Keith Christiansen
An Overview of the Met Museum’s Exhibition: The Medici Portraits and Politics 1512-1570
Summary
Keith Christensen, a curator emeritus at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, walks us through many of the Medici portraits (and some others as well) from 1512–1570 and discusses their significance and relationship to politics at that time.
Keith Christiansen
Keith Christiansen is curator emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum, where he began his career as assistant curator in 1977 before becoming the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of European Paintings in 2009. During the forty-four years he served at the museum, he collaborated in the organization of over twenty exhibitions. He has taught at Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and was the Clarence and Ruth Wedgewood Kennedy Professor in Renaissance Studies at Smith College (1999) and a guest professor at Vassar (2006). In addition to the many acquisitions he pursued that have enriched the Met’s collection, he has published widely and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, conferred by the Ministry of Arts in France.
Oh wow, good question. My guess is yes, but I honestly don’t know.
Yes, I think that’s such a good observation. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer, except that the elegance of the hands with those long tapering fingers becomes an aristocratic emblem. You’ve never had hard labour. You’ve never touched anything that might create deformities or show over musculature in your hands. So I think it’s an intentional way of demonstrating your detachment from ordinary life and from being anything ordinary. It really is a noble emblem. And you find these same sorts of hands, not surprisingly, in Van Dyke’s portraits of British grandees. Where you see them sometimes in poses such as this, but with extraordinarily long, almost ridiculously long, elegant fingers. And so in this sense, these gestures with these elegant hands are themselves emblematic of being somebody apart from the hoi polloi.
Well, I’ll tell, you know, in drawing up an exhibition like this, there was a challenge. There are, first of all those things that you know, cannot be obtained because of their importance or fragility. But nonetheless, you drop a list of certain things that you want absolutely to have. And I will, I confess the first work of art that I put down was Laura Battiferri. It’s a work that I’ve seen in Florence and simply thought, “This is such an idiosyncratic individual work "and one that takes you "into a completely different dimension. "Must have.” And then, and another one was the Pontormo portrait that I showed early on of the young boy in the red and yellow holding a . So these are among my favourite works, I have to say. Yes, absolutely.