The small Neo-Renaissance style villa that holds Siviero’s collection was among the works directed by the architect Giuseppe Poggi in 1875, during the extensive renovation of Florence when the city was the capital of Italy. The small villa has four floors. The basement held the domestics’ apartment and the storerooms. The ground floor, slightly raised, was Rodolfo Siviero’s apartment. It is the part of the house which is currently open to the public and it faithfully conserves the furnishings as they were when the collector past away. The two upper floors, where Rodolfo Siviero’s parents and his sister lived, are not yet opened to the public. Siviero bought the villa at the end of the Second World War from the renown art historian Giorgio Castelfranco. It is an affluent home with fine furniture and beautiful architectural ornaments. Fireplaces, columns, antique furniture, paintings, sculptures and household objects show the variety of things that Siviero chose and placed with care in order to harmonize the style of his home. The dining-room is probably the most fascinating room with its pictorial decoration on the ceiling done by the academic artist Stefano Ussi (1822-1901), together with a mix of different and contrasting pieces of art which characterized Rodolfo Siviero’s eclectic taste.

The collection contains twelve works of Giorgio De Chirico (1888-1978): oil paintings on canvas, tempera paintings, sketches and drawings. They document the intense, although not always serene, relation between the two men. Within this group, the self-portrait from the early Forties, bought by Siviero for eighty thousands lire and exhibited at the Biennale of Venice in 1942, is one of the most significant works. This very high quality painting is from the mature period of the artist which followed his Metaphysical phase and is rich with references to the great masters of the past, from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Like De Chirico, Siviero was a strenuous defender of the Italian cultural heritage. He admired its great artistic tradition and was convinced that the most stimulating and significant cultural models were to be found in the past. Despite the harsh criticism of others toward the neo-Baroque works of the painter, Siviero considered De Chirico to be the principle "classic" artist of the 1900s and appreciated his return to tradition and his use of ancient statuary and mythological references. Siviero had a particular interest in De Chirico’s portraits which dominated his collection by the artist and which is were a focus in Siviero’s critical essays.

The wooden panel, meant to be used for private devotion, depicts in the foreground the kneeling Virgin, her hands joined in prayer as she worships the baby Jesus. Saint Joseph is seated behind them and in the background a donkey and an ox look out from the manger. The artist shows himself to be up to date with the latest advancements in perspective of the Renaissance period and has composed the picture with a three-dimensional space that convincingly gives the impression of depth. Due to the small size of the panel, however, the overall impression is that the elements of the composition seem slightly compressed and unbalanced. The picture is attributed to an anonymous painter named, Master of the Johnson Nativity, from a work by him which is conserved in the Johnson collection in Philadelphia. He is a Florentine master with a style inspired by Alesso Baldovinetti and Filippo Lippi, whose composition, style and facial features he often imitates. Recently the identification of this anonymous painter has been proposed as Domenico of Zanobi, a painter working, according to the existing documentation of the time, in the 1460s in Florence. Domenico di Zanobi is mentioned among the collaborators of Filippo Lippi and this fact contributes to the credibility of the proposed identification. The presence in Siviero’s collection of this work, which, although executed in the second half of the 15th century, looks earlier and owes much to the models at the beginning of the 15th century, documents Siviero’s interest for Florentine Renaissance art and his special love for Masaccio.

Among the characters from Greek Mythology is Hylas, the handsome young companion of Hercules during the quest to find the golden fleece. At a stop during the voyage, Hylas was sent to find water and went to a spring inhabited by lovely water nymphs. The nymphs, struck by the beauty of Hylas, pulled him into the water where he was never heard from again. In the marble panel of the Siviero Collection, Hylas is made up of a combination of pieces of precious stones of different colors and materials: His body is realized in veined marble, his cape in red porphyry, mother of pearl makes up the band around his head and the belt across his chest to which his sword is attached, the water is created by small pieces of turquoise, the background is of green serpentine stone. The panel is a copy of a masterpiece of the 4th A.C. century which is currently in the National Museum of Ancient Rome in Rome and which comes from the basilica of Junius Bassus which was built in 331 and was destroyed in 17th century. The rich decorations of inlayed marble flooring and wall coverings of the basilica, exemplifying the splendour and level of the artistic technique which was achieved in ancient Rome, was partially saved when the building was destroyed. In 1958 the remains of this decoration were illegally exported to Switzerland and Siviero succeeded in recovering them and brought them back to Italy. A handwritten label by Siviero on the back of the panel indicates that the Hylas inlay was a reproduction commissioned using left-over pieces of stone from the Roman basilica of Junius Bassus.

The crowded scene simultaneously presents several episodes of the Passion of Christ: from Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane that one glimpses in the background to the moment of Christ’s arrest that unfolds in the foreground and which converges in the culminating act of Judas kissing Jesus. In the composition there is also a depiction of Simon Peter as he re-sheaths his sword after having cut off the ear of the servant of the High priest. The incredible variety of weapons that have been reproduced, in fact, no piece is the same, adds to further the liveliness of the scene, already rich in detail and overflowing with different characters. Cornelius Engelbrechtsen (1468-1533), dominant figure in the artistic scene in Leyden, knew how to blend the knowledge of the Flemish figurative culture with the art of the Italian Renaissance, creating from this union his own personal style. The analytic description of reality, a characteristic element in Flemish art, blends, in fact, in a harmonic way with the new mannerist Italian trend, here represented by the particular attention to the rendering of the clothes and the armour, from the exaggerated pursuit of the expressiveness of the faces that sometimes leads to grotesque features and of the use of elegant forms and costly paints. The painting, among the most valuable of the small nucleus of Flemish paintings present in the collection, testifies to the appreciation of Siviero for Northern painting, of which he praised the "different sensibility, opposite from our own", and admired the "dream-like fantasy".

This painted wooden statue, made in the second half of the 15th Century, represents a life-sized Saint Roch. Wearing a tunic tied at the waist by a rope belt and with a cloak which hangs from his shoulders, the saint is standing erect with his legs slightly apart, while he uncovers his thigh to show his plague sore. The statue appears without any of the objects normally associated with the saint, such as a dog and a walking stick, which perhaps have been lost. The devotion of San Roch began in the 1300s when the saint went on a pilgrimage to Rome and dedicated himself to the cure of people sickened by the plague thereby catching the disease himself. For the miraculous cures that have been attributed to him both while he was alive and through prayers after his death, Saint Roch is invoked as protector against the plague. In the 1930’s there was a renewed interest on the part of art historians for these wooden statues but Rodolfo Siviero already had an appreciation for wooden statues which he expressed through the acquisition of some interesting examples from different eras and of different styles. The statue still looks well made despite the wearing away of the color and some missing pieces. In the restauration work on Saint Roch, carried out by Leonetto Tintori and Alfio Del Serra, Siviero’s reasons for certain choices in the method and conservation of the statue are well explained. Abandoning the reconstructive method of restauration typical of the 1800s, Siviero was in favour of the modern practice which respected the work without straying, through arbitrary additions and complicated interventions, into the falsification of the piece.

The stool in the Siviero collection has the shape characteristic of stools of the 1500s, of which other examples can be found in the Florentine museums, but this one is particular in that the seat opens with a hinge to reveal a hole with a wide ring around it and a space underneath for an extractable pot. This is a "commode stool" or a portable toilet. In the Renaissance, furniture of this type was generally found in the bedroom, sometimes placed in a niche carved into the wall or in a small room next to the bedroom. Despite the fact that, around the middle of the 15th Century, the architect Leon Battista Alberti condemned this "dirty practice", this piece of furniture continued to be sited in the household inventories for the rest of the 1500’s. Eleonora da Toledo, Duchess of Tuscany, herself, in 1553, even had a "segetta" or "little seat", another name for this commode, in her bedroom in the Palazzo Vecchio. Besides, if the stools or "seggette" were emptied by a servant immediately after use, the risk that they were smelly and dirty, was reduced. In the houses of nobles, the use of the "seggetta" was personal, unlike the latrine with its several holes which was designated for the use of the servants. In general, the ring in the seat was padded and the pot used was of metal, brass or pewter. The style of the stool often varied, from the seggetta with its box-like shape covered in velvet or other cloth, to a chair with armrests. Some particularly luxurious examples were even made of inlaid wood.

Dominating the guest bedroom is an elegant bed with wrought iron columns, topped by a canopy painted on the inside with a wash drawing on wood with decorative motifs and secular subjects which are in harmony with the bed’s function. The structure of the bed and of the canopy both appear to be originals from the first half of the 1600’s. The pictorial decoration on the dome are of the style of the Florentine artist Bernardino Poccetti (1548-1612), tireless fresco painter and artist of a lively narrative vein. The columned beds began to be seen in Italy towards the end of the 15th Century and they spread rapidly due to the hanging curtains which increased their functionality with respect to the normal beds at the beginning of the Renaissance. The first examples were characterized by a slender and graceful frame, with time this was replaced with an architectural model of strongly monumental framework. Despite the older dating and the use of iron instead of wood, the bed in Casa Siviero corresponds to a more archaic type of columned bed and, in fact, does not have lateral curtains. This valuable piece of furniture fits well inside the design of Siviero, collector of art that, taking as a model the illustrious examples of local collectors from Bardini to Stibbert, configured his collection with a variegated mix of styles and objects to recreate a tasteful and fascinating ambiance.

This graphic work executed in tempera on paper is a proof for, or a copy of, the cover realized by De Chirico for the fashion magazine, Vogue, published on 15 November 1935 in the English edition and on 15 December of the same year in the French edition. The work is related to the visit to New York by the artist in the 1930’s which was full of meetings, events, expositions and sales of art. In the proof, next to the references to the world of fashion, one finds elements significant to the life of the artist. The chair and armadio are reminiscent of a stage set while the picture within a picture introduces a symbolic element which is always present in the works of De Chirico. On the back of the proof, a handwritten note by Siviero reads, "G. De Chirico told me the painting I will give to you, but the frame will cost 300 lira. Year 1942, Siviero" offers a curious testament to the personal relationship between the two men. If the group of works of De Chirico in the collection are important to reconstructing the critical thoughts of Siviero regarding art of the 1900s, the choice of the other artists represented in the collection is no less meaningful. Among the painters are Pietro Annigoni, Bruno Becchi, Charles Hawthorne, Ugo Pignotti and Ardengo Soffici. The sculptors are Quinto Martini, Francesco Messina, Antonio Bert and Giacomo Manzù. Particularly interesting is the collection of medals that link the institutional activities of Siviero and with the initiatives promoted by him while a plenipotentiary minister.

The Etruscan mirror, which goes back to the end of the 4th Century B.C., is one of most significant pieces in the archaeological collection of Siviero that has over forty-seven works which represent all of the principal classes of antique objects from sculpture to bronze objects to those of ceramic and of glass. Fruit of a slow and methodical research, the collection of antique objects gives testimony to the profound interest of Rodolfo Siviero for the great civilizations of the Mediterranean: Greek, Etruscan and Roman. The eclectic nature that characterizes the collection appears to be the consequence of a criteria of selection of pieces based essentially on personal taste and orientation rather than from an ornamental interest to decorated the house. The Etruscan mirror, that is in an excellent state of conservation, is interesting also due to the subject it portrays. A dancing Silenus with a short horse’s tail accompanied by an animal, perhaps a panther, with wide-open jaws and surrounded by grape vines or ivy. The representation of a character such as Silenus, tied to the world of Dionysus, appears in line with the prevalent themes used in the decoration of these objects: love, beauty and fertility. The figures portrayed on the Etruscan mirrors allow one to follow, for a continuous period of four centuries, the formation and development of local beliefs related to the religious and to the mythological, as well as the reception and re-elaboration of stimuli from the Greek world.