Marco Musillo - MAP FORUM

MAP FORUM - 2 December 2025

From the Archive to the Collezione Aulica: A Research Journey for Studying the Portrait of a Manchu Emperor in the Medici Collections

This talk explores the life of the portrait of the Qing emperor Kangxi that at the beginning of the eighteenth century was received by Cosimo III de’ Medici, and which today is housed in the Uffizi Gallery. Kangxi, who reigned from 1661 to 1722, enjoyed a broad popularity among the European Catholic elites, especialy for his patronage of European sciences promoted by the Jesuit missionaries at the Beijing court. My research trajectory, that has connected the Medici Archive to the Uffizi, reveals crucial elements of the Medici imaginary of China, but at the same time evidences some missing links that in the modern epoch have concealed the portrait of Kangxi under a vaguely constructed exoticism.

Marco Musillo is a research fellow at the University of Vienna, and received his PhD in World Art History from the University of East Anglia (2007). His research explores early modern East-West artistic and cultural dialogues. Among his publications are: The Shining Inheritance: Italian Artists at the Qing Court, 1699-1812 (Getty Research Institute, 2016), and Tangible Whispers, Neglected Encounters: Histories of East-West Artistic Dialogues, 1350-1904(Mimesis, 2018). He recently published on the Virgin Mary in China and Japan in García and Sáenz-López Pérez (eds.), Iconotropy and Cult Images from the Ancient to Modern World (Routledge, 2022); and, together with Francesco Freddolini, he is the editor and author of Art, Mobility, and Exchange in Early Modern Tuscany and Eurasia (Routledge, 2020).