Art Unwrapped 2024

Art Unwrapped annually brings  a well-loved painting from the Ulster Museum collection to the widest possible viewership, staging the exhibition within easy reach of the city centre in order to ‘unwrap’ it for new audiences.

This unwrapping, as ever, has been placed in the very capable hands of our Year 2 Fine Art painting students, who will be on-hand to share their own personal interpretations of the stories behind the painting, in their role as gallery guides.

Art Unwrapped 2024 will see our Fine Art students working with the Ulster Museum to bring two works by 16th/17th Century artist Cristofano Allori.

St Francis in Prayer

Oil on copper, Ulster Museum Collection. Donated by W.J. Braithwaite, 1906.

St. Francis of Assisi is best known for his deep reverence for all nature, his preaching to the birds and calling all animals his brothers. At the end of his life, St. Francis experienced a light-filled vision of an angle playing music, and felt the wounds of Christ (the stigmata). Allori has depicted the saint at prayer in a dark landscape, as yet unaware of the approaching vision which has already begun to light the night sky.

Landscape with Grove of Trees, a Town in the Distance

Black chalk with touches of red chalk, Ulster Museum Collection.

The attribution of this drawing to Cristofano Allori was proposed by Miles Chappell who wrote Allori ‘made many drawings of scenes an vignettes of nature…His picturesque views of Tuscan scenes with rustic houses and winding roads framed by twisting trees with sinuous branches and graceful, detailed clusters of leaves are unified by an atmospheric quality deriving from…soft, often blurred chalks’. It is likely that Allori used such sketches as studies for the backgrounds of his paintings, such as the small depiction of St. Francis at Prayer in a night landscape.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Florence, Cristofano Allori was one of the leading painters in the region during the late 16^th early 17^th century. He received many commissions at the Medici court, and was in demand as a portrait painter and for his depictions of saints and religious scenes. He used dramatic lighting and dark backgrounds to accentuate his painting of skin and rich fabrics, and this highly-finished style was particularly suited to small, exquisitely detailed paintings of saints and biblical scenes. Allori was admired for his close adherence to nature, and for his delicate and closely observed depictions.