The Study

This is a small thing, a domestic interior on a wooden panel, and the museum knows less about it than you would expect. Its catalogue sheet dates the panel only to somewhere in a span of about 25 years in the middle of the 19th century, and adds that the picture offers little to secure even the attribution to Borrani, though the gallery does file it under his name. What is there is a room recorded quickly in bright patches of colour: a sofa with a guitar propped against it, a red curtain with a yellow band behind it, a dresser of painted maiolica plates. The panel came to Florence in 1947 in a private donation, and has hung since in the modern gallery on the second floor of Palazzo Pitti. On its back someone wrote the number six in pencil.