The Italian Courtyard
Various, casts after Donatello, Verrocchio, Michelangelo and others · Casts made about 1900 to 1912 after originals of the fourteenth to sixteenth century
Walk through the door and you are suddenly in Florence. The hall is built as a copy of the courtyard of the Bargello, the medieval palace that is now the Florentine sculpture museum, with an open arcade, a staircase climbing one wall and daylight falling through the glass roof. Filling it are casts of the most celebrated sculptures of the Italian Renaissance: Michelangelo's David towering over everything, Donatello's bronze David and his Saint George, Verrocchio's mounted condottiere Colleoni, and the golden Gates of Paradise that Ghiberti made for the Florence Baptistery.
Everything here is plaster, and that is the point. Ivan Tsvetaev, who founded the museum, ordered the casts from the workshops attached to the great European museums, and each was taken directly from the original, so that every chisel mark and every fold of drapery is exact. Look at the David: at over five metres it is the same size as the marble in Florence, and you can walk round it and see the oversized hands and the tense turn of the head just as Michelangelo cut them. Some of the casts were tinted to imitate bronze or marble. The heavy Romanesque portal and the tomb of Saint Sebaldus from Nuremberg add a northern note.
When the museum opened in 1912 this was the biggest and most expensive of its halls, and the casts were the reason the building existed. Museums of casts fell out of fashion in the twentieth century and many were destroyed; Moscow kept its collection, and the Italian Courtyard is now valued as a rare intact example of how art was taught a century ago. It is also simply one of the most beautiful rooms in the city, and Muscovites come here to sit on the benches and read.
Did You Know? The cast of Michelangelo's David was so tall that a special opening had to be made in the wall to bring it into the hall in 1912.
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