Giorgio Vasari

Initially excluded from the Medici court, Giorgio Vasari worked mainly in his native town of Arezzo and occasionally in Venice, Naples, and Rome during his early career. His opportunity to settle permanently in Florence came only in 1554, when, thanks to the intercession of some influential members of the ducal entourage, the artist was appointed by Duke Cosimo I (1519–1574) to supervise the renovation of the Palazzo della Signoria (otherwise known as the Palazzo Vecchio), the traditional headquarters of Florentine politics. Cosimo decided to move his official seat from the Palazzo Medici in via Larga to the Palazzo della Signoria in May 1540, and the new residence underwent a major renovation that included the decoration of the rooms with extensive fresco cycles celebrating the history of the duke’s ancestors. The Morgan drawing is the design for the ceiling of the Sala di Lorenzo il Magnifico, one of the six rooms composing the so-called Quartiere di Leone X, decorated between 1556 and 1560.

The Morgan sheet is one of the four extant preparatory drawings that Vasari created for the Sala di Lorenzo, and the only one representing the entire ceiling of the room.¹ The elaborate design follows a decorative scheme that Vasari used for all the ceilings of the Quartiere di Leone X.² A central panel is surrounded by an elegant frame of grottesche and flanked by four hemicycles containing additional scenes, below each of which is a portrait medallion supported by putti. Pairs of Virtues occupy the triangular spaces adjacent to the hemicycles.³

Meticulously following the program devised by the erudite Florentine Cosimo Bartoli (1503–1572),⁴ in the central panel Vasari painted Lorenzo il Magnifico on a throne surrounded by ambassadors from around the world. While the ambassadors proffer exotic gifts, including a pair of camels and a giraffe visible at the back of the scene,⁵ a papal delegate presents a cardinal’s hat, a clear allusion to Lorenzo’s fourth son, Giovanni de’ Medici, who was named cardinal in 1489 and elected pope in 1513, with the name of Leo X. Around the central panel, four additional episodes complete the narration of Lorenzo’s achievements: the duke appears as a humanist at the left (Lorenzo Among the Scholars and the Men of Letters), as a warrior at the right (Lorenzo at the Siege of Sarzana), and as a diplomat at top and bottom (Lorenzo Before the King of Naples and Lorenzo Presiding at the Congress of Cremona). Finally, allegorical figures celebrate Lorenzo’s virtues.

The Morgan drawing provides a good pretext to discuss Vasari’s working method. Because of the scale of the decoration—more than fifteen rooms neededto be painted during the first phase of the work—Vasari used drawings as instruments to coordinate his vast team of assistants. Obliged to conceive a large number of different scenes, he systematically relied on a portfolio of stock figures reusing the same models in different contexts to create new compositions. The figure of the duke sitting on the throne, for example, is an element that Vasari had already used in his posthumous portrait of Lorenzo il Magnifico painted twenty years earlier, around 1534 (Gallerie degli Uffi Florence). Similarly, the figure of the kneeling soldier at the bottom right in the Morgan drawing reproduces in reverse an old idea that Vasari used in his Adoration of the Magi in the church of Santa Maria della Scolca, Rimini (1547).⁶ The painter also derived the giraffe and the group of three horses on the left from the Rimini Adoration, as well as the figure of a man emerging from the lower edge of the picture. This last element is not present in the Morgan sheet but appears in a highly finished drawing for the central panel of the ceiling,⁷ as well as in the final fresco.

—MSB

Footnotes:

1. Other preparatory drawings for the same fresco are in Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1185 e and inv. 14455 f; Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, inv. 176; and Albertina, Vienna, inv. 272. See Härb 2015, nos. 258, 259, 260.
2. Other projects for the ceilings of the Quartiere di Leone X’s rooms are now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 2172, 2174, 2175, 2176. See Härb 2015, nos. 240, 255, 262, 268.
3. As recently noted by Rick Scorza, the personification originally drawn at the lower right edge was edited by Vasari, who carefully excised it and replaced with a depiction of the Buon Giudizio, now visible on the sheet. See Scorza 2017, 370.
4. Diplomat, mathematician, philologist, and humanist, Cosimo Bartoli worked as secretary to Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and as diplomatic agent for Duke Cosimo I. Author of numerous books, including the celebrated Ragionamenti accademici (1567), Bartoli devised the iconographic programs of the decoration of the ducal quarters in the Palazzo della Signoria. The design for the ceiling of the Sala di Lorenzo il Magnifico is carefully illustrated in a letter sent by Bartoli to Vasari in the spring of 1556. See Frey 1911, 1:437–38, no. CCXXXII.
5. A famous giraffe, also known as “la giraffa di Lorenzo,” was presented to the duke in 1486 by Sultan al-Ashraf Qaitbay of Egypt in an attempt to win the support of the Medici.
6. The altarpiece is now in the church of San Fortunato, Rimini. See Härb 2015, 289–90.
7. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, inv. 1185e. See Härb 2015, 409, no. 258.