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Pietro Benvenuti (Arezzo, 1769 ��" Florence, 1844) was the leading protagonist of Tuscan art in the years that marked the passage from neoclassicism to romanticism. He studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Florence and completed his training in Rome where he painted his first important studio trials: the Judith for the Cathedral of Arezzo and the Martyrdom of the Blessed Signoretto Alliata for the Cathedral of Pisa.
Elisa Baciocchi (whose brother Napoleon Bonaparte received the principality of Lucca and Piombino, and then the government of the entire Tuscany) appointed Benvenuti court painter, and in 1807 she summoned him to direct the Academy of Florence, an office he maintained until his death.
The Napoleonic parenthesis was the period of several monumental compositions (The Death of Priam, The Oath of the Saxons, Elisa and the Artists), which preluded to the great decorative undertakings planned to modernise the Pitti Palace, the Room of Hercules in particular (in the wing today occupied by the Palatine Gallery), terminated during the Restoration.
Benvenuti was also an extraordinary portraitist. In Tuscany, he represents the style that prevailed in the middle-European ambit, both in bringing the character of the personages into focus, and in the setting. His classicist vocation is fully expressed in the composition of mythological themes, which the painter prepared with exquisite drawings that often assume the value of autonomous works. Leopold II of Lorraine commissioned him to complete the decorations in the dome of the Chapel of the Princes in the Church of San Lorenzo.
So the exhibition illustrates Benvenuti’s artistic history, presents his most important works, and compares them with those of his early teachers, and those by Italian and foreign artists (from Giani to Sabatelli), encountered in Rome in the eccentric and experimental Accademia dei Pensieri (Academy of Thought). The Sala Bianca of the Palatine Gallery presents the paintings of the Napoleonic years (mainly portraits and mythological themes). The set up revolves around the large painting of Pyrrhus, presented to the public for the first time after a long and complex restoration that has revealed its stylistic components drawn from the study of David and Canova.
The exhibition itinerary also includes the Room of Hercules and ends with a section dedicated to the paintings of the years of the Restoration, genre paintings for the most part of a historical-literary matrix with inflections of a troubadour flavour. The particular interest of these works emerges from the comparison with several paintings with an explicit romantic adhesion by contemporaries Luigi Sabatelli and Giuseppe Bezzuoli. They are the proof that the classicist maestro Benvenuti at least in part shared the instances of truthfulness advanced by the next generation of the “moderns”, especially the Macchiaioli.