Palazzo Buontalenti.
A photographic campaign

A photographic campaign is a kind of collective work, the result of a collaboration of people who have different professional qualifications but a common objective. At the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, this objective is always research. In addition to the photographers, the entire Photothek team is, at various levels, involved in bringing the campaign to fruition. While the research assistants plan the campaign and the photo-technical assistant supervises all steps of the process, numerous colleagues work on inventorying and cataloguing the photographic prints, in addition to mounting them on cardboard and labelling them. The photographic documents that eventually will be available to users in the Photothek itself and in the Digital Photothek are the product of a rather complex process. 

The focus of the photo campaign being ‘dissected’ in this online exhibition is the fresco cycle in the Casino Mediceo di San Marco/Palazzo Buontalenti in Florence. Painted in 1621–1623, these frescoes were intended to position the Medici family as a major player in Europe and the Mediterranean, both in military terms and as patrons of the sciences and the arts. Like every other new photographic campaign, this one opens doors to new studies that in the future might lead to a revision of traditional interpretative criteria based on the rhetoric of the Medici’s ‘triumphs’ and ‘glory’.

The cooperation of the European University Institute, which established the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the Palazzo Buontalenti in 2017, has been crucial. This online exhibition is therefore also a result of institutional exchange between two research institutions based in Florence.

go to the online exhibition