The Accademia Gallery in Florence enriches its exhibition space with a painting by Odoardo Borrani

The Accademia Gallery in Florence has renewed and enriched its exhibition space with a painting by Odoardo Borrani (Pisa, 1833-Florence, 1905), La Galleria dei quadri antichi della Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze (The Gallery of Ancient Paintings of the Accademia Gallery in Florence), owned by the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, which has placed it on long-term loan to the Florentine Museum.

The work, which was probably conceived together with other canvases depicting rooms in the Accademia Gallery in Florence painted by Borrani around the 1880s, has never been exhibited to the public before.

Visitors will be able to admire it in dialogue with the work Alla Galleria dell'Accademia, purchased by the Italian state in 2003 and destined for the Florentine museum, which represents another room in the nineteenth-century gallery, the so-called Sala dei quadri grandi (Hall of the Great Paintings).

The two paintings thus introduce visitors to the origins of the Accademia Gallery, commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo, primarily for educational purposes, as a tool for young artists and students of the adjacent Academy of Fine Arts, which he founded in 1784.

Over time, the Accademia Gallery also became a place for meetings, cultural exchanges and visits by a public - initially elite, but widening over time - interested in admiring masterpieces of the past and works of modern and contemporary painting and sculpture.

The museum also exhibited the works of young artists, in particular the winners of the annual and triennial competitions organised by the Institute, as well as the works of the most deserving painters and sculptors who had received study grants in Rome and, more generally, outside Tuscany.

The long-term deposit of Odoardo Borrani's painting La Galleria dei quadri antichi alla Galleria dell'Accademia (The Gallery of Antique Paintings in the Accademia Gallery) represents an important opportunity to explore and make accessible to the public an important chapter in the history of our museum and the nineteenth-century layout of its rooms. At the same time, it is a virtuous example of collaboration between public museum institutions that share the responsibility of promoting and reinterpreting a common heritage," comments Massimo Osanna, Director General of the Museums. "I would like to thank the Director of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, Renata Cristina Mazzantini, for making this project possible, with her willingness and spirit of collaboration, to enhance and recover a historical memory that enriches the narrative of the Accademia Gallery.

The renovated exhibition also provided an opportunity to display a painting by Stefano Ussi (Florence, 1836-1922), Interior with Odalisque, owned by the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno as a bequest from the painter's wife, Linda Salimbeni Ussi, which had been stored in the Galleria dell'Accademia for some time.