Florence

Monday

James Panero

Meet the Medici at the Met

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.

Medici
Wine
Henry Jeffreys

The romantic return of Florence’s wine windows

Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways for tiny people, though they would have to be quite athletic tiny people, as the openings are three feet off the ground. But they’re not entrances for Tuscan pixies — they’re for selling wine. There are more than 150 buchette del vino dotted around the city and they date back to the 17th century. You’d knock on the door, hand over some money and a bottle, and the mysterious person behind the wall would fill it full of wine. It wouldn’t have been just any old plonk either; the great merchant houses of the city like Frescobaldi, Ricasoli and Antinori, who still make some of Tuscany’s best wines, would sell in this way.

Monday

Marco Grassi

Pictures at an exhibition

Deeply learned and with a style all his own, Marco Grassi is as at home with Duccio as with Norton Simon; Bronzino as with Bernard Berenson; a painting on his desk as with a ‘Last Supper’ in Florence’s Basilica of Santa Croce. In the Kitchen of Art presents Grassi’s most memorable essays over a span of nearly 20 years. Beginning with a previously unpublished memoir of his Florentine upbringing, and continuing with in-depth critical discussions of the greats of Italian art along with recollections of the grandest collectors of the 20th century, this book shows the art world in the round.

grassi

Sunday

James Panero

Secrets of the maestro

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At last, some justice for the ‘teacher of Leonardo da Vinci’. Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, reveals that this master was more than a mere footnote to his famous apprentice. Born around 1435 into the artistic boomtown that was Florence under the Medici, Andrea del Verrocchio may, in fact, have been the original Renaissance man. The greatest artists of the Florentine Renaissance took root in his studio and grew out of his mentorship: not just Leonardo, who stayed with him for over a decade, but also Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi and, most probably, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli too.