Palazzo Strozzi, with its centuries-old connection to art patronage and collecting, is unquestionably the ideal place to celebrate this major anniversary. Even in fifteenth-century Florence, people sought answers to their questions in the infinite depths of space, pondering the influence of the “fixed” and “wandering” stars on human life: Filippo Strozzi himself consulted the heavens before embarking on the construction of his imposing palazzo. Embracing the Ancient Roman theory that Mercury influenced artistic creativity, Florentine engraver Baccio Baldini’s Seven Planets series (circa 1460) shows the Children of Mercury hard at work painting, sculpting, chiseling, composing music, philosophizing, and pursuing the sciences, astronomy, astrology, and mathematics: a range of activities, research, and interests that seems perfectly in keeping with the multidisciplinary approach of this many-faceted exhibition. According to De triplici vita (1489) by Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, artists were instead “born under Saturn,” and he described them as moody, rebellious, lustful, eccentric,and above all “melancholic”: a characterization that would be echoed centuries later by the modern myth of the artiste maudit.