| Art historical research in late 16th and early 17th century Florence has mostly to do with art commissions of the Medici family. Besides the Medici family however, there was a rich cultural society, in which many Florentine patricians participated. They gave art commissions for their own palaces, villas, chapels and gardens, they collected paintings and antiquities and they organised themselves in formal and informal academies. Thanks to their diplomatic missions to other courts, they experienced many new cultural influences, which they introduced in Florence. Very little of this rich cultural world is still known to us today, because many of their collections were lost or dispersed, because of the manipulation of history-writing by the Medici family and because of the inaccessibility of the patrician palaces that still remain. By means of archival research the cultural world of the patricians and their importance for the cultural society in early modern Florence can be reconstructed. Thanks to their high social standing, the Florentine patricians could operate as patrons, brokers and clients at the same time. They were key figures between members of the Medici family and artists and between the Roman and Florentine court. In the coming 4 years I will focus my research on four Florentine patricians and their brokerage activities between Tuscan artists and powerful patrons in Florence and Rome. These four patricians are Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (1568-1647), Giovanni Niccolini (1544-1611), his son Filippo Niccolini (1586-1666) and Piero Guicciardini (1569-1626). In my dissertation I will answer the following question: In which way did the brokerage activities of Florentine patricians innovate the cultural life in early modern Florence and how did they contribute to the geographical and social mobility of artists? Besides secondary literature and writings of contemporaries, my main sources are the correspondences of the patricians with artists and patrons, which have been preserved in family archives in Florence. My research originated from the ideas of Henk Th. van Veen about the cultural habit of Florentine patricians (1530-1670) and was further developed by analyzing publications about brokerage in early modern Europe and comparing the methods of brokerage used in these social networks with the strategies of Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger. |
