Description
The Opificio delle Pietre Dure is in Florence, on Via degli Alfani, an institute that unites an ancient manufactory and a great restoration center. For visitors, the thing to see is the museum: works made of hard stones, cut and fitted together like a puzzle of colors.
Pictures that are not painted. Flowers, fruit, even a view of Piazza della Signoria, composed with pieces of stone cut and set side by side, chosen for color and veining. This is the Florentine commesso, and the Opificio has practiced it since 1588.
The museum shows cabinets, tabletops, plaques and inlaid nameplates, with a vast repertoire of decorations and pictorial scenes. The large Baroque fireplace faced in malachite, a dazzling green, is striking. The inlaid copies of paintings often shine brighter than the originals on canvas beside them.
One room is dedicated to pietra paesina, quarried near Florence: its layers of different colors, cut the right way, give the illusion of a painted rocky landscape. On the first floor are the tools of inlay and a sample collection of stones from the Medici era.
The last room has Art Nouveau vases and furnishings from the early 20th century, with the tabletops by Zocchi, with a harp and garlands, and by Niccolò Betti, with flowers and birds.
The manufactory was founded by Grand Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici, in the former monastery of San Niccolò di Cafaggio: he needed craftsmen to clad the Chapel of the Princes in San Lorenzo with inlaid marbles. Out of it came furniture and perfect copies of paintings.
When the grand dukes were gone, nobody ordered hard-stone furnishings any more, and the craftsmen set about restoring them. That is how the Opificio changed trade. The hardest test came in 1966.
After the flood, the restoration laboratory of the Soprintendenza, the first modern one in Italy, moved to the Fortezza da Basso to take in a crowd of wounded works, such as Cimabue's great painted Crucifix. Since 1975 it has been part of the Opificio.
Pictures that are not painted. Flowers, fruit, even a view of Piazza della Signoria, composed with pieces of stone cut and set side by side, chosen for color and veining. This is the Florentine commesso, and the Opificio has practiced it since 1588.
The museum shows cabinets, tabletops, plaques and inlaid nameplates, with a vast repertoire of decorations and pictorial scenes. The large Baroque fireplace faced in malachite, a dazzling green, is striking. The inlaid copies of paintings often shine brighter than the originals on canvas beside them.
One room is dedicated to pietra paesina, quarried near Florence: its layers of different colors, cut the right way, give the illusion of a painted rocky landscape. On the first floor are the tools of inlay and a sample collection of stones from the Medici era.
The last room has Art Nouveau vases and furnishings from the early 20th century, with the tabletops by Zocchi, with a harp and garlands, and by Niccolò Betti, with flowers and birds.
The manufactory was founded by Grand Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici, in the former monastery of San Niccolò di Cafaggio: he needed craftsmen to clad the Chapel of the Princes in San Lorenzo with inlaid marbles. Out of it came furniture and perfect copies of paintings.
When the grand dukes were gone, nobody ordered hard-stone furnishings any more, and the craftsmen set about restoring them. That is how the Opificio changed trade. The hardest test came in 1966.
After the flood, the restoration laboratory of the Soprintendenza, the first modern one in Italy, moved to the Fortezza da Basso to take in a crowd of wounded works, such as Cimabue's great painted Crucifix. Since 1975 it has been part of the Opificio.