Super donation from 455 works to Uffizi: Del Bravo collection enters museum

The donation of Carlo Del Bravo’s collection to the Uffizi Gallery has been completed: the Florentine museum thus acquires a collection of 455 works, including paintings, drawings and sculptures, covering a span of time from the seventeenth century to the present day. The works include an extraordinary San Giovannino by Rosso Fiorentino, and then masterpieces by Tribolo, Jacopo Vignali,Giovanni Battista Foggini, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pio Fedi, Giuseppe Bezzuoli and many others. The bequest was made possible thanks to the generosity and foresight of Carlo Del Bravo’s pupil and universal heir, Lorenzo Gnocchi, a professor at the University of Florence.

Carlo Del Bravo (San Casciano in Val di Pesa, 1935 - Florence, 2017) was an art historian specializing in Renaissance and sixteenth-century art, particularly sculpture, with interests that also spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as a professor of art history at the University of Florence. Del Bravo, after graduating in 1959 with Roberto Longhi, Carlo Del Bravo later taught at the Porta Romana Art Institute before becoming assistant to Roberto Salvini at the University of Florence. In 1982 he was given the chair of History of Modern Art at the same university, where he taught until 2008, and voluntarily beyond: generations of students were trained under his guidance, including three directors of the Gallery of Modern Art, Ettore Spalletti, Carlo Sisi, Simonella Condemi, and Antonio Natali, former director of the Uffizi Gallery. Carlo del Bravo’s scholarly output is vast and ranges from, among other things, Sienese art of the 15th century (recall his pioneering book on Sienese sculpture of the 15th century, published in 1970) to Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael; from seventeenth-century Florentine (and other) painting to the sculpture of Cellini and Lorenzo Mochi; from Italian and European artists of the 19th century to Italian sculpture between the two Wars. In a series of important essays, he has tackled “transversal” topics with a highly original interpretive approach: we recall here, among others, Sul significato della luce nel Caravaggio e in Gianlorenzo Bernini, from 1983; Ritratti petrarcheschi, from 1997; L’iconologia generale e Rodolfo, from 2012.

As anticipated, among the works that become part of the public holdings are Rosso Fiorentino’s wry and irreverent San Giovannino (the last painting by the great Mannerist painter so far in private hands) and will be part of the new display of early 16th-century painting at the Uffizi (currently in preparation). Two of the Florentine Jacopo Vignali ’s most poignant canvases (The Young Flutist and Jesus Crowned with Thorns) will be displayed in the Palatine Gallery. But the bulk of the collection (with works by nineteenth-century masters such as Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Léon Bonnat, Antonio Ciseri, Raffaello Sernesi, and many others, as well as paintings by friends who were contemporary artists of Carlo Del Bravo), will be displayed in two dedicated rooms in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti, which will be restored and set up in the coming months: spaces for many decades closed to the public and used as offices, but with a spectacular view of Florence’s monuments that always enchanted Del Bravo when he looked out of those windows. Two other adjacent rooms, also inaccessible for more than half a century and lately used as storage rooms, will once again house Domenico Trentacoste’s sculptures, as it was originally. Del Bravo, moreover, was for decades a member of the Commission for the Evaluation and New Acquisitions of the Pitti Palace Gallery of Modern Art, which met regularly in those spaces. Within this body, Del Bravo represented an avant-garde cultural model in terms of choices and methodological direction, advocating purchases of fundamental importance including Pietro Benvenuti’s drawings, Giorgio Morandi’s famous Landscape at Grizzana, and Lorenzo Bartolini’s marble stele. In addition, an exhibition on Carlo Del Bravo as collector, scholar, and teacher of generations of students is being prepared, as well as a comprehensive scholarly catalog of all the works in his collection. Finally, groups of works from the Carlo Del Bravo Bequest will be exhibited in San Casciano Val di Pesa, the birthplace and early childhood home of the scholar.

“Just as in academic studies,” comments Uffizi Director Eike D. Schmidt, “the collection that Carlo Del Bravo put together during his lifetime (one of the most important donations to Florentine museums since World War II) is also the fruit of a life marked by a passion for knowledge and a sense of beauty, rigorous studies and intense artistic friendships. It is precisely these values that have inspired today the act of generosity performed by his pupil and universal heir Lorenzo Gnocchi, who has handed over the most precious, personal and intimate treasures of his master to the entire Italian people: thus the will and hopes of the testatary are fulfilled, with foresight and true filial love for one of the greatest art historians the second half of the 20th century has seen.”

“Carlo Del Bravo consecrated his entire existence to the beauty bearer of great thoughts, and he represented a true light, in studies, in teaching, as in friendships,” Lorenzo Gnocchi explains. “He lavished much of his own, many, human and intellectual forces, with severity, but also with affectionate participation, with extraordinary clarity and lexical election, and favoring seminar teaching; he thus established true friendships with his students based on the understanding of the values of art and beauty: ”the courses presented new and methodologically formative topics each year, and the ’Lessons in Reading and Attribution of Works of Art’ from the 15th to the 21st century broadened knowledge to those artists whom he presented well in advance of the times of their rediscovery, such as, as early as the 1960s, Scandinavian painters, Italian and European ’academics’ of the nineteenth century, the photographic secessions, and figurative sculptors between the two wars."

Pictured are two works from the Del Bravo donation: Rosso Fiorentino, San Giovannino (c. 1520; tempera on panel, 53.5 x 35.5 cm) and Jacopo Vignali, Giovane flautista (c. 1650, oil on canvas, 72 x 58.5 cm)

Super donation from 455 works to Uffizi: Del Bravo collection enters museum

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