22/01/2008

Furini, a master of the 17th century in Florence.



The classic nude, soft and mellow, between the sacred and the profane: a different Beauty on show
Nymphs and Graces there are, but also biblical figures, all rendered according in the highly personal manner, soft and mellow, that made Francesco Furini a master of classical art in Florence, but also further afield.

Un'altra bellezza is the name of the first monograph on an international level devoted to this 17th-century Florentine artist, too often neglected by art critics, who was an indisputably leading figure in Florentine painting at the beginning of the 17th century.


After his years of study in Rome, Furini specialized in the representation of the nude according to the Classical ideal of beauty, and his works were sought after by patrons even as much as those of Guido Reni, an artist in the very forefront of Italian Classicism.
The choice of the Museo degli Argenti as the home of the exhibition was due the fact that in the Great Hall of that institution there is a fresco by Furini, commissioned by the Grand Duke Francesco de' Medici, and representing the "Accademia platonica di Careggi" and the "Allegoria della morte di Lorenzo il Magnifico". Here starts our journey around the exhibition, which follows a chronological (and in part thematic) order, showing us masterpieces brought from important Italian and foreign museums such as the Louvre and the Prado. The seven sections include a large number of preliminary drawings for frescoes which, together with all the major works, form a total of thirty-eight paintings and twenty-one drawings. A careful reconstruction based on the events of his personal life and the nature of his clients is the basis of a study of the complexity of Furini's art, which was appreciated not only in Italy but abroad (especially in Prague), and of his relations with the society and culture of his time. It is hard to discern the reasons why this Master, famous for the "profane" nature of his numerous female nudes, became prior of the parish church of Sant'Ansano in the Mugello. An apparent contradiction which is all part of the intriguing nature of Furini, a complex artist who died at the age of only forty-three. The exhibition closes with the two paintings commissioned by Duke Jacopo Salviati, truly splendid exemplars of "a different kind of beauty".

Francesco Furini. Un'altra bellezza
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti
22 December 2007-26 April 2008