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Itineraries discovering Art in Florence, Siena and Veneto

Tour guidati alla scoperta dell'arte di Siena, Firenze e il Veneto

18/08/2026

Nicchio won the Assunta Palio race, after 28 years!

15/08/2026

Have you ever seen a Madonna this tender, resting her head on her son's shoulder?

It is rare to find a Virgin so human in this gesture of total surrender to Christ, reunited with him after the Assumption. I looked for it for a long time, ever since I spotted a panel in Montefalco announcing it, only to find it is no longer in Italy: it left the country after 1863, when the Monastero della Stella in Spoleto was expropriated, the Augustinian convent for which the Master of Cesi painted it in the late thirteenth century. This year I finally saw it again in Umbria, at the Giotto and the Trecento show at the Galleria Nazionale in Perugia: finding it in the first room, next to Giotto, made me forget for a moment the Florentine loans.

My clients - I who talk so much about art with them and so little about food and wine - often ask which work is my favourite. How do you explain to someone from the other side of the world an anonymous painter, Roman by birth, swept up in the building site of Assisi, the first "school of the world", where he looks at Cimabue but draws his strength from the humanity of Giotto?

That reclining head is not just an intimate pause: it hides a fascinating theological and literary meaning. The embrace runs from the shoulders down to the feet, turning the Assumption into a royal wedding. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has even read sexual overtones in it, such as Mary's leg crossed over Christ's left thigh, a gesture that in an Austrian model book of 1213-1218 already stands for fruitful union in Christian marriage. A mystical and spousal union too, whose archetype Millard Meiss traces to the mosaic of Santa Maria in Trastevere (1240-43). And Mary's forehead against Christ's cheek echoes the Song of Songs: "Who is this coming up from the desert, leaning on her beloved?"

An archaic language opening up to the new, in that intensity of the faces Longhi called the "Passion of the Umbrians". The same gesture can still be glimpsed, badly damaged, in Cimabue's apse at Assisi, its illustrious precedent.

Today the work is at the Villa Île-de-France, once Villa Ephrussi, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where it was known as the "Door of Siena". Do you know why?

05/04/2026

Inside the church of Santi Apostoli in Florence, behind a grate, there are three flint stones.
Every year, at Easter, those stones light the fire that sets off the Scoppio del Carro.
Tradition links them to the First Crusade and a Florentine knight. But when a historian went to check, the story turned out to be more complicated — and more interesting — than anyone expected.
In the video, I'll tell you what he found. And I'll leave you with a question: what does Pazzino de' Pazzi have to do with the Battle of Montaperti?

I went to Santi Apostoli to see them. The church is a stone's throw from Ponte Vecchio and almost no one walks in. The stones sit there, in a case, with barely any explanation. Three pieces of flint holding up a thousand-year-old ritual.
If you want to know what Montaperti has to do with it, drop it in the comments.
Save this for your next walk through Florence — and go see them.

Bibliography: S. Raveggi, Storia di una leggenda: Pazzo dei Pazzi e le pietre del Santo Sepolcro, in F. Cardini (ed.), Toscana e Terrasanta nel Medioevo, Alinea, 1982.

03/04/2026

The first time you see Mantegna's Dead Christ in person, it's not the perspective that strikes you. It's that you're too close.
You're at the foot of the bed. You're in the room. Mantegna put you there on purpose, you're not a viewer, you're someone who just walked in and found this body.

I took this photo on a quiet morning at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. I noticed something that reproductions always lose: the feet. They're in the foreground, taking up a quarter of the painting, bearing the marks of the nails. Mantegna forces you to see them before anything else. You can't look away.

Then there's the shroud. Look closely: the folds aren't idealised — they're real folds of real fabric laid over a real body. A deliberate choice. Mantegna painted death without filters, without rhetoric — in 1480, when every other painter dressed it in gold and glory.
Today is Good Friday. This man is the atrocity we see every day more.

📌 Save this for your next visit to Brera.

01/04/2026

In Asciano, amidst the Crete Senesi, the Museum of Palazzo Corboli houses a small collection of works that would alone justify a detour from the Via Cassia. Among these are several panels attributed to the Master of the Osservanza, one of the most debated figures in Sienese painting of the early Quattrocento.

The conventional name derives from the altarpiece in the Basilica dell'Osservanza, on the outskirts of Siena. For decades, scholars have debated whether this name conceals Sano di Pietro, a documented and prolific Sienese painter, or an autonomous artist. Roberto Longhi, in 1940, was the first to isolate the Master's personality, distinguishing it from Sano di Pietro through its greater chromatic refinement and more modern sense of space.

The Asciano panels demonstrate this quality: slender figures, clear and luminous colours, and the bare landscapes of the Crete that seem to enter the painting as authentic backdrops. This is painting that acknowledges Florentine achievements—perspective, light—but filters them through the Sienese tradition of colour and line.

Palazzo Corboli also merits attention for the frescoes in its interior halls, featuring a cycle on Aristotle and the "Rota di Barlaam" that documents the secular culture of Sienese élites in the Trecento.

Sources:
K. Christiansen, Painting in Renaissance Siena, Met Museum, 1988

painting

26/03/2026

On the external façade of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo hang dozens of wrought-iron chains. These are the chains of Christian prisoners freed during the Reconquista. This is not a decorative detail: it is propaganda hanging from the wall.

The church was commissioned in 1476 by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, to celebrate their victory in the Battle of Toro against Portugal, which consolidated their power over Castile. The project was entrusted to Juan Guas, an architect of Breton origin working in Spain, who created one of the most representative buildings of Isabelline Gothic.

The interior features a single nave with an extremely complex stellar ribbed vault. But the most fascinating element is the upper cloister, where Gothic decoration coexists with Mudéjar elements (interlaced arches, geometric motifs of Islamic derivation) in a synthesis found only on the Iberian Peninsula.

San Juan de los Reyes was intended to be the mausoleum of the Catholic Monarchs. Isabella and Ferdinand had planned to be buried here, in the heart of reconquered Toledo. Then came the capture of Granada in 1492, and they changed their minds: they chose the Royal Chapel of Granada Cathedral, closer to their final triumph. Toledo lost the royal sepulchre, but preserved the memory of liberation, with the chains still hanging from the wall.

Sources:
J. Yarza Luaces, Los Reyes Católicos. Paisaje artístico de una monarquía, Nerea, 1993

25/03/2026

On 25th March 1470, Francesco del Cossa wrote a letter to Borso d'Este, lord of Ferrara. Its contents were a formal protest: Cossa demanded to be paid differently from the other painters who had worked on the frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia.

The Salone dei Mesi, decorated between 1468 and 1470, was an ambitious cosmological programme: twelve months of the year distributed across the walls, each articulated in three bands — the triumph of a pagan divinity above, the astrological decans of Arabic derivation in the centre, Borso's court scenes below. Cossa had painted the months of March, April and May. The payment, however, was calculated 'per foot', by surface area, as for anonymous team work.

In his letter, Cossa wrote: 'I who have always sought to bring honour and especially in said work not to be treated and judged and ranked equal to those who are not my peers.' He requested ten denari per foot, against the current seven. Borso did not reply.

Cossa left Ferrara for Bologna, where he obtained the commission for the Pala dei Mercanti for the church of Santa Maria del Baraccano. He died of plague in 1478, aged less than forty.

The letter, preserved in the State Archives of Modena, is the first known document in which a painter claims in writing the difference between ex*****on and invention.

Sources: State Archives of Modena; R. Varese, Atlante di Schifanoia, Panini, 2007

24/03/2026

At the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna hangs a painting that has resisted every attempt at definitive interpretation for five centuries. Giorgione's I tre filosofi, dated around 1508-1509, depicts three male figures of different ages before a dark cave, set within a twilight landscape.

The first known mention dates to 1525: the Venetian collector Marcantonio Michiel saw it in Taddeo Contarini's collection and noted that it had been "completed" by Sebastiano del Piombo. From Contarini the painting passed to the Gonzaga, then to the Habsburgs, and finally to Vienna.

Who are these three men? Hypotheses accumulate without converging: the Magi, the three ages of man, three philosophers representing ancient, medieval and Renaissance wisdom, or perhaps an astrological programme connected to the cave. No reading is universally accepted.

What can be observed is the technique: Giorgione constructs forms with colour, not with preparatory drawing. Radiography reveals that he changed the position and attributes of the figures during the work's ex*****on. He did not begin with a fixed iconographic programme, but sought his subject through the very act of painting—a method that would define Venetian painting for the following two centuries.

Sources: J. Anderson, Giorgione, Flammarion, 1997

23/03/2026

May a new Spring return soon

20/03/2026

In the church of San Zaccaria in Venice, in the first chapel on the left, there stands an altarpiece signed and dated 1505 by Giovanni Bellini. The painter was around seventy-five years old.

The scene is a sacra conversazione: the Virgin and Child at the centre, flanked by Saints Peter, Catherine, Lucy and Jerome, set within a painted apse that replicates the church's own architecture. Light enters from the left, warm and natural, enveloping the figures in a golden penumbra that softens contours and merges bodies into space.

This is what the Venetians called tonal painting: not drawing that defines form, but colour and light that construct it. Bellini arrived at this late, after an extraordinarily long career that began with the Paduan linearity of his father-in-law Jacopo and brother-in-law Mantegna. At seventy-five, he painted as no one had before him, whilst the young Giorgione was only just beginning to understand where to go.

This altarpiece attracts fewer tourists than the Frari or the Accademia. One can look at it calmly, and should: the illusionistic cartellino below, with the signature hanging from a painted nail, is the discreet farewell of a painter who knew he had achieved something definitive.

Sources: R. Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, Yale UP, 1989

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