I 200 Anni della Galleria Bazzanti

The Postal Service of the Italian State considered the Pietro Bazzanti and Son Art Gallery of Florence an institution of great worldwide importance.
In March 2022 they came to visit us in the Gallery some technicians of Poligrafico dello Stato, Post Office and Telegraph section, for an interview with the owner Ferdinando Marinelli and to visit the Gallery. They returned to ask for permission for the project they described to us: the creation of an official postmark to be affixed to the stamps of two illustrated postcards on which to print details of sculptures in the Gallery, highlighting the 200th anniversary.

The Bazzanti Gallery was opened in 1822, and therefore in this year 2022 falls the 200th anniversary of its foundation.
Two details of important works present in the Gallery were chosen as images: the head of the Dancer with her hands on her hips by Canova, the original of which is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and a detail of the bronze Triton by the sculptor Sergio Benvenuti.

The Second World War began a period of great difficulty which did not spare even the Pietro Bazzanti Gallery.
No brightening appeared on the horizon when in 1960 the Gallery passed to the Marinelli family, owners since 1905 of the Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry in Florence. The new management was able to exploit the years of economic recovery by also reopening its own sculpture studio, and giving greater vigor to its very popular Foundry.
For the historic Gallery, all this meant a new course, marked by a more managerial direction able to control the artistic quality of the works more rigorously and to organize more extensive assistance in exporting.
In addition to the nineteenth-century plaster models inherited from the old property, those from the gipsoteca of the Foundry were added, all casts made on the originals by Ferdinando Marinelli Sr., creator of the homonymous Foundry, made in the 1930s.
The already attractive catalog of the Bazzanti gallery has grown with a vast and highly qualified collection of bronzes, known throughout the world since the early 1900s.
In 1976 the reins of the Gallery and the Foundry passed into the hands of Ferdinando Marinelli Jr., who still today feeds the two souls of Bazzanti: that of the marble sculpted in his studio, and that of the bronzes cast in the Foundry with the ancient Renaissance techniques of lost wax casting learned from grandfather Ferdinando Marinelli Sr.