Benedetto Varchi Reading His Storia fiorentina to Cosimo I de' Medici

Florence in 1862 was a year into the new Kingdom of Italy, and its young painters were working the Medici past as national history. Giuseppe Ciaranfi, three years after his first classes at the Accademia, made his debut at the city's Promotrice exhibition with this scene. The scholar Benedetto Varchi reads aloud to Duke Cosimo I from the history of Florence that Cosimo had commissioned from him around 1547. What the picture leaves out is what became of the book. Varchi covered the years from 1527 to 1538, when the republic fell and the Medici took the state for good, and he set down the violence of the winning side freely enough that the text stayed unprinted for more than 150 years. It came out in 1721 under a Cologne imprint, long after both men in this room were dead.