meet him, he gifted her a snub-nosed .38 special in the manner of Clemenza handing one to Michael Corleone, just without the tape on the butt.

In 2003, when the Smith and Wesson company debuted its .50 caliber five-shot revolver (the Model 500), my father was first in line to purchase one. He lived and died an avowed atheist, but he believed in stopping power. The gun was designed to stop a bear in its tracks. It could also ‘put a bullet through an engine block’, he liked to say. When we finally tested it together at a sandpit in the free state of Vermont, the pistol felt like a piece of personal artillery. A flaming shockwave emanated from the end of its barrel and expanded in a cone of heat and light. ‘This gun is your inheritance,’ he told me, more on target than I cared to realize. It was the last time we shot together.

Snowbound at City Ballet

THE NEW CRITERION

Snowbound at City Ballet

On Kyle Abraham’s When We Fell, performed by New York City Ballet.

Video killed the ballet star. At least that’s the impression we got watching the many attempts over the past year at translating the ballet stage to the computer screen. Iced out of the David H. Koch Theater, last fall New York City Ballet tried to turn up the heat for the final week of its digital fall season with five video premieres. To its credit, the pre-recorded programs gratefully brought ballet out onto the streets. Coming home from the office one evening, I happened to see one of the works in production, with the principal dancer Taylor Stanley moving fluidly, then spastically, as if suddenly possessed, as he stood up from a bench in Riverside Park.

The joy of seeing live dance—even just a few seconds of it set to recorded music—seemed far removed from the treacly, overedited final product that ensued. Created by Justin Peck, with Jody Lee Lipes as the director of photography, that sneaker ballet became just another Nike ad, in this case set to Chris Thile’s earworm of a tune called “Thank You, New York.” Really, no thanks. Another reason to pack up and move to Texas.

Despite the talent of their choreographers and dancers, the other four works fared little better. The problem was the overly redolent filmmaking by Ezra Hurwitz and cinematography by Jon Chema. In Andrea Miller’s “new song,” set to music by the executed Chilean singer Víctor Jara, the perfume was at its fullest, and was in fact quite evocative. But ballet does not need quick cuts, smokey closeups, and lens flares. Just let dancers dance.

With its new spring initiative, City Ballet has learned from the mistakes of last fall. The mandate to let dancers dance is what makes choreographer Kyle Abraham’s latest video premiere, called When We Fell, so compelling. Developed with eight City Ballet dancers during a three week residency—“COVID-compliant,” we are assured—at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli, New York, the ballet offers a haunting return to form. Co-directed by Abraham and the cinematographer Ryan Marie Helfant, When We Fell captures the performers in 16-millimeter black-and-white film as they move across the Koch Theater stage and, even more affectingly, Philip Johnson’s mezzanine. Now the cameras are static, often fitted with a fisheye lens, so that the point of view resembles surveillance footage switching intermittently among feeds. In the otherwise empty theater—empty of all of us for far too long—the work feels like “night at the ballet,” or day at the ballet, with the ghosts of dance filling the shadows.

But of course, the Koch theater has not been entirely vacant this past year. Those colossal marble statues, enlarged by Lincoln Kirstein from tiny figurines by Elie Nadelman, have kept watch over the hall. With bodysuit costumes by Marc Happel, in When We Fell the dancers arrive as marble halfway made flesh. In her pantomime poses, the soloist Claire Kretzschmar enters the scene as a Nadelman sculpture herself, at times come to life, at others returning to the cold stone of the space.

Captured at various angles, this ballet, which remains available for streaming through Thursday, makes the most of the rigid geometries of the mezzanine’s architecture. The dancers move like chess pieces across the gridded marble floor. They watch one another. Then they freeze in position, as when the corps dancer India Bradley pauses in penché. Taylor Stanley is most adroit at incorporating Abraham’s liquid breakdancing flow with the Balanchine technique—two dance traditions that are not so far removed as one might imagine. Done right, the hip-hop dancing looks like ballet in reverse, with movement made strange, popping and melting down. The opening music of “Piece for Four Pianos,” by Morton Feldman, adds to the odd emptiness as it seemingly reverberates through the vacant theater.

We should not expect such ballet, at moments like this, to resolve into the Nutcracker Suite. And indeed, as Abraham’s sixteen-minute work continues, it shifts from the mezzanine to the Koch Theater stage, with dancers now overanimated by the cacophony of Jason Moran’s “All Hammers and Chains,” which sounds as advertised. As the performers dance past one another, an abundance of cabriole leaps and fouetté turns by the apprentice KJ Takahashi resolves into a pas de deux. Now the lighting designer Dan Scully shines a backlight on the principals Lauren Lovette and Taylor Stanley and it seems as if we observe them from offstage. Nico Muhly supplies the music, titled “Falling Berceuse,” for this elegiac coda. Finally the camera zooms out to reveal dapples of light that turn out to be the faceted lamps of the Koch auditorium, so well known, but here become strange. Created during a snowy residency in upstate New York, When We Fell captures that eerie, snowbound feeling of a year in frozen isolation.