Michelangelo’s The Dream (ca. 1533)

In 1563, when Cosimo de’ Medici, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, founded the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, it marked a significant step toward his larger goal of creating a centralized regime structure that would channel the artistic, intellectual, mercantile, and even religious pursuits of its subjects toward the greater glory of the state and its dynastic ruler. The Accademia was intended to function as if it were a ministry for the visual arts: essentially a propaganda agency. It was a first and very successful experiment in monarchic absolutism, energized in southern Europe by the Counter-Reformation, and destined to dominate the wider political landscape for nearly two centuries. What set Cosimo apart from earlier, mediaeval autocrats was the efficient, proto-modern bureaucracy by which his government functioned. The Duke’s ally in creating the Accademia was a remarkably enterprising artist: the painter, theorist, and historian Giorgio Vasari, who counted among his many accomplishments publication of the monumental Vite (“Lives of the Painters, etc.”), now considered a first milestone of art history. Their innovation was to have profound and lasting consequences on the subsequent development of European art. In 1648, Cardinal Mazarin founded the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, a direct descendant of Cosimo and Vasari’s Accademia, thus taking a High Renaissance model and transforming it into a fully formed Baroque institution, one which was to serve the Sun King and his successors particularly well.

Note the slight