We never stop talking about Alexandre Dumas. While the children of France have started reading en masse The Count of Monte Cristo after the success (more than 9.3 million spectators) of the film by Alexandre de la Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte released this summer, a new event has come to enhance, if necessary, the excellence of our writer national: the publication by Editions du Chêne of The Gallery of Florence told by Alexandre Dumas, established, presented and annotated by Cristina Farnetti and Jocelyn Fiorina, an exceptional work never published until today. Everything is extraordinary here, the author’s science as well as the history of this colossal work (box set in 7 volumes, 1,700 pages and 4,430 kilos, 149 euros). But let’s start at the beginning.
In 1840, Alexandre Dumas, having barely arrived in Florence, was asked to write a guide to the Uffizi Museum. He made it a masterful creation, with on the one hand the commentary of 200 masterpieces and on the other hand, a history of the Medici, eight centuries of painting in Italy and portraits of painters, all being sent monthly ( and this for four to five years) to subscribers in the form of booklets. It was on this bound set that the professor at CentraleSupélec and president of the Society of Friends of Alexandre Dumas Jocelyn Florina came across one day in Florence. A rarity – there are only around ten left in the world or only two according to experts, including one nestled in the library of the Institut de France, to the great surprise of its president at the time, Xavier Darcos. Still, Jocelyn Florina decides to bring him back to life.
40 models later
Thanks to the support of Cristina Farnetti, a researcher employed at the Italian Ministry of Culture, he obtained authorization from the Uffizi Museum. He still has to convince a publisher. One Sunday afternoon in November 2022, he sent an email to Emmanuel Le Valois, the director of Le Chêne: “I have an unpublished work by Alexandre Dumas, would you be interested?” “I immediately responded, ‘Yes, with pleasure,’” the enthusiastic editor confides, “and we met the following week. Then we left very quickly for Florence.”
Two years and 40 models later (“in order to find the best way to visually convey the presence of this company”), here is the Dumas monument, enriched with all the works in color. Monument which would have served as a playground for future novels, Three Musketeers At Count of Monte Cristo _ as well as “a certain Lady Clareck” seen in Rubens’ biography, “who will become the famous Milady”. A treasure, this box…