Works-in-Progress Session: Drawings for the Medici Trionfi da Tavola (1646–1670) and the Corporeal Nature of Vessels in Early Modern Florence

Presented by Emily Ann Ostlander, Ph.D. Student, University of California, Los Angeles

Hosted by the Early Modern Research Group

Online event via Zoom
To register, please visit: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUtc-2vpj0oEtEnrJdCJuoDudU5rn4nCj7B

A drawing in ink and blue wash from a series of table-top creations known as the Trionfi da Tavola presents viewers with a design for a fantastic ewer. The vessel is devised as an assemblage of forms from nature. Vascular tubes converge into a tree trunk and gnarled branches frame an unexpected composition of bodies. An annotation attempts to explain the design of the vessel by describing how it circulates liquid, with red wine filling figures of eagles and serpents, and white wine flowing into the rest of the apparatus. The anatomical character of the drawing provokes my investigation of contemporary ideas of the body, fantasy, and metamorphosis.

The series of drawings for table centerpieces was made for the Florentine court of Ferdinando II de’ Medici (1610–70) during a period of heightened experimentation in the luxury arts. Since the designs are not signed by an artist, scholarship on the Trionfi has concentrated on questions of attribution. Instead, this work-in-progress session situates the drawings from the Trionfi in the history of early modern designs for ewers. It then explores how they were vehicles for the transmission of ideas about bodies and materials in seventeenth-century Florence.

Emily Ann Ostlander is a first-year Ph.D. student in Art History at UCLA. As an undergraduate at New York University, she became interested in early modern art through her work at the Acton Collection at Villa La Pietra in Florence. Her Master’s thesis, completed in 2024, analyzed a seventeenth-century thesis print to demonstrate the political efficacy of iterative imagery to promote the architectural interventions of Pope Alexander VII (1599–1667) in Rome. Her current research focuses on representations of the body that resist conventions of gender and idealization in Italy during the sixteenth century.

Image: Attributed to the Master of the Medici Banquet Decanters (Italian, active 17th century), Design for a Ewer, 1646–70, 14 1/8 × 10 1/8 in., Pen and ink and blue wash, The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection.