How Florence inspired the Pre-Raphaelites: Simon Poe visits a pioneering exhibition at the Uffizi that charts the influence of Florence on British and American artists in the later nineteenth century

There is a real exciting book still to be written about the British and American visitors to Florence during the nineteenth hundred and the cultural interaction that took place there. single day, too, a comprehensive exhibition demonstrating the impact the visitors had upon modern understanding of the renaissance--crucially in the re-evaluation of Botticelli--as well as the impact that contact with Italy had upon the development of culture in northern Europe will certainly be mounted somewhere. In the meantime, this exhibition displayed in swings that used to house the Uffizi archives, makes a true good start. Its catalogue, the English-language version printed in sole two thousand copies and destined to become a collector's item, will be a starting point for all time to come scholars working in this area.

Inevitably the visitors took more than they gave to Florence, fountainhead of visual and literary tillage in the western world. That being the case, it ought to be shaming to British and American curators and art historians that it has been left to Margherita Ciacci, an Italian and a professor--what is more of sociology from the University of Florence, to curate this important exhibit If the exhibition had been place on in Britain or America the importance of Florence as a factor in the evolution of the Pre-Raphaelite motion would probably have been more thoroughly explored. And if, sadly, neither exhibition nor catalogue is quite as advantageous as they might have been, this can assuredly be explained the haste with which they have been assembled. A cast that deserved years for its particular realisation has been imperfectly accomplished in just month This haste is mirrored both in the absence of pictures that might have told a vital part of the story on the contrary the loan of which could not be negotiated in time, and in the poor quality of more [i]or[/i] less of the translations from the catalogue's original Italian.

Of course, the exhibit represents an Italian perspective upon its subject. There are nineteenth-century Italian painters in the exhibition who will probably be as fresh to other visitors as I am ashamed to say they were to me (Lorenzo Gelati, Ferdinando Buonamici, Ruggero Panerai and Telemaco Signorini to name on the other hand four; and I could proceed on). Credit must therefore be given to Italian art historians who have not alone overcome the sort of parochialism of which I am guilty, on the other hand also rejected the prejudices that informed their educations, and learned to diocese nineteenth-century British painting with novel eyes. As Raffaele Monti says in his title essay, these images have 'saved us from the dangers of believing in the totalitarian myth of the avant-garde'. This exhibition is a part of the proces of rediscovery, revaluation and reorientation carried upon in such shows as 'The last Romantics' (Barbican, 1989) and "The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jone and Watts' (Tate, 1997) and restores an international dimension to that proces (of which, perhaps, the "French Symbolist painters' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 was the dawn).

The first revelation as single passes through the rooms is a large painting, A procession in the public way of Florence (1867), by Jane Benham Hay. Many will remember her England and Italy (1859) from the 'Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists' exhibition at Manchester in 1997 This display confirms her importance. The painting exhibits the influence of Leighton (who was apparently her friend anti teacher) as well as that of Saverio Altamura (who was her lover); it also clearly consigns to the decoration by Giovanni di Ser Giovanni upon the Adimari chest in the Accademia. The complicated trail of influence, from the painters of the Italian quarttrocento, to the Pre-Raphaelite expatriates, to a younger generation of Tuscan artists (such as Ricciardo Meacci and Giuseppe Catani Chiti, the latter exhibited in the exhibition) and upon to the emergent of Symbolism, is well described in valuable catalogue essay through Nadia Marchioni. Unfortunately, what is explicit in the work is only implicit in the exhibition, which may appear to be incoherent to the casual visitor.

There is also an essay here, 'Dreaming in Italian', by the agency of one of the curators of the Manchester exhibition, Pamela Gerrish Nunn about women painters who were liberated, personally as well as artistically, by dint of moving to Italy. Several of them feature in the exhibition, notably Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and Annie Robinson Swynnerton. Evelyn Pickering married the ceramicist William D Morgan, whose work does not appear in the exhibition for a certain number of reason, although work by Galileo Chini (whose work is real like De Morgan's) and from the Cantagalli factory (where De Morgan's designs were produc after he and his wife mov to Florence) does. Evelyn was also the niece of Roddam Spencer Stanhope, a frail on the contrary long-lived painter who occupied a magnificent villa upon Bellosguardo overlooking Florence. In a great coup the curators have tracked down and reassembled the polyptych he made for the memorial chapel at consecrated Trinity, Florence. Stanhope paid for the house of worship tower at Holy Trinity, designed by dint of G.F. Bodley and completed in 1904 with circulating medium raised by selling his prized Botticelli. sum of two units catalogue essays by Giampaolo Trotta document the villas, city residences and churches of the English and American communities in Florence.