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| Shared Passions |
Artful Beginnings
Aline Sullivan
08/02/2004
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Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492), the Florentine prince known to contemporaries
as “Il Magnifico,” is regarded as the mastermind behind the Italian Renaissance.
In his time, collecting contemporary art meant commissioning works by the likes
of Michelangelo and Sandro Botticelli. Yet Lorenzo the Magnificent lavished more
attention—and far more money—on a single, somewhat obscure cup than he did on
any other single piece of artwork. A shrewd investment it was not.
 The
so-called Tazza Farnese was the centerpiece of Lorenzo’s collection of carved
precious and semiprecious stones. Fashioned from a single piece of agate,
probably in the first or second century AD in Egypt, it depicts cavorting gods
in bass relief. After leaving Egypt, it traveled to Rome, then Constantinople,
then Sweden, then Persia and finally to Naples before falling into Lorenzo’s
hands.
He paid a heady sum for the Tazza Farnese, several times more than
what his cousin, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, would pay Botticelli for
his latest painting, but it was not entirely in vain. Thousands of people each
year admire the Tazza in Naples’ archeological museum. However, they are but a
tiny fraction of the throngs that flood Florence’s Uffizi to admire Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears that the glories of
antiquity so dazzled Il Magnifico that he was blinded, relatively speaking, to
the masterpiece in his own time.
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