Il Gazzettino - December 2009

I arrived in February as the new President and Cultural Director of the Medici Archive Project. Much has changed at MAP in the past ten months and the future is brighter and closer than ever before. One of the more groundbreaking developments regards MAP’s online database, Documentary Sources for the Arts and Humanities in the Medici Granducal Archive, 1537-1743. Recognizing our need for a more powerful, state-of-the-art, interactive platform, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded MAP a generous grant to commence a “study and planning phase” for this projected platform. The new platform will contain digitized images of the documents and will offer scholars all over the world the possibility of contributing commentary to the contents of our online database. The goal is to create a global network of scholars with our database as the primary instrument of both learning and research as its focus.
 

There are additional reasons that MAP is looking very different than it did just ten months ago. On October 12, 2009, MAP launched a pilot online course in Italian Paleography, its very first foray into teaching. We have initiated a publication series that will bring the Fellows’ scholarly works to the public under the aegis of MAP. We have been invited to offer a series of public lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in March 2010 to complement their exhibition Bronzino’s drawings. We are about to make our most extensive showing ever at the Renaissance Society of America’s Annual Conference (Venice, April 8-10, 2010), with no less than five MAP-sponsored panels. And finally, we have just added a new scholar to our world-class research team: Dr. Roberta Piccinelli, our very first Compagnia di San Paolo Fellow.
 

MAP is extremely grateful to have received generous grants in 2009 from the Compagnia di San Paolo, the Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena, The Florence Gould Foundation, The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We are grateful to these institutions for their support and are making strong efforts to see that these grants as well as the gifts received from private donors go a long way. Thus, trimming away at our budget has been one of my primary concerns since February. We have streamlined our expenses substantially by seeking the most economical solutions. The budget tightening has not hampered MAP’s ability to create new programs nor has it subtracted resources from its primary mission; in fact, it has helped us to set our priorities in clear order.
 

I began above by saying that the future is brighter, and closer, than ever before. Paradoxically, for those of us at MAP who are working to give greater access to the history of the Early Modern world, this means that the past, too, is brighter and closer than ever before.

 Manfredi Piccolomini, President & Cultural Director