 My name is Joel Goldberg. I'm an associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. I'm filling in for the dean, Bill Falls, who is out sick today with whatever is going around. So he sends his apologies for not being able to attend and looks forward to watching it on video. Another great reason to record these. So I want to welcome you to the second full professor lecture of this academic year. The College of Arts and Sciences initiated this lecture series in 2007 as a way of providing well-earned recognition to faculty who have been recently promoted to the rank of full professor. Today, I'm honored to introduce Kelly Dedeo, professor in the Department of Art and Art History. Kelly Dedeo has established herself as one of the major scholars in the area of Italian Renaissance studies and 16th century Spanish sculpture. She has written four books in counting. Check in next week. There might be a fifth, I don't know, the rate that she's producing them. Numerous articles and papers. She's in demand at professional conferences, symposia, book anthologies, reviews in professional journals, and has organized two major conferences. In addition to a variety of grants, she secured a prestigious fellowship at Villa Fittati, am I mispronouncing that family? The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, located just outside of Florence. I wasn't invited to check out the facilities beforehand tonight. It's no surprise, then, that her colleagues describe her track record as formidable. They also note that she has managed to accomplish all of this without losing sight of the importance of excellence in teaching, having been nominated for the University's Teaching Award, the Krebschmoree's Award at least five times. Six times. Even half dozen right there. She remains committed to her teaching and is accessible to her students. She's referred to as a dynamic and charismatic instructor. I think we'll see some of that today. In short, Kelly de Dio exemplifies the teacher-scholar model. Clearly, we are extremely fortunate to have someone of Kelly's reputation, experience, and achievement amongst our faculty. But before we hear Kelly's lecture, I would like to turn the floor over to Bill Mears, the professor of art history, and the Richard and Pamela Eater-Greeninggold professor. We'll tell us a little bit more about Kelly and her many accomplishments. Bill. It's a pleasure to be able to introduce my colleague and friend, Kelly Poundstretner de Dio. You've heard somewhat of what she's accomplished in her time here. The books she has written, how she placed her in an international category, and we witnessed that two years ago when she hosted Symposium, which brought speakers from all of the United States and from Europe to our humble campus. It was certainly one of the most impressive symposia that arts and sciences, or certainly the humanities have been able to put on at UVM, and certainly the most impressive that the department has ever been able to host. And she's also been extraordinarily successful at producing high-quality work, as you hear four books, and a fifth, did have overkill, but that's beside the point. She is, as was suggested, a dynamic teacher, and we see this in the ease with which students come to her classes, and the success that those students have, both in her classes and in the classes that we teach them in later. And many of those students go on, some into the field. She has sent a number of students on into graduate programs, and also into a variety of internships. We now have a student at the Victoria and Albert doing an internship because of Kelly's connections. So she is one of the great prides of the program, and one of the strongest members of our small team. But that isn't really who she is. You need a story. Not that. Kelly, who this person really is, why the university is lucky to have her. So Kelly joined us directly from Florence. She arrived with her husband, that'd be. And her son, and I'm not quite sure how many trunks of clothes. And that first semester, I witnessed the fashion of Italy stream past my office door. Both the computer all the way. And for every outfit, never repeated, I might have, a pair of shoes to match. It set a very high standard, higher than the books, I'm sure. And so I watched all of September, and all of October. And then it got cold in November, and that lovely Italian-designed coat came out. And so too, she continued through October and November. But it was an early winter. And yes, those lovely Italian shoes did walk through the snow, over to the Fleming on a regular basis. And that coat did get bundled up. But I left for Christmas break, very much aware that I was going to get a call from the chair, telling me, we were doing a new search. There was absolutely no way that we were getting her back for the winter. And so when we came back, I was happy to see the chair get in her office. And I was very, very interested to notice that there had been a change. Now there was a black-down coat. No more of this Italian designer stuff. And instead of those lovely, but very small shoes, there were boots. Not Italian-designed boots, no, Vermont boots. Now, the story is amusing, I think, but it tells you some things about Kelly which are important to know. One, that she is tenacious, and she will fight through, and she will demand even the weather accommodate her at least for a while. But then there is the reality and adaptation and compromise comes into play. Compromising on things that one can compromise on, but never abandoning the things that really matter. These are important traits. They are the traits of a colleague, someone you want to entrust with the responsibility of the teaching, but also entrust with the responsibility of being a functioning and fully involved member of the community. She is someone you can trust and someone you can depend on. Someone who will set high standards and maintain them but knows when to adapt them, when to compromise. Never sacrificing that which really matters in the process. So we're lucky. We're very lucky she came back after that first introduction to Vermont. We're lucky, I'll call it lucky, and it's going to be very lucky in the coming years as we have lots of things to face and we need people like you to face them. So thank you for staying. And please come share with us. I have to admit that following Bill Mears is not something I would wish on anyone as I was thinking about how I was going to put together this lecture. And even as I thought about the title of this lecture, it was Bill that inspired me. If you've never seen Bill Mears lecture, you absolutely must. He is the true treasure of our department. You can be sure, an incredible lecturer and always has wonderful titles. And as you've already heard, wonderful stories to tell that and weaves them together always so beautifully. I think you can tell already that I'm actually the lucky one. And I certainly feel that in every way as I look out and see those of you who have come to support me yet again, my family, my friends, my students and former students and absolutely my amazing colleagues, not only from my department that I cherish so much, but also from across the college, people that I've met from my very first visit here, like Christina Mazzoni and people that I am meeting as I serve in new ways, the college that I love so much and feel so indebted to. So thank you again for coming and allowing me to share some of my research with you. It's not something I get to do very often actually in such a public forum in Vermont. I've lectured all over the place, but strangely, I haven't really found many venues when I worked my stuff in Vermont, so I'm happy to share some of that new research here. I would like to say as well that I've been very fortunate to receive a lot of funding from the university to help support my research, especially from the college and some of that research you'll hear today and it's been an incredibly valuable and important thing for me. Those four and a half books would not have been written without the support of the college, so I'm truly grateful. So Bill's already mentioned that we moved here from Florence and that's an adjustment in a lot of ways. As you, if you've been to Florence, you can well imagine. So taking my lead from my amazing colleague Bill, I too am going to share a little story. So four months after we moved from Vermont, I mean, to Vermont from Florence, a shipping truck finally backed up to our door in Colchester to deliver the crate of boxes of books and baby equipment for our baby son Tomaso, now 13, clothes because as you've heard, this is an important component of my life, photographs and other precious objects. We had carefully packed up and before our departure had enlisted all of our family members in Italy to help us carefully package everything and bubble wrap and box it up and then we paid a shipping company $3,500 which was more money than UVM gave me to move but that's okay. To pack and ship these things into a crate that would then be taken from Florence by a truck and then get to the port at Livorno and be packed up in one of those gigantic aluminum shipping crates and we hoped that we would one day see that again but we weren't frankly very sure. When it arrived in Colchester, we were thrilled. It meant it had taken that voyage from Florence to Livorno across the Atlantic, arrived in Boston, gotten loaded on a truck and had made it finally to our tiny little condo in Colchester that we were starting out in. Some of that excitement faded however, when the moving guy opened up the back of the truck and we saw with great surprise and sadness that most of the contents of our life had been destroyed. They were in pieces. Our boxes were just completely falling apart and I'll never forget it. My whole set of silverware was strewn on the floor of the truck. I took that as a particularly bad sign that anything more fragile had arrived intact. So we were very worried about what all had happened and I still come across things and I think whatever did happen to that thing and I think, oh yeah, well it's in the Atlantic somewhere. All right, so we jumped ahead a few months and the next summer I won a fellowship to do research in Spain and I was commissioned by the National Gallery to write an essay about sculpture collections in Spain for this huge book they were doing about collecting in various places in Europe during the early modern period which is my area of interest. I got to Madrid and started doing the research for that essay and I do archival research. So I was looking in inventories and different sorts of types of documentation to see what I could dig up because as you'll hear me talking about for the next half an hour or so, people did not really think that the Spanish cared anything about sculpture and that there really wasn't any sculpture that was collected in Spain during this period but that turns out to be entirely erroneous. So as I started uncovering these documents, it really started the wheels turning. I was so excited about where all of this was gonna go, how many books I could whip out of this research I was uncovering I've gotten to. And I started walking around the city and Madrid, I love Florence absolutely but Madrid is one of my very favorite places on the face of the earth and it is a wonderful city to walk through and I was walking through and looking around and thinking about all of this information I was finding and I came across this city square. This is the Plaza Mayor, one of the most beautiful squares in Spain in my opinion though there are many other beautiful city squares in Spain. But this one particularly appealed to me for a number of reasons that will become very obvious in the next few minutes. As I went into this city square, I looked and saw this sculpture, a sculpture I knew well, a sculpture that had been made by a Florentine artist at the end of the Renaissance, his name is Pietro Taca. It was a sculpture that had been started by his master, John Bologna, one of the most respected artists of his day. And I knew that this sculpture being made by a Florentine artist had likely been made in Florence where those massive and well equipped foundries were to make such large scale sculptures. So I figured it had been made in Florence and arrived in Spain. And from what I could tell, it looked like it had survived the trip pretty well. A hell of a lot better than our belongings that never really arrived intact did. And so that got me thinking, how did that get here? How did they make a sculpture like this of this size and of this weight and have it get all the way from Florence which is landlocked really and get it all the way from there to then arrive at the port of Spain and then Madrid is incredibly landlocked and difficult roads you have to go through to get to the city and how did they possibly manage that? And so I started there an exploration of things that I never in my life thought I would be interested in. What kind of boats did they use? Did they have to design new sorts of equipment to get those things loaded up onto the ships? I mean, these are things that weigh 12,000 pounds or more. So what kind of mechanisms were important? How much did all of this cost? If our load of cardboard boxes and stuff that really didn't weigh that much except for my books and my shoes cost $3,500. How much could that possibly have cost them? And on top of that, why was it worth it? Who thought it was worth it to go through all of that labor and expense in order to get it to Madrid? So I am an archival historian and researcher and what that means is that I spend more time than is actually healthy in the archives, both in Spain, especially in Madrid and in Florence. While I was preparing this talk, I was looking for images of these different archives I've worked in and some examples of some documents to show as well just so you can kind of see what I do. And I saw on the webpage for my favorite archive in Madrid, the historical material archives in Madrid, a photograph of a researcher hard at work and oh my God, it was me. And I thought, oh my, I think that they took this picture because I know that they're all talking about me when I'm there because when I go to Madrid it's for these intensive research campaigns and they have the most wonderful hours of any archive in the world and they're open for 10 hours a day, which is extraordinary. And I go there, I'm waiting when they unlock the door in the morning and they have to shove me out at night. So I am a full on 10 hour a day person and they worry about me. I've actually had them bring me a candy bar in the middle of the day, like you really need to take a little bit of a pause. But anyway, I swear they took this photograph to document this insane American who comes there as often as she's able and spends ungodly amounts of time there. You can see that the Spanish woman across from me looks easily more sane than I do. You get that sort of nervous energy just looking at the back of me. Anyway, what sorts of things was I looking at? I was looking at inventories especially and in my very first day in the archive when I was still a grad student actually I found an inventory of a sculptor that I worked on. I was writing my dissertation on and that of his son was also a sculptor. So this is the kind of document that I look at. This is a page from the inventory of Pompeo Leoni, something I published, I don't know, in my first years here at UVM. But you can see, for example, in the first line it says that he owned a book of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. Well you can imagine as a Renaissance scholar I about fell out of my chair in the archive and knew I was on the path to some pretty exciting finds. So he had drawings but he also had a sizeable collection of sculptures and as I've said, he wasn't the only one. These inventories, so they may look like chicken, look like chicken scratch to you. I promise that if you spend enough time you learn how to make out the letters and you understand that this notary makes his T's and R's this way and so forth and you just build it up until you're able to read the whole thing. Trust me. Again, it's a madness, the archive. All of us who are archival researchers talk about the sickness that we share. So it's not healthy. I'm not trying to suggest anyone go and do it but it can be very exciting. So the other place that I spend a lot of time researching is in Florence. That is where I was living for seven years when I was finishing up my dissertation and then I had a postdoc in the State Archives in Florence and I know that archive really well and I go back there very often to do my research. Why Florence? Well, why not? You saw the first picture but for one thing, the Florentines are absolutely crazy about records and in part that is because the Medici, the great fathers of the Renaissance in Florence were bankers and as bankers they believed in record keeping and they not only wrote many letters but they would write copies of those letters before they sent them off. So it's an extraordinary thing because it means very unusually you can find two sides of a conversation instead of just hearing the one side is the norm in other archives where those families didn't save copies of the letters they were sending out but they keep all of their accounting records. There's absolutely everything, contracts, inventories, work orders, everything. So I knew I would be able to find a great deal of information as I was starting this new project on transport in the Medici archives. While I was a postdoc and as I was continuing to do this research in Florence through various grants and fellowships that I have been fortunate to have, I would read the letters of the Medici family in particular because their letters are fascinating. They are full of wonderful, juicy information. They are in Italian of course and so as Italian is certainly where I'm most comfortable speaking in my second as a second language and so I can read these quite easily but it's also the way that they write. The Florentines are a force of nature and I am married to one so I really say that with a great deal of authority and they are so descriptive and tell you all of these fabulous stories, all kinds of court intrigue and scandals and love affairs and you know, Elianora de Toledo gambles too much and just all kinds of great stuff that you really can't find anywhere else. So it's always a real treat. One of the things that they also talk about is who are we gonna get to do this sculpture? What's our situation with the court of Spain? What's going on in the world right now that makes it so we need to do our best to form an alliance? And so that's what I'm gonna talk about now but just while I have this up just to say that this is an example of some of the correspondence that you find in the Medici archives and this one just happens to talk about the funeral of Michelangelo which is not such a bad thing to read about. All right, so that's kind of the big background about how I do what I do and I guess now I sort of need to explain better why I do this, why I spend this insane amount of time doing this sort of research As a sculpture historian, what became really clear to me early on is that when there was a major crisis on the hands of the Medici, they could win favors by sending sculpture. They would send paintings all the time. Paintings are really cheap, actually. You can roll them up, you can pack them really easily. They're lightweight, no big deal. Send those babies off and they did that all the time. So they would send, like the Duke of Lerma, one of the great men of his time and one who we'll be seeing a project for. He has a collection of 1,500 paintings, most of them Italian by the end of his time as minister in the government because the Florentines are sending paintings as much as possible as are the other princes of Italy. The Spanish want Florentine sculpture in particular because the Florentines were regarded as being the premium sculptors in the world. The only people that come close to the Florentines are the Flemish and they're extraordinary sculptors as well, Lord knows. Paintings, on the other hand, they love Venetian paintings. They like Florentine paintings too, but they love Venetian paintings. So the Florentines understood well that sculpture was their money object. They knew they could really use sculpture. So as a sculpture scholar, obviously this has appeal for me. What I've found and what I'm gonna share with you are these particular case studies that I've been developing so that I'm looking at exactly what the political situation is at that moment that requires such an important gift and then what all it takes to get that gift from Florence all the way to Madrid or wherever else the court finds itself at that time. I do wanna emphasize again, they're sending lots of different sorts of gifts, but sculpture is what they send when something big is happening. So it becomes very interesting to trace. The way that the Medici would send gifts is that in these moments of crisis they would hone in through ambassadors or agents that they placed at the court. They would hone in on who the critical people were that they needed to win over. Sometimes it was the king, but sometimes the kings of Spain were not actually all that interested in the administration of the state. And so it would be men like the Duke of Laerma that I just mentioned that were really sort of controlling the way things were working in the state. And so they would be the targets for these major gifts. And as I said, the Spanish were major collectors. So these gifts were highly sought after and desired by these men and women of the court. So these are the four cases that I've really looked into. We've got from left to right, the crucifixion by Benvenuto Cellini. In my opinion, incredibly mediocre sculpture by Cristoforo Statti of Sampson and the Lion. It's now in Chicago at the Art Institute. The sculpture of Sampson by John Bologna, this amazing sculptor who I've already mentioned is the master of Taka. And then that equestrian monument that started this whole thing, the equestrian monument of Philip III by Pietro Taka. So when this really picks up, when these big gifts really start to be sent is when Philip II starts working on a brand new project, a gigantic architectural block here that is the Basilica, the library and the monastery of San Lorenzo at Ellis Goria. This was a little town outside of Madrid. It was a place where Philip could go and relax and hang out with his family, which he did and then the Medici correspondents. They have lovely stories that the ambassadors tell about what a great guy Philip is. And he goes ice skating with his children and just all kinds of just fabulous little gyms like that. That's not really the idea of Philip II that most of us have. However, he famously was involved with the Inquisition. He was this hardcore zealot and a very difficult and severe administrator of the state. So I would say at the very least, I don't know which one is right, but I will say that I think there's a lot greater nuance to his personality than what we get in thinking that he was just this horrible character. Anyway, he starts building the Esquireal in 1563. And right in that moment, you have this member of the Medici family, Francesco de Medici, who has come of age and his father, the Duke Cosimo has died and Francesco takes over and he too wants to have the same sort of titles that his father did. Including the title of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. That title, however, can only be given to him by the Spanish King. So it may not seem like it'd be a big deal like just let the title go, which I had that same sort of feeling last year as I was going through the cycle of becoming full professor, just like let it go, it's just a title. But Francesco, much like myself, not willing to let that go. So he did what he could to win over Philip. And what that meant was finding a sculpture that would be appropriate. And that was a difficult thing sometimes for the Florentines to figure out what was appropriate. What he did is send a crucifix. And it is that crucifix by Cellini. And the reason he sent it is because, well, frankly, it was just kind of laying around. That crucifix had been made by Cellini first for his own funeral for his tomb. And that actually didn't pan out quite as Cellini had hoped. And then it was meant to be a gift from Cellini to the Duke. Well, Francesco and maybe Duke Cosimo didn't really care about it. So he was just in basically a closet, kind of sitting there. So Francesco is looking around for an important gift, one that would be by big name sculptor, as Cellini was, and something that was already ready to roll. So that you took out that whole long and complicated process that's involved when you make a new sculpture. What is that big long process? Well, that was something that I started really looking into. You know, what did they have to do to get the materials to Florence to begin with? There is a scholar that I deeply admire, Bill Wallace, who's a Michelangelo expert and came to that symposium I hear at UVM a couple of years ago. And he has worked on the same issues in the context of Michelangelo's work. And that's been incredibly helpful for me. But what I can tell you is this, it wasn't easy. They would get their marble from Carada, where the greatest, most beautiful white marble is still found, especially in the months of the Caradese. And they would get that marble from Carada, that itself was an unbelievable undertaking that often men died in the process because they would get these big blocks of marble. They would put them on the cart, the hillside is incredibly steep and sometimes they would lose control of the cart and it would take some men out on its way. They built new roads to ship these huge sculptures, these huge blocks of marble. And so roads had to be built in new kinds of carts and a whole pulley system was designed all in the course of the 16th century in part because of their need for sculpture for their own projects but also the ones that they sent out in the world. So here's Carada all the way up here. Once they were able to get it from the mountain down all the way to the shore, the shore at Carada is actually not sufficient enough in its depth to manage the weight of a boat carrying large shipments of marble. So they would have to sort of drag it along if you can imagine until they got to where deeper waters were in Avenza. In Avenza they would then have to transfer it onto a different kind of ship and then they would finally have it make its way all the way down to either Pisa or Livorno. And from there, that's when things got really exciting because you have the Arno River to contend with. The Arno River is not particularly deep and it makes it very complicated to try to ship everything on it. So they had to design new sorts of boats that have very flat bottoms and can manage to be shipped in those seven months of the year when it's actually possible. So barring bad weather or especially drought that made the Arno even more shallow, they waited till there was good weather conditions. They could not do it in the winter. They couldn't do it in parts of the summer. It was just a mess. And they would finally start shipping the thing down the Arno River. It couldn't make it all the way to Florence, however, because Florence, it's definitely not deep enough, the Arno at that point. So they would have to unload it, put it on these carts at the level of Semia. And from Semia they would take it by these opsin pooled carts. Finally to Florence where then it would arrive in the hands of a sculptor who would take a really long time, which the Medici complained about all the time, to finish up their sculptures and have it ready to send. So you can see why this crucifix by Cellini that was just sitting there anyway was the perfect gift to send. On top of that, it's a religious subject matter. And they knew that this was the only kind of gift that Philip II would really accept. He was very wary of accepting things that were not of a religious nature. So they sent this with the hope that it would be the altar piece for the Escorial, for the Church of the Escorial. That's actually not how it panned out. You might note that the crucifix, this beautiful body of Christ as it is displayed here is nude. And while the Florentines were cool with that, the Spanish were not. And as it turned out, my sculptor that I've worked on, Pompeo Leone, was immediately commissioned to make a little thing to go on top of it, lest it offend anyone. So, and it worked out really well for Pompeo actually, because he ended up being the one to get the big sculpture commission for the high altar. So he was happy to see Cellini's failure in this case. It did, however, achieve what it needed to achieve. And that is that it allowed for Francesco to acquire his title in the letter of gratitude for this sculpture. The king calls Francesco Granduca, and so it's official, right? So he got what he was after. I should show you, since I've just pulled you all the way through how it gets to Florence, what it has to do to get to Madrid. And this is an incredibly difficult thing, but from Florence, when the thing is finally done, it has to go backtrack all the way to Livorno or Pisa. And from there, it is loaded up and God willing will arrive. There are terrible storms in this area and you have to worry about pirates. True story. And you have to navigate around until you get to either Alicante or Cartagena where it would be unloaded. And then they had to find men that were brave enough to use their ox and carts and load this thing and take it all the way to the king wherever he was. And so this was truly not an easy task and also an incredibly expensive one that usually took about seven months to transpire. So again, no doubt it was easier just to use something you've got on hand and get that ball rolling. So I've mentioned already that Francesco had come to power but I should tell you part of what his anxiety was about getting the title of Grand Duke. Francesco had been married to one of the Hapsburg women, Joanna D'Austria. And she sadly had died really all of a sudden and that was all kinds of questionable. Everyone was very suspicious because everybody knew that Francesco had a beautiful Venetian woman that he was already housed up with even though poor Joanna was still around. And so when she dies all of a sudden, that's a little problematic, especially because this is of course a family member of Philip II's. On top of that, in the year 1576, this sister of Francesco's, Isabella, had been murdered by her husband with Francesco's blessing. These were not acts that were seen as acceptable even in those days. And certainly Philip no doubt had some worries as he made this guy as the supreme ruler of Tuscany. But this was sort of a family issue to be frank in that soon after Francesco gets this title of Grand Duke and everything seems to be going swimmingly, he evidently has a brother who would kind of like to be Grand Duke as well. And his brother, Ferdinando, had been a cardinal and had served therefore a very high office of the church. And this was an important thing for the Medici for a number of reasons. It helped establish a prominence for the family also but obviously, but it also allowed them to make important connections with the papal state which is always a good idea especially if you're killing family members. So Ferdinando de Medici in around 1588 decides that he's had enough of this Venetian mistress of his brothers and frankly of his brother as well. And he has them poisoned by arsenic and they die. There's some speculation about whether they actually died from arsenic and in fact they recently, maybe five years ago exhumed the bodies to do tests to see if in fact they died from arsenic poisoning. And what they discovered was at the very least Bianca certainly did but poor Francesco was sort of plagued with all sorts of health issues and he had the arsenic as well. It was just hard to say whether that was the thing that killed him or not. I think it's highly suspicious though because they died on the same night. What are the chances of that? So here comes Ferdinando now as Duke of Tuscany and he now needs his title of Grand Duke supported by the king. And so it's time for him to look around and figure out a gift that he should send. And that's of course exactly what he does. The agent at the court in Madrid suggest that a fountain be sent as soon as possible to the Duke of Laerma. Philip III is king at this point and Philip is less interested in the affairs of state. He's really nothing like his father. It must have been all that ice skating, I don't know. But he is just not interested and really turns over that kind of, bothersome affairs of state over to the Duke of Laerma who thoroughly enjoys the power. There's no doubt about it. And eventually poor Duke of Laerma is also banished from the court but that's how the cookie crumbles in Renaissance court life. But this agent at the court, the Medici's agent said, you've got this great fountain. It's by John Bologna, it's fabulous. Even in the letter, he even sends a little sketch of it. He remembers exactly what this fountain looks like and says it would be perfect because the Duke of Laerma is making, he's redesigning his gardens in the place of Vallada Lid which is where the court had moved to. And it would just be the perfect addition to his garden. And so the long trip of this sculpture is sent. So this is a sculpture group. Now I'm the Victorian Albert Museum but had been made for one of the Medici gardens. What I would have you notice about this beautiful group is the dynamic composition here. The bodies are in beautiful twisting motion. There's all kinds of action that you see the arms are extended into space. It expresses fully the action of this moment when Samson is getting ready to bonk this guy over this woman over the head, right? And this will presumably put him into it. So this kind of, man, I don't know why I said woman. Most women are not equipped in that way. Anyway, so when this sculpture starts its journey, the Duke is so eager to get it. And for the Medici they think that means he's gonna help pay for some of the shipping expenses. That is not how that goes. There's all kinds of correspondence back and forth saying, can you see if he would help just with the customs taxes because they were extremely high. And they had to pay customs each time they moved through a different region in Spain. So this sums added up quickly. And they had to send people, sculptors, along with the sculpture to be able to set it up and understand well how to hook the thing up and have it become a fountain. And also just to do any repairs that might be necessary. In the case of this sculpture, as was the case with Cellini sculpture, they're obviously sending something that is available for all sorts of reasons as you've well understood by now. On the other hand, this comes at a great risk. And the risks that are involved are that marble is quite fragile. And no matter what kind of lovely packing job you do, things can get broken, especially in this long and bumpy ride it has particularly in Spain. And it's clear by looking at both the crucifix and the sculpture by John Bologna that things did in fact happen to these sculptures as there are breaks along the arms and in parts of the legs that show that it had to be pieced back together. Ankles and arms are always really fragile and difficult to have arrive intact. So it was worth it because it was quick but it was also more expensive because of the extra care that had to go into the shipping of it and then to send people with it. So what happened the next time around which was frankly immediately, the sculpture of John Bologna's group arrives and the Duke of Lama loves it so much he decides he'd like to have two. And so immediately the agent writes the Duke of Florence frantic saying, oh my God, we've got to come up with another one of these things and what have you got that you can send and the Duke is like I have nothing. And so what happens is that this artist, Christofro Stati is commissioned to do this group that would be the pendant for the Samson and the Philistine and it is the Samson and the lion. So it was meant to be seen together and presumably Stati would have known John Bologna's composition and had it in mind as he was working out what he wanted to do with his group. The marble took its usual long time and great risk and lots of expense to finally get to Florence and Stati worked on this for about three years before it was ready to be sent off. It's ready, it's sent, it gets there, it's actually in pretty good shape. However, the Duke is like this is not John Bologna and I think anybody no matter your familiarity with Renaissance sculpture can see very quickly that this ain't no John Bologna, this is a sculpture that sure was nice and stable and really self-contained so that it would be durable but it's not exactly dynamic and beautiful and shows that superiority of Florentine sculpture and the Florentines say that are at the court say, I don't know why you sent this thing, we said it needed to be John Bologna, you said it was by John Bologna like in all of the shipping documents it says it's by John Bologna and this is not John Bologna unless there be any doubt, he actually signed his name on the trunk of it, it says that it's by Cristofro Stati so there was no real getting around him. But what I would have you think about is that Stati was not just always a miserable sculptor despite what that particular group shows us that in a sculpture that he did just a couple of years earlier, this sculpture of Orpheus that's in the Met, it's a beautiful sculpture, you have this beautiful male figure who has these graceful arms extended, it's not dramatic and dynamic like John Bologna's but neither is the subject matter so it seems to fit in and it's just beautifully done, lovely modeling and so forth. But this was a sculpture that was meant to stay in Florence, it was a commission for a private residence in Florence. So lovely, backside of course, my students know me well, I never forget to show all the way around the figure so you can enjoy it from all sides as the sculptor would want. But when we look at these two sculptures side by side for one thing I think it's really unfair to Stati, right, I mean it's really no competition here but what I would have you think about and what took me a while to come to but I really feel is true is that when they had something ready made, they sent it, it was cheap and ready and they knew that they had to spend the extra money for the expensive packaging but at least you didn't have to pay for a sculptor to do it and wait for him to finish and all of that. When that wasn't the case, they had to make sculptures that were gonna be durable and so Stati's figure is less about his incompetency as a sculptor than it is about their real concerns about shipping and packaging and movement of sculptures. Previous art historians of Spanish art or of Italian sculptures that are sent to Spain and it's not like there's a million of us but you get the point, have looked at these and not really understood why Stati's figure was formed this way and we've just kind of written off these figures as being mediocre, right? But when we look at sculptures in bronze that were sent, we see the kind of dynamism of the figures. Jambalonia, that beloved sculptor did lots of bronze statuettes so little sculptures that were easy to ship and less breakable and Jambalonia talks about how bronze is so much better because you can extend the figure fully into space and it doesn't get broken so easily. So Jambalonia did lots of these and they were highly collected but that doesn't explain this gigantic, heavy, expensive statue that started this whole journey and this is of course that statue in the Plaza Mayor Plaza Mayor in Madrid. This sculpture was done because it was a moment when yet another Medici Duke had come to power, Cosimo II and he too needed his title reconferred. He came thankfully under less problematic circumstances but downside he was a really ineffective leader. You win some, you lose some. So he needed to have these titles reconferred and it was gonna take something massive because in this period of 1604, when all of this story starts, Florence found itself in a very difficult position. Lots is going on in Europe in this period. I won't bore you with the details especially because I know I'm pushing my luck with you already but there was so much turmoil going on, a treaty had been forged in 1604 that was meant to sort of quell a lot of that struggle between these major European forces, France and Spain in particular. But the Medici found themselves on the fence because they were intermarried with France, Maria de Medici was actually Francesco's daughter and then they needed Spain for all sorts of reasons, economic reasons and political reasons. So what they did was decide to spend the money to send two equestrian monuments at the same time. They send one to Henry IV, so equestrian monument of Henry IV and then this one of Philip III. As Pietro Taca is working on this equestrian monument, he first works on the one of Henry IV and I'll jump ahead so you can see a drawing of it, a drawing of it because it no longer is extant. It had a terrible fate from the very beginnings. This is one of those terrible stories that I've come across in my research where they start after finally getting the bloody thing finished and to the port where it sits by the way for 11 months waiting for someone to come pick the thing up and send it, it finally gets moving on the ship and they swear, they've written off and sworn that they've checked that the boat will be as stable as possible. It sinks 20 miles off the coast. Can you imagine these frantic letters come back like oh my God, this thing, what are we gonna do? And the reply from the Duke is fish it out, which I don't know how they thought, he thought they were gonna do that exactly, but they did. They were able to fish the thing out, set it back up, clean it off, it has water damage, but they did the best they could with it. They have to get more galleys and ready to go with it and one of the sculptors gets seasick, it's just a mess. So anyway, they finally get the thing to Paris, it gets set up and during the French Revolution it was melted down, so there's that. This one has obviously had a better fate. Surely, Taka was very worried about how this would all go, knowing that while he's working on it, the one of Henry IV is being pulled out of the sea, but he has really worked on figuring out how to make these cast as light as possible. And in fact, the one of Philip III is about 4,000 pounds less than the one of Henry IV was. And if you go back and look at these other monuments he does, it's clear that this is a real aim of his to make them as light as possible, which means that they are thinner in their cast but would be less expensive to ship and so surely worth it. Bronze, the material is incredibly expensive. But much, much, much more so than marble. And, but the shipping cost of it are much, much, much less. So things end up sort of coming out in the wash between marble and bronze as it turns out. This monument has a much easier trip, thankfully. No pirates, no ship sinking, nothing and finally makes its way to the court and the Florentines are so excited because they think that it's going to be set up in the most prominent city square in Madrid, hallelujah. This will be their real mark of prominence. They've made it. No one can question Florentine dominance on the European scene. That's not what happens. What happens is that initially the king is not really sure what he wants to do with this thing because it's just kind of not his style. He's not a showy, you know, he doesn't really like sculpted portraits of any sort in fact and he really doesn't know what to do with this gigantic thing that has arrived. He's kind of embarrassing. So what he does is put it in the gardens of one of his country houses outside of the city. The Florentines were devastated. But there's lovely stories about this because when it arrives it's still in its packing cases and the gardener gets arrested because he's making money selling the, just to get a glimpse into the packing cases. So he's made all of this extra money on the side and you know, we've got throngs of people in the king's garden, it's never a good thing. So he ends up getting into trouble but it sits there for a while. In fact, it actually sits there until you get to the 1800s when it was finally put in Plaza Mayor. So I know I've talked for more than you would possibly want me to but what I would say is that what my conclusions are so far about this research is it was not easy, it was very expensive but it was really worth it to the Florentines. It truly paid off for the Florentines and this doesn't even account for the impact that these sculptures have on the development of Spanish art, which is formidable as well but that's even outside the scope of some things up that one of the reasons that I have pursued this research is again, thanks to the support of my college and my colleagues, my family and friends as well but also because of my students who ask me the best questions and make me think about issues like how did that get here in a way that is meaningful and adds so much to how I think about this period that I love so much. So I'm very grateful to them. I'm grateful to all of you for coming this evening to my talk and I'm even grateful for that ill-fated shipment of stuff from Florence to Colchester that taught me an important lesson about packaging and shipping. Thank you very much.