The following sessions, brought to my attention by the Collecting and 
Display Seminar,  may be of interest for anyone attending the 
Renaissance Society of America's annual conference in Boston from 31 
March to 2 April 2016. Conference details at 
http://www.rsa.org/?page=2016Boston, schedule at 
http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/rsa/rsa16/


The Patrons' Input I
Chair: Andrea M. Gáldy

Thu, March 31, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hynes Convention Center, Level Two, 204

Adriana Turpin, Buontalenti and Francesco and Ferdinando de’ Medici

The architect Bernardo Buontalenti is famous for his projects for Grand 
Dukes Francesco and Ferdinando de’ Medici (1574-1609). Nonetheless, his 
relationship with his patrons and the nature and extent of their 
involvement with these projects remain obscure. This paper proposes to 
investigate the creation of two of Buontalenti’s projects in the Uffizi, 
the theatre and the Tribuna, and place them in the Florentine 
intellectual context at the end of the sixteenth century. It has long 
been accepted that the grand dukes themselves commissioned these spaces 
and decided on questions of decoration and display. Closer analysis of 
the court culture under Francesco and under Ferdinand after 1587, 
provides more detailed insights into the role of some courtiers. 
Accordingly, the focus will be on the musical circles in Florence, in 
particular those of Giovanni Bardi.

Susan Nalezyty, Writing and Buying: Pietro Bembo as Patron and Collector

As an author seeking new literary models, Pietro Bembo shared 
corresponding aims with visual artist friends, individuals who sometimes 
provided insights into the works he sought, acquired, displayed, loaned, 
and received as gifts. This scholarly collector’s career took him away 
from his celebrated collection in his Paduan palazzo and villa. Bembo 
served as his own buying agent with a trusted curator at home, though he 
often complains in epistolary evidence of strained economic 
circumstances. He brought works to Urbino, Venice and Rome, which 
informed his stylistic preferences, unique for his deep experience of 
these contexts near princely and papal collections. He valued not just 
monumental paintings, but portable objects of different media, and just 
as important were his visitors. Prominent authors wrote of what they 
saw, providing access to issues of usage and reception of Bembo’s works, 
which traveled up and down the Italian peninsula with him throughout his 
life.

Gregory A. Grämiger, The Patrons’ Joys and Struggles in Three University 
Collections

Already in the 16th century, the University of Leiden established a 
library, a botanical garden, a theatre of anatomy and different cabinets 
of curiosities. Specialized professors were responsible for establishing 
and ordering the different collections. Sometimes, they even ignored 
scientific facts to follow their own interests. Fellow colleagues 
disagreed with their works. Students wanted unrestricted access to the 
latest books and artefacts, while visitors paid an entrance fee and 
expected to see unknown curiosities. Donators were generous but in 
return wanted to be remembered infinitely. The advisory board of the 
university was mainly concerned with financial problems. The patrons 
were also dependent on voyagers and distant colleagues to receive 
extraordinary exhibits. The fate of their collection was in jeopardy 
when successors took over. Working extensively with primary sources, the 
paper intends to give insights into the patrons’ joys and struggles in 
hosting three collections of an early modern university.


The Patrons' Input II
Chair: Susan Bracken

Thu, March 31, 3:30 to 5:00pm, Hynes Convention Center, Level Two, 204

Nathan Flis, The Paston Treasure

The Paston Treasure is the first painting to depict an English 
Schatzkammer and will be the focus of an exhibition at the Yale Center 
for British Art and Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery in 2018. The 
painting was commissioned, c. 1676-79, by Sir Robert Paston, 1st Earl of 
Yarmouth (1631-1683). Recent conservation treatment has revealed 
iconographic puzzles within its painted layers that underlie apparent 
changes of decision and iconography, by artist and patron, to create its 
final appearance. The painting is an iconic memorial to the collecting 
of Sir William Paston, 1st Baronet of Oxnead (1610-1663), who travelled 
through Europe, reaching Alexandria and Jerusalem in 1638-39. A number 
of recently discovered inventories of Oxnead Hall, the countryseat built 
by Sir William, reveal that Oxnead housed an extensive collection of 
curiosities, schatzkammer objects and paintings, until now lost to the 
record.

Alesandra Becucci, Ho visto la prontezza del pittore: 
Seventeenth-Century Military Nobility’s Art Purchases

The paper considers the role of seventeenth-century military noblemen in 
the Habsburg service in the process of building up their art 
collections. In particular, it explores the Habsburg military nobility’s 
actual involvement in the choice of artworks and in the maintenance of 
contacts with artists producing them. The mobility inherent to these 
noblemen’s military and diplomatic activity often implied the need of a 
reliable network of agents, able to carry out the patrons’ orders for 
purchases, payments and display. On the other hand, frequent 
displacements on duty allowed this nobility to directly get in touch 
with the most active art markets in Europe. By considering an unusual 
category of patrons and their collecting habits, this paper argues that 
patronage practices and luxury acquisitions in early modern Europe 
should be reconsidered as operating at several levels, depending on 
context, circumstances, and mediators conditioning the patrons’ choices.

Tomasz Grusiecki, Connoisseurship as a Dialogic Process: The Kunstkammer 
of Sigismund III Vasa

Sigismund III Vasa (r. 1587-1632) was the first Polish-Lithuanian 
monarch to create a Kunstkammer in his official residence. However, 
historians of early modern art collecting have traditionally assumed 
that Polish-Lithuanian model of connoisseurship was a direct transplant 
from major European cultural centres. In this paper, I contend against 
classifying the transfer of an art-collecting practice from western 
Europe to Poland-Lithuania as an unmediated cultural diffusionism from 
the centre to a periphery. I argue that Sigismund’s cultural input was 
crucial in producing a local form of connoisseurship. Polish-Lithuanian 
gentry so fervently attacked and rejected art collecting as a 
respectable mode of sociability that Sigismund and his defenders needed 
to get their act together. A series of clashes between the court and the 
gentry offered a unique context in which to debate the value of art. 
 From this dialogic tension, a specific set of conditions emerges where 
Sigismund’s agency as a collector can be re-considered.
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