ABSTRACT
Among the more surprising items owned by the Galleria Nazionale del Bargello in Florence is a rather splendid Byzantine icon of Christ Pantokrator (Figure 6.1 and Colour Plate XVI).1 It is executed in a technique generally referred to as miniature mosaic: tiny mosaic tesserae embedded in wax or mastic on a wooden panel – a cabinet-sized cousin of the monumental mosaics for which Byzantium is famous.2 It is not the type of work visitors to the Bargello might anticipate to find in a museum in a Renaissance city. In fact, the presence of the icon among so many treasures of the Renaissance in Florence meant that the piece was not even recognized as Byzantine when it first came to the Bargello in the nineteenth century.3 Even less expected is perhaps the notion that this Byzantine work once had pride of place in the art collection of those notorious champions of the Renaissance, the Medici. We associate the Medici collection with antique cameos and Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture; more recently, it has been recognized that they also
had a predilection for contemporary paintings from Flanders,4 but Byzantine art falls well outside the scope of our perception of Renaissance tastes – shaped as that perception is, no doubt, by the narrative of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, in which the maniera greca stands for everything a self-respecting Renaissance artist would seek to avoid.5 So great is the inconsistency that scholars have repeatedly dismissed the Medici interest in the Pantokrator icon and other similar works they owned as a mere taste for exotic curios.6
