 Hi everybody. Thank you for your patience as we have gotten the AV set up. I wanted to welcome you all to the School of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation this evening. You are here for part of our fall lecture series. In fact, we will hear tonight our fall 2017 speaker for the Art and Architectural History Program. Kelly Helmstutler de Dio joins us tonight to share her ongoing research on the logistics of sculpture transport in Renaissance Europe. Professor de Dio's work on the shipping of sculptures exemplifies the way that her research binds together kingdoms that have often been treated as separate contexts by Renaissance art historians. Several of you in this auditorium have already read some of her important work on Leone and Pompeo Leone, and by examining the careers of these sculptors in both Madrid and Milan, Professor de Dio has given the discipline a fuller understanding of the interconnectedness of European courts and of the mobility of artists and objects between those courts. Choosing which of Professor de Dio's numerous accomplishments to highlight is a joyful challenge in moments like these. She has wide acclaim within the field. She received funding for her research from the Ministry of Arts and Culture of Spain, the Crest Foundation, the Medici Archive Project, and Harvard's Center for Renaissance Studies Villa Itati. In addition to important articles, Professor de Dio has also published several books, including Leone Leone and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance in 2011, and Sculpture Collections in Early Modern Spain in 2014. Most recently, she edited a volume published by Ashgate in 2015 titled Making and Moving Sculptures in Early Modern Italy, which we'll get to hear a part of that tonight. Professor de Dio has paired her prolific scholarship with a real dedication to her students and to teaching. She received the University of Vermont's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2016. Roger Williams University is fortunate and grateful that she is joining us tonight, and I'd like to ask you all to help me welcome Kelly Helmstutler de Dio. Hi, thank you for that Ann, and thank you all for coming out for this. I know this is sort of a difficult time in the semester to give up any time, so I am very grateful to your willingness to listen to me for a little bit tonight. So what I really want to do tonight is to sort of explain how I got started down this path of art history and of doing the kind of research that I do. As you can tell just from what Ann described, I tend to look at things in a really practical way, and I was really interested as I was walking through different cities in Europe and thought about how did that thing get here and where did it come from, these sculptures that were around the cities or different building materials that I could tell were not local building materials. So these sorts of questions about where things come from has been important to me. Sorry about that. Sure. So that's what I'm going to try to share with you. So this, as Ann said, has been an ongoing project in that I've been working on this project a really long time, really doing research on it from the time I was a PhD student, and that was a really long time ago. And I have sort of always had in the back of my head these issues, and I'm finally finishing up the book project that will tie all of this stuff together, and then I'm going to Hawaii. So I'm going to probably read some of my paper, but certainly not all of it, as you may know that's sort of the standard in the field, but I know it can be dull, but I aim not to be dull. So bear with me if you will. So when visitors go to Madrid and they're walking around the city, they come across at least a couple of equestrian monuments. Have any of you been to Madrid and seen some of these? May ring a bell. This one, for example, is in the Plaza Mayor, which you can't help but go through as you're going through the city of Madrid. It's such a beautiful positioning of this sculpture, but that's not always where the sculpture resided. And what was interesting to me as I was a PhD student and I had gotten funding to go to Spain to do research, which is why you should study Renaissance art history. I went up to this sculpture. It was a sculpture I knew about. My area of specialization is Renaissance and Baroque Italian sculpture. So I knew the sculpture by Pietro Taca of King Philip III. And it's this big bronze sculpture, and in fact it weighs about 12,000 pounds. This thing made a trip from Florence, Italy in the 1600s all the way to Madrid. That's pretty formidable feat, right? But what I found is that really no one had talked about these kind of mechanics of how things get moved around, and so that perplexed me. And I started to wonder why it was even worth it to send this sculpture all the way from Spain to the court, you know, from Florence to the court in Spain. So I really started thinking about these issues as I said when I was a PhD student. I was in Spain when I came across this sculpture as I was working on the artist Leone Leone, who I'm sure you're all terribly familiar with. I'm just kidding. He's certainly not Michelangelo, at least in, you know, American and I mean otherwise awareness of the great Italian Renaissance artist. But in fact, as I have tried to work on so far in my scholarship, he's worth resurrecting as an artist because in his own day, he was a big deal. So I was in Spain trying to do some archival research. I am primarily an archival researcher. I go in and look for any kind of document that luckily has made it to our present day. So handwritten, of course, documents usually written in fairly complex handwriting in Spanish or in Italian. Of course, if I'm doing work there, sometimes in Latin, but that's primarily the kind of stuff I work on. So I went to Madrid to read some letters and these letters were about Leone Leone and some of them in fact talked about Leone Leone's contacts with the King of Spain and the many sculptures he produced that were sent to Spain. The thing about it was that Leone Leone never visited Spain as far as we're aware. He never actually traveled there. So all the sculptures he made were made in Italy and they had to make their way to Spain and some of them were enormous. Some of them we'll look at in just a few minutes. So all of these ideas were sort of percolating and it actually got me more and more interested in Spain as a site of studies. And Spain itself has been fairly overlooked in scholarship. So I felt like there was a lot of rich work to be done there. So that was an extra challenge for me. So here's some of Leone's works. These are two sculptures that he did for his chief patron Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor who was always on the move until he around Europe until he finally settled when he retired in Spain in 1556. So he commissioned sculptures from Leone starting in 1549. Leone's working on these sculptures. He produces the one that you see on the left and about from 1550 to 1552 usually takes a while to finish one of these kinds of sculptures. And then it had to be moved somewhere. And in fact this one and the one on the right a marble sculpture by Leone were sent to Spain. What I'd like you to take note of and something I'll be talking about throughout this talk is that there are some perceivable visual differences between the bronze sculpture group you see on the left and the sculpture you see on the right. Some of that is just the material. Bronze is not the same as marble. But what I would like you to sort of think about is what differences there are in terms of shipping marble or shipping bronze. And as I found out the differences are pretty notable and really impact what sculptures are sent and when they're sent to Spain. One of the greatest architectural projects in Spanish Renaissance history and certainly one of the most if you know probably in fact the most complex and large scale bronze sculpture projects of the whole Renaissance is in the Escorial in Spain. And this was the primary church of Philip II. He's the son of Charles V who we just saw. And Philip was really interested in creating this enormous complex. It's a church. There's a library. There's a monastery all in this site. And as soon as people in Italy heard that Philip II was working on this building project they thought here's our golden opportunity to suck up to the king. And so that's what they did. They did that by sending lots of fancy gifts to the king. So why did they want to make this contact with Spain and with the king of Spain particularly Philip II? Because that's who had the greatest power in the period of the Renaissance. That may not be who you think has the most power based on how in Renaissance studies we tend to focus on Italy. But the truth is most of Italy actually was under Spanish rule. And Spain had the greatest dominion in the world in the Western world in its time. So Spain was an important ally for Italy. A critical partner in order to have trade flourish in order for Italy to get some connections with the New World which was also under Spanish protection or exploitation depending on how you look at it. And there were all kinds of reasons that it was financially and politically beneficial for Italy and especially the court of the Medici in Florence to be as closely in favor of the king as possible. So they sent lots of gifts. And so this question of gift giving I think is a really important one. And one that has really been a major part of the kind of research that I do when I was a fellow. So I lived in Italy for seven years in Florence and in that time I was doing a lot of archival research. One of the sort of most important moments in my scholarly formation was working in the archives in Florence. Why was that such a big deal because I had the best job in the world which was to read the secret letters of the Medici family. And so these were letters that have not had many of them. Most of them had not been published and were not available for scholars to read anywhere. And they are full of juicy information. There is no better way to get to know the Medici than to read their letters. And it's not only letters between the family members of the Medici with other major figures across Europe but it's also and perhaps most interestingly their secretaries that are writing. And that's where you get all the juicy bits. You know they'll say you know Cosimo is not doing his work. He spends his whole day gambling with Eleonora. They play poker all the time or you know they're going ice skating again instead of doing whatever they feel like you know the secretary is what they should be doing. And it also sort of documents the anxieties of the Medici as they are seeing you know the ebbs and flows of favor with the Spanish court. So they're negotiating this kind of relationship with Spain throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. State gifts are a critically important part of that. It's certainly not the only way that connections were made. You know they would send all kinds of gifts. They would send like garden specimens for example. They would send tapestries. Certainly they sent paintings and they sent manuscripts of different sorts. They sent medicines. They sent soaps. They sent all kinds of stuff. But the gift giving wasn't just like Christmas time. It was it had a real motivation behind it. So they would send these gifts strategically and important moments when those Medici anxieties about power were most acute. So when one of the Medici Grand Dukes dies and the son usually is the one that is next in line for power at the court he has to have his title recognized by the king of Spain. So those are moments when we see particular anxieties of the Medici. You know they need that court recognition to have that title. And it's not like that title was just like a fancy title like my fancy title of professor. It was that it was the key to having any sort of respect in the European court in the European court system. But it also came with a series of guarantees about tax revenues about access to revenues from salt mines. It was all sorts of things that you may not expect as places where the Medici are getting their money. So you know all of these sorts of things are critical. And I should also point out that there were other ties with Spain that were important to the Medici family particularly intermarriage with members of the Spanish court. So Cosimo the first Grand Duke of the of Tuscany was married to a woman from the Spanish noble class. And that of course informed what Cosimo's sons end up doing. And it also means they speak Spanish and that's no small thing in these European relations. So lots of gifts are sent. But so I got interested in you know why and when and what kinds of gifts they're sending what they looked like which artists were chosen and why. What kinds of themes in art are selected to be sent to the court. And of course as a sculpture person I was most interested in these gifts of sculpture. And I have a couple of reasons for that besides being a specialist of Italian sculpture. You know these were the gifts that were so expensive to send. They weren't necessarily the most expensive in their manufacture that probably was textiles more than anything. And textiles were probably the highest valued commodity that would be sent to as a work of art being sent across Europe. But these were bulky and delicate and had shipping issues. And nevertheless they were sent in these particularly delicate moments of transactions with the Spanish court. So why was that. And you know which sculptors were particularly chosen to represent that Florentine genius in sculpture which was an important part of what the Florentines were trying to show. So that was one part of it. The other part that was interesting to me and related to that is that paintings is what we you know so much of Italian Renaissance scholarship has focused it focused on paintings. There's nothing totally wrong with paintings I suppose but but you know they they were really cheap to send you could roll those things up you could pack them in a crate. It was zero big deal to send paintings to Spain. I mean sure condition problems happen. They'd be exposed to humidity or whatever and that's not great for painting but it has you know it doesn't hold a candle to the difficulties in shipping sculptures. So that's what really intrigued me about these particular gifts. These are the four sculptures I really want to focus on. So we've got a crucifix by the fabulous if psychopathic artist Ben Venuto Cellini. Cristoforo Statti another sort of unsung quasi hero of Renaissance sculpture certainly not a favorite of mine. Giambologna who truly is the greatest late Renaissance sculptor active in Europe in you know in the 17th century especially he's the guy that really carries the way and informs what sculpture is going to look like for the next half century anyway. And that's who's Samson and the Philistine you see here. And then Pietro Takas Philip the third which we've already seen which was sent in 1616. So here is that church of the Esquire or better I should say the whole Esquire complex that I mentioned earlier and you can see it's got this very severe architecture it's a very particular style that Philip the second preferred. It is not in fact terribly Italian in its design though there are certain aspects of it that certainly show that the architect or architects I should say that worked on this project were really aware of what Italian architecture look like. But you know it's not like you would transplant this building into Italy and it would blend in it doesn't it is meant to be very particularly Spanish. Here is Francesco de Medici so with this Francesco was the son of Cosimo the first that Grand Duke who is married to the woman from the Spanish nobility Eleonora de Toledo. Francesco de Medici was you know the first that I'll talk about that was so concerned about having this recognition of his title from Philip the second whose portrait we see by Leonie Leonie on the right. Francesco was really worried about perceptions of power at the Florentine court after the death of his father. There were some scandals at court that he needed to kind of address and including the fact that he had he had married into the Habsburg family but his wife sort of dies all of a sudden which is truly unfortunate especially because he already had a lover. So no worries there I'm sure it's totally legit. But Francesco you know is worried about what the perception at the court is going to be since he has this lover and worst of all she was Venetian and that was just not okay in Florence. That was something you know to have a foreign wife like a Venetian you just didn't do that in Florence. Spain is another thing but Venetians they're in a whole other category so he had to worry about that and the Florentines were really unhappy with him. And so he was worried about his political stability at the time so he really needed to have this title of Grand Duke of Tuscany reconferred by Philip the second. Part of what happens though is that there are these deaths that happen at the court all of a sudden and these sort of add to the further scandal at the court that Francesco and then his brother Ferdinando have to deal with. And there are the death of these two Medici princesses Isabella and Eleonora and the thought at least the rumor at the court was that Francesco had ordered their deaths because they were having affairs and bringing shame to the family. So that was yet another scandal that he needed to address in some way basically by you know glossing it over with a really nice present and hopefully ending with the confirming of the title. So there are many kinds of sculptures that he could have chosen to be sent in this moment. What you're looking at here are the mountains of Carada the great source for that beautiful white Italian marble. I'm sure you're familiar with Carada marble a favorite of sculpture because of the purity of the white marble and of course was at least one of the sources for the marble that Michelangelo so famously preferred. So Carada was a great source of the building materials and the sculpture materials for Florence but it's kind of far away from Florence. So when they decided that they wanted to have marble from from Carada they had to do a lot of work to get it to Florence for it to be usable there and this again is true for architectural projects as much as it is for sculpture projects. In the time of Michelangelo and there were new roads that were constructed so that this it sort of facilitated the movement of the marble. But no matter you know how much the roads helped there were serious complications with dealing with this incredibly difficult material to get out of the side of the mountain and worse get it down the hill to the shoreline where it would be then picked up on a boat and then transported to the port that was closest to Florence the port of Livorno. So all of that is super complicated and very expensive and you know also incredibly dangerous men died because the carts would be unstable and you know they'd gain too much speed as they were going down the mountainside and they would lose control and the marble would topple on top of one of these poor men who was having to do this as his job and would die. It was not an uncommon thing whatsoever. And in fact even with modern technology you know the way that they get the marble out and even some of the dangers of moving the marble have not really changed significantly which is kind of an interesting part of this. But just so you can visualize exactly where things have to go from Karada once they finally get it down to the shoreline. You have to use a particular kind of boat to navigate with such heavy weight as these blocks of marble. So that was one issue that I've had to look into like what was the ship design like to be able to do this sort of stuff. And what were the machines that they use to be able to load marble from the shoreline into the boats. And then again once it finally arrived either in Pisa or Livorno how would they then unload it from the ship and then get it on a series of carts that would then take it to the mouth of the Arno river. So they would either go by land from Livorno or hook into the source of the Arno in Pisa and go. I hope you can see find the pointer if I can figure out how to employ it. They would go oops no I can't. Oh it's really faint but there you go. They would go on the Arno river until they got to this tiny little town called Sinha which is around here and they would then have to take it over land from Sinha to Florence. And you may think well the Arno goes through Florence that's true but the Arno unfortunately hits its lowest point of depth at Florence. So there was no way these heavy ships or boats could go through all the way to Florence and make it there. They would just be grounded right so that didn't work. So a super complicated series of things had to happen. So given those complications and of course labor expenses machine expenses all of that stuff. It was way easier to send something you already had hanging around your house right so it's sort of re-gifting. Benvenuto Cellini had in fact given this as a gift to Cosimo Francesco's father and it really had never nothing had ever really been done with it. It wasn't. It was just hanging out in the store rooms. So Francesco and his secretary probably walking around one day like what are we going to send to Francesco say hey how about this crucifix. And so that's what they do. It was made in 1562 and it just it Cellini had given it as a gift. It just been hanging out 1576. It gets sent to Madrid or better to the Escorial. Their hope was that this would be the big altarpiece in this glorious new church of the Escorial. We've already seen it's not going to work out that way for the Medici and that it's actually the Leone that end up doing the altarpiece. But you know they send it with good faith and it's in this particular moment where they need to send something important and they know that it's best to send a religious present. A gift with a religious theme than it is of any other subject matter so that Philip II will you know more easily take it. He saw themes that were mythological or secular in some way as being kind of too much in the form of bribery. Whereas this was an active piety and the acceptance of it for the placement in the church was totally OK. He didn't want to be seen as corrupt so religious gifts seem to sort of be the work around for that. It is a very complicated trip. There are two ways you can do it really. And what you can see on this map is that it's got to make its way from Livorno. So it does that whole path that I just described from Livorno to Florence. It has to do that. You know just imagine that in reverse. They end up at the shores of Livorno and then a decision has to be made about what direction to send it in. So you unfortunately have these two large things hanging out in the middle that make it so you can't just go like that. So what they do is you could maybe go this way right as is sort of drawn out on here and go to one of the big seaports either Cartagena or Alicante. And then from there go by land which as you can see Madrid is terribly unfortunately placed in the middle of nothing. Right so there's no waterways there's no easy path that's going to be all over land over there. But this was a tricky path to take because unfortunately this is where you have very rough waters and pirates. And so you really had to worry about pirates attacking your ship. They end up coming up with a whole new ship design to manage the weight of these things and provide defense so that they can protect the contents from the pirate. Usually what they end up doing is going in this direction over and then down. They would either go to Alicante or Cartagena and not to say Valencia or Barcelona which would by looking at the map seem to make a lot more sense. But the taxes in Barcelona and Valencia were way higher. And so they did the practical thing of saving a little bit of money by sending it down here and not having to pay as much in the shipping taxes. So they had customs prices to custom taxes just like we do today. All of that is something we've just brought down from from them and before for that matter. So from Alicante this is the long and arduous path. Same thing from Cartagena. And you know going over land what they would have to do once they arrived there is to do their best to pay for men to be hired to take their carts and a team of oxen and make that trip. Well the oxen would die unfortunately. And so they would have to you know trade out the oxen along the way because this was such a horrible difficult journey. They also had to pay for the men that were accompanying the sculpture and helping to set it up. They had to pay for the transport and that meant not only the transportation itself but also food lodging and all of that stuff which would add up really quickly. Chilini sculpture gets there which is super. Everyone's excited except that there's a sculptor at the court Pompeo Leoni son of Leoni Leoni who's like you know I don't really like that thing. It's really indecent. He's got his bits hanging out and that's not really appropriate for a church and Philip II said well how about if we make a little skirt for it. And so Pompeo Leoni was like yeah I can make the skirt for it. And then that's the last time we hear of anything. But all of a sudden this is in the way back of the church where really was practically invisible and was moved around quite a bit. And then Pompeo Leoni and his father get the commission to do this amazing altarpiece super complicated. Lots of sculptures and needless to say a lot of investment of financial resources in the bronze and the gold which is actually gold melted down from objects they would bring from the new world which is kind of horrifying to think about. But all of these were made in Milan. So Pompeo ends up going back home to Milan to work on these and then have them sent back to Spain. Doing that whole long series of transport but instead from the port of Genoa instead of Livorno. Ferdinando the next Grand Duke has to do essentially the same thing right as he becomes the Grand Duke after the terribly suspicious death of his brother Francesco. Ferdinando goes from being a cardinal to being the next Grand Duke of Tuscany a little suspicious. And in fact the belief has been in at least myth and maybe in reality that Francesco I mean that Ferdinando had paid for them to be for him and his lover Bianca the Venetian to be poisoned. In any case when he becomes a Grand Duke we have a change in regime on the Spanish side as well and it's King Philip the third who we see here on the left you can see he was really happy go lucky kind of guy. And then we have the Duke of Larama who is on the right and truly it's really the Duke of Larama that kind of runs the court because Philip the second Philip the third I'm sorry really doesn't want the responsibilities of the court. So the Duke kind of manages things for him. So the Florentine start sending works of sculpture for the Duke of Larama and they send this gorgeous sculpture again it's already ready made ready to go. And this is what they send and it is John Bologna as Samson and the Philistine. You can see it's this gorgeous thing of movement and all of you know you've got these are outstretched arms all of these you know extensions into space which made the work very fragile. And you know it would have required extra careful packing. But what's true is that we can see that it is it has a lot of damage actually it's broken at the ankles and there are other areas where we see damage some of which has happened in its course of life at the Victorian Albert Museum where it lives now but some of it likely happened as it was being shipped from Florence in a commission for another project that John Bologna was commissioned for. He is instructed specifically by the Spanish patron not to have any arms sticking out or anything like that because it would make it too easy to break as it went on this difficult path of travel. So when the Duke of Larama decides he would like to have a sculpture to be a pendant so to have a pair of these sculptures together so the same theme of Samson and the lion. Christofarostati is commissioned to do it and you can see in this sculpture that I since it's being made on demand so it's not something that's ready made hanging out at the court ready to send. It's a sculpture that is much more self contained and as you can see in these images that show you some various views. Everything is sort of connected and contained within the block that it what derived from so very tightly knit group. Everything's got sort of extra supports on it as you can see in that image on the right of these little armatures so that it can be as durable as possible as it makes this difficult track as we've seen. So you can some more images I got a little carried away at the Art Institute can't help myself and it's also signed. It signed Christofarostati from Brachano made this and you know good for him. But when it got there the people at the court were like wait a minute this is not Jambalonia. What happened to Jambalonia who was seen as way superior in sculpture to Christofarostati and frankly I have to agree with them there. The Florentines really believed that the Spanish didn't know sculpture well enough to notice the difference or to care right. They really underestimated the Spanish taste for sculpture. Anyway in this painting that you see here we can see one of those sculptures. This is Stati sculptures that was placed in a really prominent place in the garden. So eventually you know Larimer is like OK fine I'll keep it whatever. But he refuses to pay. He had sort of offered to help offset some of the transportation fees and he decides he's not going to do that because it's really not that great. So and you can see this is like the cruelest comparison ever in my book. The comparison between Jambalonia's glorious full of movement sculpture lots of drama there really spectacular. And then Stati's a very sort of conservative sculpture there on the right. And just so I don't completely you know this poor Christofarostati it's not that he wasn't capable of doing better. This sculpture of Orpheus that's in the Metropolitan Museum shows that you know it's not like he didn't know how to do a body in movement with you know the arms extended and whatever. But this was a sculpture that was meant to stay in Florence. So it didn't have those kinds of issues of potential breakage and transport like the Sampson and the lion did just to do him justice. Here we go. Fine. But that's still hideous. OK. So Leonie Leonie really is you know we can look at Leonie Leonie sculptures that were intended for Spain and see that same difference in what you can do with the material when you know it's going long distance. Right. Bronze of course does not have the breakage issues that marble does. And so with bronze you can be much more inventive actually and much more you know doing sort of forms that are more diverse and less self contained than what you can do with marble. I think that's pretty obvious in these two busts that Leonie did at the same time. So it's not like it's a stylistic change in his career. The easiest cheapest thing to send and the most popular thing to send was certainly statuettes and the statuettes tend to be made of bronze. These are also by John Maloney and my favorite sculptor but they are you know really full of movement. You can do all kinds of you can do anything you want with these statuettes and they will be easily shipped because they're they're heavy but they're not that heavy. It's not like a big sculpture and they're durable. So these were sent more than anything when I was working on the book I did about Spanish sculpture collections. There were thousands of statuettes in these inventories. It was really unbelievable the quantity that that was produced primarily in Florence and sent to Spain. But sometimes they needed a big gift sent and that's when we see Philip the Third's equestrian statuette statue come sorry come into play. So Pietro Taca was Jambalonia's student and follower and really maintains the style of Jambalonia in his work. And he really pushes with each equestrian monument that he does and he did several to do something that makes them you know better than the last one he did in whatever way that may mean. In one important way that I've seen he does this is by lessening the weight of each of the sculptures he does when he knows that they're going long distance. You know he'll have like the first one he did is like 13,000 pounds but it's for Florence. The next one is 11,000 or almost 12,000 like this one. So he's working to make the cast thinner so it's not so heavy as it's being shipped. Also these were done in pieces and would be put back together when they got to Spain so he made it so that they were fairly easy to ship. But it usually would take a couple of years for that whole transportation process to take place. Just to send it from one of the ports Cartagena to Madrid would take six months on average. So these were long arduous difficult journeys that these monuments had to undertake. I'm going to skip this other one that he did just this was just to show you yet another equestrian monument. He sent this one to Paris. But you know the disappointing thing for the Florentines when they spent all of this money and the transportation of the sculpture of Philip the third was that you know yes they ended up getting the confirmation of the title that they needed but it was placed in this totally unimportant site. They wanted it to be as it is today in the center of Madrid where everybody could see it and say wow those Florentines really are something. But instead it ends up getting stuck in the backyard of one of the country houses of the king and they're totally gutted by this decision. And you know they've already known that Chilini sculptures back in the church nobody can see it and now this has happened. So it's two times when those investments have ended up really not panning out for them at least in terms of their placement even if it does help them achieve their other goals. But in the images that we see produced of when the sculpture was in the Casa del Campo you know it's kind of interesting to see the way that it's depicted. You can frankly tell when you've got a Florentine artist that's working at the court doing it as is likely the case here or when you've got someone else doing it and you can see all of a sudden you've got this statuette poor equestrian monument that's been reduced to nothing. I mean you can tell with the scale of the people this is probably someone from Genoa who just hated those Florentines and hated all they did. In fact the fountain behind them was in fact sent by Andrea Doria from Genoa. So Taka again you know has his sort of crowning achievement and really one of the crowning achievements of Baroque sculpture is when this monument is commissioned for Philip III's son Philip IV and he does this amazing accomplishment here that required even the intervention of one of the greatest scientists of the day Galileo who helped him figure out how to do the positioning of the horse. And this one is actually heavier than the Philip III so kind of goes against that line of lessening the weight but there's a reason for it. It had to be filled in with lead. The back of the horse is actually solid so that it could maintain this very difficult position in terms of stability of the monument with the raised horse. And we know from documents that I located about the shipment of this sculpture that just that one leg from Cartagena to Madrid cost 60,000 reales. And most working people would make about a reale a day and the sculpture itself was valued at like a quarter actually of that amount. So how much Taka eventually was paid for it was just you know a ridiculous fraction of that expenditure. So my point in my research has been to show that these gifts happened in these particular moments but also to show that this was a major economic investment in labor investment on the part of the Florentines to send this work to Spain. So clearly it had to have this sort of political impact to make it worth it. And while the sculptures were not always placed where the Florentines would have liked they did usually get what it was they were going for. Even as unfortunately you have some sculptures the one on the right side going to pop up but the one on the left you know when you're sending marble. They're not always spectacular sculptures which is surely the case of this hideous Camigliani sculpture of Andromeda from 1578. That again is a marble sculpture being sent long distance and is super compact in its depiction but also at a real price to style. There it is. Oh that bust of Charles the fit that we saw earlier. Same thing with this much more compacted style because of the material. And then of course just to show you one more time the glory of Cristofo Dostati with his very self contained sculpture in marble of Samson. While in bronze as I've seen you know even though maybe initially the material of bronze is more than the cost of the material of marble. The shipping is so much easier relatively speaking because you don't have the issues of durability like you do with marble. And that meant that sculptors could also be much more innovative in the kinds of sculptures that they produced and that were sent on these long treks along across the sea. And that is what I have done so far. So thank you for your attention and I'm happy to take questions should you have any. Thank you. After a very brief discussion but there are a lot of students here today so I'd like to open up the floor to questions from some of our students. I mean it's really hard to detach that sort of influence of politics and all of their relationships in Europe frankly. What I've seen especially in the time of Philip the third that I think is pretty interesting is how many gifts were sent to women at the court. And at first I was like well it's not just nice of them to make that gesture towards the women at the court. But then there is a fabulous letter that really explains why that happens and it's because the women at the court of Spain actually wielded a great deal of power which is not something we may think about. But they realized that it was the women at the court that would influence their husband's decision making which as we know is true in any time period in any place. But you know the Florentines really figure out that this is their key in especially because Philip the third really doesn't want to accept gifts. He's really particular about what gifts he'll take. So they end up being sent to the Duke of Lerma until he's busted for corruption and they're sent to Rodrigo Decado who was also busted for corruption. So they had to deal with this fine line between you know when it's appropriate to send a gift and what kind of gift to send you didn't want it to be too flashy because then they would get caught for corruption. They had sent in fact a large shipment of gifts for the Duke of Lerma and found out like the secretary at the court writes back in this frantic letter like tell me what you send I need to stop it before it gets to court because you know the Duke of Lerma is being questioned for corruption and we're going to be implicated if these gifts arrive. So they do this whole cover up thing to sort of figure out what to do with those gifts and they just redistribute them to other people at the court including a lot of the women especially the Duke of Lerma's sister. So it's you know they send them for marriage gifts but in birthing gifts but those are often political in their intentions as well. So it's kind of hard to separate that out. Yeah. Yeah. Well I think the most interesting of them is actually the one I didn't talk about which is a really fabulous choice for a speaker to make I suppose but what I didn't talk about was this sculpture of Henry the Fourth of France. And poor Anne just heard this paper that I gave not long ago. Well it is a great I'll tell a abbreviated version of it. It's my favorite one that I've come across because after it goes through all of this difficulty in months in fact years are spent not only in its manufacture but then getting it to leave or no to be shipped up to Paris its ultimate destination. It ends up you know they're having a hard time finding the appropriate ship to put it on because it's you know it's bulky it's difficult it's weighty. And so they're waiting for various ships to come in and their reports like well we checked out this ship it looks like it's OK but we're not really sure. Finally the Queen of France gets really impatient waiting for this sculpture to arrive and so she's you know basically says just go on and send the damn thing. And so they do and just a couple of months later there are these other frantic reports back to the court saying oh my God the ship sank. And so they've finally gotten this sculpture and it just made it just up a little ways from Genoa so really had not made it very far. And there was a storm and there were two shipwrecks and that had that was one of them. The other one had textiles that were going to Spain and that were lost. So you know the journey of that very difficult sculpture made me want to figure out what machines they used to be able to get that sculpture out from the bottom of the sea. And think about the engineering behind that and what it would involve. And it finally does eventually make it to Paris but the sad end story of that is that it was destroyed during the French Revolution. So it had the worst history ever for a sculpture just a terrible life. But it's a fascinating journey and you know the gift is that I have so much documentation about these sculptures. I mean it's it's an amazing thing to work in Florence and have you know they they were meticulous and sort of obsessive really because they would make copies of the letters they would send out. So you have both sides of the conversation usually which is pretty extraordinary and allows you to figure out these stories like this sunken ship story which is fun. But that that's probably the longest most arduous journey I've come across. Yes absolutely. You bet. So this was a constant problem. And you know so that Medici are sending as I said all kinds of gifts pirates are an issue repeatedly. And sometimes it's not just in that little strip. It is you know they would also come up to Sardinia or Sisley or whatever and sort of make their way in the various ports and were a threat. Absolutely. And so sure absolutely. And I think you know not only would they you know usually what happened is that they would just burn the Medici ship right that would be in these are it's more fair. Or they would take the monetary items that seem to be easy right to sort of get their hands on and probably sell. But there's no doubt there is a trove at the bottom of the sea between Italy and Spain and you know in the right up above Northern Africa that you know scholars are investigating. There are archaeologists that just deal with with sunken ships and there is there's one at URI actually that is working on this period and trying to figure out what's down there. So it's not telling what we'll find. And that would be related to pirates are related to some you know the storms or whatever. So definitely. Yes. No they did. So that's a whole other part of it. They you know you would probably ideally want to have the sculptor travel with it so they could make repairs or whatever along the you know if needed along the way. But that rarely happened as far as I can tell. Usually it would be the assistance that would go with the sculpture. And you know in the case of the sculpture of Philip the fourth one of Taka's assistants got terribly seasick and they had to like stop at Marseille and let him off the ship because it was just like a disaster. So so yeah they went you know a team of sculptors would go or assistants would go and theoretically they were meant to make the repairs and then help especially in these big equestrian monuments put the pieces back together and set the thing up. But in the case of Philip the fourth it's like they forgot the instructions so they get to court and the secretary writes back and it's like they say they have no idea how to do it now what you know. So you know they would certainly go they not always knew what they were doing I suppose but yeah they did go to help out. It would be this team usually this team of sculptors that would travel with that the sculpture from Florence all the way to Madrid or Paris would bolt the sculptures together. Right and we can see the bolts if you really study it where they put the thing together. But it was a huge problem because you know even if it's done in pieces they're still incredibly heavy and difficult to work with right. So that's a whole other side of the engineering machinery picture that I have not yet tackled but I'm sure I'll be able to piece it together in time so to speak. Yeah. So you know the one of Philip the third in particular the story goes that it was set up in the Casa de Campo because Philip felt like it was too showy. It wasn't his kind of thing to be sort of you know flaunting his power in public to in that way. Right. And his father was kind of the same way actually despite the fact that he commissioned lots of sculptures. Most of them like the ones by the Leonie weren't ever displayed in public like in the Emperor's lifetime as far as we know. So clearly there are some issues there of how they're received on the other end and what they decide is actually appropriate. The sculpture of Philip the third only gets moved during the Baroque period under Philip the fourth when they redo the urban planning of Madrid and then it's moved. Philip the fourth didn't have a problem with it but Philip the third did. Right. I mean in the shipping part on the ship they were armed ships so they were prepared to defend the goods. So that we know. But once it's on land being transported I don't know the answer to that. I haven't seen any reference to those sorts of people. You would think that there would be in a way but considering the trouble these sculptors would often get themselves into. They seem to be pretty prepared to defend themselves. So maybe that that was just sort of additional thing on their job description. But I haven't found anything specifically these works would be insured in like the way we think of insurance policies. Right. So. Yeah. Absolutely. In the end it's actually hasn't changed that much which has been kind of a fascinating thing to see with these. Yeah. With yes that would be tough. But God in Spain in this period lots of things happened in that trek of land. But you know it's a lot of open land that you're talking about. So with some corruption and agreements I suppose anything is possible. Yeah. So they're shipping things in both directions and that's a real that's a great question because that's a really important thing to keep in mind. So not only would they be shipping things like sculptures from Florence to Spain but things from Spain would be sent back over all kinds of commodities especially from the new world would be sent over spices become very popular in this period and so those get sent as well. So evidently they would sort of calculate and it's pretty clear in the documentation that they would they knew exactly what the weight requirements were of course would you know some ships would stay ported until they had gained enough weight to make the trek back over. So they were they were absolutely aware of of the issues and you know they would send you know they did send lots of objects from the new world. You know art objects that were sent were a huge part of this kind of exchange that was going on but other things as well other sorts of commodities that maybe art historians don't talk about very much but are a critical part of that story. Yeah. Totally. Right. I mean that's the crazy thing. So that was the other thing that was totally perplexing to me like especially bronze. They had bronze casting facilities that initially when I started this research I didn't think that they did. But what I found is that in Seville in particular they knew very well how to do large bronze casting and made big bronze sculptures in the period. So why wouldn't they have done it that way. And frankly I don't have a good answer for it. I mean I think there is a sense of that sort of Italian bravura but you know they have plenty of Italians working at the court of Madrid. Pompeo Leoni travels from Madrid to go back home to Milan to do it. So why is that. And I don't have a good answer for that yet. But there's got to be something to it. Right. It doesn't make any sense otherwise. Absolutely. Yeah. So the Medici Archive project is has been around. I have to do a little math but I think it's been around since about 1995 maybe 96. And I was so they did they started doing these three year fellowships for postdocs. So I was in the second group of postdoc fellowship starting in 2000. And what the Medici Archive project does is digitize those letters so that they will be open access. So this is a long and ongoing project of you know and back in my day we were transcribing the letters and sort of putting an excerpt and then a translation and excerpt of the excerpt on. In this database and now they are they've sort of changed gears and they're scanning the pages so that you can actually see the document itself and then there will be a transcription in the original language on the database. So it's all part of this long digital humanities project. One of the first big digital humanities projects. So I got that because I was in the right place at the right time. I was already living in Italy and I finished my I was in the last stages of my you know doing the revisions for my dissertation. I saw the announcement for this thing and I was like oh my God I'm already here like this would be the perfect thing for me. And especially great because it was in the days of the Italian lira and the American dollar was super strong and I was paid an American dollar. So it was like I had won the lottery for a grad student. I mean it was dramatic like I went from essentially making like $10,000 a year as a grad student to making 60,000. So it was like this huge thing. So it was a no brainer for me to accept this position even just on financial basis. But then it ended up being I mean it was grueling because it was eight hour days of looking at these letters which sounds cool but is also unbelievably tedious. And you start to really hate the people that are in this very small room with you you know but anyway. So it was difficult but it gave me such an insight into the lives of the Medici and these you know how they valued stuff was totally different than what I had learned in grad school. It was not paintings at the apex of artistic value at all. Tapestries were the the most prized possession. And so just sort of made me rethink like what is it that we really know what's just been repeated in scholarship just because that's what so and so said you know. And that made me really start to think about the you know how to come at new ways of looking at this Renaissance material that otherwise you would think was like everybody knows that stuff already right. Like how many more books on Michelangelo do we need you could say. But the truth is there's so much in the archives that still is yet to be really studied by scholars and it can totally change the way we look at this stuff. So for me it's super super interesting. Yeah. That's such a great question. Good for you. That's a great question. So they would often have paintings sent over. So a local painter in Spain sometimes you know not sure just everyday artists like Velázquez would make these paintings of these portraits of the king and send them to Florence. So in the case of Taka making Philip the fourth it was Velázquez that made a portrait an equestrian portrait of Philip and then sent it to Florence. It's in the Uffizi even today. Other times it would be drawings. Sometimes it they would send wax statuettes. That was the case for Philip the third. There was a sculptor that was actually Tuscan that was at the court in Spain and this sort of goes back to the question. Why not just do it there. But anyway he made a little wax statuette to show what the king thought he wanted and then they sent it over. So they would have that kind of record to know what the likeness was. But in a portrait to such an important role of portraits in Renaissance art can't be understated. I mean they're always circulating these portraits. So people had a fairly good sense of what they look like even if they never met in real life. In some court cultures in Italy in particular they make you way more beautiful than you actually are. It's like the Photoshop of the day. But in other countries it's like hyper realistic style in Spain. It's kind of an in between spot between the two. So you know it's kind of interesting to look at how people would perceive like Italians are really beautiful. And that's because the Italians are like totally photoshopping the stuff right. So you have to think about you know what they're seeing and how that you know and also what those courts want their portraits to look like. The question before about likeness and whether they were upset about the likeness whether it was close enough. Not everybody cared about that. And you know some sculptors that we know well like Michelangelo. He did not care if it looked like that to him that's not the point of the portrait. It's to give a memory of this person for posterity. It doesn't have to be the exact likeness. So I suspect that that's part of this as well. One more good question. Oh no. Yeah. Oh yeah. So okay. So in the case of these gifts these are court artists of the Medici. So they're on the salary rolls of the Medici. So they often I mean sometimes they would receive additional payment but not always for doing these projects. Sometimes it was just part of their job. In the case of Pietro Taka he was promised as a gift after the question monument of Philip III arrived. He sent along with it a huge crucifix like just in case. And they the king said oh my gosh it's the most beautiful crucifix I've ever seen. I'm going to send you 2 million scoot 2000 scooty which is a lot of money. Taka would usually be paid like 150. So he was psyched the payment never arrived. So you know sometimes there would be promises of payment from the king of Spain but usually this is just work that the Medici would have to pay for out of pocket which may also explain why they often send things that are already done and available. Thank you.