Maxi donation of Carlo Pineider to the Uffizi: more than a hundred drawings and etchings

Maxi donation to the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet by Carlo Pineider, collector and heir to the family of the historic Florentine luxury stationery and leather goods brand.

107 works, including 82 drawings dating from the early 16th century to the last years of the 18th century and 25 etchings by Simone Cantarini, one of Pineider’s most beloved artists, have now become part of the Uffizi Galleries’ collections.

As for the drawings, they are mostly sketches or first preparatory strokes of pictorial works, attributed mainly to artists from Tuscany, but also from the Veneto, Emilia and Rome. Also present are finished drawings and those that are studio or autonomous, thus not intended to become paintings. Many sheets come from famous collections or from the collections of celebrated scholars, including J. Fitchett Marsh, Vallardi, Luigi Grassi, Amédée-Paul-Emile Gasc, C. König of Vienna, Émile Maurice Marignane, Hubert Marignane, Ludwig Zatzka, Jan Pietersz Zoomer, Francis Abott, and Sir Robert Witt.

Laura Donati, coordinator of the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi, and Donatella Fratini, curator of the drawings, immediately commented, “The one made by Carlo Pineider is undoubtedly one of the most important donations of recent decades, not only in light of the good condition of the sheets, but also for the importance that some of them hold in the graphic and pictorial corpus of the artists who made them. The 107 works including prints and drawings now acquired by the Uffizi will be a useful and important addition to the Galleries’ collection.”

Although most of the sheets were made by important and famous artists, others are attributed to lesser-known artists, such as Francesco Zamolo, Giovanni Mauro della Rovere known as Fiamminghino, Giuseppe Marchesi known as Sansone, Giovanni Carboncino and Giovanni Battista Tempesti. Of great value are Battista Franco’s study for the Nativity of the Virgin, preparatory for the frescoes in the apse of Urbino Cathedral, two drawings attributed to Domenico Canmpagnola depicting Moses receiving the tables of the law and a Landscape Study with Studies of Figures on the verso. Also, works from the Florentine seventeenth century, by artists such as Baldassarre Franceschini known as Volterrano, including a Study for the figure of St. John the Baptist (recto) and a Study for a Sibyl (verso), the Study for the protomartyr St. Stephen frescoed in the dome of the Tribuna della Santissima Annunziata in Florence, and the Martyrdom of Saints Attinia and Greciniana. Among the Veneto drawings, theAdoration of the Magi attributed to Marcantonio Bassetti, while among the Emilians, the Allegorical Scene in sanguine by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. Drawings by Giovanni Domenico Ferretti also enrich the eighteenth-century drawings.

“It is with immense gratitude that the Uffizi Galleries welcomes the Pineider collection, one of the most important donations to arrive at the Uffizi in the last century. In these hard times, in which Italy is proudly fighting the microbiological enemy, the generosity of this gift, intended for the entire Italian people, takes on special value as an example of the altruism and spirit of sacrifice to which we are all called to protect the community,” said Uffizi Galleries Director Eike Schmidt.

“My wish was to save these small works of art forever, rescuing them from the uncertain and unjust fate of a market that has no qualms about dispersing our cultural riches, whether large or small, but still unique and irreplaceable. Allocating them to be part of the collection of the Prints and Drawings Cabinet of the Uffizi constituted the logical landing place of the feelings that bind me to ’my sheets’ and to the most prestigious institution for the preservation of graphic art in my city and in the world,” said collector Carlo Pineider.

Maxi donation of Carlo Pineider to the Uffizi: more than a hundred drawings and etchings

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