Lorenzo Tornabuoni's History of Jason and Medea series. Chivalry and classicism in 1480s Florence

Abstract

This article examines the set of spalliera panels representing the Greek legend of Jason and Medea, which were commissioned by the Florentine patrician Giovanni Tornabuoni to commemorate his marriage to Giovanna degli Albizzi in 1486. Unlike Medea, Giovanna degli Albizzi was famed for her chaste virtues, and modern art historians have devised theories of increasing complexity and ingenuity to explain such a choice of subject. However, detailed iconographic analysis suggests that these panels depicting an ancient story are not based on ancient sources. Instead their origins can be found in several late medieval chivalric texts, Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae and Raoul Lefèvre's Histoire de Jason (the latter was written for the Burgundian court, celebrating the origins of the Order of the Golden Fleece). Thus Lorenzo Tornabuoni's Jason and Medea spalliera series elides the two most prestigious cultural value systems of late fifteenth‐century Florence: Greek and Roman antiquity and chivalry. The paintings still vividly celebrate the complex interaction and mingling of classicism and chivalry that was such a salient, but still underestimated, characteristic of Florentine culture in the Vasarian ‘Golden Age’ of the 1470s and 1480s.