The Opificio delle Pietre Dure Museum Florence

The present day location is that to which the grand ducal workshops were transferred under Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine. These are in a group of old buildings which formed part of the former Hospital of St. Matthew and the adjacent convent of St. Nicholas. It was here that the laboratories, stores for old and precious materials and the little museum housing drawings, studies, incomplete hard stone inlays and those for the internal use by the Opificio were gathered. Among the more important pieces are Florentine and Northern landscapes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, models and stone panels for the Cappella dei Principi, paintings on "pietra paesina" (where court painters created remarkable effects in paint), water stoups and precious boxes. From the eighteenth century date Zocchi's beautiful paintings designed to be rendered in stone, examples of scagliola decorations and, from the nineteenth century, tablets creating bizarre visual effects which document the vanishing of a technique still striking to visitors.
Of great interest are the work tables and instruments and a rare and widely representative range of lithological samples.

The Museum annexed to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, currently a modern centre specialising in conservation, directly derives from the manufactory for the artistic production and workmanship of semiprecious stones which was officially founded in 1588 by Ferdinand I de’ Medici.

The physiognomy of the Museum does not correspond to a particular collector’s taste but is more the reflection of life and events of a centuries-old artistic production.

The most prestigious creations, frequently gifts on the part of the Florentine Grand Dukes, are conserved in palaces and museums throughout Europe, whereas the incomplete works were left behind in the workshops, along with modified or subsequently disassembled works. To these may be added all those artefacts which survived the 19th century dispersion, ending only in 1882 when the collection took on museum form. The latter examples, some of which are highly impressive and sophisticated, are sufficient in outlining the historic course of craftsmanship which unfolds over three centuries. The Museum, furthermore, possesses an important reserve of ancient marbles and semiprecious stones, whose assortment depends on the inlay technique employed at the time.

The Museum was renovated in 1995, to Adolfo Natalini’s design. The collection has been rearranged, under the guidance of Anna Maria Giusti, according to theme: the rooms created out of the great hall document works produced in the Grand-ducal Medici and Lorraine periods, whereas the 19th century rooms contain works of the post-Unification period. The mezzanine of the hall is dedicated to the craftsman’s techniques and includes a rich set of stone samples, work benches, tools and even didactic examples of a few of the production phases of intarsia and inlay work. It is, indeed, possible in this way to trace the full process, from the initial design through to the finished work, and to discover the most intimate mechanisms of a fascinating episode of Florentine art history.