Enfilade

From the Uffizi:

Rooms of the Muses: Baroque Paintings from the Francesco Molinari Collection
Uffizi, Florence, 11 February — 11 May 2014

Carlo Magini, Still-life with Vegetables, Bread, Calf’s Head, and Kitchen Utensils, ca. 1760–1800

The Molinari Pradelli private collection is internationally renown and the most important formed in Bologna in the twentieth century. The famed orchestra conductor Francesco Molinari Pradelli (1911–1996) traveled all over the world during his professional career and loved collecting high quality works of art.

With over 100 paintings from the collection, the Uffizi Gallery pays homage to a prestigious conductor who worked in Florence at the helm of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and at the Teatro Comunale. The conductor had success all over the world, in Europe and America, from Vienna to San Francisco to New York’s Metropolitan Opera. His growing passion for collecting paintings started in the 1950s, first with nineteenth-century works and then discovering Baroque painting. He developed an attraction for still-lifes, a genre just beginning to garner interested from scholars. Great art historians from Europe and America came to admire the maestro’s large private collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting from various Italian schools and the particular attention for models.