Laura Moretti:
Inside the casa dell’orto: Niccolò Gaddi and the Material World of Early Modern Florence

In the 1570s, the Florentine collector Niccolò Gaddi (1537–1591), working alongside the architect Giovanni Antonio Dosio, restructured a property adjacent to his family palace—the casa dell’orto—to house his extraordinary collections. This lecture explores the material world housed throughout Gaddi’s casa dell’orto, with particular attention to the non-artistic materials, exotica, and naturalia displayed in its top floor. Drawing on archival building inventories, diplomatic correspondence, and surviving global objects—ranging from Chinese porcelain and ebony items to Turkish costume albums, ivory gaming boards, and maps of the world—this paper examines how Gaddi curated space to navigate early modern global networks. By examining the micro-spatial arrangement, taxonomy, and display strategies across the site, this talk moves beyond traditional connoisseurship. It demonstrates how Gaddi leveraged the social interactions of his ‘museum’ to perform cultural sophistication, construct a cosmopolitan identity, and exercise political soft power in late sixteenth-century Florence.

Laura Moretti is Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of In the House of the Muses. Collection, Display, and Performance in the Veronese Palace of Mario Bevilacqua (1536-93) (2020), of Dagli Incurabili alla Pietà. Le chiese degli Ospedali Grandi veneziani tra architettura e musica (2008), and the joint author (with Deborah Howard) of Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice (2009). Her fields of interest are the relationship between art, architecture and music in sixteenth-century Italy, the history of collecting, and the history of the early modern book. She is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project titled: “Cosmopolitan Ambition: Niccolò Gaddi's Global Objects in Early Modern Florence.