Stones and Bones: Character in Materials and Men

• In Event: Medici Materials: From Substance to Artefact I

Abstract

In Marcello Adriani’s funeral oration for Giuliano de’ Medici (d. 1516), the deceased and his family exemplified virtues engendered by the Florentine locale. The territory’s steep and sterile mountains, for example, not only provided stone for Florence’s buildings, but also tempered and hardened the character of its people. The eulogy was delivered before the pietra forte facade of the Medici palace, whose walls, Adriani noted, sheltered virtue and glory within. The notion that geography informed the nature and physical characteristics of local peoples, animals, and materials — including stone (which “grew” in the soil) — was commonplace. This concept also informed images of virtues or vices emerging from the soil as well as images of the auctochthonic myth of Pyrrha and Deucalion in conjunction with Florentine portraits such as that of Cosimo I in the Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici.

Author

• Beth L. Holman, Independent Scholar