Palazzo Martelli

History

In the place where the palace there were the old houses of the Martelli family, since the 1520s. In 1627, the area of this palace was aggregated after the marriage of Senator Marco Martelli and his cousin. Marco also acquired further buildings. Some frescoes on the main floor date to this era. The Cardinal Francesco Martelli (1633–1717) was a member of this family.

In 1738, Giuseppe Maria Martelli, Archbishop of Florence and Niccolo Martelli, bailiff of Florence, unified the palaces under the designs of the architect Bernardino Ciurini. The piano nobile of the palace was decorated by frescoes by Vincenzo Meucci, Ferdinando Melani, Niccolò Connestabile, and Bernardo Minozzi, as well as stuccowork by Giovanni Martino Portogalli.

At the end of the eighteenth century Marco, son of Niccolo, commissioned further frescoes depicting mythological and historic episodes of the family from teams led by Tommaso Gherardini, while Luigi Sabatelli decorated the vault of the staircase, where they displayed once two works attributed to Donatello, a statue of David and the coat of arms of the family. The marble David statue is now displayed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and it is now felt to be a copy of the marble David by Donatello in the Bargello in Florence.

Large parts of the house's artworks were sold over the past two centuries. In 1986, the last Martelli resident, Francesca Martelli, willed the house to the Curia of Florence. In 1998, the Curia sold the complex to the Italian state as part of a larger deal. This allowed the collections to be opened as a museum in 2006.

Even accounting for the loss and dispersal of items, the collection remains impressive, including works by Piero di Cosimo, Francesco Francia, Francesco Morandini, Salvator Rosa, Giordano, Beccafumi, Sustermans, Michael Sweerts, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Orazio Borgianni, Francesco Curradi, and collections of small bronzes, including some by Soldani Benzi. The works are displayed in the crowded arrangement typical of the period. The ground floor has a room frescoed with an illusionistic pergola by Connestabile.