Lorenzo Merlini e il Cosimo III di Villa Vitelli

A masterpiece of late seventeenth-century Florentine sculpture, the monumental Portrait of Cosimo III de’ Medici (1694; marble, h. 205 cm) is one of the earliest independent achievements of Lorenzo Merlini (1666–1745), a pupil of Giovanni Battista Foggini, and at the same time one of the outstanding masterpieces of his career. The Grand Duke is shown full-length, in antique dress and in an attitude of command: Merlini combines the celebratory rhetoric of the state portrait with striking physiognomic truth, achieving a highly personal synthesis of the ancient and the modern. Commissioned by Marquis Clemente Vitelli, the statue was installed in 1695 in the great hall of his villa at San Domenico in Fiesole, an exceptional setting for a grand-ducal portrait of such scale and ambition. 

In this volume Gerardo Moscariello reconstructs the history of the marble, its commission and the setting for which it was conceived. The study traces the history of Villa Vitelli and of Marquis Clemente, examines the sculpture’s sixteenth-century Florentine models, and compares it with the other great full-length portrait of Cosimo III in antique dress, carved by Giuseppe Mazzuoli for Cardinal Flavio Chigi. The first part is followed by Merlini’s manuscript autobiography, presented in an extensively annotated transcription that sheds new light on the sculptor’s training, commissions and career. Introduced by a preface by Andrea Bacchi, the volume also includes the complete English text.