The Medici and Byzantium: Hellenic culture and Greek politics in the Magi Chapel frescoes

Authors:

Pages: 43-62
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/YWRF7865

Abstract:

The Magi Chapel frescoes in Palazzo Medici-Riccardi have already been recognized as Benozzo Gozzoli’s masterpiece. Their complex and well-designed pictorial composition have captured the attention of a wide range of specialists in different scientific fields. Art Historians generally speculate that the Magi Chapel frescoes embody the transition from International Gothic to Renaissance painting. Historians have seen the frescoes as a “screenshot” of the controversial Council of Florence (1438/39). Indeed, several portraits of high-ranking political figures populate the fresco decoration, amongst whom the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaiologos, the Holy Roman emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg and a young member of the Medici family often associated with Lorenzo the Magnificent. Philologists and Theology scholars have also contributed to the investigation. They have drawn attention to the Byzantine philosopher Georgios Gemistos Plethon, author of De differentiis Platonis et Aristotelis, whose portrait stands side by side Gozzoli’s self-portrait in the Medici cortège. During his short stay in Florence, Plethon nourished to life 15th-century Neoplatonism and inspired some of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance such as Marsilio Ficino and Angolo Poliziano. This article will investigate the significance of Greek language and Byzantine tradition in the emerging Florentine cultural hegemony. It will also show the deep chasm between the political image of Byzantium and the cultural image of Byzantium. While the Magi Chapel picture John VIII Palaiologos doomed, i.e. alone in a landscape of winding roads symbolizing the entangled and contradictory arguments of Byzantine rhetoric, Plethon has clearly become part of the Medici retinue, as if the future of Plato and Aristotle was no longer in Constantinople, but in Florence.

Keywords:

Florence, the Medici, John VIII Palaiologos, Georgios Gemistos Plethon, Benozzo Gozzoli, Byzantine diplomacy, Greek humanism, neoplatonism, art theory and practice in Renaissance Italy.

Download

NA