It would be difficult to overestimate the significance that has been given to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in early modern art historiography. Founded in 1563 and generally credited to Giorgio Vasari, the first formal art academy in the West has assumed almost mythic proportions from the start. Its success was measured early, in the powerful influence it exerted on the European imagination, and it has assumed the status of a cultural monument of the first rank. Yet much has remained vague about its conception, its practices, and its functions. As Karen-edis Barzman notes in the concluding paragraph of her Introduction, “The Florentine academy remains one of the most important and talked about, if little understood, institutions of cultural production in early modern Europe” (19). With this multifaceted book, that problem is addressed to excellent effect.

Barzman tells two stories: She chronicles the history of the Accademia del Disegno within the political economy of the Medici grand duchy, from its inception under Cosimo I in the 1560s to the end of the dynasty in the 1730s and 1740s, and she undertakes a more theoretical exploration of what she calls “the discourse of disegno” at its heart. Along the way, she enlarges our understanding of innumerable historic and conceptual matters of great interest and importance. Her study is rooted in Florentine archival documents, many of which are used here for the first time. A substantial appendix of this documentation is also provided.

The Introduction establishes a clear and convincing framework, partly by situating the methodologies and arguments of the book vis-à-vis earlier scholarship. Invoking Michel Foucault’s genealogical method and his analysis of the mechanics of power, Barzman challenges some of the influential contentions of her predecessors, especially Nikolaus Pevsner (Academies of Art Past and Present [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940]), for his exaggeration of Vasari’s agency in the Accademia del Disegno’s foundation, his view of the original goal as the freeing of artists from guild restrictions, and his low estimation of the new institution’s commitment to pedagogy. Indeed, the rebuttal of these three points accounts for a good bit of this book, from its overarching agenda to the constitution of its individual chapters. Barzman is primarily concerned to set the history of the Florentine Academy within the broader history of the evolution of the modern state—from its early role as an instrument of Cosimo I’s authority to its later contribution to “the emergence of a discourse of bourgeois culture and politics” in the eighteenth century (9). This leads her to stress the tripartite nature of the Academy as guild, confraternity, and school, with considerable attention given to the establishment of pedagogical programs.

The first four chapters lay out this history admirably, beginning with the revival of the artists’ Confraternity of Saint Luke with the ceremonial reburial of Jacopo del Pontormo in Santissima Annunziata in 1562. By the next year, statutes for a new academy were being drawn up, under the auspices of Cosimo I. Barzman depicts a group-directed enterprise, rather than one orchestrated solely by Vasari, and she illustrates how all the protagonists were “Cosimo’s men” (32). Every aspect of the new organization was imbued with Cosimo’s “will and authority” (34), which was exercised powerfully but indirectly via his delegates and the regulations they deployed, which legislated the members’ submission to their titular patron. The official in charge was actually referred to as the grand duke’s “bocha,” or mouthpiece (35). We are given a wide range of data, some of it of major import, such as the very limited financial commitment of Cosimo to his academy and, in opposition to Pevsner, the formal constitution of the new organization in 1571 as the combined “Università (guild), Compagnia (confraternity), ed Accademia del Disegno.” Among the more interesting ideas offered in the first chapter is the speculation that much of the motivation for promoting first the posthumous reputation of Pontormo and then a Medici academy was to compensate for the absence of the one artist guaranteed to shore up the prestige of Cosimo’s regime, namely Michelangelo, whose republican principles compelled him to resist the grand duke’s pressure to return from Rome to Florence. It is clear that Cosimo and his new academy went to great lengths to establish the desired association with their absent hero: in lectures presented to the Academy, in the pedagogy it promoted, in the temporary locating of its meetings in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in 1563, and in the elaborate funeral it staged for the artist in that basilica in 1564. The second edition of Vasari’s Lives and its hagiographic vita of Michelangelo would soon inflate that association to mythic dimensions.

In Chapters 2 and 3, which move chronologically through the reigns of the next three Medici grand dukes, the Accademia del Disegno is shown to assume an increasingly integral role in the public promotion of the prestige of the state. For instance, Ferdinando I gave governance of the export of paintings from Tuscany to the Academy in a far-reaching decree of 1602, designed to protect the local artistic patrimony. Individual Medici relatives of the grand duke participated personally and productively in the Academy: most notably, Don Giovanni de’ Medici, half-brother of Grand Duke Francesco, and Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici, brother of Grand Duke Ferdinando II. Under Ferdinando II a rigorous reform of the governing statutes, teaching programs, and disciplines was undertaken, and the Florentine Academy reached its maximum stability.

But starting in the seventeenth century, another development began that affected this picture considerably: the gradual dispersal of centralized authority and the rise of an administrative class of bureaucrats in Florence. This was congruent with changes in the Accademia del Disegno itself, as membership tilted increasingly away from professional artists and more toward amateurs and dilettantes, the very men who made up the administrative bureaucracy that ran the government during the reigns of Cosimo III and Giangastone, the last Medici grand dukes. (This development is detailed in Chapter 4.) Ironically, Cosimo III is a crucial figure here. On the one hand, he was more personally devoted to the nurturance of the arts in Tuscany than many of his predecessors, but, on the other, he was less interested in the Academy in Florence than in the creation of a “school” for Florentine artists in Rome. During his reign and that of his hapless son Giangastone, the Academy functioned increasingly autonomously, as its amateur members became prominent figures in the wider civil arena. Barzman connects this phenomenon to the social and political development of what Jürgen Habermas has termed “modern bourgeois subjectivity” beyond Tuscany.

With Chapters 5 and 6, the focus shifts from historical narrative to the following questions, first posed in the Introduction (7): 1) How and why did the Medici institutionalize a discipline called disegno in their school?; and 2) What was the effect of their incorporation of this school with a confraternity and a guild? Chapter 5, “Disegno as a Disciplinary Practice: The Academy School,” will probably be the most useful section of the entire book. After a cogent analysis of the philosophical and aesthetic components of the concept of disegno, Barzman moves to its practices, that is, the instruction in mathematics, anatomy, and, in particular, figure drawing. The topic of the pedagogical programs, raised throughout the book, is given its fullest treatment here, and much interesting data is provided. Sometimes surprising episodes are recounted, such as the competition described in the section on “the role of artists in the vindication of Galilean science” (157–59). The wealth of material is marshaled to argue, against Pevsner, for the thorough and serious commitment of the Accademia del Disegno to teaching, and much of this evidence works well to that effect, as, for instance, when we learn that the members taxed themselves to pay for instruction in mathematics not funded by the treasury. At the same time, Barzman reveals a history marked by many stops and starts, by numerous initiatives not always sustained, which somewhat mitigates the force of her claims. Chapter 6 completes the inquiry into the Academy’s diverse formal components by providing an account of the various confraternal and guild activities of the academicians, both ceremonial and legal.

One of the most salutary aspects of this book is its linking of Baroque or “late” Florentine artistic culture to its Renaissance roots. Indeed, much of the text explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century terrain that may be unfamiliar to many art historians, for whom Florentine art fades away after Mannerism. One of the positive results of Barzman’s decision, announced in the Introduction, to bypass “issues of production and style” (19) is the avoidance of the still common conception of late Medici Florence as culturally stagnant, a sorry spectacle of decline. Many key figures in Florentine intellectual and artistic life, such as Vincenzo Viviani, Girolamo Ticciati, and Francesco Maria Gabburri, are worthy of much more attention than they have received before now, especially in English, and it is a pleasure to encounter them and their accomplishments here. Barzman offers a useful corrective not only by presenting so much relevant but long-overlooked material, but also by using that material to demonstrate the forward-looking dimensions of post-Renaissance Florentine developments.

Barzman has produced a convincing and interesting book. There are nonetheless some discordant notes. For instance, given the limited relevant visual images available, it is disappointing when one as tantalizing as Giovanni Stradano’s Allegory of the Florentine Academy of ca. 1578 (fig. 18) is barely discussed. And, as with many projects rooted in archives, where documentation survives more to record minutiae than anything else, the text does not always distinguish between mountains and molehills. A case in point is the piling up in the final chapter of detailed descriptions of processions and ceremonies undertaken by the academy in its confraternity role. More bothersome is a larger tendency toward repetitious insistence on key ideas, particularly the argument for the academy as a Medici tool or instrument of state. And at times the narrative flow is ill served by a breaking of the discussion into short units, occasionally only a single paragraph in length. Otherwise, the prose style is generally effective, and it must be stressed that overall there is far more to praise than to criticize. This book is a serious contribution to the field of early modern art history. It fills grievous and long-standing lacunae and opens many avenues for further exploration. It deserves to be widely read.