The Springtime of the Renaissance. Sculpture and the Arts in Florence 1400–60 ENG

Edited by Marc Bormand and Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi

Exhibition Catalog: Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 23 March-18 August 2013

Organized by the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation and the Musée du Louvre

The exhibition opens with an overview of the rediscovery of the Ancient, with illustrious examples of the "rebirth" between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: works by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, Arnolfo, Giotto, Tino di Camaino and their successors, in particular of French.

The "new age" comes with the new century: with the two reliefs of the Sacrifice of Isaac by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi for the Baptistery Door and with the model of the Brunelleschi's Dome.

The monumental public sculpture, with the masterpieces of Donatello and Ghiberti, is the first and highest testimony of the creation of a new style. Since the 1920s, the new canons of sculpture, illustrated by some masterpieces, have multiplied through a boundless production of reliefs.

At the same time, Florence sees the most prestigious, almost always public, artistic commissions concentrate in places of solidarity and prayer.

Around the absolute symbol of the city, represented by the wooden model of the Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, there is therefore a review of sculptural typologies and themes that are also decisive for the evolution of the other figurative arts, in direct comparison with the classical precedents: graves of the humanists, to the rebirth of the equestrian monument and the sculpted portrait.

Around the latter, which sees its genesis towards the middle of the century in the marble busts of Mino da Fiesole, Desiderio da Settignano, Antonio Rossellino, the transition from the Florentine libertas, represented by public clients to a private patronage already the sign of Medici hegemony.

In this perspective, the exhibition, which begins with the evocation of the Brunelleschi's Dome, ends with that of the most illustrious private residence of the Renaissance, through the wooden model of Palazzo Strozzi.