Ronchey, S. “Tommaso Paleologo al Concilio di Firenze.” La stella e la porpora. Il corteo di Benozzo e l’enigma del Virgilio Riccardiano. Atti del Convegno di Studi (Florence, 17 May 2007). Eds. G. Lazzi and G. Wolf, Florence: Polistampa, 2009. 135-59.

This essay combines iconographic study and historical reading of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Corteo dei Magi to focus on the protagonists of the frescoes, especially the blond young “leader of the hunt” who bears two cheetahs, one in the saddle and one on a leash.  The identification of the three Magi with the leaders of the Byzantine delegation, “bearers” of the “gift” of the Union of the Churches at the Council of Florence – the patriarch Joseph II, the basileus John VIII and his younger brother, Demetrius, pictured in the order in which their processions arrived in the city – is confirmed by the portraits of characters from their retinues (among whom are Georgius Gemistus Pletho, Isidore of Kiev, John Argyropulos, Theodorus Gaza), in addition to western Platonists and Pope Pius II.  However, there is also a “fourth Magus.”  In the portrait of the blond hunt leader flanked by two cheetahs we see the idealised image of John VIII’s youngest brother, Thomas, or at least [?] a record of his presence at the Council, revealed moreover in historical testimony, previously either unknown or unrecognised, by George Sphrantzes and Pero Tafur. Thomas, the last Palaiologian prince, was at the centre of the project to “save Byzantium in the West” which Pius II would have presented at the Council of Mantua in 1459.  On the occasion of the council, Benozzo was commissioned by Piero de’ Medici to paint the frescoes celebrating the Florentine council of twenty years earlier.  If, after the end of the Mantuan summit, the truer image of a more mature Thomas Palaiologos can be found in Pius II’s and his heirs’ commissions (in the marble portraits by Paolo Romano, completed after Thomas’s arrival in Rome, and in the portrait by Pinturicchio in the Piccolomini Library in the Cathedral of Siena), the idealised, symbolic features of the mysterious “young man with cheetahs” in Benozzo’s Corteo can be compared with those of another, equally enigmatic image of a blond young man in the “proscenium” of Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation.

 

A brief description of the volume can be read online or download here