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Artists belonged to a hierarchy according to their appointed positions in the grand duke's court. The favored sculptors and architects, and to a lesser extent the painters, were assured plenty of work and economic security, but they were required to do the ruler's bidding. From them Cosimo required an unparalleled mixture of crushing pomp, elaborate craftsmanship and theatricality of expression. His taste was typified by an octagonal jasper picture frame (see color spread overleaf) created in the grand-ducal workshops, then headed by the sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini. This object, riotously embellished with gilded bronze and carved fruit in pietre dure—a collective name for the semiprecious stones of which the last Medici were so inordinately fond—is certainly one of the most grandiose images of conspicuous consumption in all Western art. It makes Fabergé, in retrospect, look like Mies van der Rohe. The frame embodies one of Cosimo's principles: more is more. (The refrain that hums through Florentine art theory of the time is to "enrich the simplest things.") The painting in the frame, a Madonna and Child by the court artist Carlo Dolci, sums up another theme favored by Cosimo: piety. This blend of religious sentiment and florid materialism, performed in the simultaneous interests of God and the duke, is all but incomprehensible today; but it produced its masterpieces.
Another piece, also thought to be by Foggini, is the Reliquary of Saints of the Dominican Order—a gilded bronze temple with a dome made of rock-crystal scales and figurines of the saints in rare colored stone. Such works exist on a level of technical brilliance that against all the odds keeps vulgarity at bay. In the case of the Reliquary of St. Sigismund, the richness of substances (the silver figures glittering against the ebony tabernacle) seems like a Baroque restatement of the medieval belief that precious materials could in themselves symbolize the glories of heaven.
Bronze & Baroque. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this huge show is the way in which it reveals how Florentine Baroque looks forward to the later Rococo style. The show is not all a matter of ponderous wealth, especially not the bronzes and plaques by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, Foggini and his nephew and pupil Filippo della Valle. Bronze was one of Cosimo III's favorite substances, and it was to the art of bronze casting that he looked in his effort to reverse—or at least delay—the decline of Florentine sculpture, which had been stagnating since the end of the 16th century. Foggini, who was sent to Rome to study the work of Baroque masters like Bernini, learned to mold his sculptures with lyrical sensuality. This morbidezza—a quality then much prized by Italian connoisseurs—can be seen in the ravishingly decorative terra cotta model for his bronze group of David displaying the severed head of Goliath.