http://www.palazzostrozzi.org

The Exhibition Curated by Francesca Bardazzi and Carlo Sisi Realised by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi

Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of the death of Amerigo Vespucci, the exhibition celebrates the strong ties between the Old and New Worlds, exploring the cosmopolitan circles that bound the city to the New World for ever, while transmitting European culture and sophistication to America. For the first time since the recent exhibitions held in France and England, Palazzo Strozzi will be hosting the work of the American painters who embraced the artistic vocabulary of Impressionism and spent time in Italy, focusing in particular on their relationship with Florence in the decades spanning the close of the 19th and dawn of the 20th centuries. Visitors will be able to study the work of artists who, while not explicitly subscribing to the Impressionist movement, played a crucial role in forming the new generations of American painters-men like William Morris Hunt, John La Farge and Thomas Eakins.

These will be followed by the great forerunners, artists such as John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who could boast of strong cosmopolitan leanings. The main part of the exhibition will consist of work by artists of remarkable quality who spent time in Florence. Their number includes members of the American Impressionist group known as the Ten American Painters-men such as William Merrit Chase and Frederick Childe Hassam. The Americans in Florence lived their lives and pursued their activities in close contact with their scholar, collector, writer and art critic compatriots in the city, with some of whom they had previously had dealings in America-Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge, Bernard Berenson, the brothers Henry and William James, Egisto Fabbri and his family (his sisters Ernestine, a painter, and Cora, a poet) Mabel Hooper La Farge, Bancel La Farge, Charles Loeser and Edith Wharton. Though tending not to mix with the local population, these American colonies in Italy learnt the lessons of the most up-to-date Italian painting of the day and themselves had a certain impact on Italian artists and thinkers, introducing sophisticated and cosmopolitan lifestyles and adopting a more relaxed attitude towards women.

The exhibition will include female portraits of great quality in which women symbolise the modern American nation-young girls, adolescents and even children, often dressed in white, embody the purity and the hopes of an entire nation. The female portrait theme provides a link with the activity of American women painters, who were far more emancipated than their French and European counterparts. A number of themed itineraries and artistic, historical and literary tours have been designed to tie in with the exhibition, allowing the visitor to explore the places where the American artists lived, worked and met up in Florence and the surrounding countryside.

Information in the exhibition: Tel. +39 055 2645155

Opening hours: Daily 9.00-20.00; Thursdays 9.00-23.00 Reservations Sigma CSC Monday to Friday 9.00-13.00; 14.00-18.00 Tel. +39 055 2469600 Fax +39 055 244145 prenotazioni@cscsigma.it Tickets Buy on-line

While visiting the Uffizi make sure not to  miss the section of ancient sculptures, including the incredibly rich collection of Roman busts, the second most important after the one in Rome! Most visitors only see the world famous painting collection and  ignore this part of the Gallery.

In past centuries the Uffizi were  called “The Gallery of Statues”, revealing the importance of the collection of ancient Roman statues and busts. Visitors came mainly to see the statues, not the paintings!

Last Christmas Mercurio guides organized with  Amici del Turismo Travel Agency “Regalati un restauro” (“Gift idea? Help restore a work of art”) with guided tours of the exhibit   “I Mai visti – Volti svelati”  (“the Never seen before works – Revealed faces”) to raise funds in favor of the  Friends of the Uffizi Association  for the restoration of a work of art.

Thanks to the “I mai visti” exhibit every year  it’s possible to view works of art which are normally not visible- as they are kept in the storage rooms of the Gallery. Last Christmas the exhibit was dedicated to the ancient Roman busts of the Uffizi,  an exceptional collection of the Gallery which is  lesser- known to the general public.

The tours conducted by Mercurio guides (also in English)  were a great success.

Thanks to the many generous donations it was possible to restore not only one, but two ancient busts , which have now been placed back in the first corridor of the Uffizi Gallery.

Present at the inauguration on February 14^th 2012 were the Superintendent of all the State Museums of Florence,  the Director of the Uffizi Gallery and the Director of the Ancient Sculpture Department of the Uffizi.

One of the restored busts is the portrait of an elegant  lady ( end of the 1st century A.D)  who wears a beehive style wig which most likely was made with blonde hair – a popular  style  among the Roman ladies in that period.

The other restored bust dates back to the 16th century imitating  the style  from the 2nd century A.D.

In the 16th and 17th centuries  skillful sculptors were often commissioned to integrate the missing parts of ancient statues,  and they did a very good job. They could also make perfect imitations, like in this case.

18th century visitors of the Uffizi were mainly interested in seeing its rich collection of ancient sculptures,

including a vast amount of  busts from the late Republican period (late 1rst century B.C) to the 4th century A.D.  Thanks to  the tradition of art collecting from the Medici,  the Lorraine and the other noble Florentine  families, Florence has accumulated the second most important collection of ancient Roman busts   after Rome .

Tastes have changed since the days of the Grand Tour , and  nowadays  Uffizi  visitors  are  mainly interested in the paintings,  almost completely ignoring this interesting display of ancient Roman sculptures that line all three corridors of the gallery.

The “I mai visti  – Volti svelati”  exhibit offered the public an opportunity to discover an often missed,

but  very important section of the Uffizi gallery, which will certainly be  included in the Slow Florence & Tuscany Tours  – Uffizi & Oltrarno  by Mercurio.

Mercurio guides dedicated this restoration work to the memory of  Anna Maria Luisa, the last member of the Medici Family who died on February 18^th 1743,  as a sign of gratitude to the last Medici heir who left all the art collections of her family to the city and the state. Thanks to Anna Maria  Luisa  Florence has become one of the world capitals of art, culture and creativity.

Mercurio’s professional tour guides led tours of the exhibition created to fund the restoration of the Roman Bust “Domitia” from the never seen works collection of the Uffizi.

In the “depositi” (warehouses) of the Uffizi gallery are secretly stored a vast amount of precious masterpieces of art of all times. Thanks to the “I mai visti” (“The Never Seen”) cycle, a series of exhibitions that finally reveal these hidden pieces of art and history, statues, paintings and may other items have been restored.

The guided tours of the exhibition were highly participated and the fundraising was incredibly successful thanks to the tour guides of Mercurio Association in collaboration with Amici del Turismo.

“VOLTI SVELATI – I MAI VISTI” (“Unveiled Faced – The Never Seen”) was organised by the Management of the Uffizi and promoted by Amici degli Uffizi Association.

Thanks to several donations two busts (and not just one) from the lesser known collection of classical sculptures of the Uffizi Gallery are now being restored.

Our slow tours of the Uffizi and Florence are designed to deliver the best experience in a slow paced and completely enjoyable way. Like the “never seen” pieces of the Uffizi, our tours are designed to be a pleasant journey through the discovery of unrevealed sides of the many secrets and pieces of art and history hidden in the heart of Florence.

With our tour of the Uffizi we also offer our clients the opportunity to relax with the guide (Art Cafè), while still inside the Uffizi Gallery, for more insights and a nice coffe break.

Discover more about our Uffizi & Oltrarno Tour, the Walking Tour of Florence, Michelangelo and the Accademia or the Special Tour of Florence.

The use of household slaves was common in the Italian Renaissance upper class, Slaves in Florence were usually women employed as domestic servants – though there are records of slaves being used in the building industries and a large percentage of babies in foundling hospitals were the children of slaves and, presumably, the master of the house. Many of the children , however, were recognized by their fathers, Cosimo himself fathered an illegitimate son: Lorenzo de’ Medici’s uncle Carlo was born from his relationship with one of his female slaves.

Most slaves were of Middle Eastern or Slavic origin, shipped from Alexandria or other ports on Venetian ships to serve the houses of rich Italian merchants, they were few in number compared with the tens of thousands of impoverished workers, they remained economically insignificant, unlike ancient Rome, the Renaissance Florence economy was not built on the labor of the slaves. Even if , like most Florentine tax payers, Cosimo exaggerated the number of his dependents, it is clear that blood relatives were only a small part of a larger group of people who relied on Cosimo’s social and economic support. “There are fifty mouths to be fed in our family” Cosimo reported on his Tax return of 1458 and we also employ 41 retainers.”

Among those on Cosimo’s payroll were not only simple household servants and humble artisans, but visiting dignitaries, scholars, philosophers such us the great Plato and Aristotle translator Marsilio Ficino, poets, and artists whose names have since become famous. The Medici home, particularly before the completion of the new Palace, must have been in a constant bustle with visiting ambassadors , humanists, distinguished artists, artisans, and scholars of genius as well as common workers and peasants begging favors from Florence’s most powerful citizen.

One of the most distinguished of the Medici house guests was the great friar-painter Fra’ Filippo Lippi, always protected and patronised by Cosimo. Filippo was an orphan who, at the age of 16, took the Carmelite religious vows, in his ‘Lives of the Artists’, Vasari says: “Instead of studying, he spent all his time scrawling pictures on his own books and those of others.” The prior decided to give him the opportunity to learn painting.

Lippi’s painting style was full of naturalism and animation and he’s considered nowadays to be the leading painter of his generation. He was perhaps the greatest colourist and technical adept of his time, with exceptional draughtsmanship, naturalism, his compositions told great stories including semi-humorous incidents and low-life characters. Lippi’s style in fact approaches religious art from its human and not pietistic side. “… so much a slave he was of his amorous appetite “, wrote Giorgio Vasari of the Carmelite monk turned painter, “ that when he was in his humor he gave little or no attention to the works that he had undertaken; wherefore on one occasion Cosimo de’ Medici, having commissioned him to paint a picture, shut him in his own house, in order that he might not go out and waste his time”:

The strategy didn’t work however, because Filippo managed to escape from the Medici Palace with a rope that he was able to fashion out of his bed sheets. When Cosimo finally tracked down the restless monk, he agreed to give him free way to the House, concluding that “The virtues of rare minds were celestial beings, and not pack mules”.

Such was Vasari’s narrative, published less than a century after the alleged events.

Our Slow Tours of Florence take you through insights about several aspects of art and historical characters of Florence and Tuscany. Discover more with our Walking Tour of Florence, Michelangelo and Accademia, our Special Tour of Florence or the Uffizi Gallery & Oltrarno Tour.

The name Demidoff derives from the wealthy Russian family who bought the Medici Villa  in 1872 and restored the “Paggeria” for living quarters, and then the other buildings, all , of course, in a grandiose style with the intent to impress guests in their vast garden embellished with elegant statues.

In 1580 The Villa Medici of Pratolino had a garden with an elaborate network of fountains fed from springs of the nearby  mountains – using an intricate  system of cisterns and pipes. There were numerous  artificial grottoes and moving statues, and mechanical figures activated by water, sometimes accompanied with music (water organs).

This park of wonders, which today we can only create with our  imagination, bears the imprint of three personalities: the second Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco De’ Medici, the court architect Bernardo Buontalenti and the sculptor known as Giambologna.Thanks to the skills of all the creators, there is a sophisticated play of allusions and symbolism  combining elements of the classical world , philosophy and mythology.

At the center of this world of wonder and excitement, is water, the energy and dispenser of life and fertility.There wa a vertical movement starting from the top with the figure of  Zeus, the god of the rains (now at the Boboli Gardens and here replaced with a copy)below the statue of the Appennine – still standing although a bit transformed, below a  spring, then further below  was the Villa (the symbolic power of the Duke  Francesco over the citizens of  Florence) and finally at  the end was a fountain with statues of a laundress and a child.

At the “Firenze Com’Era” museum one can see the late sixteenth century Lunette painting by the Duch painter Giusto D’Utens of the Villa and Park.We can clearly see the differences from the Medici period to today:on the left side of the villa are the Farm , the Stables, and the Chapel which  still  exist today. Missing is the  the Grotto of the female bear symbolizing maternal love, and the  many ponds or “Gamberaie” ( from the Italian word for prawn).  the Grotto of Cupid still exists but without its  springs.

In the painting on the right side of the painting we see the Paggeria,  which still survives. Missing is  the Great Aviary, now a pool, and  the fountain of  Juno with peacocks  and statues representing  the two rivers Arno and Arbia – now dismantled in the courtyard of the Bargello Museum. We also  see in the painting  the Big Oak tree with platforms to look at the stars, the mountain “Parnasus” with   the statue of Pegasus, now at Boboli, but was once located  at the top of the mountain.

Below the villa and down hill from the  fountain of the laundress were  two low walls whose   springs would emit   powerful sprays  of water creating  a  tunnel underneath where  it  was possible  to walk without  getting wet; the effects of the refracted sunlight on the water would create  a beautiful continuous rainbow!

At the very end of this fantastic world, as I’ve already mentioned, was the fountain with the statue of the laundress with a cherub  who was trying  to figure out what he was doing inside the fountain!

Villa Demidoff  today has an original English style  garden which  dates back to the ”Biedermayer” period, created by  Bohemian Josef Fricks in the early 1800’s  for the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty, the dukes who succeeded the Medici dynasty which died out in 1737.