Defining Ducal Dominion: Giovanni Stradano’s City Views in the Apartment of Leo X

Vasari and Stradano worked together to visually implement Borghini’s historiographic practice and its required rhetoric in the Apartment of Leo X. The apartment consists of six rooms, each named after a Medici family patriarch and decorated by Vasari’s workshop between 1556 and 1561. Three of those rooms—those named after Giovanni delle Bande Nere (Duke Cosimo I’s father), Pope Clement VII, and Cosimo I—are decorated with Stradano’s city views. The views cover ceilings and walls, presenting panoramas that fill the viewer’s sight with a multiplicity of natural detail and historical events. According to Vasari, the ceiling paintings are done in oil on panel, while the wall and vault paintings are oil on plaster, his own innovation to harmonize the apartment.1 In these paintings, Vasari fashioned his visual history that would justify the ducal rule of Cosimo I. That history tells of the Medici and their position within Florentine, Italian, and European affairs, particularly during the Habsburg-Valois wars of the 1520s and ’30s. Pope Clement VII’s support of the French against Charles V, in the form of Giovanni delle Bande Nere’s soldiers, led to the imperial sack of Rome in 1527. Clement’s difficulties during the sack enabled the Florentines to expel his hegemony and establish the so-called Last Republic that year. Upon making peace with Charles V, pope and emperor reconquered Florence in 1530 after a months-long siege. Together the rulers reestablished the Medici as its now-imperially decreed rulers. Alessandro served as Florence’s initial Medici duke, a tenuous position given simmering republican sympathies and a lack of hereditary right. Alessandro’s assassination in 1537 paved the way for Cosimo’s election and then appointment as duke, which he proceeded to make permanent by marrying a distant relation of the emperor, providing for the safety and security of the Tuscan state, and establishing the Medici ducal lineage for his heir. Throughout this history, Vasari placed the responsibility for historical judgment on the viewer. The visual experience of perceived eyewitnessing persuades the viewer of the truth of the events and the virtues of the Medici and their imperial support, manipulating the viewer into determining the fitness of