Imagines 6

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Article in italian | In the summer of 2019, a small exhibition entitled Titian. The enigma of the self-portrait was held in Pieve di Cadore. The occasion arose from documentary evidence, related to the ancient presence in Pieve—in the palace of Tiziano l'Oratore, a relative of the painter—of an image with the features of the master testified in a deed dated 1625. Lionello Puppi dwelt on this case in an essay published in 2007, the title of which gave rise to the title of this exhibition. It presented two works from the Uffizi, traditionally ascribed to the Cadore master. The article examines these examples in the more general framework of the problem of Titian's iconography, of which only three autographs remain ascertained: the self-portraits in the Prado and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the one in the altarpiece in the archdeaconry church of Pieve di Cadore.

Article in italian | This paper proposes an attribution to Giambologna for a drawing in the Galleria Estense of Modena, previously ascribed to Giovanni Battista Codibue. As Adolfo Venturi already suggested, it can be considered a design for the monument to Ferdinando I de’ Medici in Livorno. Its appearance, which is different and more decorated than the version executed, allows proposing that the commission for the basement with the ‘Four Moors’ followed the victory over Muslim pirates in 1602. On the other hand, the similarities with other drawings since long thought to be by Giambologna permits establishing the sculptor’s graphic oeuvre with more security. Another sheet, kept in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Gallerie degli Uffizi, is here discussed as a copy from a project by Giambologna for two monumental columns, helping to clarify his contribution to the formulation of the sovereign monument in the Europe of incipient absolutism.

Article in italian | In 1601 Paul de la Houve, a Flemish art dealer who had moved to Paris, purchases in Antwerp a nucleus of copperplates now unused for at least twenty years, from the printing house of Hieronymus Cock, Aux Quatre Vents. A few months earlier, in fact, Volcxken Diericx, widow of the engraver and publisher, had passed away and her estate had been put up for sale by his heirs. De la Houve republishes the prints in the French city without substantial changes, limiting himself to replacing the existing address with his own. Among these engravings we find Florentia, a view of Florence considered very rare today, which in the past has enjoyed an unquestionable iconographic fortune, giving rise to a model that has been subsequently replicated for many years. The view, engraved with burlin and etching by Jan and Lucas van Doetecum, is present in the graphic collections of the Uffizi Galleries in the two known states: Antwerp 1557 and Paris 1601, the latter recently acquired on the antiquarian market.

Article in italian | The present essay proposes an examination of the 17th-century projects for the San Firenze Oratory complex and the related construction phases. A reliable reconstruction of the long and troubled design process, begun by Pietro da Cortona and continued by Pier Francesco Silvani, has been possible through the careful study of the drawings preserved in the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizi, also with the help of a vector drawing program, and in view of documentary sources. The drawings, previously all attributed to Pietro da Cortona, have been finally re-catalogued in the framework of the Euploos Project: for the cited images not supported in this text, and for further details on individual drawings, the reader is invited to view the corresponding entries in the digital catalogue at https://euploos.uffizi.it/

Article in italian | When in 1793 Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni left the direction of the Florentine Gallery, the operation of transferring into the folders of the historical nucleus of drawings, thousands of sheets of more recent acquisition, mostly placed, often in anonymous form, in the volumes composed by previous owners, was interrupted. Nonetheless, Pelli was able to proceed with a precise description of the new miscellaneous volumes. The result was an inventory divided into two parts, whose point of caesura falls exactly at the moment in which the author had almost concluded the arrangement of the drawings that had come to the Guardaroba medicea Archive in 1699 with the legacy of Canon Apollonio Bassetti. Left out of the arrangement were the drawings that had been temporarily arranged in the two volumes described at the opening of the second part of the Inventory, numbered LII and LIII of the Piccoli category. The present work is a supplement to the commentary that in 2014 I appended to the description of the two Volumes provided by Pelli Bencivenni.

Article in italian | The article takes its cue from the painting depicting Dante’s famous Paolo and Francesca episode, recently acquired by the Uffizi Galleries, one of the rare works on canvas so far known by Nicola Monti of Pistoia (Pistoia 1780 - Cortona 1864). With the occasion I wanted to deepen the biographical and artistic story of this bizarre and multifaceted painter, as well as author of numerous theoretical and biographical writings including the Treatise on the nude, valuable evidence of the teaching practice in force in the 19th century in the Florentine Academy, and Poliantea, a diary that reconstructs the stages of his journey to Poland and Russia where he spent three years.The painting Paolo e Francesca da Rimini nell'Inferno (Paolo and Francesca from Rimini in Hell) was made in Florence in 1810, as attested by the autograph inscription on the canvas, for the Livorno shopkeeper Luigi Fauquet, mentioned with affection by the painter in his biographical memories as his generous patron.The painting reveals some interesting elements of sublime and visionary character (certainly in line with the particular pre-Romanticism spread in Tuscany by Luigi Sabatelli) and reflects the solitary and tormented soul of this artist, endowed with a fertile imagination and a remarkable wealth of invention, as his contemporaries remembered.

Article in italian | The 1980s represented a decade in which Italian art thrived. After decades dominated by conceptual art, the pleasure of painting is rediscovered. Italian artists draw heavily on the figurative tradition, reinventing, citing and contaminating the models and cultural and aesthetic archetypes of our past. Transavanguardia and Pittura Colta are the innovative formulas that quickly obtain the consensus of the cultural and market system. Tuscany actively participates in the success obtained by the most representative movements of Postmodernism and Florence has been for some years now the capital of the new youth culture thanks to its “artistic population”, giving life to an international and exciting metropolitan atmosphere. The Florentine creative capacity explodes after years of underground culture in search of new creative possibilities. Fundamental is the action carried out by Pitti Trend, able to create a sort of worldly-cultural nomadism around itself. Ready to record the ‘new Florentine renaissance’ was “Westuff”, the Florentine magazine that, with its eclectic founders Bruno Casini, Maria Luisa Frisa and Stefano Tonchi, rendered the sentiment and the reason for the latest Italian trends, projecting them onto the international scene.