A Gallerist in Florence: The Open-Air Museum of Piazza della Signoria

There are galleries you pay to enter, and there are galleries you simply walk into. Piazza della Signoria is the second kind. No tickets, no opening hours, no glass. Just some of the greatest sculpture ever made, standing in the Tuscan sun as it has for centuries, with pigeons for company.

I spend my working life thinking about how art is seen: how it's lit, framed and hung. So there's something humbling about a square where Florence decided, five hundred years ago, that the best place for a masterpiece was out in the open, among the people at the Piazza della Signoria.

The Palace and the Tower - by the Piazza della Signoria

Palazzo Vecchio, Florence's town hall for over 700 years.

Palazzo Vecchio dominates everything. Begun in 1299, it's still Florence's town hall, a fortress with a bell tower. Look up beneath the battlements and you'll see a row of painted coats of arms, the emblems of the old Florentine Republic.

At the entrance stands a copy of Michelangelo's David, marking the spot where the original stood until it was moved indoors in 1873. Beside him is Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus, a statue Benvenuto Cellini famously mocked, comparing Hercules' muscles to a sack of melons. Artists' rivalries, it turns out, are nothing new. Remember that name, Cellini; we'll meet him again.

Neptune, or "The Big White One"

Bronze and marble, the supporting cast of the Neptune Fountain.

The Fountain of Neptune was completed in 1565 by Bartolomeo Ammannati for a Medici wedding. Neptune himself, carved in gleaming white marble and said to bear the face of Cosimo I de' Medici, was not universally loved. Florentines nicknamed him Il Biancone, "the big white one", and a popular rhyme scolded Ammannati for the fine marble he had wasted.

But walk around the basin and you'll see why the fountain wins people over. The bronze figures lounging on the rim, sea gods, nymphs and satyrs, were made by sculptors in Ammannati's circle, including a young Giambologna. Many visitors, me included, find them more alive than Neptune. The satyr gazing up at him, the bearded sea god twisting on his perch: there's personality in every one.

The contrast is the lesson: cool white marble against dark, glowing bronze. It's the same principle a good painter uses with light and shadow, and one I look for in the work we hang.

Neptune's view, 460 years of watching Florence go by.

The Loggia dei Lanzi

Beside the palace is the Loggia dei Lanzi, a vast open arcade built in the 1370s and named after the German guards of Cosimo I who were once stationed there. Today it's effectively a free sculpture hall.

One piece stopped me: Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus, a Roman copy of a lost Greek original. The Greek warrior hauls his dead friend from the battlefield while glancing over his shoulder for danger. Grief and alertness in one pose. A battered fragment of the same composition stands on a street corner in Rome, where it's known as "Pasquino" and has been covered in anonymous satire for centuries. The same sculpture is a tragedy in Florence and a gossip board in Rome.

Cellini's Perseus

Cellini's Perseus, cast in 1554, still one of the great bronzes of the Renaissance.

And then there's Perseus. Cellini, the man who mocked Bandinelli, spent nine years on this bronze of the hero holding up Medusa's severed head. According to his own autobiography, the casting nearly failed: the molten bronze began to set too early, and in desperation he threw his household pewter plates and bowls into the furnace to keep it flowing. It worked.

Look closely at the strap across Perseus's chest and you'll find Cellini's name. He signed it where every visitor would see it, if they only looked.

That's what moves me about this piece. It's the work of an artist who gambled everything on a single pour and wanted the world to know it was his. Every artist we represent knows some version of that feeling.

A Pause in the Piazza

No morning in Florence is complete without sitting down. We took a table outside Il Bargello, a restaurant here since 1948, and ordered a ham and cheese omelette, Eggs Benedict and a genuinely fantastic cappuccino, with Palazzo Vecchio in full view. The hams hanging behind the counter looked almost like a still life.

The best evidence it was good: no time to photograph it full.

Neptune After Dark

By night, Neptune finally looks like the god Ammannati intended.

We came back after dark, and the piazza was transformed. Floodlit against a deep blue sky, Neptune's marble glows and the water sparkles around the sea horses. The same statue Florentines once mocked looks, at night, every inch a god. Good lighting changes everything, which is something every gallery knows.

What the Piazza Teaches

Piazza della Signoria is a reminder that great art was never meant to be locked away. It was made to be lived with, argued over, mocked and loved. That's exactly how we think about the work in our gallery: pieces to live with every day, not admire from a distance.

Next from Florence: Santa Croce, where Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli rest.

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