Florence, in 2021 at the Bargello Museum two major exhibitions to tell the story of Dante

Two exhibitions that the Bargello Museums will organize in 2021 to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, in collaboration with theUniversity of Florence, have been presented. The museums and the University of Florence are working on the creation of a first exhibition dedicated to reconstructing the relationship between Dante and Florence in the decades immediately following his death, presenting the actors, initiatives, places, and themes. The exhibition will be titled Honorable and Ancient Citizen of Florence. The Bargello for Dante, will be held from March 23 to July 25, 2021, and will be curated by Luca Azzetta, Sonia Chiodo, and Teresa De Robertis of the University of Florence, with a scientific committee of expert philologists and art historians, consisting of Andrea De Marchi, Giovanna Frosini, Andrea Mazzucchi, Marco Petoletti, and Stefano Zamponi.

The project dates back to the fall of 2018, when an institutional collaboration signed between the Bargello Museums and two departments of the Florentine university, DILEF (Department of Letters and Philosophy) and SAGAS (Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, Art and Performing Arts), was initiated, which has led over thelast two years to frequent meetings between museum and research professionals, establishing a dialogue with experts in national and international circles among the institutions that have granted loans.

The Bargello National Museum is considered an essential starting point for the reconstruction of the relationship between Dante and his city after his condemnation and death in exile. Inside, in fact, is the fresco that testifies to the poet’s surprising inclusion among the elect of Paradise: the painting, made in 1337 by Giotto’s pupils and collaborators, is located in the Cappella del Podestà, a place symbolic of the union between the justice of men and divine justice. It is a choice of public importance, the culmination of the reappeasement between Florence and Dante, with which a process of reconstruction and invention of memory begins. The paintings in the chapel, but also the other 14th-century frescoes in the Palace, will form part of the exhibition, aimed at drawing attention to the exemplary value of their contents in relation to the building’s function as the seat of the city’s supreme judicial authority.

The exhibition will be divided into sections, with loans of manuscripts and paintings that will be set up in dialogue with the frescoes and other coeval works from the Bargello’s collections and from Italian and foreign institutions, including the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, the Biblioteca Laurenziana and the Biblioteca Riccardiana, which have contributed in a decisive way, lending a significant nucleus of manuscripts (while theAccademia della Crusca and the Opificio delle Pietre Dure were key institutional interlocutors in the articulation of the scientific project). The exhibition itinerary will retrace the stages and protagonists of this relationship between Florence, Alighieri and his work in the first half of the 14th century, presenting makers, copyists, commentators, illuminators and readers of the Commedia around the year 1337. The exhibition intends to give voice to precisely these protagonists, whose names are sometimes known but more often remain buried in the folds of the past, thus reconstructing the path that would lead Giovanni Villani to call Dante an “honorable and ancient citizen of Florence” and Giovanni Boccaccio to build his own personal paper monument. It will be an extraordinary opportunity to deepen the knowledge of studies in philology, paleography, art history and restoration, and also to show the general public a unique chapter in the civic history of Florence, which at that moment rises to a much wider dimension, giving rise to the vulgate text with which Dante would be read and received for centuries. The exhibition, designed to allow differentiated levels of reading, is aimed not only at scholars but also at the general public, paying special attention to young people and schools, to whom a program of collateral initiatives will be dedicated.

The second exhibition, on the other hand, will deal with Dante’s fortunes in the second half of the 19th century: it will be titled The Marvelous Vision. Dante and the Comedy in the Symbolist Imaginary, it will be held from September 23, 2021 to January 9, 2022 and will be curated by Carlo Sisi, with contributions from art and literature historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who will collaborate with a Scientific Committee composed of Emanuele Bardazzi, Ilaria Ciseri, Flavio Fergonzi and Laura Melosi.

The exhibition recalls how in 1865, the anniversary of the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth, the Bargello reopened its doors as the first National Museum of the Kingdom of Italy with an exhibition dedicated to theAlighieri, and at that time the figure of the Poet became increasingly identified with the national idea sanctioned by the outcomes of the politics of the Risorgimento, whereby Dante was defined as “the forerunner of the unity and freedom of Italy.” Dedicated to the complex perception of the figure of Dante and the Divine Comedy in the literary context between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the exhibition aims to present a selection of works that, from naturalist currents to the European influences of Symbolism, narrate the extraordinary catalog of images (sublime, mystical and dreamlike) that Dante’s poem offered to the art world. Also divided into sections, the exhibition is conceived as a thematic and interdisciplinary narrative whereby the works on display will form a stringent sequence, linking together paintings, sculptures and the conceptual and literary references implicit in Dante’s biographical and poetic story: from the eve of the centenary in 1865, to the Symbolist temperament and the important competition announced by Vittorio Alinari in 1900 for the illustration of the Divine Comedy.

Pictured: the portrait of Dante Alighieri in the Podestà Chapel of the Bargello.

Florence, in 2021 at the Bargello Museum two major exhibitions to tell the story of Dante

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