Search for Museums and Paintings

Italy

Italy ), officially the Italian Republic , is a country consisting of a peninsula delimited by the Alps and surrounded by several islands. Italy is located in south-central Europe, and is considered part of western Europe. A unitary parliamentary republic with Rome as its capital, the country covers a total area of 301,340 km2 and shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. Italy has a territorial enclave in Switzerland and a maritime exclave in Tunisian waters . With around 60 million inhabitants, Italy is the third-most populous member state of the European Union. Due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, Italy has historically been home to myriad peoples and cultures. In addition to the various ancient peoples dispersed throughout what is now modern-day Italy, the most predominant being the Indo-European Italic peoples who gave the peninsula its name, beginning from the classical era, Phoenicians and Carthaginians founded colonies mostly in insular Italy, Greeks established settlements in the so-called Magna Graecia of Southern Italy, while Etruscans and Celts inhabited central and northern Italy respectively. An Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom in the 8th century BC, which eventually became a republic with a government of the Senate and the People. The Roman Republic initially conquered and assimilated its neighbours on the Italian peninsula, eventually expanding and conquering parts of Europe, North Africa and Asia. By the first century BC, the Roman Empire emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and became a leading cultural, political and religious centre, inaugurating the Pax Romana, a period of more than 200 years during which Italy's law, technology, economy, art, and literature developed. Italy remained the homeland of the Romans and the metropole of the empire, whose legacy can also be observed in the global distribution of culture, governments, Christianity and the Latin script. During the Early Middle Ages, Italy endured the fall of the Western Roman Empire and barbarian invasions, but by the 11th century numerous rival city-states and maritime republics, mainly in the northern and central regions of Italy, rose to great prosperity through trade, commerce and banking, laying the groundwork for modern capitalism. These mostly independent statelets served as Europe's main trading hubs with Asia and the Near East, often enjoying a greater degree of democracy than the larger feudal monarchies that were consolidating throughout Europe; however, part of central Italy was under the control of the theocratic Papal States, while Southern Italy remained largely feudal until the 19th century, partially as a result of a succession of Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Angevin, Aragonese and other foreign conquests of the region. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration and art. Italian culture flourished, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths. During the Middle Ages, Italian explorers discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. Nevertheless, Italy's commercial and political power significantly waned with the opening of trade routes that bypassed the Mediterranean. Centuries of foreign meddling and conquest and the rivalry and infighting between the Italian city-states, such as the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, left Italy politically fragmented, and it was further conquered and divided among multiple foreign European powers over the centuries. By the mid-19th century, rising Italian nationalism and calls for independence from foreign control led to a period of revolutionary political upheaval. After centuries of foreign domination and political division, Italy was almost entirely unified in 1861, establishing the Kingdom of Italy as a great power. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy rapidly industrialised, mainly in the north, and acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained largely impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large and influential diaspora. Despite being one of the four main allied powers in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil, leading to the rise of the Italian fascist dictatorship in 1922. Participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in military defeat, economic destruction and the Italian Civil War. Following the liberation of Italy and the rise of the Italian Resistance, the country abolished their monarchy, established a democratic Republic, enjoyed a prolonged economic boom, and became a highly developed country.Today, Italy is considered to be one of the world's most culturally and economically advanced countries, with the world's eighth-largest economy by nominal GDP , sixth-largest national wealth and third-largest central bank gold reserve. It ranks very highly in life expectancy, quality of life, healthcare, and education. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs; it is both a regional power and a great power, and is ranked the world's eighth most-powerful military. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union and a member of numerous international institutions, including the United Nations, NATO, the OECD, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Trade Organization, the Group of Seven, the G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Council of Europe, Uniting for Consensus, the Schengen Area and many more. The country has long been a global centre of art, music, literature, philosophy, science and technology, and fashion, and has greatly influenced and contributed to diverse fields including cinema, cuisine, sports, jurisprudence, banking and business. As a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to the world's largest number of World Heritage Sites , and is the fifth-most visited country.

Stefano Bardini

Florence

Stefano Bardini was an Italian connoisseur and art dealer in Florence who specialized in Italian paintings, Renaissance sculpture, cassoni and other Renaissance and Cinquecento furnishings and architectural fragments that came on the market during the urban regeneration of Florence in the 1860s and 70s.Trained as a painter and expert copyist at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze from 1854, Bardini received increasing commissions as a restorer and expanded into selling works of art from 1870 onwards. Working as a restorer Bardini, who successfully removed some Botticelli frescoes from the Villa Lemmi, was commissioned to remove the frescoes commissioned by Jakob Salomon Bartholdy from several of the German Nazarene circle of painters from Casa Bartholdy, Rome, which had been purchased by Berlin, in 1886–87. His esthetic, barely distinguishable restoration of Simone Martini's Saint Catherine of Alexandria, now in the National Gallery of Canada, has been examined as an outstanding example of the seamless restorations that his generation preferred.Many well-known works of Renaissance art bear a Bardini provenience. The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, has some twenty works that passed through his hands, notably the Benedetto da Maiano Madonna and Child, the Bernardo Daddi Saint Paul and the Portrait of a Youth by Filippino Lippi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art conserves eight paintings that Bardini once owned, including Veronese's Boy with a Greyhound, and Giovanni di Paolo's Coronation of the Virgin from the Robert Lehman collection, as well as the baroque portrait bust of Ferdinando de' Medici by Giovanni Battista Foggini and an eagle lectern by Giovanni Pisano. Bardini's connections with Bernard Berenson resulted in several of Bardini's purchases finding their way to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, where Berenson was the guiding light; among them are two North Italian Romanesque stylobate, column-supporting lions and a basin, purchased from Bardini in 1897. The much-damaged marble of a curly-haired youth from the Borghese collection, employed by Stanford White as a fountain figure in the Payne Whitney house at 972 Fifth Avenue, New York City, which remained in situ as the house was bought for the French Cultural Services, then made headlines in 1996 when it was attributed as a youthful work of Michelangelo. belonged to Bardini, Stanford White's mainstay in Florence for panelling, paintings and sculpture and Renaissance furnishings, who supplied White with two 16th-century wooden ceilings reinstalled in Whitney's palazzo among the caseloads of works of art he shipped across the Atlantic to White. In the decades after 1860 he was also responsible for the transformation of many painted cassone panels that had been previously removed from the furniture, which was considered valueless, by creating new carved and part gilded walnut cassoni in the pristine condition that was required of furniture for grand houses. Of such cassoni, the quantity that came onto the market were astonishing: the German art historian Paul Schubring was shown an outbuilding, probably at Bardini's Torre del Gallo, that consisted of a single room in which he counted some 200 cassoni. The archives of the Museo Bardini make it clear that the free restorations and adaptations and imitations sold by Bardini were not misattributed; "confusion set in only half a century later when the heirs of the original owners came to sell the pieces," Ellen Callmann observes. Not all Bardini's cassoni were heavily restored: the famous cassone painted with The Conquest of Trebizond from Palazzo Strozzi, with Strozzi armorial bearings, one of the minority of cassone panels remaining integral to its cassone, is conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.In 1881 Bardini acquired the deconsecrated church and convent of San Gregorio facing piazza dei Mozzi in the Oltrarno and set about transforming it into his opulent residence and restoration studio, Palazzo Bardini, now housing the Museo Bardini, with his collections of paintings, sculpture, most notably a marble Charity by Tino da Camaino, 15th- and 16th-century Italian furniture, ceramics, tapestry, arms; stringed and keyboard musical instruments, including one of only two surviving oval spinets by Bartolomeo Cristofori; Roman and Etruscan antiquities and 15th- and 16th-century architectural fittings, including paneled and painted ceilings, chimneypieces and door surrounds. His example inspired his most successful protégé, Elia Volpi, to purchase and freely restore Palazzo Davanzati in the heart of Florence, and fill it with a similar range of art. Bardini's extensive connections among impecunious patricians and with dealers and restorers opened many avenues for acquiring works of art. Works of art from the Giampietro Campana collection, dispersed in 1858, later passed, probably indirectly, through Bardini's hands. In 1892 Bardini was commissioned to oversee the dispersal of a major part of the Borghese Collection in Rome. In the spring of 1892 Bardini prepared a lavish catalogue for an auction sale of pieces from his own collection, held at Christie's.In 1902 he purchased the Torre del Gallo at Pian de' Giullari, in the hills of Arcetri, on top of a ridge with a panoramic view over the city. There he undertook neo-medieval restorations that were carried out between 1904 and 1906. In winding down his activities, Bardini organized a sale in New York in 1918 that dispersed his sculpture and furniture into American private collections, and which eventually came to American museums. Among the works was a polychromed terracotta of the Virgin and Child that remains firmly attributed to Donatello, "in the small class of autograph Donatello reliefs", as John Pope-Hennessy observed. Lot 427 in the sale was of two Polyclitan marble fragments, a Diadoumenos torso associated with a head possibly of Hermes, both fine Roman copies: they are now in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.His bequest to the city of Florence resulted in the opening of the Museo Bardini in 1923; the Giardino Bardini across from it is also his legacy. The recent work of Lynn Catterson has corrected much of the often repeated urban legend about Bardini. See Lynn Catterson, “Stefano Bardini, His Conservative Side and the Protection of Frescoes,” in Stefano Bardini ‘estrattista;’ affreschi staccati nell’Italia Unita fra antiquariato, collezionismo e musei, Luca Ciancabilla and Cristiano Giometti, eds, Edizioni ETS Pisa, 2019, pp. 79-92. Lynn Catterson, "Art Market, Social Network and Contamination: Bardini, Bode and the Madonna Pazzi Puzzle,” in Lynn Catterson, ed, Florence, Berlin and Beyond: Social Network and the late 19C Art Market, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020. https://brill.com/view/title/56528 Lynn Catterson, “Duped or Duplicitous? Bode, Bardini and the many Madonnas of South Kensington,” Journal of the History of Collections, Spring 2020. Lynn Catterson, “From visual inventory to trophy clippings: Bardini & Co. and the use of photographs in the late 19C art market,” from the conference, The Art Market in Italy Around 1900: Actors, Archives, Photographs / Il mercato dell'arte in Italia intorno al 1900. Protagonisti, archivi, fotografie, , Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz,” Summer 2020. Lynn Catterson, “From Florence to London to New York: J.P. Morgan’s Bronze Doors,” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, 2017, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn; “Addendum,” vol. 18, no. 1, 2019 . Lynn Catterson, “Stefano Bardini & the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style. From the Gallery of a Dealer to the Institutional Canon,” in eds. Melania Savino, Eva-Maria Troelenberg. Images of the Art Museum, Connecting Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology, Berlin: de Gruyter GmbH, 2015, pp. 41-64. Lynn Catterson, “Stefano Bardini: Forming the Canon of Fifteenth-Century Italian Sculpture,” CENTER35, National Gallery of Art Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Record of Activities and Research Reports, June 2014 -May 2015, Washington, 2015, pp. 60-63. Lynn Catterson, “American collecting, Stefano Bardini & the Taste for TreQuattrocento Florence,” Discovering the Italian Trecento in the 19th Century, dedicated issue of Predella.it, 2017 n.41-42 . Lynn Catterson, Editor and Introductory essay, Dealing Art on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1860 to 1940, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017 .

Church of the Gesù

Lazio

The Church of the Gesù is the mother church of the Society of Jesus , a Catholic religious order. Officially named Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù all'Argentina , its facade is "the first truly baroque façade", introducing the baroque style into architecture. The church served as model for innumerable Jesuit churches all over the world, especially in the Americas. Its paintings in the nave, crossing, and side chapels became models for Jesuit churches throughout Italy and Europe, as well as those of other orders. The Church of the Gesù is located in the Piazza del Gesù in Rome. First conceived in 1551 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits Society of Jesus, and active during the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Gesù was also the home of the Superior General of the Society of Jesus until the suppression of the order in 1773. The church having been subsequently regained by the Jesuits, the adjacent palazzo is now a residence for Jesuit scholars from around the world studying at the Gregorian University in preparation for ordination to the priesthood.

Prato Cathedral Museum

Prato

The Cathedral museum of Prato, Italy was founded in 1967 in a few rooms of the Bishop's residence and in 1976 grew to include items from both the Cathedral of Saint Stephen and the diocesan territory.

Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi

Lucca

The Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Mansi is one of the two main art museum hosting tapestry collections and mainly post-19th century art collections owned by the city of Lucca, Italy. The collection is displayed in the Baroque palace, formerly belonging to the Mansi family, and located in central Lucca. Many of the original room decorations remain in place.The Palace was first erected at the site of a few earlier tower-houses bought in 1616 by the Lucchese merchant of silk Ascanio Mansi and his descendants. While the facade retains earlier Renaissance window features, between 1686 and 1691, Ascanio's son Raffaello employed the architect Raffaello Mazzanti to further renovate the now palace, and the piano nobile rooms acquired the present decoration and a grand staircase access. The cooler ground floor rooms were turned into a summer apartment. In the second half of the 18th century, Luigi Mansi pursued further refurbishing. The Mansi family retained prestige in the early 19th century; Raffaele Mansi and Camilla Parensi had been appointed courtiers to Elisa Bonaparte and Felice Baciocchi. Raffaello Mansi Orsetti, who died in 1956, was the first to display the art collections to the public. In the mid-1960s his children sold the palace to the state, which has converted into a National Museum of arts and tapestries. The interiors house a highly decorated bedroom alcove with gilded caryatid columns flanking the portal.

Piazza della Santissima Annunziata

Florence

Piazza della Santissima Annunziata is a square in the city of Florence, region of Tuscany, Italy. The Piazza is named after the church of the Annunziata at the head of the square. In the center of the piazza is the bronze Equestrian statue of Ferdinando I and two Mannerist fountains with fantastical figures, all works completed by the late-Renaissance sculptor Pietro Tacca.

Sant'Andrea, Pistoia

Pistoia

Sant'Andrea is a church in Pistoia, Tuscany, central Italy that served as a pieve or place that congregations from surrounding village churches use for baptism. It is dedicated to St. Andrew the Apostle, and includes the famous Pulpit of Sant' Andrea by Giovanni Pisano. The church probably dates from as early as the 8th century, though in a smaller size. In the 12th century it was extended in length. The façade shows the typical bichrome marble decoration of the Pistoiese Romanesque style, executed in the mid-12th century by Gruamonte and his brother Adeodatus, who was also responsible for the sculptures and for the portal's architrave. The latter depicts the "Journey of the Magi", a rare theme whose use here derives from the fact that the church was located on the Via Francigena, by which, in the Middle Ages, the pilgrims reached Rome from France. The decorated capitals are by a Master Henry, while the small statue of St. Andrew in the lunette over the portal is reminiscent of Giovanni Pisano's style. In the late 15th century the upper façade was finished and the central nave was vaulted. The frescoes in the apse date to 1506, executed by Bernardino del Signoraccio. Today only the central part, with the Father supported by Four Angels, survives. The altars in the aisles were added in the 17th century, with paintings by artists such as Cristofano Allori, Alessio Gimignani, and Girolamo Scaglia.

Santa Maria Formosa

Venice

Santa Maria Formosa is a church in Venice, northern Italy. It was erected in 1492 under the design by Renaissance architect Mauro Codussi. It lies on the site of a former church dating from the 7th century, which, according to tradition, was one of the eight founded by San Magno, bishop of Oderzo. The name "formosa" relates to an alleged appearance of the Holy Virgin disguised as a voluptuous woman1.

Accademia Albertina

Turin

The Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti is an institution of higher education in Turin, Italy. Its precursor dated to the first half of the 17th century. In 1678 the academy was formally founded as the Academy of Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Marie Jeanne of Savoy. It was re-established under the name Albertina in 1833 by Charles Albert of Sardinia, who had architect Giuseppe Talucchi design and realize a new building on the former site of the convent of the Church of San Francesco da Paola. The academy witnessed the transition of artistic movements during the late 19th to early 20th century, from realism to eclecticism and the Liberty style, in the works of painters Antonio Fontanesi and Giacomo Grosso, and sculptors Vincenzo Vela and Odoardo Tabacchi. Turin became a leading centre of visual arts during the mid-20th century.The academy is home to a gallery , which was founded to serve in the training of the academy's students. Its collection includes that donated by Mossi di Morano, the Archbishop of Casale Monferrato, in 1828, and 16th-century cartoons by Gaudenzio Ferrari and his school, which were donated by Charles Albert in 1832. The Mossi di Morano collection includes 16th–17th-century Flemish and Dutch works, 17th–18th-century Venetian paintings, and important 16th–17th-century Piemontese works including those of Defendente Ferrari and Giovanni Martino Spanzotti, among others. Notable works include Saint Ambrose and Saint Gregory, Doctors of the Church by Filippo Lippi, Ferrari's The Lamentation of Christ, Deposition in the Sepulchre by Maarten van Heemskerck, After the Battle by Cornelis de Wael, Portrait of a Gentleman, Three-Quarters View by Nicolas Lagneau, Hercules and the Nemean Lion by Ignazio Collino, and Giuseppe Pietro Bagetti's Mountainous Landscape with Coastal Inlets. The Pinacoteca has been open to the public since 1996.

Parma Baptistery

Parma

The Baptistery of Parma is a religious edifice in Parma, northern Italy. Architecturally, the baptistery of Parma Cathedral marks a transition between the Romanesque and Gothic styles, and it is considered to be among the most important Medieval monuments in Europe.

Load More