CONFERENCE:
A Forgotten World: Florentine Patricians as Patrons,
Collectors, Cultural Brokers under Medici rule (1530-1743)
Date: 3-5 March 2011
Location:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Conference fee:
€50 (entire conference) / €25 (for students and PhD-students) / €35
(One day)
Registration:
online
The flourishing cultural life of the
Florentine patricians during the principate of the Medici has been
forgotten or ignored for a long time. There has been little interest in
patricians as commissioners of palaces, villas and chapels, as
participants in academies and confraternities, and in patrician
engagement in literature, theatre, music and art. In the twentieth
century historians have systematically portrayed the patricians as
sycophant courtiers, only interested in gaining titles and estates. The
fact that reality was much more complex and dynamic, has become clear
only in the last two decades. Through groundbreaking research in the
field of socio-economic history, prosopography and political science,
the image we have of the Florentine patrician is now changing. These
studies show that patricians, as a group, were still holding on to most
of the economic and institutional power they had obtained in the
fifteenth century. The studies also show that patrician diplomatic
missions played an important role in the arranging of marriages and
foreign politics of the Medici. Remarkable is that this historical
revisionism is taken up only by a few cultural historians, even though
we now know that the contribution of patricians to the cultural
dynamics of early modern Florence was highly significant.
The ambition of this conference is to consider the cultural
contribution of patricians to the Florentine society and to discuss
this from an interdisciplinary perspective. The main question we will
address is: how can we distinguish these dynamics that are already
observed by economical and political disciplines, in the cultural
field? Other relevant questions are: how can we compare the cultural
activities and self-representation of the patricians to that of the
Medici? Did patricians only imitate the example of the court or did
they facilitate the Medici?
Did they emulate the grand dukes or were they seeking to rebel against
them? Were the cultural objectives of the patricians united, or did
they differ among families or groups? By stimulating the debate on an
international level, we hope to shed more light on the nature and
intentions of patrician art patronage and their collecting activities
in this period.
For more
information, the programme and registration:
http://www.rug.nl/let/onderzoek/onderzoekinstituten/icog/conferenties/florentinepatricians/index
Organizing
committee:
Chair: Henk van Veen
(University of Groningen)
Elisa Goudriaan
(University of Leiden)
Klazina Botke
(University of Groningen)
Bouk Wierda
(University of Groningen)