Your Way to Florence. Portrait of a Renaissance Banker Bindo Altoviti between Raphael and Cellini
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  PORTRAIT OF A RENAISSANCE BANKER BINDO ALTOVITI BETWEEN RAPHAEL AND CELLINI 


Exhibitions Services
 
Exhibition Venue: Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence Via del Proconsolo, 4
 
Exhibition runs: March 2, 2004 till June 15, 2004
 
Opening hours: Open from Tuesday until Sunday and every 1 st and 3 rd Monday of the month, 8:15 am - 6 pm. Closed the 2 nd and 4 th Monday of the month and May 1 st.
At 3, 4 and 5 pm every opening day, guided tours of the Museum are offered free of charge in Italian and English.
 
Ticket prices: Full rate: € 7.00 (includes Museum admission) Concession: € 3.50 for European Community citizens, 18-25 years of age. Free admission for European Community citizens under 18 and over 65 years of age.
 
 
This exhibition is dedicated to Bindo Altoviti (1491-1556), powerful banker to the papacy, patron and collector of works of art and, at the end of his life, proud opponent to the principality of Cosimo I de' Medici, in the name of his republican ideas.
 
Bindo divided his time between Florence - where his family was from and where his wife and children lived - and Rome, where his business was based. At the age of sixteen he inherited his father's Roman bank through which he amassed one of the largest fortunes in Italy.
 
Bindo was a friend of many important artists of his time, including Raphael, Michelangelo, Cellini and Vasari. When he was twenty, Raphael painted his portrait and also painted the Madonna dell'Impannata for him; Cellini did the bronze bust of him in his later years; Michelangelo gave him one of the preparatory cartoons for the Sistine Chapel; Giorgio Vasari painted frescoes in his palazzo and villa in Rome, as well as sacred paintings and the altarpiece for the family chapel in the Church of the Santi Apostoli in Florence.
 
Most of the surviving works of his collection are on show here today.
 
 
  

 

Raphael (1483-1520) Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, (ca. 1512), oil on wood, Washington, National Gallery of Art.

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, 1549, bronze, Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Giorgio Vasari (1511-1573), Allegory of the Immaculate Conception, 1541, oil on wood, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

 
Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Fiorentino. made by Parallelo