Preliminary Programme

Luxury production instead to be viewd as an old fashioned and unproductive way to the industrial growth occupied certainly an important place in many national and urban centres. Fundamental is to explore the relationships between luxury production, collectionism, art and decorative arts that were consumed either by the same social strata or by larger strata of consumers, without regarding our modern nineteenth-century criteria. We would like to look to Northern Europe as well to Southern European countries, especially to Italian peninsula. Indeed, it would be useful, instead to speak of an economic decline in the Seventeenth Century, or of an expansion of rural industry as preparation to the Industrial Revolution, to look to the conversion and adaptation of many urban centres where quality seemed to confront with quantity, constrained as were many European towns to adress international competition, and facing delicate environmental problems. That was the case of Venice or Florence or Antwerp or Amsterdam, where many polluted productions were expelled from the center of town or outside the lagoon. The conversion of some industrial production (metalworks, wool, leather to silk and to a more sophisticated and renewed artisan production) confirmed the trend. (Show less)

Don Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Eleanor degli Albizzi and her lover, Cosimo I, is not usually regarded as an international art entrepreneur. It has long been known that his project for the Medici mausoleum, known as the Cappella de’ Principi and located at San Lorenzo in Florence, rather than that presented by the legendary architect Buontalenti, was chosen 1602 by a panel of experts including the sculptor Giambologna. But his activities as a soldier and even as an alchemist have long eclipsed the artistic side of his activities. New documents from the Medici Archive Project based in Florence make possible a more accurate rendering of a figure who had a powerful impact on the Florentine art world in the early Baroque.
This paper focuses on Giovanni’s careful selection of marbles all over Northern Europe and and his efforts to form a network of international contacts to organize shipments down to Italy for the construction of the mausoleum. It goes on to examine Giovanni’s role as a conoisseur of paintings commissioned from all over Europe for the Uffizi gallery and the Medici villa at Artimino. The role of conoisseurs connected with the main patronage families in Europe at this time was crucial for the development of a market in luxury goods, and much work has concentrated on the patronage history of the families themselves. From the specific case study at hand, this paper draws some conclusions regarding the formation of an international luxury market for artistic productions and art materials, and the creation of value in art. (Show less)