Vatican Museums

A few years after the Vatican exhibition on The Saints Peter and Paul by Raphael and Fra Bartolomeo, the Vatican Museums and the Uffizi Galleries are once again jointly launching, this time in the Tuscan regional capital, a new exhibition that from Tuesday 19 December will unveil to the general public of the prestigious Florentine museum the previously unseen Pietà by Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560). Considered lost, the work was discovered three years ago in the deposits of the Pope’s Museums by Fabrizio Biferali, Curator of the Department for Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Art, and is to date the second documented painting by the master, known essentially as a sculptor and admirable draughtsman, for years in the service of Duke Cosimo I Medici.
Subjected to meticulous diagnostic investigations by the Cabinet of Scientific Research applied to Cultural Heritage and to complex restoration work carried out at the Painting and Wood Materials Restoration Laboratory, Bandinelli's oil on panel will be the protagonist in Florence of the small but significant monographic exhibition "Baccio Bandinelli painter" curated by the Director of the Uffizi Galleries Eike Schmidt, and for the Vatican Museums, by Fabrizio Biferali.

The exhibition, the result of the fruitful and well-established collaboration between the two great museum institutions, will also reach the Vatican Museums in spring next year, in the solemn spaces of the Pinacoteca.