Description
The Museo Horne is the home of an Englishman who fell in love with Florence: a Renaissance palace on Via de' Benci, a short walk from Santa Croce, brought back to how it looked in the late 1400s and furnished with the paintings, furniture and objects of that time.
It is a small, quiet museum, far from the queues. If you love Trecento and Quattrocento painting, you will find real masterpieces; if you are curious about how people lived in a Florentine palace, you will find rooms, chests and even cooking pots.
The most important piece is the Saint Stephen by Giotto, a panel from the last years of the master's life. Next to it hangs a small panel, damaged but precious: a fragment of a predella with the stories of Saint Julian, one of the very rare works by Masaccio.
The rooms also hold a Pietà by Filippo Lippi, a Madonna attributed to Simone Martini, a Holy Family by Beccafumi and Dosso Dossi's Allegory of Music, plus a colored stucco relief by Antonio Rossellino.
Then there are the furniture and household objects: Renaissance tables, chairs, chests and benches, painted ceramics, original cauldrons and kitchen utensils, and curious collections of old playing cards, coins and seals.
Take a look at the courtyard too: small, with a portico on one side, pietra serena columns and capitals attributed to the workshop of Benedetto da Rovezzano, and bands painted to look like sgraffito.
Herbert Percy Horne was a Londoner of a thousand interests: music, literature, architecture, antiques. In Florence he studied Botticelli and collected everything, in the years when real masterpieces were still on the market. In 1912, after viewing other palaces, he bought this one, which had belonged to the Corsi family.
He restored it to its early Renaissance look, removing partitions and centuries of additions, and gave each floor back its role: work on the ground floor, the owners on the piano nobile, the kitchens at the top so the smoke would not drift through the house. You still go down to the cellar by a stair built for horses and pack animals.
Horne died in 1916 and left everything so that it would become a museum, which opened in 1921. In 1966 the flood hit the palace hard, in one of the lowest parts of the city: it reopened ten years later, and the restoration of the works was only finished in 1989.
It is a small, quiet museum, far from the queues. If you love Trecento and Quattrocento painting, you will find real masterpieces; if you are curious about how people lived in a Florentine palace, you will find rooms, chests and even cooking pots.
The most important piece is the Saint Stephen by Giotto, a panel from the last years of the master's life. Next to it hangs a small panel, damaged but precious: a fragment of a predella with the stories of Saint Julian, one of the very rare works by Masaccio.
The rooms also hold a Pietà by Filippo Lippi, a Madonna attributed to Simone Martini, a Holy Family by Beccafumi and Dosso Dossi's Allegory of Music, plus a colored stucco relief by Antonio Rossellino.
Then there are the furniture and household objects: Renaissance tables, chairs, chests and benches, painted ceramics, original cauldrons and kitchen utensils, and curious collections of old playing cards, coins and seals.
Take a look at the courtyard too: small, with a portico on one side, pietra serena columns and capitals attributed to the workshop of Benedetto da Rovezzano, and bands painted to look like sgraffito.
Herbert Percy Horne was a Londoner of a thousand interests: music, literature, architecture, antiques. In Florence he studied Botticelli and collected everything, in the years when real masterpieces were still on the market. In 1912, after viewing other palaces, he bought this one, which had belonged to the Corsi family.
He restored it to its early Renaissance look, removing partitions and centuries of additions, and gave each floor back its role: work on the ground floor, the owners on the piano nobile, the kitchens at the top so the smoke would not drift through the house. You still go down to the cellar by a stair built for horses and pack animals.
Horne died in 1916 and left everything so that it would become a museum, which opened in 1921. In 1966 the flood hit the palace hard, in one of the lowest parts of the city: it reopened ten years later, and the restoration of the works was only finished in 1989.