THREAD: As part of the ongoing discussion of statues being removed, toppled, and thrown into harbors, there’s one in Livorno, Italy, that is getting renewed attention: the monument to Ferdinando I de’ Medici, more popularly known as the QUATTRO MORI (“Four Moors”). 
You may have even seen #iquattromorinonsitoccano (“Don’t touch the Four Moors!”). This poster was distributed by Manfredi Potenti, Livorno’s rep in the Camera dei Deputati. He’s from the right-wing Lega Nord, but the sentiment to leave the statue alone was widespread.
I’ve done a lot of work on the background to this monument, which I published in The Art Bulletin in 2015. This is a digest version if you want to know what’s going on in this monument, which was the site of a political rally yesterday (Saturday), although no damage was done.
Though it might initially look rather familiar in format, this monument is unique in the history of art, particularly in its depiction of slavery, as represented by the 4 individual figures chained to the corners of the base, cast between 1621 and 1626. It rewards close looking.
The slave figures refuse to conform to conventional “types”—each is individualized. One has the features of a sub-Saharan African, while 2 have mustaches and topknots likely to show that they are Ottoman subjects. The 4th, with no mustache, is probably intended as “Turkish” too.
(As I’ll explain later, 3 of the 4 figures probably represent N. African Muslims. In the era’s records, the words “Turco” (Turk) and “Moro” (Moor) were often used interchangeably by European authorities, meaning anything from Ottoman subject to N. African to sub-Saharan African.)
Those 4 bronze figures were cast by Pietro Tacca, probably the most important bronzecaster in Europe in the early 17th century.
His other works include the equestrian monuments to Philips III and IV in Madrid and Henri IV on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. The last of these was destroyed in the French Revolution. More on that later.
To give a sense of time and place, the monument was installed a decade after Shakespeare’s death and right around when Galileo published THE ASSAYER. The four bronze slaves are exactly contemporary with Bernini’s APOLLO AND DAPHNE and Rubens’ MARIE DE’ MEDICI cycle.
Marie de’ Medici was in fact the niece of the figure on the plinth, Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, sculpted in marble by Giovanni Bandini between 1597 and 1599.
Before becoming Grand Duke, he was one of the most powerful cardinals in Rome and the builder of the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill. As a side note, he was the ruler who hired Galileo to tutor his children. The Medicea Siderea (Medicean stars) were named for them in 1610.
Yesterday’s demonstration was at Piazza Micheli, the site in Livorno’s harbor where the monument currently sits (it was moved about 40 feet from its original placement during harbor remodelling in the late 19th century).
A #BLM banner was stretched across the base, but the statues remained untouched. iltelegrafolivorno.it/cronaca/quattr…
This isn’t the first time that the Quattro Mori has been threatened with destruction. In the wake of the Revolution, when Napoleon’s troops controlled this part of the Tuscan coast, General Sextius Alexandre Francois Miollis, expressed horror at what this monument represented.
Miollis, in 1799: “It is a monument to tyranny, insulting humanity. 4 captives, chained to the pedestal and 100 times more courageous than the ferocious Ferdinando that treads on them… offer a distressing spectacle...
Miollis, cont: "Feelings of pain, scorn, contempt, and hatred should necessarily disturb every sensible soul…Let us avenge the injury done to humanity!"
Miollis, cont: "You should be pleased, citizens, to order a statue of Liberty be substituted for one of that monster. Let one hand break the chains of the four slaves, while the other smashes with a pick the head of Ferdinando, spread out on the ground.”
Not bad, Revolutionary Frenchman. The previous decade had seen dozens of royal statues in France removed from their plinths and destroyed. He’s advocating for that here with the Ferdinando statue.
But more important to him was the preservation, liberation and recontextualization of the enslaved figures on the base. Freeing them was his suggestion.
Miollis did indeed remove the marble statue of Ferdinando in 1799, but he did not destroy it or have made the figure of Liberty. The 4 slave figures remained. After the port changed hands in the early 19th century, the intact Ferdinando was reattached to its pedestal in 1815.
Stendahl saw it in the 1830s and said it was “truly a poor idea to surround a prince with the eternal image of pain.” Around the same time the American painter Rembrandt Peale called it “a disgusting monument.”
The French examples of such monuments were already destroyed, and the American Confederate ones still off in the future.
But I’d like to move back a bit to discuss what this monument is doing and why slaves were such a prominent part of it. The more one scrutinizes the depiction of individual figures, the more complex responses it elicits. Let’s not destroy these figures yet without a closer look.
The idea of bound captives at the foot of a strutting “conqueror” is practically as old as art itself. We see such figures on the Arch of Titus and Column of Trajan—a defeated population bound, with hands behind backs, usually being pushed forward by a mounted military commander.
The iconography could be imported to non-authoritarian contexts. In Lorenzetti’s 14th-century Good Government frescoes, bound captives represent supporters of tyranny, not its victims.
The idea was that in a well-governed republic like Siena, the load of ruling was shared rather than concentrated on a single military ruler.
There’s obviously a distinction to be drawn between Lorenzetti’s imagery—defeated foes supporting a tyrannical political system—and those of antiquity, in which conquered enemies were paraded through streets and drafted into forced labor.
The former led usually to imprisonment and possible execution; the latter was slavery.
The imagery of strength curtailed is most famously represented in the Renaissance by Michelangelo. His captives for the tomb of Julius II symbolized the Neoplatonic limitations of the mortal human body in a Christian cosmology. Enslavement was more of an existential condition.
But the most important predecessor for this monument was the equestrian Henri IV (1604-11) on the Pont-Neuf in Paris, begun by Giambologna and completed by Pietro Tacca of Quattro Mori fame.
The four slaves at the base (1614-18) of that monument aren’t Tacca’s: they were designed by Francavilla and completed by Bordoni.
The statue of Henri IV (husband of Marie de’ Medici) was destroyed in 1792 during the Revolution, but the slaves of the base were preserved, and are today in the Louvre.
In general they follow the standard iconography of captivity, although one of the figures could be plausibly be seen as having sub-Saharan African features.
Historically the figure was usually read by early viewers in allegorical rather than documentary terms, as representing one of the four continents. Only much later, long after the Revolution, was it ever considered as representing the body or face of an actual enslaved person.
But the subject here is the Quattro Mori in the port city of Livorno, a city sometimes Anglicized as “Leghorn”. The city, 30 miles south of Pisa, was the birthplace of the painter Modigliani. It was heavily bombed in WW2 and today little resembles its seventeenth-century aspect.
Livorno was and is the most important port city of Tuscany. Up through the 18th century, slaves were an integral and complicated part of the city’s history.
That's part of what makes the monument so unnerving—exactly what its early visitors saw in it, why it evokes revulsion, shame, sympathy, and the desire to unchain its figures.
Unlike many important Italian port cities, Livorno was very small and unimportant in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The city’s population was in the hundreds for most of the 16th century.
With the founding of the Duchy of Tuscany in 1530 and the establishment of the Medici as its ruling dynasty in Florence, Livorno suddenly became critical. Pisa, at the mouth of the Arno, had largely silted up and was increasingly problematic for cargo traffic.
In the late 1540s, Cosimo I declared the city a porto franco (free port), with less strict customs duties than the rest of Tuscany. He also relaxed rules and laws, welcoming political and religious exiles, not unlike similar privileges in Marseilles and Amsterdam.
Ferdinando (the statue guy) expanded the city’s laws in the 1590s, with additional privileges and exemptions, and specifically welcomed Corsicans, French fleeing their religious wars, Sephardic Jews, Persians, Armenians, Turks, and non-Tuscan criminals and debtors.
All of this happened as the rebuilding of the port was taking place—a massive undertaking. Between 1591 and 1622, the population grew from 1000 to 10,000—with an international, religiously diverse population.
Livorno gained a reputation as raucous, rough, diverse, tolerant—classic port-city stuff. We get a sense of the harbor’s activity and the monument’s centrality to it in Stefano della Bella’s print of 1654-55, about 30 years after it was completed.
Just about everything imported to or exported from the Tuscan state went through Livorno. Its harbor was rebuilt to accommodate ever-bigger galleys containing merchandise from all over the Mediterranean. And most of those galleys were run by slave power at the oars.
Unlike slaves in much of medieval Europe or later in the American colonies, most slaves in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th century had not been acquired in their home territories but rather had been captured in the Mediterranean aboard enemy ships.
They were political prisoners who became forced labor. Depending on the type of ship, galley crews usually numbered between 200 to 300 rowers, most of whom were slaves taken on the Mediterranean.
They formed the majority of rowers on European ships: at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, there were more than 1,200 slaves aboard Venetian galleys and 550 on papal ships.
The Tuscans also contributed to this effort with the Cavalieri di S. Stefano (Knights of St. Stephen), founded in 1561 by the Medici. Much of their activity concerned patrolling the Mediterranean to protect the Italian coast and trade routes to the east.
During skirmishes, the ships of S. Stefano regularly captured Turkish and Maghrebi ships, forcing those taken into slavery at the oars of Tuscan galleys. In the first quarter of the 17th century, at least 6000 captives taken at sea were forced into gallery slavery for Tuscany.
On being taken at sea from either an Ottoman or Maghrebi ship, a slave would be placed in chains and have his beard and head shaved except for a small tuft of hair at the back of the skull.
White Christians taken as slaves by Maghrebi ships usually had their heads and beards shaved too, and were also placed in chains.
Slaves taken by Tuscany and forced onto their ships were regularly routed through Livorno, forced off the boats to spend nights ashore in the city’s notorious bagno dei forzati (slave prison).
This was a huge fortress-like complex just off the harbor that could sleep hundreds of slaves per night.
Slaves comprised approximately 60% of the galley crews. The rest were convicts and debtors, who could work off their time and eventually walk free.
The best hope for a slave was a brokered exchange with Christian slaves held by Ottoman or Maghrebi ships. Those happened fairly often, but even so many remained slaves for years.
I’ve seen a 1568 list of 210 slaves in Naples that claims 132 were “Turchi” (from Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, prob. Egypt), 8 Spanish moriscos, 61 Maghrebi from the African coast (of whom 4 were specifically called dark-skinned Africans), and 9 converts.
Livornese records don’t distinguish Maghrebi by skin color. It’s difficult to define Livorno’s slaves by race or origin because the language used to document them is inconsistent. This is one of the reasons the Quattro Mori is so important: we see multiple races among the slaves.
The bagno dei forzati was closed in 1750 and destroyed in 1930. It was probably more prominent in its time than the city’s cathedral.
Because Livorno was a young and growing city, in the early 17th century, slaves accounted for as much as 8% of the entire population of the city when the monument was erected.
Slaves were partially responsible for building the port and the bagno, and they were also its prisoners at night. During the day, some slaves “earned” the rights to circulate around the port and even have a shop stall, but they rarely were entirely free of their chains.
It’s against this backdrop that the Quattro Mori was proposed. The marble of Ferdinando by Francavilla (1599) sat unmounted in a corner of the Livorno harbor until even after Ferdinando died in 1609. Tacca designed a simple plinth for it 1615-17, before the slaves were added.
In 1621, Tacca wrote to the Medici in Florence with a proposal to add 4 slaves to the base and to replace the statute of Ferdinando with an allegorical figure in marble representing the order of the Knighthood of S. Stefano.
It’s not entirely clear what he had in mind for that statue, but that part of the proposal was rejected. He did get the green light to model the slaves, and cast them in pairs (1622-23 and 1624-27). Once all 4 were done, they were installed.
Because the monument itself was glimpsed daily by a polyglot population of merchants, religious refugees, and bound and unbound servants, viewers increasingly recognized these slaves as grounded in the experience of contemporary Livorno rather than simply resorting to type.
It would exaggerate matters to imply that Tacca, working in the 1620s, wished to subvert Medici sovereignty through his portrayal of the Quattro Mori; his many other monuments upheld rather than challenged his patrons’ authority.
Nonetheless, the naturalistic immediacy of these slaves sharply with tradition. Most monuments featuring slaves used generalizing features, but Tacca deliberately depicted each as an individual, allowing viewers to project their own stories on to these specific figures.
In all four figures of the Quattro Mori, their sparse clothing, topknots, and heavy chains identify them clearly as slaves, but beyond that Tacca allows the details of their differentiation, rather than the typical physiognomic polarities of the period, to emerge subtly.
There's always been a debate as to whether these are portraits of known individual slaves. There’s a vague document stating that Tacca planned to go make studies of slaves in the bagno, but that was from 1607, more than a decade before he was contracted to do these four figures.
Even if we don’t know if they’re literal portraits, since their installation viewers have always wanted to read them that way.
In his biography of Tacca (1702), Baldinucci claimed the sub-Saharan African was “a Moorish Turk Slave known by the nickname Morgiano, who through his great physical size and all of his features was most handsome...
Baldinucci, con’t: “He was a great help to Tacca in producing the beautiful figure, with its effigy from life... At age 10 I saw and recognized him, and I spoke to him willingly... because I recognized from the portrait that I was face to face with the handsome original.”
In late 18th century, Mariano Santelli identified the notably circumcised figure as “a robust older Saletin [from Sale in Morocco] man named Ali.”
Santelli was writing 150+ years after the monument was built, and shouldn’t be considered reliable, even if the identification as a North African Muslim is likely what Tacca intended.
In any event, they are painful in their captivity precisely because they are so lifelike, modern, and specific—unlike the usual depiction of slaves as “types”. The face of “Morgiano” is inward, withdrawn, while “Ali”’s practically makes an appeal to the viewer.
The pathos is striking in these works, as in the 2 figures facing west. One looks skyward, turning his neck sharply against his body, while the other practically crumples in on himself. But in all cases, these are powerful figures in waiting, with incredible potential for power.
With hands bound behind their backs and legs contorted on the steps of the monument, each of the over-lifesize slaves suggests interiority, thought, sadness, and, importantly, life.
Their sole attributes are their poses, their physiognomic features, and the very fact of their captivity.
These robust figures, registering as based on directly observed features, strongly signal that Tacca and his patrons saw this monument as communicating not just in the tradition of past art but also in the language of contemporary political and social conditions.
One striking aspect of the four slaves of the monument is that there is no collective response—each figure makes his own appeal in different directions, without recognition of the others nor Ferdinando above.
They call up such strong reactions precisely because they resist conforming to tradition or our expectations. Not a condemnation really, but one that explores its paradoxes. Even today, the bronzes do not offer easy solutions to the viewer’s conflicted feelings.
Let’s please allow this strange, brutal, oddly sympathetic monument to keep standing and acting as a subject of debate. It’s vitally important to our understanding of this period. [/Fin]
Bibliographic housekeeping: If you want to know a lot more, please see my “Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori and the Conditions of Slavery in Early Seicento Tuscany,” The Art Bulletin 97 (2015): 34-57. bit.ly/3e37HjE
