Florentine walks with the Medici" exhibition

Culture
Have you ever wanted to go back in time to the Renaissance? In an exhibition at the SoCLE library from April 6 to May 5, 2023, visitors were guided to the heart of Florence, where the Medici organized festivities and commissioned paintings to celebrate their regime, before the preacher Savonarola challenged these links between art and politics.
What Florentine cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) has become for us was, in Medici times, a political gesture, insofar as festivities and patronage were acts of propaganda. On a theoretical level, the course provided an opportunity to reflect on how politics defines the cultural, especially since when the Dominican preacher Savonarola and his followers imposed their vision of politics on the city of Florence at the end of the 15th century, the actions of forced moralization they carried out were all political gestures aimed at erasing the memory of the Medicean regime.

These developments are reflected in a three-part presentation of selected paintings. First, Benozzo Gozzoli's famous Cavalcata dei Magi illustrated Lorenzo the Magnificent's accession to power. A second tour evoked Lorenzo the Magnificent's celebration of his own regime through carnival festivities and patronage, towards Botticelli in particular. The last section focused on the moral, religious and political reform championed by Savonarola against the Medicean regime, which prompted Botticelli to consider his art from a more Christian perspective, leaving aside pagan mythology.

Exhibition organized by L3 LLCER Italian students with the help of their teacher Cécile TERREAUX-SCOTTO.
Updated February 27, 2024