Art inspires love: the Florence Academy Gallery's initiative for Valentine's Day

The Accademia Gallery in Florence is once again proposing the Art inspires love initiative this year on the occasion of Valentine’s Day. On Wednesday, Feb. 14, all visitors are invited to go on a discovery tour of the museum’s works that tell the story of Love, and to photograph themselves in front of them and share them with the hashtag #artinspireslove.

The Gipsoteca features plaster portraits of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, Countess d’Agoult, known as a writer under the pseudonym Daniel Stern, a free and independent woman. The two were lovers and from their relationship, which lasted from 1835 to 1839, three children were born. Their busts, displayed side by side, were made in Florence by Lorenzo Bartolini, around 1839, in the very last period of their union.

To the figure of Amore - Cupid, Bartolini dedicated many of his sculptures, and here, again in the nineteenth-century-flavored hall of the Gipsoteca, several examples can be found. One will notice a lovely little Cupid, with delicate movements, with a drape resting on his right arm, a wholly personal reinterpretation of such a classical subject, which the sculptor made in 1848. It leaves one spellbound, another extraordinary work of his, the Table known as the Table of Lovers or Genii, executed for Anatolij Demidov, whose marble version is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

So many other masterpieces preserved in the Gallery evoke Love. Pontormo reminds us of this in his 1533 panel painting of Venus and Cupid, inspired by Michelangelo’s preparatory cartoon for the sculptures in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Venus and Cupid embody, on the one hand, heavenly and spiritual love and, on the other, earthly and sensual love, according to humanistic philosophy. All the accompanying objects are symbols alluding to the transience of passion, the torments of the soul, which are also found in Michelangelo’s poems.

In this short thematic itinerary, in the fifteenth-century room, Giovanni di ser Giovanni, known as lo Scheggia, Masaccio’s brother, celebrates, in great detail, the Dance of a Wedding Feast. Known as Cassone Adimari, in reality, the panel showing the scene served as a backboard.

Now it is up to the public to unearth other details or subjects related to Love!

The Accademia Gallery in Florence is open until 6:50 p.m. (last admission 6:20 p.m.).

Pictured is the Gipsoteca of the Accademia Gallery in Florence. Photo by Guido Cozzi.

Art inspires love: the Florence Academy Gallery's initiative for Valentine's Day

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