音频游览 Court splendors

If there was one art the Medici mastered, it was that of representation. No dynasty understood better that power is not affirmed by politics and arms alone, but by the splendor of festivities, the magnificence of weddings, music, and theater. Florence thus became a stage where spectacle coincided with government.

The most memorable occasion was the marriage of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV of France: at the Palazzo Pitti was staged the first performance of a new genre, opera, with Peri and Caccini’s Euridice. A unique model reconstructs that theatrical space, symbol of a revolution destined to change music. At the banquet there even appeared sugar statues inspired by the inventions of Giambologna, ephemeral marvels that Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger celebrated as wonders of luxury and imagination.

Of Maria there also remains in the hall an intense portrait from the workshop of Rubens, showing her during the proxy marriage: before her, her uncle Ferdinando I representing the distant groom, and Cardinal Aldobrandini sealing the union. It is the image of a princess who from Florence would carry the dynasty to the throne of France.

But Medicean splendor was not exhausted in weddings. Power also shone in the most spectacular portraiture: the wax portraits on slate, baroque masterpieces that seem to anticipate the three-dimensional, and the famous Florentine diamond, the largest in the world at the time, immortalized by Orazio Fidani in a painting with Maria Maddalena of Austria wearing it in her hair as a symbol of magnificence.

And again, music: in 1700 Bartolomeo Cristofori invented for the Grand Prince Ferdinando the first pianoforte in history. A working model of its mechanism recalls how, from Florence, was born the instrument destined to dominate the centuries to come.