By Carlotta Cirilli, University of Teramo
When we approach early modern historical writing, we tend to privilege its most established forms: printed treatises, verse chronicles, or retrospective historiographies. Yet the Clio Reframed conference unsettles precisely this hierarchy, asking how women engaged the past through media that resist such disciplinary containment. While my paper for the conference examines the editorial agency of Margherita Costa in shaping diplomatic narratives, this contribution turns to another, less frequently foregrounded figure: Margherita de’ Medici, Duchess of Parma and Piacenza (1612 – 1679), whose legacy is deeply rooted in the massive epistolary holdings of the Mediceo del Principato (Archivio di Stato di Firenze), notably within the specific files dedicated to Cardinal Giovan Carlo, her brother.
Born into the Florentine grand ducal household as the daughter of Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena of Austria, Margherita received a formation that was at once courtly and philologically attentive. Contemporary accounts emphasise her refined calligraphic skill and her ability to compose epigrams and verses in both Italian and Latin, qualities that positioned her within a recognisable economy of female erudition, as later codified by writers such as Cristoforo Bronzini. In 1628, her marriage to Odoardo Farnese thrust her into the volatile political landscape of Parma, where dynastic continuity was a constant negotiation rather than an assumption. Widowed in 1646, she briefly exercised co-regency alongside Cardinal Francesco Maria Farnese before gradually being displaced within the internal politics of her lineage, particularly under the rule of her son, Ranuccio II. It is in this tension between visibility and marginalisation that her documentary afterlives acquire analytical force.
Rather than treating “legacy” as a coherent narrative, this study reconstructs it through two materially and epistemologically distinct regimes: the commemorative logic of the portrait medal and the relational temporality of epistolary exchange. These forms collectively indicate that early modern female agency was not only articulated but also disseminated across various media that encode authority in fundamentally distinct manners.
Within this framework, the portrait medal emerges not simply as a vehicle of representation but as a condensed technology of memory production, operating at the intersection of image, text, and dynastic self-fashioning. Its efficacy lies in its portability and durability, as well as in its capacity to stabilise political meaning in an object designed for circulation. Far from being ancillary to written historiography, the medal articulates a parallel regime of historical intelligibility, one in which authority is both visualised and materially fixed.
A particularly significant example is the large bronze medal (87.5 mm) preserved in the Museo di Casa Martelli in Florence, produced by Antonio Selvi between 1737 and 1740 as part of the Serie Medicea. Although posthumous, it participates in a broader eighteenth-century project of dynastic retro-projection, in which Medici memory is systematised through serial portraiture. The survival of preparatory wax models, carefully shaped on slate matrices and later studied by Fiorenza Vannel and Giuseppe Toderi, reveals the extent to which this mnemonic programme was itself the product of layered artisanal mediation rather than a simple act of commemoration.
Selvi’s obverse portrait derives from Justus Sustermans’ court painting, now in the Galleria Palatina, translating pictorial likeness into numismatic permanence. Margherita is rendered in austere profile, her widow’s veil functioning less as biographical detail than as a semiotic marker of authority, piety, and controlled visibility. The surrounding inscription – MARGAR · AB ETR · PARM · ET · PL · D – compresses her identity into a formulaic economy of dynastic affiliations, where Medici origin and Farnese sovereignty are held in deliberate tension.
The reverse stages a more explicitly allegorical register: an oyster shell emerging from a turbulent sea reveals a single pearl beneath the motto “PRECIO · FELIX”. The image operates simultaneously as visual rhetoric and onomastic encryption, translating Margarita into its semantic equivalent. Yet its resonance extends beyond wordplay. The allusion to Matthew 13:45 – 46, where the kingdom of heaven is likened to a merchant seeking precious pearls, inscribes Margherita within a soteriological economy of value, in which rarity becomes moral intensity. The result is not illustration but transposition: theological discourse is rerouted through dynastic iconography.
This metaphorical economy did not remain confined to visual culture. It was actively reactivated in funerary discourse following her death on 6 February 1679 and burial in the Madonna della Steccata in Parma. Panegyrical texts, including the Tributo d’ossequio funebre printed by Giacomo Monti, as well as orations delivered by Benedetto Bacchini, reiterate the pearl as a structuring figure of commemoration, suggesting the permeability between visual and rhetorical regimes of memory production.
If the medal seeks to arrest meaning within durable form, the epistolary archive articulates a different temporality altogether, one defined by immediacy and relational negotiation. In her extensive correspondence with Cardinal Giovan Carlo de’ Medici (1611 – 1663), Margherita constructs a documentary space in which political intelligence, familial affect, and environmental observation coexist without hierarchy. The archive thus functions less as a record than as an ongoing calibration of presence.
In a letter from Parma dated June 28, 1647, she talks about Cardinal Francesco Maria Farnese’s bad health and how it has brought back hope for everyone (le nostre speranze si son ravvivate). Such passages underscore the extent to which epistolary communication operated as infrastructural knowledge within early modern governance, particularly in contexts where the fragility of individual bodies could translate rapidly into institutional instability. Alongside these political updates, meteorological remarks on an “extravagant season” (staggione molto stravagante) register the affective texture of quotidian experience, collapsing the distance between statecraft and atmosphere.
A later letter from 2 January 1653 further illuminates the strategic dimensions of this correspondence. Here, affective rhetoric and diplomatic intent are inseparable: Margherita uses family language to strengthen the Medici-Farnese networks of reciprocity, talking about the “salutary effects” (effetti salutari) of long-term patronage. The repeated self-positioning as “most affectionate sister and servant” is not merely formulaic but structurally operative, encoding dependence and agency within the same epistolary gesture.
What emerges across these materials is not a unified historical subject but a dispersed economy of self-representation. The medal seeks permanence through abstraction; the letter constructs authority through relation. Between these two modes, Margherita de’ Medici appears not as a single narrative figure but as a field of inscriptions, dynastic, affective, and material, through which early modern women’s historical presence was continuously negotiated.
Reconsidering the archive in these terms allows us to move beyond additive accounts of “female agency” toward a more structural understanding of how authority is produced across media. In this sense, Margherita’s afterlife is not simply preserved; it is actively manufactured across competing regimes of visibility, each of which claims, in its idiom, the right to define what counts as history.
ASF, Mediceo del Principato, f. 5369, c. 241r
Margherita de’ Medici, duchessa di Parma e Piacenza, a Giovan Carlo de’ Medici
Parma, 28 giugno 1647
Eminentissimo et reverendissimo signore mio fratello osservandissimo
Mando mille cordialissime grazie a Vostra Eminenza del favore che mi fa con la sua de 25, non potendo io ricevere nuove migliori che quelle del bon stato di tutta codesta serenissima casa, e piaccia a Dio benedetto di conservarglielo per sempre. Il signor cardinale mio cognato è stato in molto pericolo questi giorni passati, ma da due giorni in qua ha preso molto miglioramento, onde le nostre speranze si son ravvivate, et essendosi smesivi da molto la febbre, si sono anche rimmessi notabilmente soliti dolori. Noi pure da molti giorni in qua proviamo una staggione molto stravagante, non habbiamo potuto godere un intiero giorno sereno e senza pioggia. Rassegno a Vostra Eminenza il mio vero e cordialissimo desiderio di servirLa sempre e di tutto core le bacio le mani. Parma il 28 giugno il 1647.
Di Vostra Eminenza Affettionatissima sorella et serva La duchessa di Parma
References
L. Börner, Die italienischen Medaillen der Renaissance und des Barock (1450 – 1750), Berlin, 1997.
J. G. Pollard, Renaissance Medals. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue, vol 2, Washington, 2007.
F. Vannel e G. Toderi, La medaglia barocca in Toscana, Firenze, 1987.
Archivio di Stato di Firenze
ASF, Mediceo del Principato, f. 5369, c. 567r
ASF, Mediceo del Principato, f. 5369, c. 241r
Carlotta Cirilli is a PhD candidate in Historical Studies at the University of Teramo, specialising in the patronage and self-representation strategies of the Medici Court. Her research bridges early modern history and digital humanities, focusing on the intersection of art, power, and cultural heritage.