Unpublished, this true treasure retracing the history of the Medici and eight centuries of painting in Italy under the pen of Dumas appears in seven volumes collected in a box set published by Editions du Chêne. The Gallery of Florence told by Alexandre Dumas releases in bookstores on November 13, 2024.
During a trip to Florence with his wife in 1840, Alexandre Dumas began writing a text devoted to the Medici collections. For the novelist, it is a question of retracing “the history of the creators of the Gallery, the Medici, and that of eight centuries of painting in Italy”. A vast program which will occupy the writer for several years.
However, this work has become a rarity. In his bibliography of Dumas’s works, Douglas Munro writes that there are only two known copies: his and that of the Royal Library in The Hague. After investigation, Jocelyn Fiorina, president of the Society of Friends of Alexandre Dumas and initiator of the project, counted “around ten almost complete copies of this extraordinary work, spread across the four corners of the globe”.
This rarity could be explained by the subscription, its method of publication. Subscribers received around ten pages written by Dumas each month, accompanied by engravings, and they therefore had to wait to be able to collect and bind all the pages of the work.
By retracing the journey of Alexandre Dumas in Italy, Jocelyn Fiorina discovered the existence of this rare text and set out to bring it back to life. The project took shape when he spoke about it to Cristina Farnetti, who works at the Italian Ministry of Culture.
When the latter informed the director of the Uffizi Museum of this project for a new publication of this work, he agreed that the work would be enriched with new color photographs of certain paintings in the collections. The publication also benefited from the support of the Institut de France, which made available one of the last original copies, kept in the library of the Académie française, allowing the reproduction of the engravings in the best conditions.
In this box set, we find the seven volumes that make up the work. History of the Mediciwhich originally constituted the preface, traces the history of the inventors of the Uffizi Gallery. In a second volume, Dumas traces the entire history of painting, from its beginnings in Egypt via Greece, its return to Alexandria, its decadence in Rome and up to the Renaissance in Italy. This history of painting is also an opportunity for Dumas to describe the different civilizations which saw the art of painting develop. A third volume is devoted to the history of painters, with the first artists of the Renaissance.
“Under the pen of Alexandre Dumas, biographies become stories of love and friendship, rivalry and passion, fleshed out by historical and political context.”
Jocelyn Fiorinapresident of the Society of Friends of Alexandre Dumas
The fourth volume is devoted to the gallery of portraits, a collection of 101 portraits of artists, in engraving and painting. And finally the last three in the gallery of paintings, more than 200 paintings from the Galerie des offices exhibited at the time of Dumas, commented on by the writer through the “engravings after”, created by around fifty designers and engravers based on the original paintings.
This new edition includes the original works in color. “In addition to the richness of the image, the comparison of the two modes of representation is rich in lessons on the changes brought about by successive restorations, or on details that have become imperceptible due to the natural degradation of colors”specifies Jocelyn Fiorina in the introduction.
In addition to its richness, the publication of this unpublished text is also an event in the light it sheds on Dumas’s fictional work. This work that the novelist carried out in Florence has in fact nourished his work. “The Florence Gallery occupies a special place in the work and life of Dumas, and it is no coincidence that it was on his return from Florence that he published two of his titles in quick succession. most famous, The Three Musketeers, and The Count of Monte Cristo”, stressed Jocelyn Fiorina.
We can therefore have fun reading this volume by unearthing the characters who inspired Dumas’s romantic work, such as “a certain Ladi Clareck” crossed in the biography of Rubens“who would become the famous Milady”.
While the project of making it a popular work, distributed in serial form in the form of booklets and in several languages, the work ultimately fell into oblivion. Its reissue, introduced and commented on by the very fluid texts of Jocelyn Fiorina and Cristina Farnetti, revives this spirit. “This composite work follows at the same time an implacable logic, propagandistic on the one hand, hagiographic on the other, where Florentine society becomes an iconic example in matters of culture and politics”analyzes Simone Verde, director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in the preface.
For all these reasons, the reissue of this work constitutes an event. “Thanks to his striking prose, the fundamental role given to the human life of the artists and their own sensitivity, Dumas succeeded in a grandiose undertaking: regenerating the artistic heritage of Florence and its galleries so that it continues to be a cultural reference indisputable, in accordance with the brand new sensibility of capitalist and bourgeois Europe”comments Simone Verde. This precious box set will not fail to delight lovers of art, history and literature.
“The Gallery of Florence told by Alexandre Dumas” (Éditions du Chêne in collaboration with the Museum of the Uffizi Gallery of Florence, box set in 7 volumes, 1,700 color pages, 149 euros).
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