Bargello, Medieval Sculpture Room completely refitted. Works not on display for some time

New layout for the Medieval Sculpture Room at the Bargello National Museum in Florence, which brings together a century of Florentine sculpture, from the late 13th century to the late 14th century, on the second floor of the museum building. The rearrangement project, overseen by Maria Cristina Valenti, former head of the technical office of the Bargello Museums, and Benedetta Chiesi, an art historian official of the Soprintendenza archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio for the provinces of Como, Lecco, Monza Brianza, Pavia, Sondrio and Varese, which has an institutional partnership with the Bargello Museums, and carried out by Lorenzo Galli’s Galli Mostre studio, is the third integral renovation of a Bargello hall after the Sala degli Avori and the Chapel. For the Room of Medieval Sculpture, the exhibition itinerary has been rethought, the ways of using and enhancing the works have been improved, and some masterpieces kept in storage that had not been visible to the public since the early 2000s have been added to the collection, including the beautiful stoup from the church of San Piero a Quaracchi.

In the rearranged Medieval Sculpture Room a number of medieval sculptures are displayed in ideal chronological succession: from the late 13th-century capitals of the Florentine Badia to Arnolfo di Cambio’s Acolytes, the central pivot of the room, to continue with Tino di Camaino’s Madonna and Child and Caryatid, the remains of the funeral monument of the Patriarch of Aquileia Gastone della Torre in Santa Croce in Florence, which was partly dismembered in the 16th century and later dispersed. Next come the panels by Giovanni di Balduccio from the church of Orsanmichele, to sculptures by Piero di Giovanni Tedesco, who worked on the facade of Santa Maria del Fiore in the last decade of the 14th century. On public display again is the stoup from the church of San Piero a Quaracchi, with its shaft populated with putti and fantastic animals. Completing the display are some coeval painted panels and two polychrome wooden statues, namely Madonna of Mercy and Seated Female Figure, which came to the museum in the early 20th century.

The two capitals of the Badia and the head of Santo Coronato had not been visible in the museum rooms since 2005, while the stoup had been in storage since 2003. Another important recovery is the tile with theObedience, walled inside the Orsanmichele church until 2005, then in storage at the Davanzati Museum, but not on display. The latter now finds a new location next to the panel with Poverty from the same Florentine church. All the works on display have undergone maintenance and conservation restoration under the guidance of Benedetta Cantini, official restorer at the Bargello Museums.

The layout is in continuity with what has been done recently in the Hall of Ivories and the Chapel, and at the same time intends to tidy up the existing one, promoting a clearer view of the works. The room, which features a consistent selection of medieval works, has been whitewashed, the decorative frieze restored, the windows screened with motorized curtains, and the lighting system renewed. All works were placed on uniform bases, chromatically aligned to those already in use in the Hall of Ivories. The heights of the works and some relationships of proximity and distance between them, such as between the three figures by Tino di Camaino, works by the same sculptor but from two different monuments, have been changed.

Also on display are works that were in storage and have recently been given new attention by scholars and specialists of different generations. Between 2016 and 2019, thanks to a PRIN project that MIUR funded four Italian universities (the University of Naples Federico II, those of Florence, Siena per Stranieri and Trento) and which was then carried out under the guidance of the Scuola Normale di Pisa, twenty research fellows under the supervision of art history professors from the different universities worked on the cataloguing of some of the Bargello’s collection nuclei. The results will be the subject of scientific publications, in preparation, and an updated online catalog. In addition, in this new arrangement some of the attributive proposals are presented to the public.

“The Bargello’s program of rearrangements continues,” commented Paola D’Agostino, director of the Bargello Museums, “made possible thanks to the autonomy of major museums, since this project, too, was carried out with funds derived from ticketing. The new arrangement of the Medieval Sculpture Room, conceived by Cristina Valenti and curated by Benedetta Chiesi, focuses on a small but important nucleus of Tuscan two- and three-century works, newly arranged to highlight the importance and exemplariness of the Bargello National Museum’s collections of medieval and Renaissance sculpture.”

“The planning and realization of the remounting of the Medieval Sculpture Room,” explained Cristina Valenti, “was complex because of the particularity of the works of art, for each of which tailor-made work was necessary. Although the operation, which lasted several months, focused on a single room there was great commitment and synergy with Benedetta Chiesi, the art historian who oversaw the project.”

“A coherent selection of mainly Tuscan, and distinctly Florentine, sculptures between the two and fourteenth centuries was arranged in the room, trying to balance historical and aesthetic needs in the layout,” Benedetta Chiesi added. The new name, ’Room of Medieval Sculpture,’ keeps well in mind the two souls of the museum: one purely civic and of large-scale sculpture, the other with a more European slant, dedicated to the suntuary arts of the Middle Ages. This room is, by theme and by position in the museum’s itinerary-and now also by its layout-a hinge between the Bargello’s two souls, introducing on the one hand to Donatello’s Hall and on the other communicating with the Hall of Ivories and the Carrand Hall."

The selection of works on display illustrates the appearance taken on by the Bargello since its opening in 1865 as an exemplary museum of medieval and Renaissance sculpture, partly at the urging of the Ministry and the Directorate, which were intended to assemble an exhaustive anthology of statuary and to implement greater protection of the area’s movable property. Indeed, the Bargello welcomed works from the Medici and Grand Ducal collections, from convents suppressed after the Unification of Italy and from the transformations of the ancient center of Florence. Important and targeted purchases immediately embellished the collection, such as the group of Acolytes, which came from the Arca di San Domenico in Bologna and was bought in 1903 by antiquarian Stefano Bardini. In the museum’s first historical layout, this space housed the Medici bronzes, including Donatello’s David. After several displays, in 1983 the room was rearranged with furniture and works from the donation of antiquarian Giovanni Bruzzichelli. In 2003, the Bruzzichelli Room was dismantled and the space set up with some works of stone sculpture between the 13th and 14th centuries. Painted panels from the same centuries, almost all from the Carrand collection, were placed to accompany the sculpture. What is on display is a selection of the Bargello’s medieval sculpture collection: many works were and still are in storage, others are in the first exhibition hall or placed in the courtyard, and others are in the San Marco lapidary.

Bargello, Medieval Sculpture Room completely refitted. Works not on display for some time

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