When this unfinished portrait appeared on the antiques market, it immediately became clear that it had to be secured for the collections of the Uffizi Galleries, to be exhibited in the halls of Palazzo Pitti. In fact, even if the work was not completely painted in Palazzo Pitti by Anton Raphael Mengs, it was certainly designed in the great palace. The little princes lived in the Florentine palace next to their parents, the constant attention of governesses and tutors, but above all of the parents themselves, while the large Boboli garden was their space for games and recreation.
We wanted to celebrate the new acquisition of the work, which came to fruition also thanks to the concessions generously given by the Virgilio Gallery in Rome, with an exhibition that highlights the historical and artistic context in which it was painted.
Of Bohemian origin, who later became European by adoption and more precisely Italian and Spanish, Mengs had asked King Charles III of Spain for permission to be able to go to Rome to work and study again antiquity and the great Renaissance painting, Raphael in primis, of the which it bore the name. The king, who loved Italy and had risked ruling Tuscany and had then become king of Naples, had allowed him to make that trip on condition that he sent him from Florence the portrait of his young nephews, born from the union of his daughter Maria Louise of Bourbon with Peter Leopold of Lorraine. The canvases, preserved in the Prado museum and exhibited in the exhibition, were painted between April 1770 and January 1771, during the artist's stay in the Tuscan capital. It was on the same occasion in which Mengs painted the portraits of the grandchildren for his grandfather and Spanish sovereign, that he had to execute the painting recently purchased by the Uffizi Galleries, portraying the same little grandchildren Ferdinand and Maria Anna, but with a completely different cut and spirit . It is a painting that must have pleased the severe taste of Pietro Leopoldo, an Enlightenment ruler, reformer, 'modern' not to say bourgeois both in public and private life. The official portraitist of the Florentine court, in the service of Pietro Leopoldo, was however another German, naturalized English, Johann Zoffany. On display is the portrait of his eldest son Francesco, first Grand Duke of Tuscany of the Lorraine lineage, painted to send to his paternal grandmother, the Empress Maria Theresa, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
At the opening of the exhibition there are then the images of the grandparents and parents, in addition to the father, the mother Maria Luisa di Borbone, and together with them the Neapolitan and Parma cousins; on leave the self-portraits of the two painters from the Uffizi collections. The famous heroic self-portrait by Mengs, an already sentimentally charged if not yet romantic image, and the subtly ironic one by Zoffany with his little dog, which, restored for this occasion, will prove to be a pleasant surprise for the public.
The exhibition is open until 7 January 2018 it is edited, like the catalog published by Sillabe, by Matteo Ceriana and Steffi Roettgen, and is promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism with the Uffizi Galleries and Firenze Musei.
