Material and Temporal Powers at the Casino di San Marco (1574–1621)

Chemistry in Renaissance Sciences

“…The duke asked Benedetti Varchi to compose his Si l'archimia è vera o no quistione (1544), where Varchi, alike Biringuccio, praised the true alchemy (alchimia vera), which led to hundreds of useful discoveries: metallic alloys, medicines, colors, artillery, glass, and many other chemical compounds and instruments (Perifano 1997). All these different arts continued being practiced in the Casino of San Marco, where Francesco I de Medici (1541-1587) set a new laboratory, or in the Fonderia of the Uffizi Gallery (Beretta 2014). Chrysopoeia was discussed and practiced by the authors of seventeenth-century chymical textbooks (a tradition inaugurated by Libavius' Alchemia), which greatly contributed to the reorganizing of this impressive body of knowledge (Hannaway 1975).…”

Hermit VS Hermeticism Hermits and the Hermetic Tradition in European Art of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

“…When he arrived in Florence as court artist to Cardinal Giancarlo de' Medici, Rosa came into contact with the latter's witty and frivolous literary academies, the 'learned' programs of court commissions and palace wall-paintings that were still very much tied up with the heritage of the previous century's Neo-Platonism. Giancarlo's uncle, Cardinal Carlo de' Medici, had been a passionate alchemist who enjoyed fame as a 'magus' [5] and lived above his famous laboratory / study in the Casino di San Marco [6], while his library made available to those in his circle the full corpus of the latest German alchemical and Rosicrucian publications. We know that the nephew -and perhaps all the Medici court artists responsible for developing complex allegorical programmes for festivities for the Duke and the cardinals -was acquainted at least with some of them.…”