The Medici’s Painter also contains a rare still life,
Vase of Tulips, Narcissi, Anemones and Buttercups with a Basin of Tulips. The Medici coat of arms in the middle of the gilded vase suggests it was a commission he could not turn down. Dolci’s real desire, however, and his spiritual mission, was to paint intimate depictions of divine subjects that would inflame the faith of those who viewed them.
The Medici’s Painter gives us an opportunity to study Dolci’s painstaking application of paint using ultrafine brushes, and only a few bristles, or the concentration it took to make tiny details look so real, as in the lace on the cloth beneath the Christ child’s feet in the foreground of
The Virgin and Child with Lilies from Montpellier. One of the first things visitors will notice about a Dolci picture is his brilliant sense of color, achieved by his access to expensive materials, such as real gold and ground lapis lazuli, which accounts for the beautiful blues. There is often a high finish that gives the surface a smooth, enamel-like quality.
Dolci’s technique was time-consuming and exacting. He was notoriously slow, a perfectionist who might take as long as 11 years to finish a canvas to his own satisfaction. Another habit contributed to the inordinate length of time: According to his biographer, Dolci would recite the litany Ora pro nobis (pray for us) between each brush stroke and sometimes write inscriptions on the back of his canvas.
The Medici’s Painter includes a fine example of such a canvas, so visitors can see Carlino’s tiny florid script.
“Dolci was an incredible colorist and an impeccable draftsman,” said Sarah Schroth, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum. “Visitors will delight in his perfect rendering of hands and faces — and will be dazzled by his colors, such as the intense blue made from ground lapis lazuli.”
The Medici’s Painter is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Davis Museum at Wellesley College ($35, Yale University Press). The catalogue was edited by exhibition curator Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, head of the European art department and Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The Medici’s Painter features essays by Straussman-Pflanzer and other leading early modern scholars: Francesca Baldassari, Edward Goldberg, Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato and Scott Nethersole. The catalogue is available at the Nasher Museum Store.
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The Medici’s Painter: Carlo Dolci and 17th-Century Florence at the Nasher Museum of Art, please consider making a
gift to support this exhibition or
Nasher general exhibitions.
For more information about how your gift sustains the future success of exhibitions at the Nasher Museum, contact Stephanie Wheatley, Director of Development, by telephone at 919.668.4063 or by email at
stephanie.wheatley@duke.edu.