Wildschut (1516027): The Maniera Etrusca in Florentine Art and Artistic Collections of the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Antique Art in the Service of Florentine Civic Mythology

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which the maniera Etrusca was defined and appropriated in the artistic production of the late 15th and 16th centuries, with a particular focus on the Etruscan self-fashioning of Leo X and Cosimo I. Placing these Medici receptions into the context of a long history of Republican responses to and constructions of the Etruscan past, this research will look to shed light on the Etruscan forms and motifs that shaped the visual language of 16th century Florence and their role in the formation of a distinct Florentine civic identity. The interaction of this Tuscan/Etruscan civic self-fashioning with the dominant conception of antiquity emanating from the Eternal City will then be discussed in the context of the artistic promotion of Medici papal power in Rome. Though the influence of ancient Etruria on the artistic production and scholarship of the 18th and 19th centuries has been well established in scholarship, the afterlife of the material culture of this ancient civilisation in the Italian Renaissance has been somewhat understudied, particularly with regards to its interaction with Renaissance conceptions of the artistic past that had long been dominated by Rome. In much scholarship on the Etruscans, therefore it appears as though the Etruscomania of the 18th and 19th centuries had little or no prelude. Given the prominence of current Museological debates on the ownership and restitution of antiquities, and the potency of these objects in the construction of modern national identities, this thesis will ultimately seek to provide an insight into the competing claims, in the Renaissance, to an ancient past tied intimately to the political and cultural selfhood of Florence.