The Medici Are Dead

Violante Siriès’ success in a changing art market

An interview with Giulia Coco by Linda Falcone

Originally published in Restoration Conversations

Issue 8 Autumn/Winter 2025

Maria Theresa of Austria’s husband Francis Stephan decided to stay in Vienna with his wife in 1737, despite being proclaimed head of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.  Europe’s more powerful states had refused to recognise Anna Maria Luisa, the last of the Medici line, as the territory’s legitimate ruler, because she was a woman – despite Austria itself being headed by an empress. Florence was left in the hands of the Lorraine, whose governance marked a time of profound change for the art market and artists themselves, including painter Violante Siriès (1710–1783). Restoration Conversations recently sat down with Giulia Coco, curator at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, following the AWA Legacy Fund’s ‘Accademia Women’ project to restore artworks attributed to Siriès, during which Coco collaborated with the conservation team, as art historian and research scholar. Coco’s insight sheds light on a little-known but highly successful eighteenth-century artist braving ‘turbulent’ times.

Giuseppe Zocchi, mid-1700s, Painting, Opificio delle Pietre Dure

Restoration Conversations: Violante Siriès lived in an era that represented an epochal shift for Florence. First, can you give us a little background on the age in which she worked?

Giulia Coco: With Giangastone de’ Medici’s death, the Grand Duchy became little more than a tiny state that could be used as a bartering chip, or a pawn on the chessboard of greater European powers. Giangastone died in 1737, when Siriès was 27, so she was young, but not ‘too young’ for her time, and was already actively pursuing her career. But it has to be said that the city no longer found itself within the context of a Grand Ducal court. The Lorraine Dynasty was not particularly generous in terms of art commissions and sponsorship in Florence, unlike the Medicis, who had created a situation that remained stable from the 1500s onwards and, ultimately, would shape and define the city as we know it today. The 1700s and 1800s are not quite the Dark Ages,  but they have never been considered thriving from an artistic point of view. Even scholars and art historians have always approached it with the attitude, ‘Ah, the Medici are dead, it was a moment of decline.’ In reality, that’s true to a certain point. Obviously, Florence no longer had a proper court, or the Medici’s great building enterprises, like the decoration of a Palazzo Pitti, but it’s also true that the city’s Regency Council (1737 to 1765), sent to represent Francis Stephan, did want to manifest their wealth and power. It organised events, dances, parties filled with pomp and circumstance, and a whole group of Florentine families came to the fore. Theirs were ancient branches with age-old traditions, who wanted to take advantage of this situation by flaunting their wealth and continuing a tradition of sponsorship and artistic promotion, via venues like the Accademia del Disegno, including the exhibitions it organised at Santissima Annunziata, in which Siriès participated. Her family’s standing gave her the foundations she needed to pursue her career. She was born and raised in an artistic environment, through her father, director at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the Grand Duchy’s precious stone workshop, and her brother, who eventually held the same position. Violante’s milieu was la crème de la crème of the city.

RC: Following AWA Legacy Fund’s recent restoration of works attributed to Siriès at the Certosa di Firenze, what can you tell us about Violante’s work as a devotional artist?

GC: Violante’s Reading Madonna is extraordinary in all of its simplicity. The figure had to be rendered as genuinely and essentially as possible, because religious orders used paintings as instruments of prayer, almost as a form of channelling, whereby paintings became a medium to reach the Divine. That is why art for private worship was the basis of a plethora of commissions. Saint Catherine, attributed to Violante because of its stylistic similarity to the artist’s signed works, depicts a woman of culture and a queen, so she is bejewelled and wearing shimmering silks and fine embroidery. With the Saints, an artist could have more fun with the details. Catherine has the look of a child, with her upturned gaze, her rosy cheeks and her half-open mouth. There’s no ostentation despite her fancy garb. In fact, she seems unaware of her finery… her wealth is on the inside. Prior to Pietro Leopoldo’s arrival in 1765, the clergy was very important for artists who produced devotional works. His pragmatic and anti-clerical stance against religious orders, the Jesuits in particular, radically changed the art market in terms of commissions garnered, largely due to his suppression of convents and monasteries and the dispersion of their artworks. Pietro Leopoldo was interested in agricultural and economic reform. In a way, he incarnated what Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici said about the Lorraine Dynasty in a letter to her secretary Pompeo Neri: ‘The Lorraine are so thirsty for everything, they would empty the sea, if they could’, which is why she created the farsighted Family Pact to bind the Medici’s possessions to the city, independent of the ruling family following her own.

Elizabeth Wicks and Marina Vincenti restore The Reading Madonna, AWA Legacy Fund, ph. Marco Badiani

RC: If Siriès had to reinvent herself and create another clientele, what would that have looked like?

GC: She was an artist who managed to navigate in all kinds of water, and to carve her place in this era of passage, despite strong competition from foreign artists. The Grand Tour was in full swing, and there were numerous English and French artists who came to Italy to train and gain knowledge, to copy the Old Masters, but many of them ended up settling in Italy and became competitors to artists like Siriès. They wanted to work, they came looking for commissioners, but she had to make this international influx work to her benefit. It’s worth mentioning that another genre became very popular in her time, causing an additional market shift Violante and other women had to grapple with – that of cityscape artists – with the likes of Giuseppe Zocchi and Thomas Patch – due to the presence of many foreigners who wanted a souvenir to take home. But Violante’s success hinged upon her decision to focus on portraits and miniatures, genres common among women artists. As I mentioned before, she had a deft hand when it came to portraying fabrics, jewels and embroideries, and this skill served to create a realistic portrait that was true to life, but also a statement of wealth and prestige, just as her paintings were.

RC: How did Siriès go about securing commissions and what kinds of works characterise her later period?

GC: After studying with Giovanna Fratellini, she followed her jeweller father to Paris for a period and trained with Rigaud and Boucher. In a matter of speaking, she went on a mini grand tour of her own! This international training was a ‘pedigree’ she could use to impress Florentine commissioners. Remember that the splendour of the 1500s and 1600s had passed and Florence was a provincial city – just as it is today. Her international experience made her a sought-after artist, enabling her to create a virtuous circle, with families like the Sandedoni and the Gondi, who in turn, were friends and relatives of other noble families and top military figures, officials, admirals and the like. Also consider that foreigners came to Italy for social and political reasons, but sometimes they came for their health, for its good weather and thermal baths. What better occasion than a healthy holiday to say, ‘You know what, I’d like to have my portrait painted’ and for the response to be, ‘I know someone good, and the price is right.’ Violante’s painting of French official Claude Alexandre, Count of Bonneval, who served the Ottoman Empire and ultimately converted to Islam, is now in France. Another noteworthy portrait is that of Edward Hughes – a British vice admiral who was stationed in Livorno in 1761 and would end up being commander of the British fleet in the Indian Ocean during the American Revolution. It is now in England at the National Trust’s National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

RC: Were other women, like Violante, pursuing successful careers in Florence during her time?

GC: In terms of art commissions, another important nucleus in Florence during Violante’s era was the ‘English colony’ which is best expressed with the arrival of the British ambassador and diplomat Horace Mann, who settled in Palazzo Manetti on via Santo Spirito from the late 1730s to the mid-1780s. In fact, Santo Spirito and the Carmine district, became the English Quarter – the Oltrarno – which is still very well loved by forestieri (foreigners). That’s where the hotels were, managed by Italians or by the English, as in the case of Charles Hadfield, the father of Maria Hadfield Cosway, who was also a painter, a little younger than Siriès. Mann writes about her in his correspondence with Horace Walpole, along with other women artists, like sculptor Anne Seymour Damer, his protégé, who has a bust in the Uffizi’s self-portrait collection. Many of the other women he cites are merely names that have been lost to history, but his mention of them gives us a sense of the cultural ferment that characterised the time. It was a context in which Violante Siriès thrived. LINDA FALCONE