Mighty Medici

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Then there were the decorative arts: hard-stone (pietre dure) inlays, gems, tapestries. The tapestries in particular were a way of extracting the maximum visual punch from skilled labor: not only could they reproduce great designs at a fraction of the cost of painting, but they could also cover enormous surfaces with sumptuous effects. Monarchs loved them, setting up weaving factories in the Netherlands, France, Naples and Madrid. Naturally, the Medici had to have their own. Most elaborate of all were the pietre dure designs — fantastically elaborate inlays of jasper, lapis lazuli, serpentine and all manner of semiprecious stones, sawed into thin sheets and assembled as a jigsaw by gem cutters. Francesco de' Medici in particular, Cosimo's son, took delight in these because of his proto-scientific, alchemical interests; he was fascinated, like someone seeing pictures in the fire or Leonardo free-associating about forms made by accidental damp on walls, by how the grain of the stone suggested further pictures within the larger design.

But it is to the paintings in the show that the visitor will probably be most drawn. Florentine mannerism--"the stylish style," as one art historian called it — reached its apogee under the immediate and inescapable influence of Michelangelo. Its hallmarks were the extreme grace and elongation of the figures and their twisting, flamelike pose, known as the figura serpentinata. Thirty years ago, the fashion among (mainly Marxist) art historians was to attribute this artificiality to social anxiety among the artists: how different was the overrefined melancholy of Pontormo from the solid materiality of earlier Renaissance artists like Masaccio! Actually there's no basis for this, and one can enjoy the wonderful (if at times rather stressed out) elegance of Florentine mannerism without feeling that the artists' world was somehow falling apart.

Besides, it is not always so far from realism. Witness the sublime painting (circa 1616-18) by Cristofano Allori of Judith, attended by her nurse, holding the decapitated head of her would-be rapist Holo-fernes. (The model for Holofernes was Allori himself; for Judith, his real-life lover, known as La Mazzafirra). Far from being etiolated or artificial, it is almost as realist as a Caravaggio, though much classier in the opulence of Judith's robes.

All in all, this isn't just a good or interesting show. It's a great one, thanks to the willingness of newly enlightened Italian collections to lend their treasures to foreign museums. The show could not have been done 10 years ago, and it shifts into the light a whole tract of art history that has never been properly treated by an American museum before.