Uffizi Lands: Andrea del Castagno's portrait of Dante goes on display in San Godenzo

The Uffizi’s Terre degli Uffizi project, the palimpsest of exhibitions that the Uffizi organizes outside Florence, lands in San Godenzo, a town in the Tuscan Apennines with great symbolic value, since it is the birthplace of Andrea del Cast agno (Castagno di San Godenzo, c. 1421 - Florence, 1457) and the last place where Dante Alighieri (Florence, 1265 - Ravenna, 1321) planned to return to Florence before accepting exile. And on display in San Godenzo goes precisely the portrait of Dante executed by Andrea del Castagno for the cycle of Illustrious Men and Women in the Villa di Legnaia, which was restored in recent months. The famous effigy of Dante is from today, Monday, July 26, on display in the territory of San Godenzo, where on June 8, 1302 Dante and other Florentine exiles gathered in assembly, as well as the birthplace of the painter Andrea del Castagno (whose 600th anniversary, in this case of his birth, falls). The fresco will be exhibited in the hamlet of Castagno d’Andrea, named after the artist: it will be housed in the spaces of the Monte Falterona and Campigna Casentino Forest Park Visitor Center, where it will remain until August 23.

Andrea del Castagno’s detached fresco with a larger-than-life figure portrait of Dante, “rejuvenated” precisely by the restoration of theOpificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence and among the protagonists of the major exhibition in Forlì La visione dell’Arte(here is our review), dedicated to the Supreme Poet on the eighteenth century since his death, thus returns to his native Tuscany and does so with a special event: the exhibition Dante and Andrea del Castagno return to San Godenzo, promoted and organized by the Municipality of San Godenzo, included in the exhibition program Terre degli Uffizi, conceived and realized does Gallerie degli Uffizi and Fondazione CR Firenze, within their respective projects Uffizi Diffusi and Piccoli Grandi Musei.

Dante, on whose head hung a death sentence, never returned to Florence: the assembly of San Godenzo was the last moment, on Tuscan soil, in which he fleetingly touched (only to abandon) the idea of returning to his native city. Andrea del Castagno’s masterpiece is one of the oldest portraits to date of Dante Alighieri, who died in exile and was rehabilitated only post mortem by his motherland. The fresco was originally part of a pictorial cycle dedicated to illustrious men and women of the past that adorned the Villa di Legnaia near Florence, which belonged to Filippo Carducci, gonfalonier of justice of the Florentine Republic. The theme, recurring in the decoration of public palaces and patrician residences between the 14th and 15th centuries, celebrated the ingenuity and virtue of famous men and women elected as examples for posterity.

The cycle in the villa at Legnaia, which begins with the figures of Adam and Eve, includes three Florentine men who were leading figures in the city’s history (Pippo Spano, Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolo? Acciaiuoli), three women of antiquity? (Queen Tomiri, Esther, the Cumaean Sibyl), three Tuscan poets (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio). In the second half of the 15th century the villa was purchased by the Pandolfini family, and the frescoes were later covered by various whitewashes until they were forgotten. Rediscovered in 1847, in 1850 they were removed from the wall by the technique of tearing by restorer Giovanni Rizzoli in order to be sold. Purchased in 1852 by the Tuscan state, then ruled by the Lorraines, until now the nine illustrious figures were at the Uffizi in the rooms of the former church of San Pier Scheraggio, normally not open to visitors. Instead, the figures of Adam and Eve remain in the Carducci Pandolfini villa, now owned by the state.

“With the inauguration of this exhibition comes a great opportunity for San Godenzo for both cultural and economic recovery after the sad period of closures related to the health emergency,” said the mayor of San Godenzo, Emanuele Piani, “The enhancement of the territory has always been the main objective for this municipal administration, which, thanks to the collaboration with the ’Terre degli Uffizi’ project for which we are one of the first three locations chosen, can be seen even more materialized. In fact, it has been possible to enhance at the same time two illustrious personalities linked to our land of which we have the good fortune to celebrate, in the same year, the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri and the six hundredth anniversary of the birth of Andrea del Castagno. I would like to express my great thanks to the director of the Uffizi Galleries Eike Schmidt and his staff, the Fondazione CR Firenze, the President of the Foreste Casentinesi Monte Falterona e Campigna National Park, the Region of Tuscany, the Italian Postal Service and all the other entities that have sponsored this splendid cultural event.”

“In San Godenzo, the Uffizi Lands project succeeds in closely linking the Casentino Forests Park to history and art,” emphasizes the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt. “And it does so with a symbolic work: in this year of Dante celebrations, also of encyclopedic scope, the Portrait of Dante exhibited here condenses in the image of the Poet not only the evocation of his stop in these places, in 1302, on his way to exile, but also a local glory, the exquisite painter Andrea del Castagno, who is the author of this portrait. In one painting, universal and local history come together to introduce visitors to unusual aspects of our culture.”

“This exhibition is the second stage of our stable collaboration with Italy’s most important museum,” says Fondazione CR Firenze Director General Gabriele Gori. “It is a project of cultural synergy, much needed in this post-pandemic moment, which continues an important ten-year program of territorial cultural marketing we started in 2005, called Piccoli Grandi Musei, which enhanced, long before the phenomenon exploded, the lesser-known beauties of our land and its specific identities. This second exhibition is also a tribute to the Supreme Poet. We have just greeted him, in the first exhibition opened not even a week ago, at the Conti Guidi castle in Poppi where he wrote parts of the Divine Comedy. We find him today in the place where the master gathered in assembly together with other Florentine exiles. We are very pleased with ’Terre degli Uffizi’ because, as is also evident on this occasion, it contributes to making known the many treasures of our region that really deserve to be more appreciated.”

Andrea del Castagno was born around 1421 in Castagno, a village later named Il Castagno d’Andrea in his memory. His artistic education took place in Florence, taking Masaccio, Paolo Uccello and Donatello as references. His first documented work dates to 1440, the lost frescoes on the facade of the Palazzo del Podesta? of Florence depicting the city’s traitors? “for the use of hanged men.” The commission attests already at this date to the artist’s familiarity with mural painting, a technique in which Andrea achieved his highest achievements. In 1442 he was working in Venice, where he signed as Andreas de Florentia the frescoes in the chapel of San Tarasio in the church of San Zaccaria, executed with the collaboration of Francesco da Faenza and characterized by virtuously foreshortened plastic figures and refined chromaticism. Returning to Florence, in 1444 he enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, a guild to which painters belonged, and in the same year received payments for the preparatory cartoon of the stained-glass window with the Deposition for one of the windows of the tambour of the dome of the Florentine cathedral. In 1447, for the Benedictine nuns of Santa Apollonia in Florence, Andrea decorated the refectory with the Last Supper and the Stories of the Passion, producing one of the highest masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance painting thanks to the masterful use of perspective in the illusionistic spatial rendering, the sensitive luministic layout and the solid plasticity of the figures, posed in solemn poses inspired by the classical world. In 1449-1450, close to the execution of the cycle of Illustrious Men frescoed in Filippo Carducci’s villa at Legnaia (Florence), Andrea executed the altarpiece with the Virgin assumed for the church of San Miniato fra le Torri in Florence (Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gema?ldegalerie). The notoriety Andrea achieved is demonstrated by the commission he received in 1455 to fresco in Florence Cathedral the equestrian monument to the condottiero Niccolo? da Tolentino, creating an extraordinary figure, plastic and dynamic. A few months later, on August 14, 1457, Andrea died of the plague.

Uffizi Lands: Andrea del Castagno's portrait of Dante goes on display in San Godenzo

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