Museo Bardini: The Palace of the Prince of Antique Dealers
Why is it significant?
Face the large palace on the side of Piazza de' Mozzi and study its windows: they do not match. Some are framed in Renaissance stone, some look borrowed from somewhere else entirely... and they are, because this whole building is a kind of collage.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Bardini: The Palace of the Prince of Antique Dealers |
|---|---|
| Address | Via dei Renai 37, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76500, 11.25840 |
| Part of Walk | Florence's Green Hill: Bardini Garden, San Miniato & Piazzale Michelangelo |
| Generated | Generated |
Face the large palace on the side of Piazza de' Mozzi and study its windows: they do not match. Some are framed in Renaissance stone, some look borrowed from somewhere else entirely... and they are, because this whole building is a kind of collage.
It belonged to Stefano Bardini, a painter who became the most powerful antique dealer in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Museums in Berlin, London and Paris bought from him, and so did the American millionaires who wanted a little piece of the Renaissance in their mansions. In 1881 he bought a former church and convent on this square and rebuilt it as his showroom.
And what a showroom. Bardini set real Renaissance doorways, coffered ceilings, stone fireplaces and staircases from dismantled buildings into his own walls, so that clients could see a sculpture or a painting as it might look in a palace. Then he painted the rooms a deep, intense blue, so that marble, bronze and gold leaf would glow against it. Restorers still call that colour Bardini blue.
There is an uncomfortable side to the story. This was the time when Florence demolished its medieval market quarter to build Piazza della Repubblica, and dealers like Bardini bought the fragments. Without him much would have been lost; because of him, much left Italy. When he died in 1922, he left the building and its collection to the city of Florence, perhaps as a way of balancing the books.
Inside, among the Madonnas and the armour, waits a familiar animal. The bronze wild boar you may have seen rubbed for luck at the Mercato Nuovo is a copy; the original, cast by Pietro Tacca in the seventeenth century, now rests here, out of reach of a million hopeful hands. Now cross the little square to the garden gate on Via de' Bardi, and start to climb.