The most important Italian Renaissance tapestry housed in the United States is about to get a glow up.
On April 28, The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) announced that it was granting its €25,000 ($29,300) Museum Restoration Fund to the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) to repair , a mid-16th century tapestry. It’s the first time since the initiative was launched in 2012 that TEFAF has funded the restoration of a tapestry.
MIA’s collection of more than 40 tapestries ranks as one of America’s most distinguished and the wool and silk depiction of the two great poets of the Italian peninsula meeting stands as its crown jewel. Spanning 17 feet tall and eight feet wide, the only early Medici tapestry held by a public collection outside of Italy is both extremely large and rather fragile. Accordingly, for much of the past 70 years, the tapestry has been in storage on account of structural weaknesses and light sensitivity.
The conservation work will be carried out by the Midwest Art Conservation Center, which is located inside the MIA, a process that will include wet cleaning, stabilization, and partial reweaving. The project will also support the installation of a new system to allow the tapestry to be safely displayed. The museum has already designed a custom frame that will allow the work to be loaned to outside institutions in the future.
“Returning a work of this scale and significance to public view is an important moment for the museum and for all audiences interested in Renaissance art,” Max Bryant, MIA’s associate curator of European arts and sculpture said in a statement.
The tapestry was made between 1547 and 1549 by the Florentine workshop that was established a couple of years earlier by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Cosimo’s hope was to rival the great tapestry manufacturers in Brussels and to do so he hired Jan Rost, a master weaver who managed the workshop and its weavers. The tapestry, which offers the opening scene from Dante’s epic poem , was designed by the painter Francesco Salviati.
Earlier this year, TEFAF funded the restoration of Peter Paul Rubens’s (1616 to 1618) at the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, Germany. It has previously funded the restoration of a rare 15th-century manuscript at The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, a Mannerist marble sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, and three Egyptian coffins at the Rijksmuseum.
is set to go back on display at MIA on July 11.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
