„MEDICI“, ANOTHER WORD FOR ART

Düsseldorf in 1691: the entire population anxiously awaited the arrival of the new spouse of the Count Palatine Johann Wilhelm: Anna Maria de Medici from Florence. In a great hurry, the sovereign – called ‚Jan Wellem’ by the people – issued a street sanitation decree and invested in street lighting and cobblestones, since a French envoy had criticized that in Düsseldorf “one walks through excrement as high as one’s ankles.”

However, the young and beautiful Princess wasn’t particularly happy in the somber city palace on the Rhine despite the “pretty and precious” jewels that her husband gave his new bride on the morning after their wedding. The Princess grew up as the heiress to a mighty dynasty of rich drapers and bankers who determined the future of numerous popes and powerful queens. She had lived up until then in Florence, which was, with its 90,000 inhabitants, the seat of power and culture in Europe. Provincial Düsseldorf, in contrast, had a mere 8,500 citizens and “only a handful of royal residences … with rooms that were so small that one has the feeling of dancing on a hammered dulcimer.” The Princess had wheels of Parmesan imported from her home country, as well as a constant delivery of shoes from the shoemaker to the court. The marriage is a happy one; however, after a miscarriage, the royal couple remained childless. The two discovered other common interests, such as a love for hunting and art.

Medici – that was and still is synonymous with the word art. The noble family gave Florence, Italy and the rest of the world the Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti and many other Medici treasures. And Anna Maria inherited this gene. Together with Jan Wellem, she amassed a collection of around a thousand paintings by, among other artists, Rubens, Rembrandt, Raphael, Jordaens and van Dyck. She also wasn’t afraid to use her clerical contacts for this purpose, for example, contacting her uncle, Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici, to acquire the splendid Rubens altar Day of Judgement; shortly thereafter, the monks at the Jesuit church bid farewell to the masterpiece. Emissaries from the house of Medici made sure that works by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci also found their way into the “Louvre on the Rhine.” Other artists took up residence at court, studios and all, including the sculptor Gabriel Grupell from Brussels, whose bronze equestrian portrait of Jan Wellem still stands today in front of Düsseldorf’s city hall. The Princess was very generous, indeed, making 80,000 gulden from her private purse available for the opera house alone. In contrast to this, Jan Wellem had to account for their spending, as money was in short supply in Düsseldorf: too much for music and too little for the serious affairs of state, complained his relative, Liselotte von der Pfalz, the sister-in-law of the French Sun King.

With Jan Wellem’s death in 1716, Düsseldorf’s heyday came to an end. The famous Galerie was done away with, and most of the paintings found their way to the Bavarian branch of the family, the Pfalz-Sulzbach. These can be seen today in the Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich – including, for example, Raphael’s Holy Family. Anna Maria eventually returned to Florence, taking with her everything that she bought with her own money or that was given to her by her husband. Only Ruben’s colossal Assumption remained on the Rhine – and still resides, in all its glory, in the Museum Kunst Palast.