1.7 mln visitors, exhibitions accounted for, David protected: director draws up balance sheet for Academy Gallery

Today the director of the Accademia Gallery in Florence, Cecile Hollberg, presented a review of her tenure from 2015 to the present, focusing on all aspects of the management of the important Florentine museum: the mounting of the collection, new acquisitions, exhibitions and their reporting, opening to the city and its inhabitants, the David ordinance, structural works for the maintenance and renovation of the building, the reorganization of staffing, and the tender for the concession of services.

The presentation opens with numerical data: according to official figures provided by the National Statistical Service (SISTAN), the Gallery has crossed the 1.7 million visitor mark, with an increase of 300,000 visitors in the past three years, all, Hollberg stressed, in complete compliance with the limits prescribed by security. This result, according to the director, was driven by several factors: among them, the shift of exhibition programming to the winter, low-season period between late November and March, which in 2018 led to a 23 percent increase over the previous year. Another important factor according to Hollberg was the greater openness to the City, with active involvement of its inhabitants, thanks to the creation, for example, of the Association of the Friends of the Accademia Gallery, and with the proposal of dedicated activity programs such as concerts, specific visits to the collection, presentation of the restorations done and others. The Gallery has also achieved the goal of distributing the flow of visitors during the week thanks to the two evening openings in the summer period, from June to September, from 7 to 10 p.m., with the realization, every Tuesday, of the billboard Voci fiorentine. Close Encounters with Art, a series with important ’Florentine’ personalities that registered about 100 people for each meeting.

During these first three quarters of her term of office, Cecile Hollberg explained that her action has been devoted to maximum transparency, and for the first time a plan for reporting on the exhibitions made has been implemented, which has made it possible, the director added, to restore a situation and to calculate exactly the income brought in by at least the three exhibitions held from 2015 to date: Carlo Portelli. Eccentric Painter between Rosso Fiorentino and Vasari; Giovanni Dal Ponte. Protagonist of Florentine Late Gothic Humanism; Fabric and Wealth in Florence in the Fourteenth Century. Wool, silk, painting. This reporting operation put the administrative papers in order and yielded a profit of about 1 million euros. Hollberg then considers “a momentous international victory” the protection of the image of Michelangelo’s David through the 2017 ordinance of the Court of Florence, which countered its illicit use for commercial purposes. The ordinance proved to be a moneymaker and could still be a trailblazer for all Italian cultural heritage, studied in other European countries as well. At the Accademia Gallery in Florence, it has currently yielded about 50,000 euros.

Still, maintenance, preventive conservation and restoration works have been implemented. And for obvious conservation reasons, loans have been significantly reduced. Thanks to external funding, also received through theAssociation of the Friends of the Accademia Gallery of Florence, every single work in the museum has been inspected and cleaned. Regular and continuous monitoring, as of this January 2019, has finally been entrusted to an in-house state restorer, Eleonora Pucci. Also on this front, the Gallery has worked thoroughly on restoring the air conditioning system, purchased humidifiers, installed a digital environmental data acquisition system, and so on.

Another goal achieved, Hollberg continued, was to make the works on display more accessible and visible to the public as well as the rearrangement of the Hall of Colossus in September 2018, which allowed for a 360-degree view of the clay model of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women. The prearranged changes made it possible for visitors to immediately locate, upon entering the Gallery, the area dedicated to temporary exhibitions, located at the far right in the Great Hall. Changes that, the director assures, will not stop here: in the works is a project for a new entrance to the museum that will be presented soon and will also see the birth of a new coordinated image with the creation of a new logo, new captions with models for the visually impaired, and new signage. Finally, an all-encompassing photoshoot will allow all the museum’s works to be digitized in very high resolution. The Accademia Gallery suffers from a lack of space for the expansion of the collection, for service use in storage, checkrooms, offices and for teaching. Also as part of the work, after two and a half years (with the arrival last March of an institutional architect, Carlotta Matta), the management has managed to initiate fundamental projects that are not visible to the public but that concern improving the functionality of the building, such as doubling the water tanks to ensure precisely the operation of the aforementioned air conditioning system and the use of the bathrooms, bringing the facility up to safety standards, and overhauling the roofs and gutters. Telephony has been restored, connecting to the GARR’s national ultra-wideband network to improve connectivity. Restoration and consolidation of the trusses and replacement of windows in the Gisposteca will be started soon, thanks to the major project “Masterplan air conditioning.”

Moving on, 2018 saw the regularization of the annexation of the Museum of Musical Instruments, which had already been on loan for use to the Accademia Gallery since 1996: this is a collection with extraordinary pieces that belonged to the grand ducal Medici and Lorraine families, which were subsequently passed on to the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory. And still on the subject of collections, the Accademia Gallery’s collection, over the past three years, has been enriched with new works that will be presented in the upcoming exhibition New Acquisitions from 2016 to 2018, which will open to the public on January 22, 2019. Also with the invaluable support of the Friends of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, the marble bust of 19th-century playwright Giovan Battista Niccolini, executed by Lorenzo Bartolini in 1827, whose plaster model is kept in the Accademia’s Gipsoteca and which was rediscovered and purchased in the last edition of the Florence Biennale dell’Antiquariato, has also become part of the collection. Continued publishing activity has then been undertaken with the publication of catalogs, conference proceedings, a first volume of a children’s series, and the third volume of the Florence Accademia Gallery’s scientific catalog will soon be released.

On the relations front, important collaborations with Italian and foreign museums, institutes, academies and universities have been established in recent years. Most valuable among these is the one with the Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Würzburg (with which an international cooperation project was signed), which began thanks to the loan of a panel by Gherardo Starnina for the 2017 exhibition on Giovanni dal Ponte. “Together,” Hollberg says, “we were able to find funding from a German foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Kunstststiftung, to be able to carry out the restoration of the Starnina Triptych at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence.”

In terms of tenders, on December 20, 2018, the tender for the concession of museum services at the Accademia Gallery and the San Marco Museum in Florence was published. A tender that comes to fruition after a good 21 years. The Gallery was the first, together with the San Marco Museum, to initiate the procedure in the city of Florence and among the first, in Italy, to publish an all-inclusive tender for additional services nationwide.

Finally, as for the 2019 program, the Accademia Gallery will participate in two international initiatives (the first in Milan, in May, and the second in Crete, in June), together with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of Florence, with a pioneering application in Italy of BIM (Building Information Modeling) to a historic building, aimed at both more efficient maintenance and conservation management and the development of a computational model for structural analysis and seismic risk assessment of the complex and its collections. Lastly, the list of future projects was presented, starting with the aforementioned exhibition New Acquisitions from 2016 to 2018: on January 28 there will be a lecture Il Quadrilatero Lorenese delle arti by Professor Oronzo Brunetti, professor of History of Architecture at the University of Parma. This will be followed on Feb. 25 by a lecture on the export of works of art entitled What do I need to consider in order to export a work from Italy. Starting Feb. 4, every first Monday of the month appointments with the directors of state museums, who will tell the public about them: participants will include Martina Bagnoli, director of Gallerie Estensi; Peter Aufreiter, director of Galleria Nazionale delle Marche; Enrica Pagella, director of Musei Reali di Torino; Eva Degli Innocenti, director of Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Taranto; Marco Pierini, director of Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria; and Peter Assmann, director of Palazzo Ducale di Mantova.

March 6 will mark the third year since the establishment of the Association of Friends of the Accademia Gallery of Florence, while on May 13 there will be a conference devoted to the theme of theImmaculate Conception in art history. In the summer, evening openings will resume and there will be the second edition of Florentine Voices, while on October 20 and 21 it will be the turn of the international conference 10 Years MIMO - Musical Instrument Museums Online. Finally, January 2020 will see the opening of the exhibition The Busts of Michelangelo by Daniele da Volterra.

1.7 mln visitors, exhibitions accounted for, David protected: director draws up balance sheet for Academy Gallery

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