The Medici Phenomenon

Catalog description

This course will explore the long durée of the Medici experience somewhat obliquely. While the protagonists, accomplishments, and events that have marked this family's history for over four centuries will remain the same, the methodologies employed to unlock these personal and public histories will be drawn from a great array of conventional and unconventional sources (not just archival correspondence, inventories of objects, works of art, and manuscripts, but also early modern newspapers, digital reconstructions, forensic reports, restoration diagnoses, postcards, films, menus, blueprints, passports, romance novels, 19th-century guides, posters etc). Special attention will be paid to their self-fashioning strategies, information control systems, and patterns of taste. Also crucial to this ten-week exploration will be how their critics constructed defamatory and inflammatory mytho-narratives, many of which became part of standardized accounts. Although they became extinct in 1743, their specific gravitas pervaded to the point of becoming synonymous with Florence and the Renaissance. And yet, much of their kaleidoscopic contributions have been submerged by a tsunami of often limiting epithets: "the Godfathers of the Renaissance", "first among equals", "bankers of the popes" and so on. More than a house or dynasty, the Medici should be seen as a phenomenon, whose nature was successfully protean and omnivorous, but also conflicting and self-destructive. The principal aim of this course is to bring to the fore covert histories, stories, and mythologies which allow us to forge new trajectories of Medici identities. To further inform this scholarly experience, each week we will be critically reading and addressing secondary sources that have marked the "history of the history" of the Medici as well as more recent ones that have frustrated mainstream scholarship. Limited…