Murray Seminar, Sarah McBryde
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
People with dwarfism were frequently employed as attendants in courts across Europe from the Medieval period until the eighteenth century and their presence is recorded in contemporary artworks and written sources. Despite their popularity, traditional academic approaches tended to marginalise court dwarfs and, until recently, little consideration was given to the possibility that they could have made any significant contribution to court life. This seminar takes a fresh look at the court dwarf tradition in sixteenth-century Florence by investigating the pictorial and archival evidence regarding Morgante, a notable figure in the ducal household of Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Spanish-Neapolitan consort Eleonora di Toledo. Morgante is the most famous of the Medici’s dwarf attendants due to his prominence in the historical record. He was the subject of numerous portraits by the pre-eminent court artists of the time, including Agnolo Bronzino, Valerio Cioli and Giambologna, and was also immortalised by the Florentine academician Antonfrancesco Grazzini in two satirical poems. The seminar assesses biographical information from archival and other written sources, along with analyses of Morgante’s surviving portraits, in order to provide new perspectives on his life, both inside and outside the court, and examine his role as jester-entertainer to the Medici grand dukes.
Contact name: Allison Deutsch
Speakers-
Sarah McBryde
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Dr Sarah McBryde is an Independent Scholar. She completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2022, further to a master’s degree and graduate certificate, also at Birkbeck. She currently serves as Assistant Editor for the monograph series Elements in the Renaissance, published by Cambridge University Press. McBryde’s publications include ‘“Per mano della Maria Nana”: A Female Dwarf in the Retinue of Eleonora di Toledo’, in Giants and Dwarfs in European Art and Culture, ca. 1350–1750: Real, Imagined, Metaphorical (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), and ‘Rethinking the Life of Court Dwarfs in Early Modern Florence: The Case of Pietro Barbino at the Medici Court’, Renaissance Studies (online, Oct 2024; vol. 39.5, Nov 2025). Her research on Morgante will be included in the forthcoming conference proceedings volume Playing Fools, published by Brepols in association with the recent Louvre exhibition Figures du Fou, Du Moyen Âge aux Romantiques (2024–25).
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