The story
Two young men look out of a panel by Pontormo, the Florentine painter, made around 1523. One of them holds a sheet with a passage from Cicero's treatise on friendship, and the picture is known as the Double Portrait of Friends. It hangs on the first floor of Palazzo Cini, a house on the Grand Canal at Campo San Vio, a short walk from the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
The house belonged to Vittorio Cini, an industrialist from Ferrara who built one of Italy's great private art collections in the 20th century. He bought the two 16th-century palaces that make up the building in 1919 and 1920 and lived here. After his eldest son Giorgio died in 1949, he set up the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in 1951, in his memory.
The gallery came later. In 1981 and 1982 Cini's daughter, Yana Cini Alliata di Montereale, gave his Tuscan paintings and decorative arts to the foundation, and the rooms opened in September 1984, arranged by the art historian Federico Zeri, who also wrote the catalogue. The display keeps the feel of a lived-in home, with furniture, enamels and porcelain among the pictures.
Most of the paintings are Tuscan, from the 13th to the 16th century, with works by Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi and Piero di Cosimo, and a Judgement of Paris given to Botticelli and his workshop. A second group comes from Ferrara, Cini's home city, with Cosmè Tura and Dosso Dossi. The palace opens for a season each year, roughly spring to autumn, and its upper floor is used for temporary exhibitions.
