entirely safe and fun

Wikipedia’s featured article on 15 March 2006 was on the Palazzo Pitti, home of the Silver Museum (Museo degli Argenti) where are displayed the least tasteful of the Medici treasures - more rococo travelling altars, gilded reliquaries, and jewel-and-curlicue boxes than anyone could have suspected the existence of. I’m going to have to see if I can find a picture from my visit there of what I’ve called the “Saint of the Month Club,” perhaps the grossest relic I’ve ever seen. This is a gold-encrusted baroque box with a glass front into which are set twelve (?) magnifying lenses, under each of which is a chip of bone and a little slip of paper inscribed with the name of the luckless martyr who is claimed to have been its one-time owner. I guess the Medici already owned everything worth owning by then, and production of plastic lawn flamigoes and mirrored garden globes wouldn’t begin for another four hundred odd years. “Gee, Ferdinando, your second cousin three times removed sure had a lot of pretty paintings… ooh, shiny! Let’s accumulate some baroque crappe!”

Apparently the Medici had some problems in their universal-objects-of-flattery years as well as in their post-magnificent tchotchke-amassing phase. The clan’s wikipedia entry reveals patriarchs who revel in such epithets as Piero I “Il Gottoso” or “The Gouty” (that being a factor in his death) and Piero II “The Unfortunate” (”drowned in the Garigliano River, while attempting to flee the aftermath of a battle which the French (with whom he was allied) had lost”). Lorenzo “The Magnificent” was the son of the former and the father of the latter, which one hopes was some comfort to them as they respectively put up their feet for the last time and fled downhill.

*This is, I hope, the correct plural of epitheton necessarium - it sure is euphonious!