Review: Españoles en la corte de los Medici: Arquitectura y política en tiempos de Cosimo I, by Carlos Plaza

Abstract

Carlos Plaza Espanoles en la corte de los Medici: Arquitectura y politica en tiempos de Cosimo I Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispanica, 2016, 562 pp., 60 color and 165 b/w illus. €33.66, ISBN 9788415245568 Recent research about early modern Spanish Italy has yielded fruitful results for architectural history. For instance, we now know more about a Castilian cardinal's patronage of Donato Bramante in Rome, and we have new evidence of correspondence between viceroys and a Spanish king about building a royal palace in Naples.1 Carlos Plaza's Espanoles en la corte de los Medici also contributes new knowledge about Spanish patrons of architecture in Florence during that city's transformation by Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74) and his successors into the site of a ducal court. This is a book with many protagonists, beginning with Cosimo, his first wife, Eleanora of Toledo (1522–62), and his sons Francesco I (1541–87) and Ferdinando I (1549–1609). The cast of characters expands to include three Spaniards whose Florentine palaces form the core of the study: the courtiers Antonio Ramirez de Montalvo (d. 1581) and Fabio Arrazola de Mondragon (1530/35–86), and the merchant and bali , or grand master, of the Order of Santo Stefano, Baltasar Suarez de la Concha (d. 1620). Plaza's ambitious project probes the biographies of these three Spaniards and elucidates the processes by which they built monuments to glorify the Medici dukes and elevate their own status. Plaza also reevaluates existing scholarship on Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511–92), who emerges as another principal figure. In the book's prologue, Howard Burns commends Plaza's attention to little-known Spanish patrons and to the political, cultural, and architectural contexts in which they operated. Indeed, context drives Plaza's introduction, where he provides wide-ranging information about Florence and its relation with Spain from the late Middle Ages through the sixteenth century. During the Renaissance, according to Plaza, Italy and Spain formed “a common territory” for the circulation of ideas, models, and persons that helped shape architectural …