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Compte rendu par Nicola Courtright, Amherst College Nombre de mots : 2160 mots Publié en ligne le 2019-08-26 Citation: Histara les comptes rendus (ISSN 2100-0700). Lien: http://histara.sorbonne.fr/cr.php?cr=3374 Lien pour commander ce livre
This book is an encyclopedic tour-de-force, encompassing 555 pages of text followed by appendixes transcribing and annotating sources and documents, bibliography, and an index. Christina Strunck examines the place of art and architecture surrounding Christina of Lorraine at the Medici Grand Ducal court in secular and sacred settings, and in doing so investigates transfers of ideas and goods between the political and religious cultures of Tuscany, Lorraine, and France. She particularly emphasizes previously undetected influences of the art and culture of France and Lorraine upon Florence in order to understand the complexity of early seventeenth-century Florentine cultural politics, she states.
Strunck’s most ambitious goal is to discover how Christina of Lorraine had an effect on the Grand Ducal political environment through cultural exchange, political acts, and art patronage. This is a formidable task, for as is well known, it is not easy to track exactly how women exerted power in early modern history: documents, objects, and spaces that contain art may not mention women patrons, let alone outline their intentions. Yet Strunck persevered, unearthing many sources and engaging with a great deal of literature. Part I, devoted to the “actors, the spaces of actions, and relationships of exchange,” treats the issue of gender in Florence, the models that Christina’s predecessors presented, her life, persons who made the “transfers” of culture and objects possible—members of court, diplomats, ecclesiastics, entrepreneurs, the military, humanists—as well as identifying the objects gifted or received. She sometimes reads documents, art, and spaces against the grain or expands upon the evidence in order to tease out how the widowed Christina alone and then, in the 1620s, with her daughter-in-law and co-regent Maria Magdalena of Austria, crafted a positive portrayal of the Medici Grand Dukes to whom they were married or whom they mothered, and how they sometimes even (subtly) expressed their own authority as spouses or regents. Strunck argues that Christina, more than her predecessors, defined her own image and became a real political force.
One of the important points supporting Strunck’s thesis is that before Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici died, he had named his wife Christina future regent for their son Cosimo II in his will, and this pre-death dictum meant the assumption of authority went more smoothly than might be expected. Strunck finds sources suggesting that Ferdinando wanted his wife to participate in the business of rule even during his life, lending her a status unaccustomed either for a Medici Grand Duchess or a French royal consort such as queen Catherine de’ Medici of France, her grandmother. Christina subsequently participated in rule after her husband died and her son had achieved his majority, much as the influential queen mother Catherine de’ Medici had done after her husband Henri II’s death. Also, Strunck emphasizes that Catherine, who showed her favor to her granddaughter in manifold ways (including willing her the grand Hôtel de la Reine in Paris) was also very important for Christina’s idea of governing on behalf of her husband, son, and grandson, the Medici Grand Dukes. Strunck’s larger conclusion is that, on the whole, Christina followed Catherine’s example of acting largely in the background, so as not to get into the kind of trouble Christina’s niece by marriage, queen mother Marie de’ Medici, had in public conflicts with her son Louis XIII after her own regency.
Yet through her patronage of religion and its art and architecture Christina did not hesitate to strengthen visible ties to her own background, the cultures of Lorraine and France. Strunck demonstrates this thesis especially in Part II, devoted to sacred spaces. Christina helped the peace-oriented, Mary-focused congregation of the Feuillants, supported by French royalty, settle in Florence, and there she commissioned their high altar in Santa Maria della Pace. She sees that edifice as a model for a type of Marian church found throughout Tuscany evoking, Strunck proposes, a geographically expansive, divinely protected Medicean realm of peace. She also paid for an altar dedicated to St. Fiacre, revered by the French, in the sacristy of Santo Spirito, and left considerable money in her will to sustain the Augustinians and their convent there. In other projects Christina emphasized her relationship to her ancestors, the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon and St. William the Hermit (William of Malavalle). Strunck argues that Christina’s French ancestry was woven together with Medici ambitions to champion the Christian faith in some of the most important Medici commissions. She maintains that the original scheme for the new glitzy burial site for the Medici Grand Dukes, the Cappella dei Principi in San Lorenzo, was derived from the design of the mausoleum of the Valois kings in Saint Denis, commissioned by Catherine de’ Medici and transmitted to Florence by Christina. This French-style plan (later altered), Strunck suggests, demonstrated Ferdinando’s ambition to be a king. In addition, Strunck proposes that Ferdinando’s idea that the chapel should contain the Holy Sepulchre linked the Grand Duke’s idea of the Medici as warriors of faith to Christina’s own crusading ancestry, Godfrey of Bouillon, so that their goals of upholding the Catholic religion were one and the same.
Strunck’s trickiest, riskiest, and most ambitious job was searching for ways in which Christina and her daughter-in-law Maria Magdalena of Austria might have subtly “re-coded” spaces ordinarily read as dominated by their husbands and sons. Strunck wrestles with the question of the contemporary viewer’s awareness of “masculine” and “feminine” values in public spaces, and to persuade the reader relies upon a reinterpretation of documents, analysis of spatial relations, and in-depth iconographical analysis, important tools of the art historian. One complex, extended example she cites is the process of the regents’ patronage of the Medici church of San Lorenzo. They commissioned a reconstruction of the high altar in 1622, incorporating their coats-of-arms. This project, Strunck suggests, reconfigured the church so that the Cappella dei Principi was visually unified with the basilica proper and when seen from the nave, focused upon the women’s coats-of-arms. She presents evidence for her claim that important stages of the building history of the Cappella dei Principi and the high altar of San Lorenzo should be re-dated to the era of the regencies, the 1620s. This situation raises questions for Strunck to what degree, and for how long, this iconic Medici space of San Lorenzo was “re-coded” as feminine. Strunck reads Christina’s overlooked 1596 patronage of the Santo Spirito’s altar of the healing saint worshiped in France, St. Fiacre, as alluding to Christina’s charitable, Medici-like healing powers. Baptised Chrétienne, the Grand Duchess affiliated herself with St. Christina and often emphasized her Christian piety. Strunck regards Santo Spirito’s sacristy (where the cloister was additionally amplified by a cycle dedicated to St. William the Hermit) as a Christina-oriented, Francophile pendant to her husband’s Cappella dei Principi in the main Medici basilica of San Lorenzo. She equates the gendering of these spaces she regards as pendants with the secular pairing of the (female) Stanza di Madama and the (male) Tribuna in the Uffizi. Documents and other sources are often missing from the historical record, so that Strunck’s extensive argument about feminine “re-coding” relies on a great quantity of suggestive material she has unearthed and the author’s capacity to marshal this evidence in a persuasive fashion. Strunck’s task is easier when discussing spaces that allude more explicitly to their commissioners, such as the private chapels in the Palazzo Pitti and in Christina’s villas La Petraia and La Quiete.
A particularly strong section of the book is Part III, dedicated to secular spaces, in which Strunck closely examines the architecture and decoration of the Medici palaces in Florence: the Grand Ducal apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio where Cosimo and Eleonora da Toledo moved in 1540, which were later inhabited by his son Francesco I and first wife Johanna of Austria (Marie de’ Medici’s parents) and then by Francesco with his mistress, Bianca Cappello, who became his second wife. After their sudden deaths, Francesco’s brother Ferdinando I acceded to the title, and soon after his marriage to Christina in 1589 the couple moved into the Palazzo Pitti, now the official Medici residence. By scrutinizing inventories, ceremonial accounts, guidebooks, and (few) extant plans to determine what was in the rooms and what their functions were, Strunck has reconstructed changes in the architecture, décor, and ritual that reveal the status and political program of the patrons over time. Strunck concludes that during Christina’s era as consort and regent, her apartment in the Pitti Palace presented her as an ideal ruler by stressing her connoisseurship and collections. The author further suggests that the differing designs of the apartments of Ferdinando and Christina revealed differentiated relationships with their subjects: Ferdinando’s suite was more formal, preserving spatial distance from the visitor, whereas Christina adopted the French custom of encouraging familiarité with the court community by receiving visitors in her bedchamber. During the double regency, ceremony in the apartment of Maria Magdalena of Austria, as befit the mother of the young Grand Duke and sister of the emperor, revealed her higher status; yet Christina still participated fully in the work of the regency, and held audiences in her spaces. In Part III.3, Strunck offers an in-depth, new interpretation of the program of the Sala di Bona, carried out under Christina, which on the whole she sees as a glorification of the rule of Ferdinando I.
Strunck goes farther afield to France in Part III.2, because she wishes to consider the women regents’ attempts to influence the image of the Medici that the widowed Marie de’ Medici was promoting in her Parisian residence, the Luxembourg Palace, in the 1620s. Marie had earlier asked Christina for drawings of the Pitti Palace, her family residence until her marriage, as a model for her new residence, then later she commissioned Rubens to paint the famous Medici galleries there (one biographical cycle devoted to her life, and a second, unfinished one to that of her dead husband Henri IV). At the same time Marie requested paintings from her female relatives in Florence to decorate some of her chambers, including an important grand cabinet, the Cabinet doré. Strunck at length analyzes the use and iconography of the spaces (including the Medici gallery), and proposes a different order for the paintings in the Cabinet doré, concluding that the Florentine regents chose subjects for the that were politically more intelligent than Marie’s requests. Strunck suggests that they ultimately sent works that gave a more diplomatic picture of the Medici dynasty in general and female rule in particular than she believes Marie knew to do. Given the vexed history of French queens’ regencies, however, quite different cultural and political expectations faced a foreign queen mother in Paris than confronted female Grand Ducal regents in Tuscany. As alarming as Marie’s acts seemed to her cautious Florentine relatives at the time, it is possible that history will eventually give the programs Marie developed for her dowager’s palace a higher grade for their imaginative artistic and political reach than they receive here.
The length and detail of this tome are imposing, and there are jewel-like studies—even small books—embedded within the vast text. To guide the reader, Strunck clearly lays out the organization of the book and the argument for each section in the introduction, and at the beginning of each of the three sections Strunck briefly and usefully sketches their contents. Admirably, she often asks pressing questions that she will address and discusses her methodology. In her conclusion to the book, Strunck recapitulates what she regards as her main contributions. Nevertheless, a few impediments to understanding remain. In addition to the presumption that the reader will know five languages (some with early modern spelling and antiquated forms of expression) and thus does not require translation of sources either in the body of the text or in footnotes, Strunck’s style sometimes makes the wealth of material hard to digest. She starts with enumerating neutral-seeming evidence and thereafter draws her conclusions, e.g. will list objects in an inventory chronicling the contents of a room, instead of making a case for what was in the room and why and using the inventory as evidence. She is apt to launch into the entire history of an issue or a monument rather than using that information as a subsidiary part of a larger argument she is making. For such a lengthy book, the reader would benefit from a more continuously flowing argument, in addition to the helpful signposts along the way.
There is no question that this book is invaluable, however, as loaded with fascinating facts and original, stimulating interpretations as it is. In future scholars will not be able to discuss the history of any Grand Ducal monuments in Florence nor how female rule was represented in early modern Europe without taking Strunck’s commendable research and contributions into account.
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Éditeurs : Lorenz E. Baumer, Université de Genève ; Jan Blanc, Université de Genève ; Christian Heck, Université Lille III ; François Queyrel, École pratique des Hautes Études, Paris |
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