The bronze 'skin' of Silenus with the boy Bacchus, created by the sixteenth-century artist Jacopo Del Duca and exhibited on the first floor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, has returned to its original beauty.
The work, explains a note from the museum complex, underwent a restoration operation that lasted over six months.
This is, the museum specifies, the first recovery intervention carried out on the work in the modern era, made necessary due to the excessive tarnishing of the bronze (linked to the numerous retouches and corrections made to the surface of the Silenus over the centuries) and to a need of consolidation of the base, which presented micro lesions in several points.
The restoration, supervised by Flavia Puoti (Uffizi Galleries) and Veronica Collina, began last June and concluded a few days ago.
An initial diagnostic campaign, also carried out in collaboration with the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, provided information on the problems of the work, also allowing the sculpture's constituent materials to be fully distinguished from the elements used in previous maintenance interventions.
The subject of the work, the museum recalls, derives from a marble statue, now preserved in the Louvre, a Roman copy from the imperial era of a bronze from the late 4th century BC, most likely by Lysippos.
The Louvre Silenus (so-called Borghese Silenus) was found in the second half of the sixteenth century in Rome in Carlo Muti's garden.
The bronze copy in the Uffizi, attributed in 1993 to Jacopo del Duca, was commissioned by Ferdinando I de' Medici.
In 1588, the Grand Duke placed the sculpture, together with the Mars Gradivo by Bartolomeo Ammannati, inside the gallery of Villa Medici in Rome, then in 1787, at the behest of Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine, they were brought to Florence and exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery , where they are still found today.
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