Stefano Bardini

Stefano Bardini (1836–1922) was an Italian connoisseur and art dealer in Florence who specialized in Italian paintings, Renaissance sculpture, cassoni and other Renaissance and Cinquecento furnishings and architectural fragments that came on the market during the urbanistic reorganization of Florence in the 1860s and 70s.

Trained as a painter and expert copyist at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze from 1854, Bardini received increasing commissions as a restorer and expanded into selling works of art from 1870 onwards.

Working as a restorer Bardini, who successfully removed some Botticelli frescoes from the Villa Lemmi, was commissioned to remove the frescoes commissioned by Jakob Salomon Bartholdy from several of the German Nazarene circle of painters from Casa Bartholdy, Rome, which had been purchased by Berlin, in 1886–87. His esthetic, barely distinguishable restoration of Simone Martini's Saint Catherine of Alexandria, now in the National Gallery of Canada, has been examined as an outstanding example of the seamless restorations that his generation preferred.

Many well-known works of Renaissance art bear a Bardini provenience. The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, has some twenty works that passed through his hands, notably the Benedetto da Maiano Madonna and Child, the Bernardo Daddi Saint Paul and the Portrait of a Youth by Filippino Lippi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art conserves eight paintings that Bardini once owned, including Veronese's Boy with a Greyhound, and Giovanni di Paolo's Coronation of the Virgin from the Robert Lehman collection, as well as the baroque portrait bust of Ferdinando de' Medici by Giovanni Battista Foggini and an eagle lectern by Giovanni Pisano. Bardini's connections with Bernard Berenson resulted in several of Bardini's purchases finding their way to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, where Berenson was the guiding light; among them are two North Italian Romanesque stylobate, column-supporting lions and a basin, purchased from Bardini in 1897. The much-damaged marble of a curly-haired youth from the Borghese collection, employed by Stanford White as a fountain figure in the Payne Whitney house at 972 Fifth Avenue, New York City, which remained in situ as the house was bought for the French Cultural Services, then made headlines in 1996 when it was attributed as a youthful work of Michelangelo. belonged to Bardini, Stanford White's mainstay in Florence for panelling, paintings and sculpture and Renaissance furnishings, who supplied White with two 16th-century wooden ceilings reinstalled in Whitney's palazzo among the caseloads of works of art he shipped across the Atlantic to White.

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