HRH Ottaviano de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

The Medici are one of the most important dynasties in Italian history, inextricably linked to the history of Florence, and hence to a city that is bound up in the collective imagination with the emergence of the Renaissance, the paradigm of republicanism and the origins of modern democracy. The Medici are an integral part of that history. Above all, the Medici succeeded in combining the major economic resources at their disposal with an intense political activity. They were also engaged in patronage, following the precepts of Gaius Cilneus Maecenas (68 BC-8AD), who believed that fostering arts and literature always brought a return in terms of political consensus. The Medici transformed Florence into an ideal city, with an architectural structure consisting of masterpieces unique in the world. They fostered the creation of magnificent and peerless monuments capable of expressing the unrivalled technical level achieved by the artists who worked under their protection over the centuries. Their far-sightedness made it possible to preserve a series of works of art of such power that they have continued to be a daily source of inspiration for later generations.

The Medici pursued a cultural itinerary marked out by the greatest masterpieces ever produced over the history of human life on this earth, making Florence a city in which man and his rational action are at the hub, a place in which one can ideally achieve perfection through the rules of perspective and geometry, a place in which man is fee to devote himself to understanding the meaning of perfection. In Florence, the mathematical perfection of forms became an echo of divine perfection.

Patronage became meshed with political power in its classic sense and the Medici were its epitome interpreters. Humanity owes a great deal to the family that more than any other succeeded in binding a historical era to the phenomenon of magnificence, in inspiring others to patronize artists to produce works of art that turned out to be unutterably exceptional. The Medici made their name at the height of a season when Florence was the hub of Italian, European and global history. The advent of perspective in the arts was a case history in science, a Copernican revolution ahead of its time, an accident that allowed artists to represent reality as an image of divine perfection. Florence created genius and genius repaid the city by making it ideal. It is also necessary to represent human creation at the core of genius, since the masterpieces that the genius of Florence succeeds in creating underlie the perfection that man himself strives for.

In Florence, the world became the result of art and of human will, a maze and a utopia as rational as could be. The Medici were the guiding thread of Florence as an ideal city, ever poised between active and contemplative life. They contributed to the creation of the world in which no fracture between action and contemplation could be perceived, in which man transformed the world into a work of art in which the human being expresses his innate creativity. The aim of humanist education was to create informed individuals, cultured men and good citizens, to make people aware and hence intellectually present within society. This is why the Medici are a family, or rather a dynasty, that must always be placed at the hub of a cultural revolution around which the Western world slowly took shape.

– Excerpted from “The Medici, The Power of a Dynasty” by Fabrizio Ricciardelli