In the summer of 1551, the artist Giulio Clovio arrived in Florence in the entourage of his long-time patron Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who had left Rome out of political expediency. Although Cardinal Farnese’s sojourn in Florence was short, Clovio remained in the city for three years as a guest of Cosimo and his wife, Eleonora de Toledo. Best known for his ability to imitate Michelangelo, Clovio supplied works for the Medici collection that brought the self-exiled Florentine artist’s designs home and other works that were more representative in general of the central Italian bella maniera. The gift of two of these works from the Medici to Charles V and his son Philip, respectively, bookend exactly the war that Cosimo fought on behalf of the Habsburg to conquer Siena, 1553-1555. This paper examines the degree to which the Medici leveraged Clovio’s much-coveted works as cultural capital to achieve political ends in one of the final campaigns of the Italian Wars.
Elena Calvillo is Professor and Chair of Art History at the University of Richmond, Virginia. She is the author of The Invention of Giulio Clovio: A Cosmopolitan Refugee in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Brill, forthcoming 2026) and co-editor with Piers Baker-Bates of Almost Eternal: Paintings on Stone and Material Innovation in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). She is broadly interested in theories of representation and of cultural translation and brokerage in Italy, Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century and has published several studies on Clovio, Francisco de Holanda, and Sebastiano del Piombo.
Nicholas Scott Baker is Associate Professor of History at Macquarie University, Sydney, and currently has a visiting position in Classical Studies at the University of Richmond. He is the author of The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480-1550 (Harvard, 2013) and In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2021) as well as several articles and book chapters on the political and economic cultures of Italy in the sixteenth century. He is currently working on a microhistory of the Botti family, merchants and art collectors, in sixteenth-century Tuscany and Andalusia.
