Smoke and mirrors

The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine Father of Spin emphasised, it was a great deal more important to seem to have, rather than actually to have, these qualities.

The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine Father of Spin emphasised, it was a great deal more important to seem to have, rather than actually to have, these qualities.

Nick Danziger took a remarkable set of photographs of Tony Blair, when Danziger and the journalist Peter Stothard ended up, through an unplanned stroke of fortune, following the prime minister around for 30 days before the beginning of the second Gulf war. Danziger’s images are the first to greet the visitor at Portraits and Power, a thought-provoking exhibition, in the city that gave us Michelangelo, the Medici and Machiavelli.

Indeed, the present show of photographs and videos by 18 contemporary artists from around the world was planned in parallel with the splendid exhibition upstairs in Palazzo Strozzi devoted to Bronzino, who immortalised the Medici in paint in the mid-16th century. On his second day out, Danziger took an eloquent picture of Blair in his shirtsleeves in his ‘den’ at No. 10 on the phone to Yasser Arafat, the photographer at the same time catching unawares that power behind the throne Alastair Campbell, listening in, out of shot but reflected in a mirror.