Etra Studio Tommasi

Active since: 2014
Areas of interest: Modern and contemporary art; sculpture, painting and photography; cultural workshops and presentations

Five centuries ago, working in a ‘garden’ in Via della Pergola, Benvenuto Cellini cast the magnificent Perseus, which today stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi showing the head of Medusa to passers-by in Piazza della Signoria. That workshop was brought back to life in the early 1970s, taking the name of the sculptor who purchased it and becoming the site of a new artistic experience: Marcello Tommasi worked here for nearly 40 years, leaving behind a rich collection of works in marble, plaster and bronze, together with drawings, paintings and engravings. The recovery of the studio involved carefully restoring the premises as well as archiving the corpus of the works. The architecture was preserved, not only in the structures but even in the arrangement of the furnishings, as if a red thread had been drawn connecting the Cinquecento with our times. Since 2014, Studio Tommasi has been managed by Francesca Sacchi Tommasi, who offers the city a space for the works of contemporary painters and sculptors and for the recovery of the great tradition of figurative art. Yet the gallery is also a meeting place which periodically holds workshops, concerts and performances in the fields of poetry, music and theatre.