Academy Gallery, paintings come alive in video pills dedicated to young people and families

The Accademia Gallery in Florence presents Didattica, a new series of online appointments dedicated to youngsters and families. Every Wednesday, starting April 7, video pills will be posted on the museum’s YouTube channel and website in which a narrator’s voice will illustrate a thematic path through some paintings belonging to the museum collections, which will come alive for the occasion.

“This new project,” said Gallery Director Cecilie Hollberg, "was born at the same time as DISCOVER the GALLERY, a format where international experts delve into some of the works preserved in the Gallery. DIDACTIC, carried out by the museum’s educational services, on the other hand, will have a more popular slant: some aspects of the evolution of painting from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance will be explained in a simple way, with an animated approach, including some curiosities, such as the secrets of the workshops, how and where gold was used, why the different formats of the works and more. With DIDACTIC and with DISCOVER the GALLERY, in tune with the Ministry of Culture, we try, through a plurality of offerings, to reach different audiences."

It begins on Wednesday, April 7, with Renaissance: masters and workshops, which will deal with the reality of the workshops in which, before the establishment of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, talented young people learned the craft of the artist. Apprenticeship began as children, parents entrusting their children to the master who guided and instructed them until they reached the age and experience to open their own workshop. Often for important commissions, the master would delegate the realization of certain parts to the pupils, as, for example, in the painting Madonna and Child with Saints by Sandro Botticelli and workshop, from the Medici villa at Trebbio, for which Botticelli probably did the design and general composition, while the pupils took care of the other phases.

April 14 will be devoted to The Saints in 15th-century Florentine Painting. Some, depicted in impressive altarpieces, witness miraculous events, others are represented in individual panels of fragments of polyptychs. Still others are featured in precious panels that originally decorated family chapels inside important Florentine churches. Among the works analyzed is Tobias and the Three Archangels by Domenico di Michelino, probably commissioned following the miraculous apparition in 1423 of the archangel Raphael to the nuns of Santa Felicita, as recounted in her “memoirs” by Sister Margherita Cambi.

On April 21, two different types of works of art will be featured in From the altarpiece to the tondo: examples of altarpieces of various forms will be offered, including Pietro Perugino’s large panel depicting theAssumption of the Virgin, originally placed on the high altar of the Camaldolese Abbey of Vallombrosa. And the tondo, another genre of support with a considerably reduced size and circular shape, which became widespread during the 15th century. An example of this in the Gallery is Francesco di Cristofano’s tondo known as the Franciabigio with The Madonna and Child, St. Joseph and St. John, inspired by Raphael’s paintings in the composition and expression of the Madonna.

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Trebbio Altarpiece (1480-1500; oil on canvas; Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia)

Academy Gallery, paintings come alive in video pills dedicated to young people and families

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