Dickinson Gallery is delighted to return this year to the Biennale dell’Antiquariato in Florence. Dickinson’s stand will largely focus on works by Italian artists, with examples from the early Renaissance through the early 20th Century, in a range of media including painting, drawing and sculpture. Leading the highlights will be a remarkable rediscovery: an early drawing of Jupiter by Michelangelo.
The Study of Jupiter represents one of the most exciting old master discoveries to have been made in recent decades, and is an important addition to the small group of extant drawings by Michelangelo. Acquired at auction in Paris over thirty years ago as the work of an anonymous hand, this Study of Jupiter is now held by many leading scholars to be the Renaissance master’s earliest known drawing, based on a fragment of a Roman marble and featuring distinctive stylistic traits learned by Michelangelo in the Florentine studio of Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio.
The earliest of the exhibited works is a jewel-like gold ground panel from the early trecento by the so-called Maestro di Verucchio, representing The Nativity. It originally formed the left half of a diptych, together with a Crucifixion now in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam museum, and its handling and details recall the work of Giotto and his early Florentine followers. From the early 16th Century comes The Crucifixion by Girolamo da Cotignola, a pupil of Raphael. It was acquired on Grand Tour by James Hugh Smith-Barry, and was recorded hanging at Marbury Hall in Waagen’s 1854 Treasures of art in Great Britain. Alessandro Allori’s captivating, recently rediscovered Portrait of Antonio de’ Medici (c. 1590-92) was painted by the leading Florentine Mannerist during the period in which he combined the elegance of his master Bronzino with a Flemish inflection. Another rediscovery, having emerged recently from a private English collection, is Bartolomeo Salvestrini’s Rebecca dressing Jacob in Esau’s garments (1630), the finest version of this rare Old Testament subject.
Dickinson will also be showing three superb examples of Renaissance sculpture, two in bronze and one in polychrome terracotta. The terracotta, a Madonna and Child by Benedetto Buglioni and Benedetto da Maiano (c. 1495 – 1505), shares the elegance of the famed Della Robbia workshop in its serene palette dominated by blue and white. In bronze, Dickinson will feature Giovanni Francesco Susini’s A pacing bull (c. 1650), based on a model by Giambologna and remodelled by Giovanni Francesco’s uncle Antonio; and Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi’s Ganymede and the Eagle (c. 1714), an exquisitely finished example that hails from the collection of the Earls of Lanesborough.
Moving into the late 19th and early 20th Century, Dickinson will exhibit works by two of the greatest names in Belle Époque portraiture. Giovanni Boldini’s small-scale Ladies of the First Empire (1875) is a sumptuous study of the upper class at leisure, based on the interiors of Versailles and featuring shimmering fabrics and polished surfaces. Frau Marie von Grunelius (c. 1902-03), by his friend and rival John Singer Sargent, is a London-period portrait by the famed American ex-pat, depicting the artist’s close friend, later Marie Beaumont, in an elegant posture and diaphanous evening gown.
We look forward to welcoming you to stand 4 in the Palazzo Corsini.