The Medici’s Painter: Carlo Dolci and 17th-Century

The Medici’s Painter: Carlo Dolci and 17th-Century Florence is the first exhibition in America devoted to the luminous and meticulously rendered paintings and drawings of Italian artist Carlo Dolci (1616–1687). It provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the life and oeuvre of 17th-century Florence’s most important painter, whose reverence for detail, brilliant palette, and seemingly enameled surfaces earned the favor of patronage by the powerful Medici family.

The Davis Museum’s most ambitious Old Masters project to date, The Medici’s Painter includes over fifty autograph works—pictures of the highest pictorial, technical, and spiritual qualities—through exceptional loans from the world’s major museums and rarely seen works from private collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Louvre Museum in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

The Medici’s Painter is curated by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Head of the European Art Department & Elizabeth and Allan Shelden Curator of European Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts, with Francesca Baldassari. A fully illustrated catalogue, distributed by Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition. Edited by Dr. Straussman- Pflanzer, the volume features essays by leading scholars: Francesca Baldassari, Edward Goldberg, Lisa Goldenberg Stoppato, Scott Nethersole, and Eve Straussman-Pflanzer.

Generously supported by the Wellesley College Friends of Art at the Davis Museum, Davis World Cultures Fund, E. Franklin Robbins Art Museum Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts Museum Program Fund, Anonymous '70 Endowed Davis Museum Program Fund, The Judith Blough Wentz '57 Museum Programs Fund, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc., and the Office of the Provost and Dean of Wellesley College.