A real gem, the Gipsoteca of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florencethat reopens to the public with a new look, after two and a half years of works, which close the large construction sites started in 2020. BEYOND THE DAVID is the title under which the director Cecilie Hollberg presents the new Accademia Galleryto underline that the museum is not only a treasure chest of Michelangelo’s sculpture, loved all over the world, but is a witness to important collections related to Florentine art that today, finally, emerge stealing the scene even from David.
“The Gipsoteca is the last and most precious step in the renovation process of the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence” Cecilie Hollberg says with satisfaction. “A task that was entrusted to me by the Franceschini reform, that is to ferry an unprecedented and modern gallery from the 19th century into the 21st century. A huge undertaking that we were able to complete thanks to the heartfelt and constant commitment of our very small staff and all those who supported us. Despite the many setbacks, due to the suspension of autonomy, the pandemic crisis, the various criticalities of the structure encountered during construction, we managed to work the miracle. The layout of the Gipsoteca has been rearranged and modernized in full respect of the historical one, and I thank my friend Carlo Sisi for the precious advice. The plaster casts, restored and cleaned, are enhanced by the light powder blue of the walls, so much so that they seem alive, with their lives, their stories. The result is magnificent! We are proud and happy to be able to share it with everyone from now on.“
“The reopening of the Gipsoteca is an important step in the path undertaken since 2016 to bring the Accademia Gallery of Florence, one of the most important and visited Italian state museums, into the twenty-first century” declares the Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini. “The works, concerning the entire building, allowed significant innovations in the systems, making a museum conceived in the second half of the nineteenth century modern, without distorting it.. All this has been made possible by the passion, dedication and professionalism with which the director Hollberg and all the staff of the Gallery have worked since the establishment of the autonomous museum in 2015, amid a thousand difficulties and interruptions due to the pandemic.. I wish, therefore, every success to this day of celebration for the Galleria dell’Accademia and I extend my sincere congratulations to
all those who worked to achieve this important result.“
“That of the Gipsoteca of the Accademia Gallery – underlines Carlo Sisi, President of the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence – is an exemplary restitution, which in respecting the previous setting conceived by Sandra Pinto in the 1970s is configured as a real critical act, a museum operation that preserves a crucial episode of national museography by renewing its compositional structure with methodological intelligence and the grace of the details. The new color chosen for the walls makes it possible to recover the correct reading of the works, now exhibited in their entirety, and the removal of the obsolete air conditioners allows you to admire the sequence of the works without disturbing interruptions, but with the ‘poetic’ continuity that can finally to attract the visitor to what in the nineteenth century was called the adventure in the atelier ”.
The monumental hall of the nineteenth century, formerly the seat of the women’s ward of the ancient hospital of San Matteo, later incorporated into the Academy of Fine Arts, collects the plaster collection, over 400, including busts, bas-reliefs, monumental sculptures, original models in much of Lorenzo Bartolini, one of the most important Italian sculptors of the 19th century. The collection was acquired by the Italian state after the artist’s death and moved here following the flood of ’66. A place of great charm that ideally recreates Bartolini’s studio, enriched by a collection of paintings by nineteenth-century masters who studied or taught at the Academy of Fine Arts.
The interventions were of a static-structural order, relating to the air conditioning system, lighting and electrical system. For static and climatic stability reasons, various windows have been closed, allowing the new setting, with the walls painted in a powder blue “gipsoteca” color, to recover a large exhibition space, enriching the Gipsoteca also with those plaster models that were hitherto kept in the offices of the Gallery. The shelves, renewed and enlarged, accommodate the portrait busts, which for the first time have been able to be secured thanks to a safe and non-invasive anchoring system. The fragile plaster models, during the renovation works, were subjected to a careful conservative revision and dusting. All the works have been subjected to an accurate photographic campaign.
The major construction sites began in 2016, including the study and preparation phases, generating documentation and floor plans that were not there. It was necessary: to bring the safety system up to standard; renew the plant; the architectural-structural restoration of the Gipsoteca; the consolidation or replacement of the eighteenth-century wooden trusses of the Colossus room, shabby; intervene on the ventilation and air conditioning systems, missing in some rooms or 40 years old; provide adequate lighting. The works have developed on 3000 square meters of the museum. 750 meters of ventilation ducts have been replaced or sanitized and 130 meters of ducts renewed. For the first time, now, the museum has a functioning air conditioning system in every room with new latest generation LED lights that enhance the works on display and contribute to energy efficiency. According to the needs, interventions were made on all the works of the museum, they were moved, protected, packed, moved, dusted, magazines or other. And on this occasion, in-depth photographic campaigns, conservative or digitization, were carried out on all the collections. Paths and settings have been rethought.
From the Colossus room, which opens the exhibition with his blue Academy, characterized, in the center, by the imposing Rape of the Sabine Womena masterpiece by Giambologna, around which the precious collection of Florentine painting of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries revolves, to the new room dedicated to the fifteenth century, in which masterpieces such as the so-called Cassone Adimari dello Scheggia or la Thebaid by Paolo Uccello, finally legible in all their wonderful details. From the Galleria dei Prigioni to the Tribuna del David, the fulcrum of the museum, with the largest collection of Michelangelo’s works that the new lighting enhances, making visible every detail, every sign of the “unfinished”. Works that compare with the large altarpieces of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which testify to the influence of Michelangelo on his fellow countrymen in the search for the new spirituality of the Counter-Reformation. And finally the thirteenth and fourteenth century rooms, where the gold backgrounds shine with a brightness never perceived before on the walls painted in a “Giotto” green. Today the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence has changed its face, it has a new strong identity.
Carlo Franza