Arredi preziosi per Leone X

There are works that bring history with them. They witness the past centuries and we are used to call them 'masterpieces'.

This is the case of the magnificent crosier donated by Pope Leo X to the Florentine church of San Lorenzo in 1520, a unicum hardly comparable to other contemporary works, which is still preserved, together with a mitre and other sumptuous gifts, in the Museum of the Medici Chapels.

This study tries to develop the difficult path of attribution of this pastoral and other works related to the figure of the first Medici Pope, analyzing the stylistic and historical references, the citations in the sources and the archive documents, in order to reach new conclusions also in the light of recent studies on the fifteenth-century Florentine goldsmiths.

Historical investigation can hardly give absolute certainty as it requires constant adjustments, and yet in these pages, Dora Liscia Bemporad offers not only absolutely shareable hypotheses but, once more, a method lesson to everyone, and especially to her students.