Two rare Florentine vases from the 16th century made in the attempt to produce in Europe porcelain of like quality and type as that imported from China have been donated to the Museum of San Marco in Florence. They are two of only 60 to 70 surviving pieces manufactured in the Casino di San Marco complex, established by Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici. Today only one other example of Medici porcelain is in a Tuscan Culture Ministry institution, so the donation of two vases triples the number in public collections in their place of origin.

Manufactured between 1575 and 1585, both vases are white with blue decoration and feature striking serpentine handles.

The first vessel is a jug, or mesciroba, 16 centimeters tall. It has a globular body, a long cylindrical neck, and a spout with a distinctive triangular cross-section, while the handle consists of two snake-like forms joined together—a design that gives the object a particularly elaborate appearance. The white surface is decorated in deep blue with peonies, daisies, and lotus flowers. The decoration draws specifically on Chinese porcelain from the Ming Dynasty and the Yongle period, but the Eastern model is not the object’s sole source of inspiration. The shapes of the flowers, in fact, derive from a decorative tradition that had already been influenced by Islamic metalware, while the structure of the vessel recalls the Hispano-Moorish mescirobes with tall necks and spheroidal bodies produced in the Valencia region between the 14th and 15th centuries. […]

The second piece, on the other hand, is slightly larger, about 20 centimeters tall, and has a different shape. It is a vase with an ovoid body, two opposing serpentine handles, and a hexagonal spout protruding from the body (its shape finds a parallel in the grotesque-decorated Urbino majolica pieces that had already been part of the Medici collections since 1569).

The grand-ducal workshop of Casino di San Marco was one of several founded by Francesco I as a laboratory for experimentation where painters, sculptors, academics and artisans worked together to investigate natural phenomena and invent new materials and processes. Francesco had a great personal interest in alchemy and glassmaking, as well as in collecting at and antiquities, and he invested much time and money promoting technical innovation by marrying the experimental sciences in the applied arts.

On the first floor of the palace alone were glass works, an alchemy laboratory, foundries for metal work, including the forging of steel tools hard enough to hew porphyry, furnaces where rock crystal was fused to create decorative objects and precious stones (emeralds, rubies) were counterfeited, and ovens for producing a soft paste porcelain that became known as “Medici porcelain.”

In 1575, the Florentine manufactory succeeded in producing the first examples of what would come to be known as “Medici Porcelain, ” a soft-paste porcelain that represented Europe’s first successful attempt to reproduce the Eastern material. The venture was short-lived, however: the very high temperatures required for firing and the high production costs limited its development, and the manufactory ceased operations after the death of Francesco I in 1587, resulting in a very limited production run (the inventories of the Medici court recorded about three hundred pieces, but today only sixty or seventy survive worldwide). It is in this context that the donation of the two vases to the Museum of San Marco should be viewed, as it expands an already extremely rare presence in Tuscan public collections.

Both vases bear the workshop’s mark on the bottom: the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore painted in blue, surmounted by the letter “F,” the initial identifying Florence. This is one of the features that allows us to recognize production linked to the court of Francesco I and immediately connects the objects to the experimentation carried out in the Tuscan capital.

The vases have gone on display in the Museum of San Marco’s Greek Hall, where they will be neighbors with Renaissance majolica apothecary jars from the Dominican convent that was across the street from the Casino di San Marco.

The largest Italian Renaissance work of art in the United States will emerge from the storage underworld at the Minneapolis Institute of Art for the first time in 70 years. It is a tapestry 17.4 feet high and 15.5 feet wide depicting Dante’s meeting with Virgil in Canto I of Inferno designed by Florentine painter Francesco Salviati between 1546 and 1548.

The monumental tapestry was created in one of two workshops Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici founded in 1545 to rival the famed tapestry weavers of Belgium. He hired Brussels master weaver Jan Rost to get the Florentine workshop off the ground, staffing it with Flemish weavers who brought the secrets of their art from Brussels to Florence. Flemish artist Johannes Stradanus made the cartoon from Salviati’s design and weaving began on The Meeting of Dante and Virgil in 1547. It was completed in 1549.

It captures Dante emerging from the “selva oscura” where he had lost his way. His path is blocked by three animals — a leopard/lynx, a lion and a she-wolf, symbolizing three major categories of sin punished in Hell — but the poet Virgil emerges on a mountain, quiets the animals and gestures to Dante. This scene is set in border with swagged banners, fantastical figures and scrolls.

The ownership history of the tapestry is not fully documented. It was in Rome in the 17th century, part of the collection of the noble Rospigliosi family. Banker John Pierpoint Morgan acquired it there. He loaned it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which he co-founded). After his death in 1913, his son J.P. Morgan, Jr., sold the tapestry along with many thousands of objects his father had collected.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art acquired the tapestry in 1915, a donation from Ella Martin in memory of her husband. It was removed from display in the 1950s due to its dire state of conservation. Centuries of light exposure have caused fading, ironically the image of the sunrise suffered the most loss. There are threadbare areas, and despite being extraordinary light (it weighs less than 100 pounds) for its monumental size, the pull of gravity took its toll on the weaving.

For its long-term preservation, the tapestry needed to be exhibited in very low light levels with a new custom-made hanging system. Gaps in the woven silk are being bridges with tulle, invisible to the naked eye but far less complex and invasive than attempting a new weave.

The masterpiece will be the exhibited in the Fiterman Gallery, the only space in the museum large enough to display so enormous a work of art. The exhibition, “Back from the Underworld: Mia’s Dante Tapestry Restored,” runs from July 11, 2026, through January 31, 2027.

A rare early work by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli has been acquired by the Klesch Collection in London after an export bar was placed on the masterpiece in 2025. It will now go on public display for the first time in 80 years at the Ashmolean Museum. The last time it was exhibited, at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Birmingham in 1945, it was attributed to the master’s workshop, but the current scholarship and new imaging studies show complexity and detail in the preparatory drawing evident in known autograph works by the master himself.

The Virgin and Child Enthroned was painted around 1470, early in the carrer of Mariano Filipepi, aka Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445–1510). It depicts the Virgin seated on a throne with the Christ Child on her knee. They sit under an architectural canopy with gilded columns and marble inlays along the arch. The checkered marble floor recedes under the Virgin’s feet to a one point perspective confirmed by imaging investigations that revealed the underlying drawings and perspective lines. The composition is similar in style to Botticelli’s Sant’Ambrogio altarpiece currently in the Uffizi, particularly the design of the Child and the position of the Virgin’s hands holding him. Art historians believe the Virgin and Child Enthroned was also an altarpiece, albeit on a smaller scale, intended for a more intimate private chapel.

By the early 19th century, it was in the oratory of the Convent of San Giuliano in Florence. After the Napoleonic suppression of the convent in 1808, the property was bought by the Calasanz monastic order and the painting was then moved to the chapel of a convalescent home for sick brothers of the order in a village outside of Florence. The property, including the painting, was inherited by the Graziani family and in 1903 Giovanni Magherini Graziani sold it to Florence art dealer Elia Volpi. She sold it to heiress, philanthropist and art collector Harriet Loyd-Lindsay, Baroness Wantage, in 1904, and Virgin and Child Enthroned moved to England.

Lady Wantage’s famed collection was largely dispersed after her death in 1920, the most important works sold at Sotheby’s in 1945, but this Madonna by Botticelli was kept by her descendants in Betterton House, Berkshire, until they put it up for sale in 2024. The painting was published, but only known from black and white photos and when it was mentioned its location was even listed incorrectly. The sale spurred new research, material analysis, X-rays and infrared reflectography imaging that reclaimed the work as a masterpiece of international significance.

It was sold at auction at Sotheby’s London on December, 4, 2024 for a final sale price of £10 million ($12.6 million), blasting past the presale estimate of £2-3 million. There are very few works by Botticelli in the United Kingdom and this one is not only of exceptional importance due to its early date, but also due to its relevance to the history of Old Master collecting in the country. Because of these factors, when a foreign buyer won the auction and applied for an export license, the UK’s Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism imposed a temporary export ban in 2025. The Klesch Collection stepped up to the plate and was able acquire the painting for the nation.