The Grand Dukes and their inventories: administering possessions and defining value at the Medici court

Abstract

Inventories produced for princely collections in the early modern period diverged substantially from contemporaneous notarial and legal inventories. By investigating a variety of inventories of the Medici family, from 1553 to 1713, this essay sheds light on such differences and explores the material existence and textual strategies of court inventories, addressing issues of function and authorship, as well as relationships between text, objects and people. This essay also explores the role played by these texts in defining artistic value and collectors’ identities through material and aesthetic discourses.

Keywords

• Inventory
• materiality
• Medici court
• list
• textuality
• value