A show celebrating Florence's ties with Paul Cezanne looks at two Tuscan collectors' efforts to spread the French artist's name after recognizing his talents and becoming devoted fans of his work.
The exhibition runs in Florence's Palazzo Strozzi until July 29.
Egisto Paolo Fabbri (1866-1933) and Charles Alexander Loeser (1864-1928) were both born in the US but settled in Florence after spending time in Paris.
They collected around 50 paintings by Cezanne, who was still viewed as something of a solitary and experimental outsider at the time.
The show has proven an unique opportunity to see many of these works together, as both collections were broken up after World War II.
The paintings are now scattered around top museums such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London, the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg and Washington's National Gallery of Art.
"The collections left Florence but we wanted to reconstruct a puzzle that saw this cosmopolitan city deeply involved in the upswell of avant-garde art at the time," explained Cezanne expert Francesca Bardazzi, one of the show's curators.
Of the 100 works on display, around 20 are by Cezanne, including some of his most famous paintings: 'Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair', 'The Bathers' and 'House on the Marne', a very rare loan from the White House.
There has also been considerable excitement surrounding an early painting by the master, which was recently tracked down in a private Italian collection 60 years after it went missing.
The work is a copy of a painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese, Cena in Casa di Simone or the Meal at the House of Simon the Pharisee (1570).
"It was probably made between 1860 and 1870, when the young Cezanne went to the Louvre to copy past masterpieces, especially Italian and Venetian paintings," said Bardazzi, who rediscovered the painting after 10 years' research.
It was last seen in Florence in 1945, when it was part of an exhibition of Cezanne works owned by Fabbri.
"The turning point was when I managed to get in touch with Fabbri's heirs and made this important discovery thanks to an exchange of documents," Bardazzi continued.
The painting - an oil on canvas that is 29 cm by 61 cm - is on display with a letter Cezanne wrote to Fabbri in 1899 and a photograph of the artist with Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. Both items were found with the work.
The exhibition also includes fine paintings by some of Cezanne's contemporaries, such as Pissarro, Vincent Van Gogh Henri Matisse and John Singer Sargent.
In addition, there are a number of works by a school of Tuscan painters and sculptors who were influenced by developments in avant-garde art at the time, including Ardengo Soffici, Alfredo Muller, Oscar Ghiglia and Romano Romanelli.
Critics have described Cezanne (1839-1906) as the bridge between 19th-century Impressionism and the new forms of artistic expression that emerged in the 20th century, particularly Cubism.
