937 - FRATELLI ALINARI (19th) Circle, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, around 1880, albumen paper print

FRATELLI ALINARI (19th) Circle, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, around 1880, albumen paper print Fratelli Alinari (19th century) Circle: Italy: Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, c. 1880, albumen paper print Technique: albumen paper print, mounted on cardboard Date: c. 1880 Description: The photograph shows the Palazzo Vecchio in a beautiful square with a horse; as the seat of the city parliament, it was the center of secular power in 14th-century Florence. Original photograph with high-definition sharpness. An early example of travel photography. Around the middle of the 19th century, more and more tourists from the bourgeoisie traveled to Italy. At that time, taking photographs required a great deal of time and involved expensive, cumbersome equipment. This made many tourists all the more grateful for the services of professional photography studios on site, allowing them to bring home a souvenir from their vacation or collect them as mementos. Famous photographers such as Carlo Naya, Giorgio Sommer, and the Alinari brothers photographed the most famous sights in their home cities and traveled themselves to photograph their customers’ favorite destinations, offering them as albumen prints. Ancient art treasures were also photographed and made available to travelers. The high-quality photographs of sculptures and frescoes continued to make an important contribution to documenting these art treasures and making them accessible to scholars from all over Europe, who previously had to rely on reproductions or engravings if they were unable to view the originals themselves. “Fratelli Alinari” in Florence is the oldest surviving photographic company in the world: founded in 1852, a good two decades after the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce succeeded in capturing an image on a tin plate. The Alinari brothers were Romualdo (1830–1891), Leopoldo (1832–1865), and Giuseppe (1836–1892). Leopoldo began taking photographs during the daguerreotype era and worked for the lithographer Guiseppe Bardi, with whom he founded a joint photography studio in 1850. In 1854, Leopoldo bought Bardi’s shares and, together with his brothers, founded the Fratelli Alinari studio. It became one of the most important Italian studios of the 19th century and later one of the largest photographic archives in the world, which still exists today. Keywords: 19th century, Historicism, Architecture, Italy, Size: Cardboard: 36.8 cm x 31.0 cm (14.5 x 12.2 in), Image: 24.3 cm x 18.8 cm (9.6 x 7.4 in) Condition: Good condition. The image is in very good condition. Slight staining in the center of the upper margin; slight diagonal streaks on the left half of the image; the cardboard is slightly wavy.