The prince's body: imagining regime change in mid-sixteenth-century Florence

The creation of the Medici principality in mid-sixteenth-century Florence necessitated a profound shift in both institutions and political culture. It also re-oriented the city toward the emergent Spanish empire. This chapter considers the ways that the body politic of Florence became imagined, quite literally, as the body of the Medici prince in a dramatic shift away from the collective allegorical iconography of the Florentine republic, which had imagined itself in biblical or mythological figures. The chapter considers this shift in visual culture as part of the larger politico-cultural integration of sixteenth-century Florence into the Spanish world and global empire. The wealth of imagery of the ruling Medici princes and their families has previously been analyzed in terms of personal ideology of governance or continuities of republican traditions. This chapter develops from that scholarship to examine how this visual patrimony imagined and represented the fundamental change in political culture from republic to principality and the consequent transformation of Florence’s place in the Mediterranean and the wider world.