The "Buffoons, Villains and Players at the Medici Court" Exhibit (Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy)

 

 

uffoons, Villains and Players at the Medici Court (Buffoni, Villani e Giocatori alla Corte dei Medici) Exhibit

The first temporary exhibition we encountered during our tour of the Palazzo Pitti was the barely two-week old Buffoni, Villani e Giocatori alla Corte dei Medici (Buffoons, Villains and Players at the Medici Court) Exhibit ongoing at the Andito degli Angioni from May 19 to September 11, 2016. The exhibition, curated by Anna Bisceglia, Matteo Ceriana and Simona Mammana, is promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism with the Uffizi Galleries and Florence Museums.

 

 The exhibition presented about 30 selected paintings, of some of the most bizarre and unexpected figurative subjects recurring in the Medici collections came, for the most part, mainly from the deposits of the Palatine Gallery and some from the Gallery of Statues and Paintings (both part of the Uffizi Galleries complex created by the recent reform).

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, these marginal and deviant characters (fools, ignorant or grotesque peasants, dwarves and practitioners of both licit and illicit games) found significant, and sometimes curious, artistic representations through artists such as Anton Domenico Gabbiani, Faustino Bocchi and Hieronymus Bosch.

 

Four Servants at the Court of the Medici (Anton Domenico Gabbiani, ca. 1684, oil on canvas)

This colorful and unexpected collection of often real-life characters, from the Medici court, illustrated the comical aspects of social life and life at the court and embodies the ambivalent world of buffoonery, rusticitas (holy rusticity) and play. These characters were entrusted with the entertainment and leisure of the gentlemen, an antidote to boredom always lurking in the mesh of the rigid Spanish ceremonial.

 

Portrait of a child of Odoardo Farnese with a dwarf and a dog (Domenico and Valori Casini)

“Genre” painting is a critical tool that allows you to draw, through art, from the most varied reality of the world and these so-called ‘genre’ scenes, in the clear hierarchy of Baroque painting, has made it possible to illustrate, often also with moral or didactic intent, various comic aspects of social and court life, those themes considered otherwise low and without decoration, unworthy of a high painting, with a sacred, mythological or historical subject.

 

Grotesque Banquet (Unknown Tuscan painter, ca. 1630 – 1640, oil on canvas)

From the archive documents with a defined identity, they are, in fact, remembered for exploits (and sometimes misdeeds) that insert them as real people in the life of the court, whose biography can be outlined in savory details, and the high human and cultural depth of many can be clarified.

 

Portrait of a dwarf with iron club and dog on a leash (ca. 1620 -30, oil on canvas)

These buffoons, dwarves and jugglers, considered as living toys, wonders of nature worthy of a Wunderkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities), were also shrewd advisers with special licenses with respect to court etiquette.

 

Portrait of Dwarf Morgante (Bronzino)

The position of the buffoons, halfway between the fun and the speaking conscience of the gentleman, elevates them to protagonists of a playful and bizarre art.

 

Marble statues of dwarves along the corridor

Aside from paintings, also on display are the marble sculptures of the Nano Musician (Agostino Ubaldini) and the Nano with Bells by Andrea (Michelangelo Ferrucci) as well as the bronze statue by Giambologna depicting the Birdman (from the National Museum of the Bargello). 

Check out “Bargello Museum”

 

Buffoons, Villains and Players at the Medici Court Exhibit: Andito degli Angioni, : Pitti Palace, Piazza de’ Pitti, 1, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy. Open 8:30AM. Tel: +39 055 294883.