An exhibition at the Pitti Palace celebrates silver plates for the feast of St. John's Day

"Homage to the Grand Duke: Silver Plates for the Feast of St. John" opens today at the Pitti Palace.

The exhibition, which will end on Nov. 5, 2017, aims to highlight an episode inItalian goldsmithing between the 17th and 18th centuries that originates from the feast of St. John the Baptist, which is celebrated every year in Florence on June 24, and the Medici’s diplomatic relations with the Roman curial milieu. In particular, Lazzaro Pallavicini, a cardinal from Genoa, had his niece Maria Camilla married to a nephew of Pope Clement IX, Giovanni Battista Rospigliosi: the marriage was celebrated with the blessing of Grand Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici, and as a sign of gratitude Cardinal Pallavicini arranged for the donation of a silver to the grand duke (a custom that continued thereafter).

Following these events, the Medici collections were enriched with a splendid collection of silver historiated plates made to designs by leading contemporary Roman artists.
Known designs from Italian and foreign museums and private collections are displayed in the exhibition.
On display are plaster casts taken from the silver originals that the Ginori Manufactory of Doccia had made by silversmith Pietro Romolo Bini as evidence of the lost silver series that Grand Duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine cast and used to replenish the Tuscan budget for the purpose of favoring military enterprises.

"St. John’s plates represented a celebration of the House of Medici, recognizing and testifying to its great merits in the government of Tuscany through the use of figurations that lead back to eternal values and contingent facts. The research conducted on this occasion led to a timely reading of the individual scenes, both for the allegorical figurations responding to the best-known repertories of iconology and for the historical scenes exemplified by a deep knowledge of events. They harken back, such goldsmith virtuosity, to the dynastic splendors put in figure in the frescoes of the Pitti Palace, from the ’hall of Giovanni da san Giovanni,’ where the exhibition is set up under the watchful eye of Lorenzo the Magnificent, celebrated in the ’plates’ as a politician, for his diplomatic qualities, and as a man of culture, for the Platonic Academy, to the apotheosis of Pietro da Cortona and Ciro Ferri in the rooms of the Palatine Gallery," explained Uffizi Galleries director Eike Schmidt.

The exhibition is curated by Rita Balleri and Maria Sframeli and is sponsored by MiBACT, the Uffizi Galleries and Firenze Musei. The catalog is published by Sillabe.

Source: Press release

Image:

Triumph of Cosimo I (1682; plaster cast, Florence, Uffizi Galleries, Treasury of the Grand Dukes)
Designer: Carlo Maratti (Camerano 1625 - Rome 1713)

An exhibition at the Pitti Palace celebrates silver plates for the feast of St. John's Day

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