A Gallerist in Florence: Painting the City, from Street Easel to Gallery Wall
Updated: 7 days ago
In the colonnade outside the Uffizi, Florence's past and present stand side by side. Above, in stone niches, are the city's great names: Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo. Below, on the paving, are today's painters, easels up, selling watercolours to passers-by. After five centuries, Florence is still a city of working artists.
The Masters in the Niches
The statues lining the Uffizi's courtyard were added in the mid-1800s to honour Tuscany's greatest figures. Donatello, the sculptor who helped launch the Renaissance, is shown with a chisel and mallet in his hands, not the robes of a nobleman. It's a portrait of an artist as a craftsman, and I like that.
The Painters Below - Florence Paintings
Beneath the statue of the anatomist Paolo Mascagni, one painter had set out delicate watercolours of the Ponte Vecchio, all glowing reflections and warm stone. A little further along, the artist Hiko Nagahama had a stall of golden, sketch-like views of the Duomo alongside panoramic strips of the Tuscan countryside, cypresses marching across green hills.
Watching people stop, look and buy, I was reminded that this is how art has always found its audience: an artist, a picture and someone who falls for it.
From Sketch to Palette Knife
In the Piazza del Duomo, one artist had set up with a view straight to Brunelleschi's dome. On one canvas, the dome was just a faint red chalk outline: the architecture mapped out in a few confident lines.
Beside it stood the finished version of the same view, built up in thick ridges of paint with a palette knife, the white marble and terracotta almost sculpted onto the canvas. Seeing both side by side was like watching a painting being made, from first line to final stroke. It's a process every artist we represent goes through, and one visitors rarely get to see.
Lisa Comes Home, in Chalk
Near the Uffizi, someone had chalked the Mona Lisa straight onto the paving stones. It felt fitting. The sitter, Lisa Gherardini, was the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, and Leonardo began her portrait here in Florence. The original has been in France for centuries, so this is the only way Florence gets her back: in chalk, for as long as the rain allows.
The View the Painters Paint
Late in the afternoon we climbed up to the hillside viewpoints south of the river, and the whole city opened up below us: the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio on the left, Palazzo Vecchio's tower, Brunelleschi's dome, and Santa Croce on the right. Nearly everywhere we'd walked, in a single frame. Giotto's bell tower is wrapped in white scaffolding at the moment, a reminder that looking after a city like this never stops.
Down at river level, the Ponte Vecchio is even more of a painter's subject. Its colourful little shops hang over the water, and the long enclosed walkway along the top is the Vasari Corridor, built so the Medici could walk from their offices to their palace without mixing with the public. The butchers who once traded on the bridge were replaced by goldsmiths in the 1590s, on the Grand Duke's orders, and the jewellers are still there today.
Standing there, I understood why so many painters come back to this view. From up here, Florence stops being a list of monuments and becomes one picture.
Three Artists, Three Florences
Back home, several of the artists we represent have painted Florence too, and seeing the real city made me look at their work with fresh eyes. It's the same city, painted three completely different ways.
Hinchliffe paints light the way Florence actually feels. A long colonnade recedes into shadow while sunlight spills across flower stalls and a white market umbrella. After a day walking beneath the city's arcades, I recognised that exact moment: stepping out of the shade into the warmth.
Original. Framed dimensions: 64 x 54 cm. RRP £3,195.
Where the street painters capture the Ponte Vecchio up close, Brown takes it from above, from almost exactly the kind of viewpoint we stood on: bridge after bridge stepping down the Arno through a blaze of terracotta rooftops, all bold, energetic strokes. Put his painting next to my photograph and you can see what he saw, and what he made of it. The Ponte Vecchio was the only Florentine bridge spared when the retreating German army blew up the others in 1944, and Brown's painting feels like a celebration of that survival.
Limited edition. Framed dimensions: 90 x 90 cm. RRP £1,195.
Cooke's Florence is less a place than a memory of one. The Duomo's great dome rises in soft pink beyond rows of vines, with leaves drifting down from the branches above, in his layered, expressive style. It's the same pairing of tower and dome we saw from the hillside, remembered on the flight home.
Original. Framed dimensions: 96.8 x 96.8 x 5 cm. RRP £1,895.
Which Florence Would You Hang?
The watercolourist by the Uffizi, Hinchliffe's sunlit arcade, Brown's rooftops and Cooke's dreamlike vineyards are all true to the city, and none of them is a photograph. That's the point. A painting shows you how someone saw a place, and the right one lets you keep seeing it every day.
If any of these pieces speaks to you, get in touch and we'll let you know what's available.
More from Florence soon.
Next from Florence: wine windows, gelato and the art of everyday life.
Discover more than 70 artists in our artist directory.
Comments