The exhibition Da Allegretto Nuzi a Pietro Perugino, beginning on Thursday 29 September and open the whole month of October, will focus on a refined selection of about twenty paintings. Most of the works were dispersed throughout the international market and have now been brought together through the efforts of Fabrizio Moretti, who worked to bring together these great Italian masterpieces to be placed in the greatest museum and collections.
Within the rooms of the Florence gallery, one can admire the Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Pietro Vannucci, also known as Perugino, a painting that has come back to Italy after a hundreds of years abroad. It is a truly exquisite panel that was part of a much larger altarpiece that was never realized. Positioned in the centre of the Church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, it was originally formed of seven paintings, now divided between the Museo dell’Accademia in Florence, the Florentine Church and the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York. The recovery of this work will allow for the re-unification with the other panels and a reconstruction of the original altar in an upcoming exhibition on Perugino. The panel was purchased by Sir Joseph B. Robinson at the end of the nineteenth century, who then gave it to his daughter, Ida, Princess Labia.
Another important acquisition of a small but inspiring work by Tommaso di Cristofano called Masolino, depicting Saint John the Baptist, miraculously “re-appeared” on the American market about ten years. It was immediately recognized for the portrayal of humanity ascribed to one of the most significant Italian painters during the passage from Gothic to Renaissance: Masolino da Panicale.
The Nativity by the Master of the Spinola Annunciation, a Florentine painter and student of Giotto active during the second decade of the fourteenth century, comes from an important overseas collection. It is one of a small group of pictures put together by Roberto Longhi in his famous paper on Stefano Fiorentino.
Each exhibited work will be accompanied by an extensive study by some of the most accomplished specialists of the sector: Luciano Bellosi, Andrea de Marchi, J. K. Nelson, Nicoletta Pons, Angelo Tartuferi, and Cristina Guarnieri.