The Atelier De Matteis: The Revival of Stained Glass in Nineteenth-Century Florence

During my current sabbatical (2006-07), I am at work on a book about the artist Ulisse De Matteis (1827-1910), who established his stained glass company in Florence in 1859. In the spirit of nationalism that pervaded Italy following unification in 1861, Florentines sought to revive their medieval and Renaissance past. Accordingly, there was a significant demand for artists and architects who worked in these historic styles, including the De Matteis workshop. The De Matteis firm restored and created hundreds of windows for monuments throughout Italy and Europe, but De Matteis produced the bulk of his stained glass windows for buildings in Tuscany. In Florence, De Matteis’ work can be found in the Bargello, the Cathedral, Santa Croce, and Santa Trinita. In Siena, De Matteis collaborated for over forty years with the architect Giuseppe Partini, making new stained glass for almost every window in the city’s cathedral. Despite the prolific nature and renown of the atelier in its day, scholarship on De Matteis is scarce, and art historians today know very little about his life or workshop.

Ulisse De Matteis, St. Silvester, Santa Trinita, Florence, 1895-97

The central goal of my book is to place DeMatteis’ body of work within the larger political and cultural context of Tuscany following Italian unification in 1861. As Tuscany emerged from foreign rule and joined the sovereign Kingdom of Italy, artists and cultural critics considered the Baroque and neo-classical art created in Italy under absolute Medici rule and Austrian occupation as decadent and in poor taste. Luigi Mussini (1815-88), a painter who was a professor at the Academy in Siena and the leader of a popular artistic movement called Purism, consistently charged Tuscan artists to look for inspiration to the period before the Medici duchy to understand the true nature of art. In an 1870 essay on the restoration of the Florentine church of Santa Croce, Mussini praises De Matteis’ completion of the three double lancet windows in the choir and remarks with approval that the restorers have successfully returned Santa Croce to its glorious medieval state. In his periodical Arte e storia the Florentine Guido Carocci (1851-1916) regularly praises De Matteis for his authentic style and method, particularly in the case of the large lancet windows De Matteis made in the 1890s for the Florentine church of Santa Trinita, which were based on fourteenth-century models. For Carocci, this authenticity signaled a return to the true art of Italy; that is, to the working methods of fourteenth-century craftsmen who worked in Italy before it was dominated by foreign powers ousted from Tuscany only a few decades before. Through an examination of De Matteis’ richly documented working methods, I explore how he collaborated with architects and restorers to return Tuscany’s medieval monuments that were damaged by the “decadence” of the Baroque and Neo-classical styles to their glorious, medieval states.