Kraft Hotel Florence · ARTS & CRAFTS
| A Year of Art |
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Welcome to the Kraft Hotel Arts and Crafts page. Texts taken from "Mestieri della moda a Firenze tra arte e artigianato" project. Click here for lots of info about Art in Florence... www.florenceartfashion.com |
| FONDAZIONE ARTE DELLA SETA "LISIO" |
| In 1971, Fidalma Lisio, having inherited the foremost Italian factory of silken fabrics, founded by her father Giuseppe in 1907, created a foundation with the scope of perpetuating the technical knowledge and ancient methods involved in the manufacture of this exclusive product. The most precious silk weaving techniques have been kept alive through study of historical evidence and documentary images. In it’s rooms, the foundation hosts a valuable theme library and a collection of ancient fabrics thanks to which sector specialists have succeeded in reconstructing the manufacturing techniques that created many historic fabrics, like the velvets with gold and silver brocade, with their shimmering effects, and the bouclé velvets, besides other laborious, highly-complex textile processes. The collections of graphic materials and samples preserved here, which represent figurative types dating from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century, are still used for creating unique products that can not be made on our modern mechanized looms, some of wich reproduce and interpret details of famous pictorial works of different periods: for example, the ancient Roman figures in the “Pompeiian” lampas or the Renaissance themes of the “Beato Angelico”, “Botticelli” and “Veronese” brocades. The knowledge acquired through research and experimentation is also applied to design of contemporary fabrics and inclusion of new materials, result of the most highly-advanced technological research. Over the years, fruitful collaboration has been established with such important designers from the world of fashion as Valentino, Versace, Gucci and Fendi, for whom Lisio has created several exclusive, highly-priced fabrics for bags, and in particular for the “Baguette” model. |
| GALLERIA D’ARTE MODERNA - PALAZZO PITTI FIRENZE |
| The gallery, inaugurated in 1922 on the second floor of Palazzo Pitti, presents the development of Italian painting and sculpture from the neoclassic period through the early decades of the last century and also contains significant works by foreign artists, all arranged according to precise chronology and thematic groupings. The collection originated in the era of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine – with the idea of creating a museum dedicated to the coeval works that took prizes at academic contest – and was later enriched, at the time of Italian unification, by numerous other collections to which the gallery acceded by gift, like the very important Diego Martelli bequest of 1897, or by purchase. A visit to the museum’s rooms places in evidence not only the many historical and stylistic passages that made up this complex cultural period, exhibiting the regional schools of undeniable attraction such as the Tuscan Macchiaioli, but also, thanks to splendid portrait gallery, focusing attention on the inimitable union of the character and personality of the subjects and the style and form of the clothing they wore, which leads one’s imagination to the drawing-rooms and the local tailors’ establishments or the great international ateliers of the various periods. In paintings by such artists as Ary Sheffer, Puccinelli, Ciseri, Lega, Fattori, Cecioni, Winterhalter, Carolus Duran, Zandomeneghi, Boldini, Simi, and Elizabeth Chaplin we can explore cutaways of different lifestyles and glimpse, through the artists’ eyes, the gestures, postures, and rituals of domestic intimacy or sophisticated social life. Passing from delicate shifts in cotton mousseline to the rustling silks of the ball gowns we can read, almost as though in an illustrated manual of style, the oscillations of fashion and its forms, from the simple Empire toilette through the billowing crinolines and the sculptural tournures of the nineteenth century to the reaffirmation of essential linearity in the Decò. Or follow the same personality in the different phases of his or her existence, as in the case of Alaide Banti, painted as a young girl in blue by the meticulous Michele Gordigiani, then as a woman with a strong personality in Boldini’s lively brushstrokes, and finally with the austere carriage of old age Oscar Ghiglia. |
| GALLERIA DEL COSTUME - PALAZZO PITTI FIRENZE |
| The first state-operated museum dedicated entirely to study and preservation of costumes, accessories, and fabrics, the Costume Gallery was created in 1983 under the direction of Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti. Its prestigious headquarters is the neoclassical Palazzina della Meridiana ordered built by Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine in 1776 on the south side of Palazzo Pitti. Today, the museum storage rooms preserve a collection of more than 6000 items, including ancient and modem garments, accessories, and costumes for the theatre and the cinema of great documentary value. It is a unique gallery whose centre is the famous Medici collection, among the world’s oldest, made up of the burial clothes worn by Cosimo I Grand Duke of Tuscany, his wife Eleonora de Toledo, and their son Don Garzia, all restored in the museum’s own restoration shops. A significant place is also reserved for contemporary costume, with selected nuclei representing the greatest protagonists of international high fashion and prét-à-porter, such as Worth, Poiret, Vionnet, Capucci, Missoni, Valentino, Pucci, Ferrè, and Yves Saint Laurent, to name only a few. Most of the accessions come from public and private donations and often the wardrobes of famous personalities, either of historic importance or known for their influence on aesthetics in a given era, like the Sicilian noblewoman Franca Florio and Eleonora Duse; or from collections patiently and carefully put together by such figures as Umberto Tirelli, founder of one of Italy’s most prestigious and internationally-famous theatrical and cinematographic costume houses. Due to their extreme organic fragility, the exhibits are alternated in two-year cycles according to a thematic and chronological exhibition scheme that runs from the l8th to the 2Oth centuries; at the same time, the Gallery holds important monographic exhibitions in specific rooms, clear testimonies to the progress made in the study of costume and fashion that are closely linked to this extraordinary collection, today directed by Carlo Sisi in collaboration with Caterina Chiarelli. |
| MUSEO DEGLI ARGENTI - PALAZZO PITTI FIRENZE |
| Founded in the second halt of the 1800s in Palazzo Pitti in what were the splendid summer apartments of the Medici court, decorated with frescoes that exalt the glories of the family, the Silver Museum (or “Medici Treasury”) offers the visitor an itinerary studded with authentic marvels, an extraordinary document attesting. to dynastic collecting, including gemstones, cameos, items made of semi-precious stone, ivories, jewellery, and silver. What was once the “Medici treasure” is represented here as a series of thematic groupings that witness the family members’ interest in collecting but also in creating new works based on examples of ancient art, with precious and semiprecious materials; these arts were raised to the highest aesthetic and technical levels by the finest workshops in the Grand Duchy. Arranged according to chronological criteria, the rooms display vases and cups in amethyst, jasper, and sardonyx, of ancient origin but mounted in gold and silver in the medieval and Renaissance periods, eighteen of which are from the private collection of Lorenzo the Magnificent; cameos and carved stones collected by Grand Duke Cosimo I, and extremely valuable objects whose purchase was suggested by Benvenuto Cellini; pitchers, salt-cellars, and cups in rock crystal and lapislazuli desired by Cosimo’s son Francesco, Maria Magdalena of Austria’s amber pieces, and the surprising German ivories brought to Florence by Mattias de’ Medici. The variety of the collections is further enhanced by rare, bizarre “Wunderkammer” objects from far-off worlds; the silver treasure of the Salzburg prince-bishops that gave the museum its name, and above all the jewels of the Palatine Elettress: a rare example of precious gems and “jewelled gallantries” of various eras, among which the pendants in gold, precious stones, and enamel centring on singular Baroque pearls selected by Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medìci, the dynasty’s last representative. In recent years the museum’s holdings have been enriched by an important free loan of different types of women’s and men’s jewellery from the i 700s through the 1900s including diadems, parures, and devants de corsage in diamonds and colored stones as well as bracelets and brooches in micro-mosaic or Etruscan granulation with an archaeological flair, all from the Roman workshops of the Castellani and the Giulliani goldsmiths, and precious Cartìer pieces from the 1920s. |
| MUSEO DEI RAGAZZI - PALAZZO VECCHIO FIRENZE |
| The posthumous portrait of Eleonora de Toledo and the portrait of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici that hang - facing one another - in the Studiolo of Francesco I in Palazzo Vecchio recall the Duchess and Duke as their son Francesco wanted them to remain indelibly impressed in eternal memory. The Duchess is portrayed in the flower of her beauty as the “first lady” of a reigning dynasty, and is dressed as befits her role. The face meets all the canons of beauty illustrated by the portrait painters of the time: wide forehead, thin brows, dark tawny eyes, moderately-proportioned ears; her clothing is the type she normally wore, red with gold decoration, while her jewels - the pearls and pendent at her neck - are her favourite pieces. Duke Cosimo -founder of the dynasty and the state, who made Palazzo della Signoria (today known as Palazzo Vecchio) the first among the Medici palaces and worthy of its designation in its size and decoration - is portrayed in armour. Today, the Monumental Quarters of Palazzo Vecchio have become a museum in which richly-decorated and frescoed rooms, almost all painted with secular scenes in which the historical figures are dressed in the fashion of the second half of the Cinquecento - in other words, in re-interpretations of the ancient fashion of the Florence of the 1400s and 1 300s and of classical antiquity. Palazzo Vecchio consequently proposes to its visitors of all ages and origins various communications tools for observing and understanding certain facets of the lifestyle and the ideas of the Civiltà del Rinascimento a Firenze [Florentine Renaissance civilization] that generated these works. As regards the history of fashion and taste, in particular, visitors are offered two complementary tools: detailed information in individually-accessible multimedia form and the possibility of attending dramatizations staged in the Theatre of the Civiltà del Rinascimento a Firenze Museum on the Mezzanine floor of Palazzo Vecchio, The multimedia information can be consulted throughout The Monumental Quarters, in Italian or English, at the stations containing the CD-ROM Palazzo Vecchio Segreto [The Secrets of Palazzo Vecchio), three chapters of which are dedicated to fashion and the perception of the human body at the Medici court: Il lusso di Eleonora [Eleonora’s Luxury] dedicated to the style of Eleonora de Toledo and women’s fashion; L’eleganza di Cosimo [Cosimo’s Elegance], exploring the style of Cosimo I and the characteristics of men’s fashion; I piccoli principi [The Little Princes) dedicated to the children’s clothing, from birth onward. The dramatizations staged in the Mezzanine of Palazzo Vecchio are based on reconstructions of the clothing of Cosimo, Eleonora, of several of their children, of Giorgio Vasari - court painter and architect from 1555 to 1574 - of one of the Duchess’ ladies-in-waiting, and of one of the young princes’ nurses. The clothing is made of precious silks in respect of l0th-century models, cuts, and sartorial techniques. Also reconstructed on the basis of thorough analysis of the images found in art and the latest studies of the history of costume are footwear, jewellery, accessories for the women’s coiffeurs, hats, gloves, underclothes, and corsets. The public can thus see and touch the clothing and even try on some of the articles, but above all interact with the animator-actors who impersonate the Duke and Duchess, discovering in the process the language of the fashion and the body-language of the Florence of the times. Paola Pacetti |
| MUSEO SALVATORE FERRAGAMO |
| Thi private museum, founded in 1995, is dedicated to Salvatore Ferragamo’s activity and the brand’s continuing creativity down through our times. It is home to a large and unique collection comprising a surprising 10,000 models of footwear that attest to the great creative flair of the company’s founder, who was in perfect touch with the artistic stimuli of his world, and to his extraordinary capacity to reuse materials, including simple and sometimes ‘poor” materials, the only materials, in fact, available during some of the trying moments in history that he lived through in the course of his career, for example the autarchic Thirties. With a two-year exhibit rotation frequency and according to thematic criteria, the museum exhibits some of Ferragamo’s masterpieces that are still astounding as to the modernity of their design and their use of colour and raw materials. There are the wedge sandals built of cork or wood, carved and painted by hand or even covered in mirror glass, satin, or embossed brass grates studded with strass, or the “invisible sandal” from 1947, with a vamp of transparent nylon thread, that won him the fashion Oscar for that year, or, finally, the elegant series of 1 950s low-cut pumps, one of which, in brown crocodile, was designed especially for Marilyn Monroe. The Archives preserve hundreds of wooden lasts for made-to-measure footwear for representatives of the international diplomatic corps, members of the royal houses, and above all the stars of Italian and Hollywood cinema. The Museum is also home to a small collection of period footwear from the 1 8th and l9th centuries, a selection of items of clothing from the late l950s onward, and a collection of bags produced since 1970, all accompanied by copious paper based documentation, from press releases to a remarkable collection of patents. For ten years now, the museum premises have hosted theme exhibitions or retrospective exhibits on aspects of history, personalities, creativity, or technique linked to the Ferragamo griffe. |
| MUSEO STIBBERT |
| The House-Museum dedicated to Frederick Stibbert (1838-1906), an English citizen born in Florence who himself remodelled the house in the form of a neo-Gothic castle, offers the visitor a view of the extraordinary collections put together by its owner over the course of an intense life made of journeys and research dedicated to his interest in the exotic and the applied arts, in a variety that ranges from armour to porcelain to furniture and from European men’s and women’s clothing to Islamic civil and military costume and the costumes of the Far East. Especially intriguing, in this singular context, is the clear testimony to Stibbert’s late l9th- century eclectic taste provided by the theatrical arrangement of the objects in rooms themselves evoking different styles et the past, from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic period; the park mirrors the house, with suggestive corners and many references to things ancient. Of outstanding fame is the Sala della Cavalcata (Hall of the Cavalcade), which reconstructs a life-size model of a military parade of l5th through l7th century European and Islamic mounted troops; ether rooms contain analogous reconstructions of the splendid armour of the Islamic world from North Africa to central Asia, and India moghul. The armory section is completed by the elegance and colours of the Japanese warriors in the rooms that take their names, where the costumes and most significant objects from this refined culture create a nucleus which for the abundance and quality of its items is considered one of the world’s most significant. Stibbert’s interest in fashion, spoken to in his precious publication, with its many illustrated plates, which appeared only in 1914, expressed itself in his acquisition of a vast number of military uniform and about a thousand pieces of European and Oriental civil clothing, quite rare and therefore of considerable interest: Ct particular note among those on exhibit is the petit costume worn by Napoleon for his coronation as Ring of Italy, consisting of a short cape in green velvet and a gold-embroidered white velvet waistcoat; one of the gems in the Oriental rooms is the figure of a young Chinese woman dressed in a Qing Dynasty (late l9th century) wedding costume from the Shanxi province in embroidered polychrome silk, her hairdo adorned with gold, silver, semi-precious stones, and freshwater pearls. |
| MUSEO TORRINI |
| A small and exclusive collection dedicated to jewellery, silver, timepieces, and objects d’arte, skilfully organized into different sections in secluded premises looking out on the harmonious lines of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral: the Torrini Museum is contemporary testimony to a refined manner of transmitting an art with a very ancient tradition while raising it to levels of excellence, and awareness o/the significance that its creative endeavour has acquired over time. The main purpose of the museum is to illustrate the centuries of activity of the Torrini goldsmiths, a business founded in the Middie Ages - the family’s “Signum’ hallmark with which Torrini still marks its creations was registered with the Arte dei Fabbri guild in 1369- with a selection of products, some of which were recovered by the museum only through patient research at international auction houses and private collections. Ct special note are rare examples from the Renaissance in engraved silver, a priceless group of l8th-century brooches, and a parure Of ancient inspiration, created of fitted semi-precious stones by this workshop in the lOth century. The nucleus of the permanent collection 5 presented in constantly-changing arrangements, but the museum also hosts temporary monographic exhibits dedicated to different themes or aspects of the history of jewellery and goldsmith, and a section presenting the work of contemporary artists, among whom Cagli, Tosi, Mirko, and Antonio Bueno. The section dedicated to externally-made pieces, instead, offers among other things a representative group of l8th- to 2Oth-century pocket watches that document the technical and aesthetic evolution of this fashion item, often as precious as it was useful. |
| MUSEO DELLA PAGLIA E DELL’INTRECCIO “DOMENICO MICHELACCI” - SIGNA |
| This museum documents the art of straw-plaiting and the various products made by this technique, a mainstay of Tuscan tradition since the l4th century but developed on an industrial scale only beginning in the 1700s, thanks to the personal contribution of Domenico Michelacci from Bologna who settled in Signa in 1714. Ha experimented with new techniques for growing and harvesting wheat in order to obtain a raw material that was more suitable for use in millenary, and increased production to the point that by the mid-l800s this market sector became the Grand Duchy’s most important. Fully one-third of the tillable land of the region was engaged by this agricultural activity and Florence became the natural centre for commercial distribution of the finished product, the hat, as is amply illustrated in coeval publications with colored plates of popular costumes, in which one or another form c/ straw hat is always represented. This accessory became the most refined of the clothing items produced in series up until that moment, and remained a major strong point in the Tuscan economy, with 80,000 workers, until the crisis of 1929. Just prior to that ilI-omened date, production counted about 142 million pieces per year, a number that 5 surprising even today. In the museum, founded in 1995 to collect, study, and restore this important fashion complement that has always marked the history of costume, ere exhibits of raw materials, tools, machinery, and products flanked by documents, company archives, and sample collections that provide evidence of the entire production process. The material gathered here for the permanent exhibits as ‘Nell as for temporary monographic exhibits is of interest to many different areas of study: anthropology, art, economy, sociology, and the technical material disciplines. The museum’s copious archives and specialized library are open for consultation by people interested in conducting studies and research into the history of straw and its numberless applications. |
| MUSEO DEL TESSUTO - PRATO |
| Founded in 1975 around a primary nucleus of material, then enlarged and moved to a wing of the former Cimatoria Campolmi, a typical and evocative example of industrial archaeology, the Textile Museum is today one of Europe’s most important exhibition and study centres in the field of textile culture and related sectors, with 240 square meters of exhibition space. The structure brings together numerous collections of different origin, acquired through bequests, donations, and purchases and featuring material evidence like the sample collections of important, historic woollen industries in the district and more than 6000 samples of textiles datable from the pre-Christian era down to our day, acquired from all aver the world. This broad repertory documents every possible technique, including arras, rugs, printing, lace, and embroidery; the institution also preserves church vestments and furnishings, passementerie, an interesting collection of costumes dating from the l8th through the 2Oth century, technical and figurative drawings, and machinery and hand-operated and mechanical textiles tools from the 1 500s to the present, essential far reconstructing the ancient weaving methods. Following a section providing an introduction to recognition of the fundamental types of fibres and understanding at their production, the visitor comes to the historical section, where selections of archaeological and ancient fabrics (Etruscan, Roman, Coptic, Islamic, and Peruvian) and l8th- and 2Oth- century ethnic textiles are exhibited on a rotation basis together with the extremely rich main body of the collection, consisting of European and Oriental samplings dating from the l4th to the l8th century and l9th- and 2Oth-century production featuring pieces designed and signed by such artists as Dufy, Già Ponti, and Henry Moare. The contemporary section, instead, fallows the steps of the highly dynamic relationship between textiles and present and future production: beginning with the Prato Expo trend samples from 1982 through the present and going on to true advance showings of the new collections by Prato’s industries. The section spotlights above all the mast technologically an/or aesthetically advanced work now going on in the territory. Every year, the museum proposes a program of important exhibitions on varying themes, bath historic and contemporary, that testify to the richness and vivacity of its textile and fashion studies and its fruitful contacts with other international museum centres. |
