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Speaker: Susie Nash (I Tatti / Courtauld Institute of Art)
In the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, in the Salle delle Cantorie below the famous works by Donatello and Luca della Robbia, sits a somewhat less famous object: a reliquary made in 1500 for the Florentine Baptistry. This silver gilt and enamel, all’antica ‘tempietto’ encases another, much smaller solid gold reliquary made over a 100 years earlier in Paris: a diminutive but powerful gift from Charles V to his brother Louis of Anjou, coined early in its life a Libretto due to its complex folding form. Its eventful biography, how it came to be enshrined by the Calimala, who called it ‘perhaps the most beautiful and worthy thing this city has’, and what it may have signified to the Florentines in the turbulent years around 1500, is the subject of this seminar.
Susie Nash is the Deborah Loeb Brice Professor of Renaissance art at The Courtauld Institute where she has taught since 1993. Her research interests lie in northern Europe and Spain c. 1300-1550, across all media, with a particular focus on works of art as physical objects, their material and archival histories, their making, reception, conservation and afterlife. Her publications include Northern Renaissance Art (2008); Trade in Artists' Materials (2010); a series of articles on Claus Sluter's 'Well of Moses' in The Burlington Magazine (2005, 2006, 2008, 2024) and a major study of the tomb of the Burgundian duke Philip the Bold (JWCI, 2020).
Image: The Libretto of Louis of Anjou, detail, Florence, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
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