It is, on all counts, a stupendous show. The exhibition of late Florentine Baroque art, jointly organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts (where it runs through June 2) and the city of Florence (which will show it through the summer in the Pitti Palace), includes some 300 works. Collected in the exhibit, which is called "The Twilight of the Medici," are paintings, drawings, sculpture, medals, furniture, reliquaries and jewelry. Most are unfamiliar; all belong to a style and period—from 1670 to 1743—that only lately has come under the scholar's gaze. The result is a dazzling feat of reinstatement.
Ever since Bernard Berenson issued his ukases against it, Florentine Baroque has been considered mostly worthless baublery. Deluged with writhing allegorical nudes, surfeited by an amoral lavishness of porphyry, onyx, rock crystal and emeralds, lost in an exuberant jungle of gratuitous decoration, the viewer is a very long way from the limpid austerities of the Florentine Renaissance. The eye must struggle to adjust itself. But once that effort is made, "The Twilight of the Medici" becomes most rewarding.
To begin with, it is a vivid lesson in how even a grossly decayed and autocratic society may still produce remarkable art. For nearly 300 years, the Medici ruled Florence, gaining more and more power until finally they were the grand dukes of Tuscany. In 1737 Giovanni Gastone de' Medici, the last son of the family, died in a bedroom from which he had hardly stirred for eight years. It had been a long fall from the wolfish and pragmatic energies of the earlier Medici, like Lorenzo the Magnificent, to this vague and dropsical old prince whose face, as it survives in his portrait busts, was pleated with fat, the eyeballs bulging like those of a boiled pug dog.
Cannon & Castles. The last 70 years of Medici control were not rich in sympathetic characters. The Grand Duke Cosimo III, Giovanni Gastone's father, was a gloomy paranoiac who ruled for 53 years, longer than any other Medici, and turned his city into a religious police state. A traveler in Florence noted in 1720 that "there were, when we were there, Spies in all Companies—by which His Royal Highness was acquainted with every thing that passed—and the Cannon in the Castle, which were pointed towards the City, were always ready charg'd, in case of any popular insurrection." One of the few activities that can be said to have prospered in Florence in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was art—that, and music too, for Cosimo's older son Ferdinando (1663-1713) was patron to both Handel and Scarlatti.