Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
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Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
The Galleria Palatina is a gallery of the masterpieces of the high
Renaissance, formed by the Grand Dukes, who brought here from their own
villas and from the Uffizi the greatest works in their possession. Like
other Italian galleries, it suffered from Napoleon's generals; but
though sixty or more pictures were taken to Paris, they all seem to have
been returned. Here the Grand Dukes gathered ten pictures by Titian
eight by Raphael, as well as two, the Madonna del Baldacchino and the
Vision of Ezekiel, which he designed, ten by Andrea del Sarto, six by
Fra Bartolommeo, two lovely Peruginos, two splendid portraits by Ridolfo
Ghirlandajo, four portraits by Tintoretto, several pictures by Rubens,
two portraits, one of himself, by Rembrandt, a magnificent Vandyck, and
many lesser pictures. In the royal apartments, among other interesting
or beautiful things, is Botticelli's Pallas and the Centaur, painted, as
some have thought, to celebrate Lorenzo's return from Naples in 1480. It
is, then, rather as a royal gallery than as a museum that we must
consider the Galleria Palatina, a more splendid if less catholic Salon
Carre, the Tribuna of Italian painting. It is strange that, among all
the beautiful and splendid pictures with which the Grand Dukes
surrounded themselves, there is not one from the hand of Leonardo, nor
one that Michelangelo has painted. And then, of the many here that pass
under the name of Botticelli, only the Pallas and the Centaur in the
royal apartments seems to be really his; so that when we look for the
greatest pictures of the Florentine school, we must be content with the
strangely unsatisfactory work of Andrea del Sarto, often lovely enough
it is true, but as often insincere, shallow, not at one with itself, and
certainly a stranger here in Florence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition — John Shaqi
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