Luzzetti Museum

Welcome to the "Gianfranco Luzzetti Collection" Museum.

The museum was established in 2019 following the bequest to the municipality of Grosseto of a significant body of works collected throughout his lifetime by the Florentine antiquarian - but of Grosseto origin - Gianfranco Luzzetti.

The 64 works donated to the city represent the culmination of an ambitious project matured by the collector over a twenty-year period with the aim of creating a museum capable of attracting tourists, stimulating the sense of belonging of the community, and educating the new generations in the culture of beauty.

The main body of the collection concerns Florentine art of the seventeenth century. Its location within a seventeenth-century monastery, built during the Florentine domination of Grosseto, enhances the identity of the collection, which is based on the Baroque art of the Tuscan capital, rediscovered and valorized only from the 1960s onwards thanks to the work of important art historians such as Mina Gregori and antiquarians such as Gianfranco Luzzetti.

Among the seventeenth-century works, four paintings by Pier Dandini are worth mentioning, to which a room is dedicated, as well as works by Santi di Tito, Cigoli, Passignano, Giovanni Martinelli, Jacopo Vignali, Francesco Curradi, Giovambattista Vanni, and Pietro Tacca.

The museum collection also includes works pertaining to the Roman school, including works by Spadarino, Passeri, and Rusconi, as well as paintings from Northern Italy such as a large canvas by Montalto and a small still life by Panfilo Nuvolone. There are also eighteenth-century masterpieces by Corrado Giaquinto and Giovanni Domenico Lombardi, known as l'Omino.

The collection is completed by two nineteenth-century landscape paintings by Maffei and Markò. The exhibition path winds through the spaces of the ancient seventeenth-century convent of Santa Chiara, known as the former convent of the Clarisses, and the Church of the Bigi.

The birth of the museum has also allowed the recovery through a restoration intervention of the original and lost connection between the convent building and the historic pertinence of the Church, the only testimony of Baroque art in the city.

Pietro Dandini was one of the most important late Baroque Florentine artists. Born

in Florence in 1646, he first trained with his uncle Vincenzo, showing precocious painterly skills. His youthful style was enriched by new influences, following his visits to Venice, where he studied the paintings of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and to the Emilia region, where he encountered, and learned from works by Correggio and by the Carracci brothers.

After his return to Florence, Dandini worked intensively for illustrous families, and for the religious orders of the city, accomplishing numerous paintings with both sacred and profane subjects for private use, and various fresco cycles. His final years of activity were marked by stylistic repetition, which has diminished his critical reputation, unjustly relegating him among formulaic, second-ranking painters. He died in Florence in 1712.

In this room, four of Dandini’s works are displayed. Excecuted with oil on canvas, they date from the end of the seventeenth century.

Solomon and His Court Worshipping the Idols

This painting depicts an Old Testament episode, involving the idolatry of Solomon. During his old age, the king was pressured by his innumerable wives to engage in pagan cult practices, and for this reason he was punished by the Lord.

The painting features rapid brushwork, an intense and luminous range of colours, and evident Rubensesque characteristics. A curious fact: the numerous female figures share the same sharp and dimunitive profiles, a stylistic idiosyncrasy of the artist.

The Crucifixion of Christ

In 1965, the work appeared in the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, entitled “70 Paintings and Sculptures of Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Florence”. It then spent several decades on the antiquarian market before arriving in 2004 in the Luzzetti collection. The subject is depicted through a complex and deftly articulated composition, with a perfectly balanced layout of the figures on counterposed diagonal lines. The muscular bodies are delineated by strong chiaroscuro contrasts, and by warm, dense colours; the cloth drapery, however, stands out for its bright, saturated tones.

Christ Praying in the Garden

The work portrays one of the most appreciated episodes, in the repertory of devotional images: Christ praying amidst the olive trees. Jesus is depicted in the last moments of his final prayer to the Father, immediately before his capture; isolated, away from his sleeping disciples, he is shown in the act of receiving the chalice of the Passion from an angel.

The Sorceress of Endor Conjures the Spirit of Samuel in the Presence of King Saul

The painting depicts an Old Testament episode from the life of King Saul. After having banned necromancy from his kingdom, imposing the death sentence on witches and soothsayers, the King fears the advance of the Philistines, and as a result he seeks the counsel of the Lord, without, however, obtaining any response. During the night he pays a visit to the witch of Endor, to conjure up the spirit of Samuel. Blinded by the light of the torch, the ghost appears, wrapped in a large, billowing white mantle, predicting the tragic fate of the people of Israel after the death of their King.

The nocturnal setting, with its magical and lyrical flavour, can be readily linked with the themes of the occult and of witchcraft very much en vogue in mid-seventeenth century Florence.