The Return of Joseph, Prince of Dreams The Medici Tapestries in the Sala dei Duecento

The Twenty Medici tapestries return to Palazzo Vecchio for display in five cycles in rotation

Firenze, Palazzo Vecchio, Sala dei Duecento 26th February 2019 – 29th August 2021

May be visited by appointment only maximum 25 people every 30 minutes

Opening hours: Tue/Wed/Fri/Sat/Sun 10.00 am – 6.00 pm

May be closed on certain special occasions

Information and reservations: Info Point in the Ticket Office area

musefirenze.it info@muse.comune.fi.it

Tel. (+39) 055 2768224 – (+39) 055 2768558

Ticket: € 3.00

The magnificent cycle of twenty tapestries with Stories from the Life of Joseph commissioned by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and woven from 1545 to 1553 to designs by three of the greatest artists of the age, Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Pontormo and Francesco Salviati, originally hung in the Sala dei Duecento, the old city council chamber in Palazzo Vecchio. When Florence was the capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1865 to 1871, the cycle was split and ten of the twenty tapestries became royal property, subsequently moving with the court to the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome and ultimately becoming the property of the Presidency of the Republic. The remaining ten tapestries remained in Florence with the city's state "Galleries" and were granted on permanent loan to the municipality which had recently been installed in Palazzo Vecchio.

The cycle was split between Rome and Florence from that time on, until a travelling exhibition entitled The Prince of Dreams. Joseph in the Medici Tapestries of Pontormo and Bronzino, held to tie in with Expo 2015, brought them together again for the first time in a century and a half in the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, then in the Palazzo Reale in Milan and finally in Palazzo Vecchio, in the very room for which they were first woven. The Sala dei Duecento, without the city council benches which were removed for the occasion, looked as spectacular as it did in Cosimo I's day when the tapestries were arranged to stun the court's guests with an unbroken succession of glittering stories totally covering the walls of the vast room to a height of six metres. After the exhibition, the room hosted the city council's meetings again. Its new furnishings and systems, however, were purpose-built to ensure that its institutional function – for which it was originally built in the early 14th century – could coexist with the display of the monumental tapestries that graced its walls at a different moment in its history. Thanks to a special agreement between the Segretariato Generale della Presidenza della Repubblica, the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali and the Comune di Firenze, the Sala dei Duecento is now open to visitors, when the council is not in session, to allow them to admire the precious tapestries, reunited once again and on display in full compliance with the special conservation needs of this unique kind of textile product. In former ages, tapestries were only displayed on festive and other important ceremonial occasions or in accordance with seasonal cycles, resting in the darkness of noble palaces' wardrobes in the care of skilled craftsmen for the rest of the time. In emulation of that "best practice", the Joseph tapestries are to be displayed in groups of four, in the order of the stories depicted, on a six-monthly rotating basis lasting thirty months in all. Thus every six months visitors can discover a new chapter in the story of Joseph the Patriarch as depicted by the outstandingly skilled painters and weavers commissioned by Cosimo I to interpret this episode from the Bible. The Bible tells us that Joseph, the son of Jacob and the main character in the scenes depicted in the Sala dei Duecento tapestries, had the ability to foretell the future by interpreting dreams. He owed his misfortune to his brothers. Driven by envy and rancour, they initially thought of slaying him but then, keeping it a secret from their father, they sold him as a slave to Egyptian merchants. Thanks to his prophetic talents, however, Joseph managed to redeem himself, even becoming the vizier of Egypt, and in the end he forgave his brothers and took his whole family under his wing. Similarly the Medici, who had been exiled by their fellow Florentines on more than one occasion, ended up at the helm of the Florentine state, governing with mercy and generosity. Joseph was also a younger son, born to Jacob's second wife, just as Cosimo I descended from a minor branch of the Medici family. Thus the story of Joseph was an ideal metaphor for a tapestry cycle intended to celebrate the grandeur of Duke Cosimo, founder of the Medici legend, as a patron of artistic endeavours, of which this was one of his greatest enterprises The first reports of the cycle coincide with the arrival in Florence of Jan Rost and Nicolas Karcher, the two Flemish tapestrymakers commissioned to weave it. Cosimo I set them up in workshops in the city that trained the craftsmen who were to make the name of a glorious tapestry manufactory, the only one in Italy to survive for fully two centuries. A perfect marriage of artistic creativity and technical skill, the cycle with Stories from the Life of Joseph is at once the Florentine manufactory's first major enterprise and its masterpiece.

Cosimo I wished to vie in magnificence with the oldest and most prestigious courts of Europe and so his project was on the grand scale. It comprised twenty figured tapestries designed by great masters and woven with an abundance of costly silk and silver yarn, each tapestry a staggering six metres tall covering a total surface area of 428 m2, just short of double that of the tapestries with Stories from the Lives of the Apostles commissioned by Pope Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici) to cartoons by Raphael and his workshop for the Sistine Chapel thirty years before. The cycle is of inestimable value and thus Cosimo's successors were careful to preserve it. Given the unique fragility of this particular kind of textile work, this is an extremely rare example – not to say the sole instance – of such a large tapestry cycle made with such perishable materials as silk, surviving in its entirety. Equally impressive is the extraordinary effort put into restoring the cycle in our own age. The restoration took almost thirty years, starting in 1983 when the Florence tapestries were taken down from the walls of the Sala dei Duecento after more than a century of unbroken display, and ending in 2012. It is to this colossal undertaking that we owe the establishment of the two highly specialised workshops which de facto spawned the Italian school of tapestry restoration. The first was created by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Palazzo Vecchio in 1985, in conjunction with the Comune di Firenze, for the express purpose of restoring the ten tapestries removed from the Sala dei Duecento. This workshop trained the functionary and restorers who went on to set up a purpose-built workshop in the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome in 1995 to restore the ten tapestries owned by the Presidency of the Republic. The rotating display of the entire cycle proposed here also offers an opportunity to highlight the results of their skilled work and the singular unity of intent underpinning the entire process.