The Uffizi acquires a new painting

The Uffizi is enriched with a new painting: the celebrated Florentine museum has acquired a painting by Johann Paul Schor, an Austrian artist who achieved international fame in Rome, where he resided from 1640 to 1679, the year of his death.

The spectacular work depicts"The procession of the carnival float of Prince Giovan Battista Borghese for the masquerade of Shrove Thursday 1664" and was awarded"Most Beautiful Painting of the Fair" in the last edition of the Biennale Internazionale dell’Antiquariato at Palazzo Corsini.

Uffizi Galleries director Eike Schmidt describes the painting as follows, "The canvas shows a hundred figures dressed in golden garb parading for the 1664 carnival together with the ancient masks of the commedia dell’arte.
The procession joyfully accompanies a monumental triumphal chariot - a masterpiece by Schor himself, documented in the sources - and a carriage housing figures of the Roman aristocracy. Making us relive the splendor of the Baroque in the Urbe, the artist immortalizes and contextualizes an ephemeral and therefore now lost masterpiece, precisely a monumental gilded triumphal chariot, and also portrays himself in the lower right corner, in the act of proudly displaying the sheet with the signature: Gio. Paul Schor de Insprvh fat(to) the chariot and the painting year 1664. The painting therefore also fits into the collection of self-portraits begun in those very years by Leopold de’ Medici, the extraordinary collector whom we are still celebrating until February 25 with a major exhibition at the Pitti Palace. Schor emblematically represents the truly European dimension of the Italian art scene in the Baroque period. For this reason, too, the purchase of the painting underscores the national and European stature of the Uffizi Galleries’ collections." He adds that it is a spectacular and rare painting.

Maria Matilde Simari, curator of Seventeenth-Century Painting, says, "The Austrian stage designer and artist-who in Italy was called Giovanni Paolo Todesco (1615 -1679)-gave in this painting an original testimony to his overflowing Baroque imagination. Schor was capable of devising extraordinarily inventive urban settings, but he also executed fine fresco and canvas paintings, as well as designing furniture and everyday objects. He was an assiduous collaborator of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who found affinity in this Nordic master in the creation of exuberant machines and apparatuses that expressed to the highest degree the typical taste of their historical period."

The acquired work will be exhibited in the new Carriage Museum in the Pitti Palace, according to Alessandra Griffo, curator of 18th-century paintings, Tapestries, Furniture and Carriages, and this will fully enhance the painting’s significance and iconographic distinctiveness. Indeed, to the theme of carriages examined in detail for their decorative and representational potential can be traced numerous sheets by Johann Paul Schor and his circle, holdings of the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet and other international collections.

Image: Johann Paul Schor, The procession of Prince Giovan Battista Borghese’s carnival float for the Shrove Thursday masquerade of 1664 (1664; 122 x 317 cm)

The Uffizi acquires a new painting

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