Considerazioni su arte francese e arte italiana: da Luigi XII e Francesco I alla Maison de Gondi di Saint-Cloud e agli Orléans

The paper retraces the relationship between Italian and French art from the late 15th to the early 18th century, by focusing on some relevant episodes related especially to the Pio di Savoia and the Medici families and their connections with members of the French court.

Venere e Cupido di palazzo Pandolfini a Firenze: una scultura inedita di Chiarissimo Fancelli

This paper aims to add another piece of knowledge for Chiarissimo Fancelli, one of the leading sculptors in the Florentine art scene of the first thirty years of the Seventeenth century. The artwork, credited to the sculptor from Settignano, is located in palazzo Pandolfini (Florence) and represents Venus and Cupid. Through the analysis of both its style and available bibliographical and historical sources, the marble group can now be included in the corpus of Fancelli’s sculptures and dated to 1620-1625.

Disegni di Cesare e Pietro Dandini dalla raccolta Dandini-Targioni Tozzetti

The essay concerns two drawings by the Florentine baroque painters Cesare and Pietro Dandini, coming from the Dandini-Targioni Tozzetti collection. The naturalist Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (1712-1783), consort of Maria Brigida, daughter of Ottaviano Dandini, brought together the impressive set of drawings belonging to the Dandini family, which were divided into twenty volumes, probably dismembered in the Nineteenth century. The paper presents two drawings which belonged to that collection: a sheet in sanguine by Cesare Dandini depicting a male figure, and a drawing by Pier Dandini depicting The glory of Saint Verdiana, a preparatory study for an altarpiece that was part of a series of large canvases executed by Pier Dandini between 1706 and 1710 for the basilica of Santa Trinita in Florence.

Arte, storia e prestigio. Per un’introduzione alla ‘ritrattistica genealogica’: la serie Guadagni di Firenze

The paper describes the interesting and widespread phenomenon of genealogic portraiture in Florence by analyzing the case of the Guadagni family and its series of portraits. The series was commissioned during the mid-Seventeenth century by senator Tommaso di Francesco and it was intended to decorate the family House behind the Nunziata thanks to the contributions of many artists. Both in terms of quantity and artistic quality, the Guadagni portrait series represents a precious testimony of this specific portraiture genre, which started during the middle of the sixteenth century and reached its climax during the following century. This genre saw its decline in the 1700s, when the aristocratic ancient families lost their importance, and their illustrious ancestors’ portraits became simple relics of a remote past.

Per la ritrattistica di Antonio Montauti. Tre busti inediti di eruditi fiorentini

This paper presents for the first time three plaster sculptures made by the Florentine artist Antonio Montauti (1683-1746) and currently preserved at the Biblioteca Roncioniana in Prato. The subjects of these portraits are Tuscan literates and academics Anton Maria Salvini, Francesco Baldovini and Giovanni Battista Casotti. The three busts were most likely made around 1713: this date is indicated on Salvini’s portrait, allowing us to speculate on the existence of a series of portraits of Florentine literates, much like Montauti’s famous series dedicated to Tuscan illustrious men (Ficino and Machiavelli amongst others). These busts also give us the chance to take a further look at Montauti’s style, unveiling his interest towards antique sculpture at such an early stage of his activity.

Ancora su Giulio Pignatti ritrattista. Il mondo dei Grand Tourists e degli eruditi a Firenze

Giulio Pignatti or Pignatta (1679-1751), a painter from Modena who specialized in portraiture, arrived in Florence in 1705 and remained there until his death. During the fourty-six years spent in the Tuscan capital, he made contact with the last members of the Medici dynasty and with Grand Tourists as attested by the Portrait of Sir Andrew Fountaine with four friends in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, dated 1715. Pignatti’s oeuvre can now be expanded by another conversation piece commissioned in 1721 by Giuseppe Aversani’s pupils in the University of Pisa on the occasion of the gift of a gold medal, and by the portraits of Ludovico Tempi and Cosimo Del Sera which testifies that Pignatti worked for numerous Florentine noble families. By focusing on these paintings, the paper intends to provide a better understanding of the artist's career and patrons.

La «gita di Fiandra»: globi, libri e carte geografiche per Ferdinando II de’ Medici nella corrispondenza diplomatica di Giovan Battista Gondi

In the summer of 1634 the grand-ducal ambassador resident in France Giovan Battista Gondi made an undercover journey to Spanish Netherlands to meet Maria de’ Medici and tried to persuade her to leave the Habsburg territories for Florence. Despite the failure of the negotiations, a series of unpublished letters exchanged between Gondi and the first secretary of the Grand Duchy Andrea Cioli will serve as an opportunity to analyze which cultural and artistic affairs involved the Tuscan agent alongside the political events he primarily dealt with. In his letters Gondi described different artefacts that could have been acquired for the Medici collection, and publications that could have contributed to the reputation of the Grand Duke or, on the contrary, jeopardized it.

«Di pietra un Villanel, che da lontano par vivo»: il Villano con la falce di Valerio Cioli nel giardino mediceo di Pratolino

In the second half of the 16th century, in the garden of the Medicean villa of Pratolino the sculptor Valerio Cioli created, among other groups, the Villano con la falce, which represented a peasant in the act of sawing the reeds in a marshy lake where there was a salamander that spurted water from its mouth. The salamander is now lost while the Villano has been identified so far by critics with the statue of the so-called Mietitore attributed to Cioli and now in the Boboli garden deposits. In the 1990s, during restorations at Pratolino, a stone fragment of a male statue was found: through a careful analysis of the documentary and figurative sources as well as a close comparison with other works certainly by Cioli, this paper aims to recognize the fragment as the Villano con la falce.

I ritratti di uomini illustri degli Uffizi dipinti da Carlo Ventura Sacconi, Giovanni Pietro Pollini e Giovanni Berti

Documentary investigations conducted at the Florence State Archives contributed to shed light on eighteenth-century efforts to develop the collection of the Uomini Illustri portraits, exhibited along the walls of the Uffizi Gallery. While the original body of works had been commissioned by granduke Cosimo I to Cristofano di Papi dell’Altissimo, who had copied the series held by Paolo Giovio in his villa in Como, the Florentine collection was later enriched by a massive supply of portraits between 1719 and 1733. The desire to complete the Uffizi ‘gioviana’ series was probably due to Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici and the artist who followed in Cristofano dell’Altissimo’s footsteps should be identified in Carlo Ventura Sacconi (1676-1762), who painted 159 portraits of illustrious men. Between 1721 and 1727 the painter also completed the so-called ‘serie Aulica’, which was displayed – just like the ‘gioviana’ series – in the corridors of the Florentine Gallery.

Per un profilo di Francesco Soderini, pittore «assai ragionevole nella storia e nei paesi, in grande e più in piccolo»

Francesco Soderini (1671-1736), father of Mauro Soderini (1703-1751), was a Florentine painter who worked for the last members of the Medici dynasty, expecially for the Electress of the Palatinate Anna Maria Luisa, the only daughter of the granduke Cosimo III de’ Medici. Among the artist’s works, only the paintings for Villa La Quiete, the place where Anna Maria Luisa stayed during her last years, are well studied. This paper proposes new attributions to Soderini by recognising his style in some canvases presented on the art market and attributed to anonymous artists. These paintings contribute to a more accurate acknowledgement of the artist and of his style, which was very appreciated by his contemporaries.