Friends of Bargello
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Promoting the most important museum of Italian sculpture in the world.

RESTORING PASSION

Preserving the city’s oldest civic building, and the repository of Florentine Renaissance genius

BUILDING KNOWLEDGE

Making the distinguished collections of the Bargello accessible to the world through dedicated publications and digitalisation

ENHANCING AWARENESS

'Donatello, The Renaissance’
Palazzo Strozzi & Museo del Bargello
9 March- 31 July, 2022

This historic, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition sets out to reconstruct the outstanding career of one of the most important and influential masters of Italian art of any age, juxtaposing his work with masterpieces by other Italian Renaissance masters such as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael and Michelangelo.Curated by Francesco Caglioti and devised as a single exhibition in two venues, Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the exhibition is designed to celebrate Donatello in dialogue with institutions of Florence and indeed the whole of Italy.The exhibition is promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Musei del Bargello in conjunction with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin's Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, which will be hosting the exhibition in the autumn of 2022 and the spring of 2023 respectively.

For further information visit www.bargellomusei.beniculturali.it

 

'Cellini’s Portrait Bust of Cosimo I de’ Medici'
The Restitution of a Powerful Gaze
Following the recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512-1570, where Cellini’s bust of Cosimo 1 de’ Medici, loaned by the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, played such a pivotal role, we thought we should record its return home to Florence and the details of the work involved in bringing to light Cosimo’s silvered eyes to such a spectacular effect.It is with great pleasure that the Friends of the Bargello offer this short film showing the bust’s reinstallation and restorer Ludovica Nicolai’s description of the work she carried out to return Cosimo’s already powerful gaze to an even more penetrating intensity.
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