Important seventeenth-century Florentine painting donated to the Uffizi

The Uffizi Galleries are enriched with a new work, an important seventeenth-century Florentine painting, thanks to a donation from Fabrizio and Francesco Guidi Bruscoli. The painting is dedicated to the memory of his wife and mother Daniela Salvadori Guidi Bruscoli, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of her birth. Made by the painter Bartolomeo Salvestrini (Castello Florence, 1599 - 1633), it depicts the biblical episode of Solomon incensing idols: in old age Solomon surrounded himself with many foreign wives, as many as seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines, who induced him to worship the different deities of each, for whom he built temples and offered sacrifices. This fact and his subsequent estrangement from the Lord caused him severe divine punishment, namely, the dismemberment of his kingdom into two parts. On the canvas an inscription initialed and dated by the same painter in 1626 reads “Mulieres apostatare faciunt sapientes” (Women cause even the wise to stray from the right path).

Bartolomeo Salvestrini trained as an artist at the workshop of Passignano and Matteo Rosselli and then from 1621 became a collaborator of Giovanni Bilivert, who considered him “the best of all his pupils,” according to the testimony of biographer Filippo Baldinucci. The work presents a theatrical setting and compositional richness reminiscent of his masters, Francesco Rosselli and especially Giovanni Bilivert. The latter’s imprint is especially noticeable in the softness of his painterly touch and in his taste for the description of sumptuous costumes and precious objects and textiles, such as the ermine cape of Solomon, who kneels and incenses the idols with a thurible, placed to the right before a purple curtain. The influence of Bilivert, a goldsmith’s son, can be seen instead in the careful rendering of the finely wrought thurible, the wives’ jewelry, and the still life in the foreground, in which symbols of royalty, such as the crowned turban on which the scepter rests, are abandoned on the ground, next to the aspergillum fashioned from a shell: an object worthy of Grand Ducal manufactures. The sensual figure of the young wife lifting Solomon’s mantle seems to derive from statuary models, which perhaps Bartolomeo had seen and studied thanks to his brother Cosimo Salvestrini, an accomplished sculptor of the Medici court, who made statues for the Boboli Gardens and stuccoes for the apartments of the Pitti Palace.

Considering the short life of Bartolomeo Salvestrini, who died of the plague in 1633 at the age of just thirty-four, and the rarity of his paintings in public collections, this “room painting” represents animportant acquisition for the Uffizi Galleries, adding to some of Salvestrini’s drawings in the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints and two of his paintings, theAllegory of Painting Intent on Painting a Landscape (1624) and the copper with David with the Head of Goliath in the Palatine Gallery.

The Solomon Incensing the Idols was probably commissioned by the Pucci family: a canvas with “a story of Solomon” is in fact mentioned in a document now in the State Archives (Carte Dei, Pucci Family, XXXVIII, c. 28r.) in which the artist appears to have been paid by Bailiff Giulio Pucci, patrons of the arts along with his younger brother Alessandro and commissioners of the painters Francesco Curradi, Matteo Rosselli, Orazio Fidani and the Giovanni Bilivert. Also for the Puccis, Bartolomeo had also executed a Pietà, which has not been traced.

Salvestrini’s pictorial production was brief but intense: with Matteo Rosselli he collaborated on frescoes in the Medici residences of the Casino di San Marco and the villa at Poggio Imperiale, where he painted the lunettes of Deborah and Esther in the Sala dell’Udienza; for Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici he produced room paintings depicting Salmace and Hermaphroditus, and Rebecca dressing Jacob. Between 1625 and 1630 he painted several altarpieces for churches in the Florentine territory, including theAnnunciation for the church of Colonnata in Sesto Fiorentino, the Flagellation for the church of Santa Lucia alla Castellina in Sesto (commissioned in 1626), and Santa Verdiana meditating on the Crucifix (1629) now at Santa Verdiana in Castelfiorentino.

“Fabrizio Guidi Bruscoli together with his son Francesco have added a sublime painting to the Uffizi collections in memory of Daniela Guidi Bruscoli,” said Uffizi Galleries Director Eike Schmidt. “An act of generosity that combines love for his wife and mother with love for Florence and for the museum where the Medici treasures are collected. The most seductive contents of the splendid season of seventeenth-century Florence are condensed in the work: sensuality, the opulence of materials, the elegance of details mindful of Mannerist refinements, references to sculpture and goldsmithing, and an extraordinary wealth of cues that becomes a hymn to the unity of the arts.”

Image: Bartolomeo Salvestrini, Solomon Incenses the Idols (1626; oil on canvas, 188.5 x 211.5 cm)

Important seventeenth-century Florentine painting donated to the Uffizi

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