Untangling the Mannerist Narrative: Bronzino, Moses, and Eleanora of Toledo at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

The chapel decorated for the private use of Duchess Eleonora of Toledo by Bronzino in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (1541-45), has been much studied in recent decades, at least from the viewpoints of the fresco cycle's connoisseurship, complex formal structure and supposed Medicean iconography. This lecture takes a different direction in exploring how Eleonora, as a young Spanish woman, would have used her chapel and its narratives of the deeds of Moses for specific private devotions, which arose from the religious practices she acquired from both sides of her family. It demonstrates how the miracles of Moses were linked in contemporary Spanish devotional writings to Spain's wars against the Turk, and how Bronzino responded to his patron's passionate, Spanish sense of familial loyalty in the imagery he used. The lecture will show that this "Mannerist" visual narrative is not necessarily resistant to historical interpretation, and that if resistance is apparent it has been generated by modern art history's obsession with the formal analysis of mid-sixteenth century Italian art.

Robert W. Gaston

Robert Gaston studied History and Fine Arts at The University of Melbourne when the founding scholars of the Fine Arts Department, Joseph Burke, Bernard Smith and Franz Philipp, were teaching in their diverse but influential styles. He took his PhD. at the Warburg Institute under the supervision of Otto Kurz, then taking up a position as Assistant Professor in Art History at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, a department chaired by the dynamic Charles Mitchell, who encouraged some of the brightest graduates from Melbourne to undertake their PhDs with him, including Margaret Manion. Robert returned briefly to the Melbourne Department, and then moved to the Art History Program at La Trobe University, in which he has taught for the past thirty years.

Robert was a visiting professor at The University Professors Program at Boston University in 1991-92. He has been Hanna Kiel Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, Florence, and Samuel H. Kress Senior Research Fellow at The Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. He has published extensively on Italian art and culture 1300-1650, and has organized a number of international conferences in his field. Lately he has been preparing a critical edition of the sixteenth-century antiquarian Pirro Ligorio's manuscript XIII. B. 9 in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, for the Edizione Nazionale of the works of Ligorio, to be published in Rome by the Accademia dei Lincei.