Buffoons, villains and players at Palazzo Pitti

From 19 May to 11 September in Florence, an overview of the most bizarre paintings of the Medici collections

From 19 May to 11 September 2016, at the Palazzo Pitti, an overview of some of the most unexpected recurring figurative subjects in the Medici collections.

About thirty works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mainly from the deposits of the Palatine Gallery, illustrate recurring bizarre figurative.

It is so-called 'gender' scenes, that by the strict hierarchy of Baroque painting, allow to illustrate, often with moral intent or didactic, comic aspects of social life and of the court, that is, those issues deemed otherwise low and devoid of decorum .

Within this framework it is to the fore marginal and deviant characters like clowns, ignorant peasants or grotesque dwarf and players from both licit or illicit games. The 'genre' painting becomes short, the tool that allows art to draw from the reality of the world.

Among the works, the Dwarf Morgante by Bronzino, the Servants of the Medici court by Anton Domenico Gabbiani and Meo Matto by Giusto Suttermans, but also sculptures in marble and bronze by Giambologna depicting the Fowler

To accompany the exhibition has been prepared an itinerary in the Boboli Gardens, where all these characters, peasants, farmers, and dwarves and players come to life, even petrified, and hide in the woods and in the clearings as escaped pictorial universe that created them.