THE REDISCOVERY OF THE BARGELLO PALACE, a masterpiece of Florentine medieval architecture

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE FOUNDATION OF THE MUSEUM, the entire building has been restored.
From the stone facing that covers the surface of the main body to the Volognana tower, from the windows to the coats of arms, from the courtyard to the gates: this is the first time in 156 years that Palazzo del Bargello has been completely restored, with a unified project of overall revision. For the first time since the founding of the Museum (which took place in 1865, when it was transformed from a prison into the first National Museum dedicated to the arts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the Kingdom of Italy), the building, built in the mid-13th century, has been the object of a major restoration campaign that has involved the entire building and has entailed a meticulous review of the entire monument and all the decorative elements, bringing to light details hitherto unknown. Fifteen months of continuous work, which - despite the prolonged closure of the museum due to the Covid19 pandemic - allowed the team of restorers to conclude this operation in record time, beginning to raise the scaffolding at the end of July 2020 to dismantle the last innocent pipes in October 2021 for a total of 425 days of work. In past decades, the Palace had been the subject of targeted interventions several times, but never before had an intervention of this magnitude been put in place, a work that saw over 12 thousand square meters of pietra forte and pietra serena stone cleaned and consolidated, 128 coats of arms and 124 windows restored (including the monumental window of the Salone di Donatello), as well as the 93 battlements and 199 stone corbels.

The huge surface in pietra forte and pietra serena that characterizes the corpus of the Palace, from the lowest part of the facades to the top of the battlements, was cleaned, hammered (i.e. its resistance was verified, stone by stone) and consolidated where necessary. Inside the courtyard, thanks to the aid of scaffolding, a thorough cleaning of the facing and of the stone artifacts was carried out, including the coats of arms, which were restored directly on site, without being lowered to the ground. The more than one hundred windows of the building have also been restored, which required "tailor-made" interventions according to the type (wooden windows or iron-framed windows), which now guarantee a seal against water infiltration. In some cases, such as the windows in the Salone di Donatello and those in the Cappella della Maddalena, it has been necessary to make new frames and then completely dismantle the windows themselves. In particular, for the Salone's window, a new frame was made, shaped on the decorative elements of the window, an operation that required great skill both in the disassembly and reassembly phases, given its considerable size (it is 5.40 meters high and composed of two panels each 1.10 meters wide). The large masonry mullioned window was made by Benci di Cione in 1345 and, like many other parts of the Palace, it has undergone extensive restoration work over the course of time. A special treatment has been reserved to the tower and to the belfry that, besides being restored, cleaned and consolidated, has seen the pictorial restoration of the painted coats of arms and of the rampant lion placed on the top.

Thanks to the restoration campaign it has been possible to "map" centimeter by centimeter the entire surface of the Palace, an operation that has allowed us to discover some "secret" details, impossible to see from below and with the naked eye. Such as the "signatures" of the stonemasons who over the centuries have worked on the construction or maintenance of the building, but also traces of painting (such as that which emerged on the window frames of the courtyard) or the dates engraved in the stone, the ornamental details carved into the marble capitals and the pietra forte, all pieces of the rich and stratified history - almost eight centuries long - of one of the oldest and most important palaces in Florence. In order to illustrate the result of this extraordinary restoration work and to tell the story of the ancient Palace, a video has been realized where the history of the monument and of the collections, at the same time, is highlighted in the details of the restoration intervention.

Video by @Visivalab