Splendida Minima. Precious small sculptures in the Medici collections, from Francesco I de' Medici's Tribune to the Grand Ducal treasure

As you can gather from the title, this exhibition is devoted to a specific category of objets d'art which, regardless of their small size, are unquestionably of the highest artistic value and sophistication. These small sculptures carved in the round in semi-precious stone in the Hellenistic and Roman eras lay for centuries at the heart of the Medici family's collecting interests and a large part of that collection is now on display in the Gallerie degli Uffizi's Museo del Tesoro dei Granduchi.
 
The exhibition, "not unlike a lens, reveals a world of small but magnificent objects (...). Yet in leafing through the catalogue one's eye is frequently drawn to an image which appears at first sight to illustrate a sculpture of imposing proportions, not to say a colossus. The eye is being misled, however, and thus an imperial portrait which looks huge but which is in fact only a few centimetres tall shows us that grandiose does not necessarily mean large and that monumentality is not always a reflection of a work of art's size." ( Eike D. Schmidt, director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi)

The exhibition opens with a handful of examples illustrating the specific characteristics of these small-format sculptures of the Classical era carved in the round from precious stones, highlighting their astonishing affinity with the larger statuary of the period on both the iconographical and the formal levels. This is apparent, for instance, in the Portrait of Augustus from the Tesoro dei Granduchi which is displayed alongside a marble replica of the same portrait type.
The overall corpus of precious sculptures from the ancient world currently comprises some 400,000 known items, although that is clearly a conservative estimate so it is bound to rise as scholars probe deeper into the theme.
The first section also illustrates the function of these precious sculptures which, as we can see from the iconography exemplified in the exhibition by a precious 6^th century AD ivory diptych and an early 3^rd century AD marble relief, were used as complementary attributes associated with the portraits connected to the imperial cult.
 
A special passion for these small sculptures in semi-precious stone was displayed by Francesco I de' Medici, who owned a substantial collection of them and sought in every possible way to expand that collection, funding searches in Rome for marble and stones suitable for creating busts. Ancient heads in semi-precious stone were then mounted on oriental alabaster busts carved in the court workshops and embellished with silver gilt hair, headgear and drapery. Francesco I used this collection to decorate the Tribune (described in an inventory dated 1589), which he turned into a treasure-chest of marvels in the heart of the Uffizi. Some of the more outstanding pieces from his collection include an imperial era Bust of a Woman in rock crystal, an Egyptian Canopus in chalcedony and a Bust of a Black Woman in onyx and gilded silver carved by the Milanese sculptor Giorgio Gaffuri. Precious small sculptures were also used to adorn the brackets holding up the shelving in the Tribune, a decorative scheme of which the exhibition hosts two significant examples.
Other members of the Medici dynasty continued to collect and to cultivate a taste for these objets d'art in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, one of the most distinguished of them being Cardinal Leopoldo, a sophisticated and highly polished collector who certainly did not disdain this particular category of items, acquiring pieces of the highest quality such as the chalcedony hand that is the exhibition icon. But it was to fall to Cosimo III to add his late uncle Leopoldo's collection to the increasingly sumptuous decor of the Tribune, seen at the peak of its splendour in detailed drawings made for the Gallery atlas compiled under the supervision of Benedetto Vincenzo De Greyss. On the basis of this extremely valuable document, the final section of the exhibition hosts a tentative full-size reconstruction of the layout of one of the Uffizi Tribune's shelves as it would have looked in the 18^th century. The spectacular reproduction of the drawing of the wall with the statue of Apollo forms a backdrop for almost all of the pieces displayed on the shelf. If a few are missing, it is either because they have been lost or because it has proven impossible to obtain their loan for the exhibition. This, the first attempt ever to reconstruct this crucial aspect of the Tribune's decoration, highlights how the arrangement of the statues on the brackets continued to focus on the subtle rapport between the pieces' dimensions and colour schemes well into the 18^th century. The reconstruction conjures up the echoes and cross-references that came into being among the pieces carved in the round thanks to the carefully devised scheme in accordance with which they were displayed on the walls of this Wunderkammer, breathing new life into a substantial part of the "visual music" that transformed the Tribune and the pieces it held into the expression of a mental architecture and of a fabric – as sophisticated as it was complex – of iconographical and symbolic interaction on which scholarship is gradually beginning to shed new light.
 
The exhibition is curated, and the catalogue – published by Sillabe – is edited, by Valentina Conticelli, Riccardo Gennaioli and Fabrizio Paolucci; the exhibition is promoted by the Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo with the Gallerie degli Uffizi and Firenze Musei.

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