The Uffizi Gallery is a state museum in Florence, which is part
of the museum complex called the Uffizi Galleries and which
includes, in addition to the aforementioned gallery, the Vasari
Corridor, the collections of Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens,
which together make up quality of the works collected one of the
most important museums in the world.
The complex appears in
the list drawn up in 1901 by the Directorate General of Antiquities
and Fine Arts, as a monumental building to be considered a national
artistic heritage.
There are the most conspicuous existing
collection of Raphael and Botticelli, as well as the main nuclei of
works by Giotto, Tiziano, Pontormo, Bronzino, Andrea del Sarto,
Caravaggio, Dürer, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci and others. While the
pictorial works of the sixteenth and Baroque, but also of the
Italian nineteenth and twentieth centuries are concentrated in
Palazzo Pitti, the Vasari corridor housed until 2018 part of the
collection of self-portraits (over 1,700), which should then be
included in the exhibition itinerary of the Gallery of Statues and
Paintings, as already happens to a small extent.
The museum
houses a collection of priceless works of art, deriving, as a
fundamental nucleus, from the Medici collections, enriched over the
centuries by bequests, exchanges and donations, among which stands
out a fundamental group of religious works deriving from the
suppression of monasteries and convents between the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Divided into various rooms arranged by schools
and styles in chronological order, the exhibition displays works
from the 12th to the 18th century, with the best collection in the
world of works from the Florentine Renaissance. Of great value are
also the collection of ancient statuary and above all that of
drawings and prints which, conserved in the Cabinet of the same
name, is one of the most conspicuous and important in the world.
In 2022 it recorded 2 222 692 visitors, making it the most
visited museum in Italy.
With the establishment of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici in the ancient
municipal seat of Palazzo Vecchio, the policy
of exalting the monarchy within the city perimeter began. In 1560 the
duke wanted to bring together the 13 most important Florentine
magistracies, called offices previously located in various locations, in
a single building placed under his direct supervision, so as to flank
the old Palazzo della Signoria with a new government headquarters, in
keeping with the power political and military acquired by Florence after
the conquest of Siena. The site chosen for the new construction was a
strip of land between the southern side of Piazza della Signoria and the
Arno riverside, in a popular neighborhood where the river port of
Florence was located.
The works were entrusted to Giorgio Vasari
who was already in charge of the construction site of the adjacent
Palazzo Vecchio. The project envisaged a U-shaped building, consisting
of a long arm to the east, to be incorporated with the ancient
Romanesque church of San Pier Scheraggio, a short section overlooking
the Arno river and a short arm to the west, incorporating the Old Mint.
The offices of thirteen important Magistrates that regulated the
administration of the Medici State were to be located in the new
building; on the side of Palazzo Vecchio, from the ancient church of San
Pier Scheraggio, the following followed: the Nine Conservatories of the
Florentine Domain and Jurisdiction, the Arte dei Mercatanti, the Arte
del Cambio, the Arte della Seta, the Arte dei Medici and Speziali, the
University of Manufacturers and the Court of Merchandise; on the
opposite side the Officers of Honesty, the Tithes and Sales, the
Officials of the Grascia, the Magistrate of Pupils, the Conservators of
Laws and the Commissioners of the Bands.
To reduce expenses,
Cosimo, in addition to outsourcing the work to the lowest possible
price, granted unusual licenses to suppliers: the sand-makers were able
to extract sand from the bed of the Arno river at the current Ponte alle
Grazie (Rubaconte bridge); the stonemasons secured the use of the
sandstone quarry of the Fossato del Mulinaccio, in the Mensola valley,
near San Martino a Mensola, traditionally reserved for public works; the
masons use quarried stones extracted from the ditch of the fortress of
San Miniato, near the gate of San Niccolò and leftover paving stones
from the streets of Florence. He resorted to the imposition of
servitude, commanding the populations of some podesterias: the carters
of Campi and Prato, the stonemasons of Fiesole, the pickaxers of Figline
di Prato. The wood was bought from the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore.
The architect Giorgio Vasari was assisted in this difficult building
site by Maestro Dionigi (or Nigi) della Neghittosa.
For the
marriage of his son Francesco with Giovanna of Austria, in 1565, the
Duke decreed to open a raised and secret road between Palazzo Vecchio
and Palazzo Pitti, the new residence of the Medici dynasty and connected
directly to the bastioned circle of Florence. In just six months, Vasari
built the so-called Vasari Corridor, which, from Palazzo Vecchio, after
via della Ninna with a covered bridge, runs along part of the gallery,
crossing the Arno over the Ponte Vecchio, coming out in the Oltrarno
district, arriving in the Boboli Gardens and from there to Palazzo
Pitti; from this place a link was later set up to safely reach Forte
Belvedere. In August 1572 all the magistracies on the San Pier
Scheraggio side were already established in the new offices even if the
building was not completed.
In 1574 with the Duke Francesco I de' Medici the direction of the
works was entrusted to Bernardo Buontalenti, who completed the factory,
together with Alfonso Parigi the elder. In October 1580 the building was
completed with the joining, on the side of the Mint, "to the large and
ancient Loggia di Piazza". Between 1579 and 1581 the vaults of the
Gallery were frescoed with "grotesque" motifs by Antonio Tempesta and
later by Alessandro Allori, with whom Ludovico Buti, Giovanmaria
Butteri, Giovanni Bizzelli and Alessandro Pieroni collaborated.
In 1581 Francesco I, son of Cosimo, decided to close and use the loggia
on the top floor as a personal gallery where to collect his magnificent
collection of fifteenth-century paintings, contemporary with cameos,
medals, semi-precious stones, ancient and modern statues, goldsmiths,
small bronzes, armor, miniatures, scientific instruments and
naturalistic rarities, but also portraits of the Medici family and
famous men. He then made this collection open to visitors upon request,
thus making the Uffizi one of the oldest museums in Europe.
To
better organize the collection, starting from that same year,
Buontalenti built the Tribuna in the long arm of the Uffizi, inspired by
the Tower of the Winds in Athens, described by Vitruvius in the first
book of De architectura, the central nucleus of the Medici Gallery. In
1583 Francesco I had the terrace above the Loggia dei Lanzi transformed
into a hanging garden, now disappeared, where the court met to listen to
musical performances and other entertainment. The Porta delle Supplica
on Via Lambertesca also dates back to those years, characterized by an
unscrupulous juxtaposition of classical elements.
In the same
period (1586), it was still up to the genius of Buontalenti to complete
the Medici Theater built on the current first and second floors of the
eastern wing of the museum. It is a large double-height rectangular
room, surrounded by bleachers on three sides, with the princes' box in
the middle. In the 19th century, after being modified and used for
meetings of the Italian Senate, the theater, after the transfer of the
capital, will be divided into two floors: the first now houses the
Cabinet for Drawings and Prints, the second for some rooms of the
Gallery. Of the theater as a whole, only the Vestibule remains, where on
the left is what once constituted the entrance portal, today the
entrance to the Drawings and Prints Department; opposite, the three
doors of the Ricetto: on the central one, with wooden doors carved with
Medici coats of arms, there is the bust of Francesco I.
In 1587 with Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici, the collection was
enriched with the so-called "Giovian Series", a collection of portraits
of illustrious men undertaken by the Bishop of Como Paolo Giovio, which
today is exhibited high up among the beams of the statue galleries. By
will of the duke, closing off a terrace near the grandstand, the
so-called "room of geographical maps" was created, the walls of which
were frescoed by Ludovico Buti and Stefano Bonsignori with maps of the
"old Florentine domain", "of the State of Siena" and " of the Island of
Elba" and some canvases painted by Jacopo Zucchi with mythological tales
were placed on the ceiling. In the center of the room was a globe and an
armillary sphere (today in the Museo Galileo); moreover, the Small Room
of Mathematics was completed, intended to collect scientific
instruments, with a vault decorated by a beautiful woman,
personification of Mathematics, flanked on the walls by the Scenes with
the inventions of Archimedes.
On Ferdinando I's initiative, the
grand ducal laboratories were transferred to the Uffizi and in 1588 the
Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a state-run manufactory expert in the
processing of extremely precious objects, while the laboratories of
goldsmiths, jewelers, illuminators, gardeners, porcelain, sculptors and
painters in the west wing of the gallery and to allow access, the
so-called "Buontalenti" staircase was placed.
Near the factory,
seven rooms of the Gallery were destined to house the collection of arms
and armor, and a room was also set up with the carved precious stones
brought as a dowry by Christine of Lorraine. The repainting of some
frescoed ceilings by Ludovico Buti dates back to that period in 1588. In
1591 the Gallery was opened to the public upon request. With the death
of Ferdinand I in 1609, the Gallery remained unchanged for a long time.
Between 1658 and 1679, at the time of Ferdinando II de' Medici,
Cosimo Ulivelli, Angelo Gori and Jacopo Chiavistelli were asked to
fresco the ceilings, whose work was destroyed in 1762 and replaced by
new decorations by Giuseppe del Moro, Giuliano Traballesi and Giuseppe
Terreni. Ferdinando's wife, Vittoria della Rovere, the last descendant
of the Dukes of Urbino, brought the vast Urbino legacy to Florence: a
highly refined nucleus of works by Titian, Piero della Francesca,
Raphael, Federico Barocci and others. Other works from the Venetian
school arrived through the work of Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici, brother
of the grand duke, who began with great passion to collect drawings,
miniatures and self-portraits in his collection.
Between 1696 and
1699 under the reign of Cosimo III de' Medici, the geniuses of Giuseppe
Nicola Nasini and Giuseppe Tonelli decorated the vaults of the arm
facing the Arno, and shortly after the west arm of the gallery was
expanded, using the new rooms to house a delightful collection of
self-portraits, porcelains, medals, drawings and small bronzes.
In the Foundry, or pharmacy, they collected what stimulated above all
the naturalistic curiosity of the Renaissance: some mummies, numerous
stuffed animals, ostrich eggs and rhinoceros horns. As regards the
collections, Duke Cosimo III bought numerous Flemish paintings (many by
Rubens) and some precious Roman statues, such as the famous Venus de'
Medici, a very rare Greek original which rightfully became one of the
best-known sculptures in the gallery.
By now the Medici dynasty had ended in 1737 after the death of Gian
Gastone, the latter's sister, Anna Maria Luisa, with the Convention of
the same year, ceded the Medici collections to the Lorraine dynasty,
provided that the works remained in Florence and inalienable: it was the
act, punctually respected by the Lorraines, which allowed the intact
conservation of the vast and sublime collections up to the present day,
without dispersing or taking the road outside Italy, as happened to the
equally exceptional collections of Mantua or Urbino .
Between
1748 and 1765 a vast graphic survey was carried out, coordinated by
Benedetto Vincenzo De Greyss. On August 12, 1762, a fire destroyed part
of the eastern corridor, also destroying many of the works kept,
promptly rebuilt and redecorated.
Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena,
opening the Gallery to the public in 1769 and providing for the
construction of a new entrance, based on a project by Zanobi del Rosso,
promoted a radical transformation of the Gallery, entrusting its
direction to Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni and the reorganization, completed
in the 1780s -1782, to Luigi Lanzi, who followed the rationalistic and
pedagogical criteria of the Enlightenment, with "his own kind of thing
or at most two" in each room. The armory was removed from the Gallery,
the collection of majolica was sold and the scientific instruments moved
to the Observatory; this fact can be resolved in a rationalistic vision
of that Enlightenment which distinguished science from art and wanted to
concentrate painting in the Uffizi, separated from ancient sculpture and
the minor arts, in opposition to the eclecticism of the Renaissance.
From 1793 some exchanges with the Imperial Gallery in Vienna,
facilitated by kinship ties between the respective royal houses, saw the
arrival of masterpieces by Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Dürer
and others, in exchange for Florentine works from the 16th and 17th
centuries , including Fra Bartolomeo: in hindsight it was above all
Florence that gained.
In 1779 the Sala della Niobe was created by
Gaspare Maria Paoletti, where a complex of ancient sculptures depicting
Niobe and her children were set up, coming from the Villa Medici in
Rome.
With the French Revolution and the Italian Campaign of 1796, the
Uffizi, like a large part of the Tuscan artistic heritage during the
Napoleonic looting, was depleted of works of art chosen by Dominique
Vivant Denon, director of the Musée Napoleon, sent to Paris. Among the
stolen works are the Medici Venus removed from the Tribuna of the
Uffizi, the Madonna with a long neck, the Portrait of Leo X,
subsequently returned with the Restoration and the work by Antonio
Canova during the Congress of Vienna. However, the Accademia Galleries
had a much worse fate, and the works collected in Pisa, Massa, Carrara
and Fiesole which they saw take the road to the Louvre and are still
exhibited there today.
Between 1842 and 1856, 28 marble statues
were inserted in the niches of the pillars outside the Gallery, with
illustrious Tuscans from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Among the
most valuable of the series are the statue of Giotto by Giovanni Duprè,
on the left on the third pillar, the Machiavelli by Lorenzo Bartolini,
on the eleventh, the statue of Sant'Antonino by Duprè, on the right on
the fourth pillar, and the Michelangelo by Emilio Santarelli.
During the Risorgimento, when Florence was elected capital of Italy
(1865-1871), the Medicean Theater was extensively modified to be adapted
to the hall of the Italian Senate, also welcoming famous personalities
such as Manzoni.
In the second half of the 19th century, the
Uffizi started to become above all a collection of paintings, some
Renaissance statues were removed and transferred to the Bargello Museum
and some Etruscan statues which were transferred to the Archaeological
Museum.
The Royal Post Office (adapted by Mariano Falcini) had
its headquarters in the short arm to the west since 1866, and today,
after a restoration in 1988, there are some exhibitions of material
coming mainly from deposits.
In 1889 the Medici theater was
divided into two floors and dismantled. Today the space it occupied
contains the rooms of the "Primitives" of the Gallery and the Cabinet of
Drawings and Prints.
In 1900, the picture gallery of the
archispedale of Santa Maria Nuova was purchased, including the Portinari
Triptych from the church of Sant'Egidio, and from the beginning of the
twentieth century, with purchases and transfers from various churches
and religious institutions, areas such as the fourteenth and the early
fifteenth century, extraneous to the historic nucleus of the museum.
During World War II, the rooms of the Uffizi were emptied and the
works of art, deposited in shelters deemed safe, returned to their
headquarters in July 1945. A part had been requisitioned by the Germans
and transferred to the province of Bolzano, but was recovered.
By
separating the Medici theater into two floors and obtaining six rooms,
the first ones were restructured in 1956 on a project by Giovanni
Michelucci, Carlo Scarpa, Ignazio Gardella.
In 1969 the Contini
Bonacossi Collection was purchased.
On 27 May 1993, following the
massacre in via dei Georgofili, a mafia attack which caused the death of
five people and damaged some rooms of the Galleries and the Vasari
Corridor, many pieces of the collection were placed in deposits and
gradually, with the restoration and the securing of the western wing,
are back in the museum layout.
In 1998 the international
competition for the new exit of the Uffizi Gallery was won by Arata
Isozaki together with Andrea Maffei, but the project has not yet been
completed.
Another long-term project was the creation of the "Grandi Uffizi",
doubling the exhibition area thanks to the move of the Florence archive
from the first floor, drawing works from the deposits (which are located
on the top floor) and thus expanding all sections, hitherto slightly
penalized by spaces.
The plan for rearranging the rooms and
renewing the systems was carried out by the directors Antonio Natali and
then, from 2015, by Eike Schmidt, who modified the original project, for
example by including the Contini-Bonacossi collection in the normal
visit itinerary in the "Blue" salt.
The construction was begun in 1560 and carried out by adopting the
Doric order, according to Vasari, "safer and firmer than the others,
[...] always much liked by the lord duke Cosimo". In 1565 the so-called
Uffizi Lunghi and the section facing the Arno were already completed.
The Uffizi building is made up of two main longitudinal buildings,
connected to the south by a shorter side that is completely similar,
thus giving rise to a "U"-shaped complex, which embraces a square and
opens out towards Piazza della Signoria in perspective, with a perfect
shot of Palazzo Vecchio and its tower.
The three buildings have
the same module: on the ground floor an architraved loggia covered with
a barrel vault, consisting of bays delimited by pillars with niches and
divided into three intercolumns by two columns placed between the
pillars; corresponding to this module are three openings in the false
mezzanine above which serve to illuminate the portico and three windows
on the first floor which alternate between a triangular and curvilinear
tympanum and are included between pilasters; finally, on the top floor,
a loggia resumed the tripartite form and would later house the original
"Gallery" of the Uffizi.
On the ground floor, a portico runs
along the entire length of the west and south sides, and along the east
side as far as via Lambertesca; raised on a podium of a few steps, the
portico is made up of Doric columns and pillars with niches for statues
that support an architrave, but is covered by long barrel vaults,
decorated with rectangular frames in relief, which are connected to each
other by bands drawing a broken and uniform geometric motif.
The
architraved portico represents a great novelty in the history of
architecture, as the medieval porticoes, and then the Renaissance ones,
were made up of a series of arches and never of architraves, both in
Florence (such as the portico of the Spedale degli Innocenti) , and
elsewhere, apart from Michelangelo's Palazzo Senatorio which is in fact
one of the models of Vasari's project.
On the upper floors a
module of three panels is repeated, three windows with balconies and
tympanums respectively triangular, circular and triangular again (first
floor) and three openings on the upper loggia (now the gallery on the
second floor), divided by two small columns. The floors are divided by
majestic string courses. The architectural elements are underlined by
the use of pietra serena (particularly that extracted from the Mensola
valley), which stands out against the white plaster, according to the
more typically Florentine style begun by Brunelleschi.
The short
side is characterized by a large arch forming a serliana which
scenically frames the view of the Arno, surmounted by a loggia, open
both on the square in front and on the Arno, as a real theatrical
backdrop, inspired by contemporary scenographic achievements. On the
ground floor there is the statue of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, by
Temistocle Guerrazzi. On the first floor the large windows have an
arched crowning and in front of the central one, the largest,
corresponding internally to the Verone, there are three statues: Cosimo
I standing by Giambologna (1585), flanked by the reclining
personifications of Equity and Penalty, both by Vincenzo Danti (1566).
In the niches of the pillars of the loggia it was planned to insert a
series of statues of famous Florentines, the realization only starting
from 1835.
The portal ("porta delle Supplica") built by Bernardo
Buontalenti on via Lambertesca is very original: it is crowned by a
broken tympanum, but for greater originality Buontalenti reversed the
two halves, obtaining a sort of "winged" tympanum, which recalls the
cues animalistic and organic of his architecture.
In 1998 the
architects Arata Isozaki and Andrea Maffei won the international
competition for the redevelopment project of Piazza Castellani on the
back to use it as the New Exit of the Uffizi museum. After various
vicissitudes, the executive project was completed and approved by the
Ministry of Cultural Heritage in February 2009 and is awaiting
completion.
The environment, consisting of three vestibules, was created at the
end of the eighteenth century with the completion of the monumental
staircase, the new access to the Gallery, by the will of the Grand Duke
Pietro Leopoldo. In the first vestibule are the marble and porphyry
busts of the Medici, from Francesco I to Gian Gastone; communicating
with this is the rectangular vestibule, decorated in the vault by
Giovanni da San Giovanni with mythological Caprices, set up with altars,
ancient and modern busts; in the elliptical vestibule there are Roman
statues, sarcophagi and ancient reliefs. The door that leads into the
Gallery, flanked by two Molossian dogs, Roman copies from the 1st
century AD, is surmounted by the bust of Leopold.
The three
corridors that correspond to the three bodies of the building run along
the entire internal side and the halls open onto them. The ceilings are
decorated with frescoes and the large windows reveal their primitive
aspect of an open covered loggia.
Today the corridors house the
collection of ancient statuary, started by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who
kept the works in the Garden of San Marco near the Palazzo Medici. The
collection was enlarged by Cosimo I after his first trip to Rome in 1560
when he chose to allocate the statues to embellish Palazzo Pitti and the
portraits and busts for Palazzo Vecchio. Finally, it was further
increased at the time of Peter Leopold of Lorraine, when the works of
Villa Medici were brought to Florence, mostly collected by the future
Grand Duke Ferdinando I, a cardinal at the time. It is curious to note
that these works, today often distractedly avoided by visitors, were the
main reason for visiting the gallery until the early nineteenth century.
According to some sources, it was an essay by John Ruskin that revived
interest in the museum's Renaissance painting, hitherto mistreated.
The sculptures are of great value and date mainly from Roman times,
with numerous copies of Greek originals. Sometimes the incomplete or
broken statues were restored and integrated by the great sculptors of
the Renaissance. The arrangement of the sculptures today follows as much
as possible that of the late eighteenth century, when they allowed the
comparison between ancient and modern masters, a very dear theme at the
time, and therefore the function of the statues is still essential and
strongly characterizing the origin and historical function of the
gallery.
The first, long corridor is the east one, richly
decorated in the ceiling with grotesques dating back to 1581, while a
series of portraits, the Gioviana series, runs along the edge of the
ceiling, interspersed with larger paintings of the main exponents of the
Medici family, the Aulica series begun by Francesco I de' Medici, with
portraits by Giovanni di Bicci to Gian Gastone. The paintings of the
Gioviana series and the Aulica series, which also continue in the
corridor on the Arno and in the west corridor of the Gallery, constitute
one of the largest and most complete collections of portraits in the
world.
The pictorial portraits are counterbalanced by the series
of Roman busts, chronologically ordered at the end of the eighteenth
century so as to cover the entire imperial history.
Among the
most important statuary works are a Hercules and Centaur, from a late
Hellenistic original, integrated into the figure of the hero by Giovan
Battista Caccini in 1589; a Barbarian King, composed in 1712 starting
from only the ancient bust; Pan and Daphni, from an original by
Heliodorus of Rhodes from the early 1st century BC; the dancing Satyr or
young Bacchus, from a Hellenistic original, restored in the sixteenth
century. Further on there is a statue of Proserpina, from a Greek
original of the 4th century BC, the ancient copy of the Pothos of Skopas
(4th century BC). On the sides of the entrance to the Tribuna are a
Hercules, from an original by Lysippos, and a bust of Hadrian that
belonged to Lorenzo the Magnificent. In the last part of the corridor
there are two Venuses, from originals of the 4th century BC. and a
Hellenistic Apollo, which was located at the entrance to Villa Medici
and invited, with the restored right arm, to enter the house, as if it
were the kingdom of the god himself.
The room was created in 1921, in which works mostly from Rome are
exhibited. The reliefs include that of a chariot (5th-4th century BC)
and the frieze of the Athena Nike (restored in the 18th century by
Bartolomeo Cavaceppi). The two reliefs with workshop scenes from the 1st
century AD belong to the "plebeian" trend of Roman art. The reliefs of
the Ara Pacis are casts: the Medici possessed the original slab of
Saturnia Tellus, which returned to Rome in 1937 to recompose the
monument. The fragments of pilaster strips with spirals also date from
the Augustan period, while on the sides there are two reliefs of cupids,
one with the attributes of Jupiter (thunderbolt) and one with those of
Mars (armour): they were part of a very famous series in the Middle
Ages, from which Donatello was inspired for the choir of Santa Maria del
Fiore.
The Temple of Vesta and the Scene of Sacrifice come from a
frieze from Hadrian from the 2nd century. The sarcophagus with the
Labors of Hercules is characterized by a more accentuated luminous
contrast, through the drill work; the different ages of Hercules
depicted allude to the periods of his life.
Rooms 2 to 6 are dedicated to medieval art. With the first, from the
thirteenth century and by Giotto, one enters the nucleus of the
"primitive" rooms, set up by 1956 by Giovanni Michelucci, Carlo Scarpa
and Ignazio Gardella, who covered the room with a trussed ceiling,
imitating medieval churches. The room has a strong impact due to the
presence of the three monumental Maestàs by Cimabue, Duccio di
Buoninsegna and Giotto, painted a few years apart. In the Maestà di
Santa Trinita of 1285-1300 Cimabue attempted to free himself from the
Byzantine styles, seeking greater volume and plastic relief, with an
unprecedented softness of the nuances; opposite is Duccio's altarpiece,
called Madonna Rucellai (about 1285), built with a rhythmic structure
and graceful figures, more influenced by the coeval pictorial experience
of French Gothic; finally, in the center of the room, the Maestà di
Ognissanti by Giotto (about 1310) with a monumental layout and built
much more plastically, accentuating the chiaroscuro and the volume of
the bodies. The Badia polyptych from around 1300 is also by Giotto.
The first room also has a very select representation of
thirteenth-century painting, including a triumphant Christ from the end
of the twelfth century and a Christus patiens, rare due to their high
quality and very good state of conservation.
The following room
(3) is dedicated to the great masters of the Sienese fourteenth century,
in which the greatest masters of this school face each other: the
Annunciation by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi (1333) and the
Presentation in the Temple by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1342) , both from the
Cathedral of Siena, and the Blessed Humility Altarpiece (1340) by Pietro
Lorenzetti.
This is followed by the Florentine Trecento room (4),
which shows the development of art after Giotto with the contributions
of his pupils and more original personalities such as Giottino and
Giovanni da Milano.
The International Gothic room (5-6) is
dominated by the monumental Coronation of the Virgin (1414) by Lorenzo
Monaco and by the blaze of magnificence and elegance of the Adoration of
the Magi (1423) by Gentile da Fabriano, executed for the Florentine
merchant Palla Strozzi .
Peerless is the nucleus of early Renaissance painting, from the 1420s
to the mid-century. The elaboration of the new language is testified by
the Sant'Anna Metterza (1424) by Masolino and Masaccio in room 7: by
Masaccio are the sculptural Child and the Virgin, painted with a solemn
body so austere and realistic that it can no longer be defined as
"Gothic" ". In the same room are the Battle of San Romano by Paolo
Uccello, which testifies to his perspective "obsession", and the works
of Beato Angelico and Domenico Veneziano which indicate the search for
new formats for the altarpieces and the birth of the " light painting".
The large room 8 is dedicated to Filippo Lippi, developer of
Masaccio's proposals and ferryman of Florentine art towards that
"primacy of drawing" which was his most typical characteristic. Here is
also the extraordinary Double portrait of the Dukes of Urbino by Piero
della Francesca, one of the best-known icons of Renaissance aesthetics.
The exhibition is completed by the works of Alesso Baldovinetti and
Lippi's son, Filippino, who was a breakthrough artist at the end of the
15th century.
Room 9 is dedicated to the Pollaiolo brothers,
Antonio and Piero, among the first to practice an agile and snappy
contour line, which served as a model for many subsequent artists. In
the series of Virtues created for the Court of Merchandise, one stands
out for its formal elegance: it is the Fortress, one of the first works
by the young Botticelli (1470).
The Botticelli room, vast due to the unification of rooms 10-14,
brings together the best collection in the world of works by master
Sandro Botticelli, including his masterpiece, the Primavera and the
famous Birth of Venus, two emblematic works of the sophisticated
Neoplatonic culture developed in Florence in the second half of the
fifteenth century. These works were created in the 1480s and are the
first large-scale works with a profane subject of the Italian
Renaissance. They were painted for Lorenzo de' Medici (not Lorenzo the
Magnificent, but a cousin of his who lived in the Villa di Careggi, with
whom, among other things, he did not have good blood).
In this
room it is possible to retrace the entire pictorial evolution of the
master, with the graceful Madonna in glory of seraphim and the Madonna
del Roseto, more youthful works still linked to the style of Filippo
Lippi and Verrocchio, the Portrait of a man with a Cosimo the Elder
(1475), where we are already witnessing a maturation of the style
probably linked to the study of realism in Flemish works, to
mythological works, such as the moving Pallas and the Centaur, an
allegory of human instincts divided between reason and impulsiveness,
but guided by divine wisdom.
As the sixteenth century approached,
the ultra-religious reactionary wave of Girolamo Savonarola began to
become increasingly pressing in Florentine society and this manifested
itself more or less gradually in all the artists of the time. Even
Botticelli, after a sumptuous work such as the Madonna del Magnificat,
began to adopt a freer style, free from the geometric lucidity of the
perspective of the early fifteenth century (Madonna della Melograna,
Altarpiece of San Barnaba), with some archaic experiments such as the
Incoronazione della Virgin where the master returns to the gold
background in a scene apparently inspired by Dante's reading. The
darkest period of Savonarola's preaching brings a definitive wave of
pessimistic mysticism to his painting: Calunnia (1495) symbolizes the
failure of the humanist optimistic spirit, with the observation of human
baseness and the relegation of the truth.
But this room also
contains numerous other masterpieces: the placement of the Portinari
Triptych is particularly apt, a Flemish work by Hugo van der Goes from
around 1475 brought by a banker from the Medici firm to Bruges in 1483,
which with its formal extraneousness to the surrounding works well
renders the effect of a shining meteor that this work had in the
Florentine artistic circles of the second half of the fifteenth century.
Upon closer examination, however, we begin to perceive the affinities
with the works created later, the greater attention to detail, the
better luministic rendering due to oil painting that the Florentine
painters tried to imitate, even copying some elements of the work
Flemish, like the clear homages of Domenico Ghirlandaio in his analogous
Adoration of the Shepherds in the basilica of Santa Trinita.
Another Flemish work is the Deposition in the Sepulcher by Rogier van
der Weyden (about 1450), with the composition taken from a panel by
Beato Angelico, which testifies to the reciprocal exchanges between
Flemish and Florentine masters.
Room 15 documents the artistic beginnings of Leonardo da Vinci,
starting from the first documented work, the Baptism of Christ of 1475,
the work of his master Verrocchio in which the young Leonardo painted
the head of the angel on the left, the landscape and perhaps the modeled
after the body of Christ. Another early work is the Annunciation,
painted by the twenty-year-old master, where the qualities of Leonardo's
nuanced and his attention to atmospheric vibrations are already visible
(think of the angel who has just landed), but with some perspective
errors, such as the book on which the Virgin rests an arm, which rests
on the ground on a base much more advanced than the legs of the Madonna.
The Adoration of the Magi, on the other hand, is an unfinished work in
which the innovative sense of the genius of Vinci is evident, with an
extremely original composition centered on the Madonna and Child in a
glittering scene of numerous moving figures, among which, however, the
traditional San Giuseppe or the hut.
In the room are also
represented artists active in Florence in those years: Perugino (three
large altarpieces), Luca Signorelli and Piero di Cosimo.
Room 16
(of geographical maps) was originally a loggia and was closed at the
request of Ferdinando I de' Medici. It was decorated with geographical
maps of the Medici domains and festoons of fruit and flowers on the
beams of the ceiling, the work of Ludovico Buti. Among them, Ferdinando
I de 'Medici placed the mythological canvases commissioned from Jacopo
Zucchi, when he was still a cardinal in Rome.
Room 17 is called
the Mathematical Room, also created for Ferdinand I to house his
scientific instruments. The ceiling was in fact decorated with an
allegory of mathematics and episodes celebrating ancient scientific
culture. Today it exhibits the collection of modern bronzes and some
ancient sculptural works.
The Tribuna is an octagonal room which represents the oldest part of
the gallery. It was commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici in 1584 to
arrange the archaeological collections and later all the most precious
and beloved pieces of the Medici collections were placed there. Having
become very popular at the time of the Grand Tour, it is said that it
was an inspiration for the Wunderkammer of numerous European nobles. The
room is covered by a dome encrusted with shells and mother-of-pearl and
crossed by golden ribs and a lantern on which was a wind rose, connected
to the outside by a weather vane. The Tribuna has scarlet red walls,
given by the velvet upholstery, on which the paintings and shelves for
objects and statues are hung; the plinth, now lost, was painted by
Jacopo Ligozzi with birds, fish and other naturalistic wonders; in the
center was a small temple-casket, that is an octagonal piece of
furniture that kept the smallest and most valuable pieces of the
collection; the floor was made with marble inlays.
The Tribune,
its decorations and the objects it contained alluded to the four
elements (Air, Earth, Water, Fire): for example, the compass rose in the
lantern evoked the air, while the shells set in the dome evoked the
Water; the fire was symbolized by the red of the walls and the earth by
the precious marbles on the floor. All this symbolism was then enriched
by statues and paintings that developed the theme of the Elements and
their combinations. The meaning entrusted to the whole was, moreover,
the glory of the Medici, who, thanks to the divine will, had attained
earthly power, symbolized by the magnificent rare and precious objects
they possessed.
Today, although transformed over the centuries,
it is nonetheless the only room in which one can understand the original
spirit of the Uffizi, that is, a place of wonder where one could
directly compare the works of the ancients, represented by sculpture,
and those of the moderns, with the paintings. Around the precious table
inlaid in hard stones (from 1633-1649) are placed in a circle some of
the most famous ancient sculptures of the Medici, such as the Dancing
Faun (Roman replica of an original from the 3rd century BC), the
Wrestlers (copy from the imperial ), the Grinder (who sharpened the
knife in the group of Marsyas), the Scythian (copy of a statue of the
school of Pergamum which was part of a group with Marsyas), the Apollino
and above all the famous Venus de' Medici, a Greek original from the 1st
century BC among the most celebrated representations of the goddess.
The monumental cabinet in semi-precious stones contained the
collection of priceless precious stones, ancient cameos and worked
semi-precious stones, one of the most loved collections by the Medici,
who often had their initials engraved on the most valuable pieces: today
they are exhibited in various locations, at the Museo degli Argenti, the
National Archaeological Museum of Florence and the Museum of Mineralogy
and Lithology.
The rest of the east arm (rooms 19-23) is dedicated to various
Italian and foreign Renaissance schools: in these rooms one fully grasps
the didactic spirit of the Uffizi, which developed in the 18th century
through exchanges and specific additions, to represent the development
of painting in all its most important strands.
Room 19, formerly
the Armory, has an original vault which was destroyed and was repainted
in 1665 with the Allegories of Florence and Tuscany, triumphs, battles
and Medici coats of arms by Agnolo Gori. The room clarifies Umbrian and
Tuscan painting with masterpieces by artists already encountered in
Leonardo's room: Luca Signorelli, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi and
Piero di Cosimo. The latter artist, famous for the magical and
imaginative tone of his works with mythological subjects, is represented
here by his masterpiece Perseus liberates Andromeda. The room closes
with paintings from the Emilian, Forlì and Marche schools.
Room
20 (by Dürer) is in itself unique in Italy, hosting five works by the
undisputed master of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer, including
the Adoration of the Magi of 1504, which shows the debts to Italian
painting in the use of perspective and color. Lukas Cranach is also
represented by various works, including the large panels of Adam and Eve
(1528). Albrecht Altdorfer and Hans Holbein the Younger are instead
present in room 22. The ceiling of room 20 has a fresco decoration with
original sixteenth-century grotesque, while the views of Florence were
added later in the eighteenth century; curious is the view of the
basilica of Santa Croce without the nineteenth-century facade.
Room 21, frescoed on the vault by Ludovico Buti with battles and
grotesques (the figures of "Indians" and animals from the New World are
interesting), is dedicated to Venetian painting. If the works of
Giorgione and Vittore Carpaccio are not unanimously judged autograph by
the critics, Giovanni Bellini's masterpiece of the Sacred Allegory is
present, with a cryptic meaning not yet fully interpreted. Here is also
the only representative of fifteenth-century Ferrarese painting in the
gallery, Cosmè Tura and his San Domenico (about 1475).
Even room
22 (of the Flemings and Germans of the Renaissance) is in itself unique
in the national museum scene, with examples that testify to the prolific
season of exchanges between Florence and Flanders in the 15th century,
such as the Portraits of Benedetto and Folco Portinari by Hans Memling
(c. 1490) or the Portraits of Pierantonio Baroncelli and his wife Maria
Bonciani, by an anonymous Flemish master (c. 1490). It is no coincidence
that here are also works by the more "Flemish" Italian painter,
Antonello da Messina (Saint John the Evangelist and Madonna with Child
and crown-holding angels, around 1470-1475). The ceiling is decorated by
Ludovico Buti (1588), with lively battle scenes.
Finally, room 23
is dedicated to the masters of northern Italy Mantegna and Correggio. Of
the first are three works including the triptych from the Palazzo Ducale
in Mantua (1460), which shows his extraordinary ability to evoke the
magnificence of the ancient world. Correggio's various phases are
documented with the Madonna and Child between two musician angels (a
work from his youth), the Adoration of the Child (about 1530) and the
Rest from the Flight into Egypt with Saint Francis (about 1517), works
of astonishingly great originality forerunner of seventeenth-century
painting. The room closes with a series of paintings from the Lombard
school, especially related to the Leonardos. This room was also part of
the armory, as recalled by the ceiling frescoed by Ludovico Buti with
workshops for the production of weapons, gunpowder and models of
fortresses (1588).
Room 24 is the Cabinet of Miniatures, with an
ellipsoidal plan, visible only from the outside, which houses the
collection of around 400 Medici miniatures, from various eras and
schools and mainly depicting portraits. It was decorated at the time of
Ferdinand I, who had placed here the collection of stones and cameos
brought as a dowry by his wife Christine of Lorraine. Over time it has
housed various collections (bronzes, goldsmith's art, Mexican objects,
jewels, gems...) which today are found elsewhere, especially in the
Silver Museum. The current appearance is the result of
eighteenth-century interventions by Zanobi del Rosso, who on behalf of
the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo obtained the oval shape and recreated the
decoration (1782).
The Corridor on the Arno, spectacular for its views of the Ponte
Vecchio, the river and the hills south of Florence, has housed the best
works of ancient statuary for centuries, due to the spectacular nature
of the setting and the maximum luminosity (in fact it overlooks south).
The frescoes on the ceilings have a religious theme, executed between
1696 and 1699 by Giuseppe Nicola Nasini and Giuseppe Tonelli, on the
initiative of the "very Catholic" Grand Duke Cosimo III, apart from the
first two bays which date back to the sixteenth century: one with a
false pergola and one with grotesques. Among the statues on display are
a Cupid and Psyche, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, and the
so-called Dying Alexander, a Hellenistic head derived from a Pergamon
original, an oft-quoted model of pathetic expression. At the crossroads
with the main corridors there are two statues of the Olympia type,
derived from the seated Venus of Phidias, one from the 4th century and
one from the 1st century with the head remade in the modern era.
On the side facing the Arno are the Seated Maiden ready to dance (2nd
century BC, part of a group with the dancing Satyr of which there is a
copy in front of the entrance to the Tribune) and a black marble Mars
(from an original by 5th-4th century BC). On the opposite side there is
a fragment of a Lupa in porphyry, a copy of an original from the 5th
century BC. and a Dionysus and satyr, with only the ancient bust, while
the rest was added by Giovan Battista Caccini in the late sixteenth
century.
In the west corridor, used as a gallery from the second
half of the 17th century after having housed the artisan workshops, the
series of classical statues of mainly Roman provenance continues,
largely purchased at the time of Cosimo III on the Roman antiques
market. Among the most interesting works are the two statues of Marsyas
(white and red), placed facing each other and Roman copies of a late
Hellenistic original: the red one belonged to Cosimo the Elder and the
head was integrated, according to Vasari, by Donatello . Further on is a
copy of Myron's Discobolus, with the right arm restored as if it were
covering its face (for a long time it was aggregated to the Niobe
group). Mercury is a valuable nude derived from Praxiteles restored in
the sixteenth century. To the left of the exit vestibule is a bust of
Caracalla, with the energetic expression that inspired the portraits of
Cosimo I de' Medici. On the opposite wall is a Muse from the 4th century
BC. of Atticiano of Aphrodisias and an Apollo with the cithara, ancient
bust elaborated by Caccini. The celestial Venus is another ancient bust
integrated in the seventeenth century by Alessandro Algardi: for this
reason, when the original arms were found, they were not reinstated. The
Nereid on the Hippocampus derives from a Hellenistic original.
Remarkable is the portrait realism of the Bust of a Child, also known as
the Child Nero.
At the end of the corridor is the Laocoon copied
by Baccio Bandinelli for Cosimo I de' Medici at the request of Cardinal
Giulio de' Medici, with additions by Bandinelli himself taken from
Virgil's story. It is the only entirely modern statue in the corridors,
which allows the comparison, once so dear to the Medici, between modern
and ancient masters.
The decoration of the ceiling took place
between 1658 and 1679 on the initiative of Ferdinando II de' Medici,
with subjects linked to illustrious Florentine men, as examples of
virtue, and the personifications of the cities of the Grand Duchy of
Tuscany. The painters who participated in the work were Cosimo Ulivelli,
Angelo Gori, Jacopo Chiavistelli and others. When the last twelve spans
were lost in a fire in 1762, the frescoes were reinstated by Giuseppe
del Moro, Giuliano Traballesi and Giuseppe Terreni.
Rooms 25 to 34 host 16th century masterpieces. It begins with room 25
of Michelangelo and the Florentines, with the absolute masterpiece of
the Doni Tondo by Michelangelo, highly innovative both in terms of
composition and the use of colors (1504), surrounded by Florentine works
from the school of San Marco (Fra' Bartolomeo, Mariotto Albertinelli),
with the calm and staid monumentality that inspired Buonarroti and
Raphael himself.
Rooms 26 and 27, respectively previously
dedicated to Raffaello/Andrea del Sarto and to Pontormo/Rosso
Fiorentino, are the rearrangements after their works have been
transferred to the larger rooms on the first floor ("red rooms").
Room 28 houses the masterpieces of the Venetian school by Titian and
Sebastiano del Piombo. A series of portraits and nudes refer to the
first, including the famous Flora and the Venus of Urbino, works of
refined and enigmatic sensuality.
In rooms 29 and 30 there are
masterpieces by Emilian painters, including Dosso Dossi, Amico
Aspertini, Ludovico Mazzolino, Garofalo and, above all, Parmigianino,
whose Madonna with a long neck shows with virtuosity the overcoming of
the aesthetic canons of the Renaissance in favor of something more
eccentric and unnatural, with a complex and definitely desired
ambiguity, as well as sinuously beautiful.
Rooms 31 and 32 are
again linked to Venetian painters, in particular Veronese, Tintoretto,
the Bassanos, Paris Bordon and others. Due to the narrow and broken
shape, room 33 has been set up as a "Corridor of the sixteenth century",
dedicated to medium-small format works that show the variety of
figurative proposals elaborated over the century: ranging from the
crowded and minutely captious compositions of the artists who they
participated in the decoration of Francesco I's studiolo in Palazzo
Vecchio, in the erotic refinements of the Fontainebleau school, from the
official portraits and to the simplified works according to the dictates
of the Counter-Reformation.
The itinerary is closed by room 34,
of the Lombardi, in which the major artists active in the region
throughout the 16th century are represented. Among these stand out
Lorenzo Lotto, the link between Venetian and Lombard culture (Portrait
of a young man, Susanna and the elders, Holy Family and saints),
Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo from Brescia, extraordinary creator of
material effects, and Giovan Battista Moroni from Bergamo, unsurpassed
portraitist. Between room 34 and room 35 is the access to the Vasari
Corridor.
The west corridor houses other rooms that overlook it directly. These
rooms, after the opening of the new rooms on the ground floor, are
almost all being rearranged. The Niobe Hall was closed from spring 2011
to December 21, 2012 for restoration work.
Room 35 is dedicated
to Federico Barocci and the Counter-Reformation in Tuscany, with
numerous examples of the main exponents of the time. Del Barocci stands
out the large altarpiece of the Madonna del popolo.
Room 40 was
formerly the museum's exit vestibule. There are various examples of
classical statuary and some paintings, including a two-sided standard of
Sodom. Room 41 was already dedicated to Rubens and is now used as a
deposit. The grandiose room 42 was built by the architect Gaspare Maria
Paoletti at the end of the eighteenth century to house the numerous
statues of the Niobìdi Group, a series of Roman statues, copies of
Hellenistic originals brought to Florence in those years. The myth of
Niobe and her children is linked to maternal love, which led the
unfortunate woman to boast so much about her offspring (seven males and
seven females) that she compared herself to Latona, mother of Apollo and
Artemis, thus arousing the wrath of gods who took their revenge by
killing the children one by one. The sculptures came to light in Rome in
1583 and were part of the decorative kit of Villa Medici (purchased by
Cardinal Ferdinando), from which they were transferred to Florence in
1781, where they were displayed directly in this room. Of the enormous
canvases on the walls, two are by Rubens (part of the unfinished cycle
of Henry IV of France), one by Giusto Sustermans and one by Giuseppe
Grisoni.
Room 43, formerly from the Italian and European
seventeenth century, now houses only a very select nucleus of Italian
works, after the foreigners were moved to the "blue rooms" on the first
floor. Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, Guercino, Mattia Preti, Bernardo
Strozzi and others are represented.
Room 44 (Rembrandt and the
Flemings) is being rearranged, while room 45 (from the eighteenth
century) has been integrated with other Italian works after the foreign
ones were moved to the first floor. The works of Canaletto, Giambattista
Tiepolo, Francesco Guardi, Alessandro Magnasco and Rosalba Carriera
stand out. Important for size and quality is the canvas of Cupid and
Psyche by Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
The adjoining room is that of
the bar, which leads to the terrace above the Loggia dei Lanzi, an
excellent observation point for Piazza della Signoria, Palazzo Vecchio
and Brunelleschi's Dome. The small terrace fountain contains a copy of
Giambologna's Nano Morgante riding a snail, now in the Bargello but
originally created for this site. The bar also leads to the new
staircase, inaugurated in December 2011, which leads to the rooms on the
first floor.
Inaugurated in December 2011, the ten blue rooms on the first floor (46-55) were dedicated to foreign painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing from the rooms on the first floor, and above all from the deposits, it was possible to fully develop the presence of Spanish, French, Dutch and Flemish painters in the Medici collections, also making it possible to trace the different schools, particularly in the Netherlands. Room 46 is dedicated to the Spaniards (Velázquez, El Greco, Goya, Ribera), 48 and 51 to the French (Le Brun, Vouet, Boucher, Chardin), 47 to the school of Leiden, 49 to Amsterdam (Rembrandt) , 50 in The Hague, 52 and 55 in the Southern Netherlands (Jan Brueghel the Elder, Teniers, Brill, Rubens and van Dyck), 53 in Delft and Rotterdam, 54 in Haarlem and Utrecht.
Nine "red" rooms, from 56 to 61 and from 64 to 66, were set up in
June 2012, with works of Florentine mannerism, paying particular
attention to their relationship with the ancient. In fact, room 56
houses the best of the gallery's Hellenistic sculpture, including a
Niobide, the Gaddi Torso and a crouching Venus. The relationship with
the statuary is better clarified by the next room, in which three rare
monochromes by Andrea del Sarto, executed for the 1513 carnival, are
related to the front of the sarcophagus with a depiction of a marine
thiasus (c. 190).
Followed by the rooms of Andrea del Sarto (58)
with the famous Madonna delle Harpie and the artists of his circle (59),
those of Rosso Fiorentino (60), of Pontormo (61), and two rooms
dedicated to Agnolo Bronzino (64 and 65), linked respectively to sacred
production and to the relationship with the Medici, with the famous
family portraits including that of Eleonora di Toledo with her son
Giovanni.
The series closes with a room dedicated to Raphael
(66). Here are works from the Umbrian/Florentine phase (the Portraits of
the dukes of Urbino Elisabetta Gonzaga and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro,
the Portrait of a young man with an apple), including the famous Madonna
del Cardellino, a harmonious synthesis of different pictorial
experiences (Perugino, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo...). The Roman
period of Raphael's art is characterized by greater monumentality and
full possession of the color technique, well represented here by the
great Portrait of Leo X with cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de'
Rossi.
Between 2012 and 2018, rooms 62 and 63 hosted works by Alessandro Allori, Giorgio Vasari and other artists working in Florence in the second half of the sixteenth century.
We then reach the Verone sull'Arno, with large windows overlooking
the river and the square of the Uffizi. Here are three monumental
sculptures.
The Medici Vase (in the centre), a large neo-Attic
crater among the treasures brought to the museum from Villa Medici,
dates back to the second half of the 1st century BC. and is
extraordinary in size and quality. On the base there is a bas-relief
scene with the Achaean heroes who consult the oracle of Delphi before
leaving for the Trojan war.
Mars Gradivus is by Bartolomeo
Ammannati, with the God represented as in the act of inciting an army
standing at its head, while on the opposite side is Silenus with young
Bacchus by Jacopo del Duca, a copy of a Roman statue now in the Louvre,
from a bronze original from the 4th century, perhaps by Lisippo: these
two statues were also in Villa Medici and decorated the loggia
overlooking the garden.
The last rooms of the museum, in the east arm on the ground floor,
host works by Caravaggio, the Caravaggios and Guido Reni. Set up in 1993
and moved further north in the 2000s to leave more space for temporary
exhibitions (the halls on this side in fact follow one another almost
identically one after the other on the entire side of the square; just
over half are currently valorised). They will have no number until the
entire first floor set-up is completed.
The works of Caravaggio
in Florence are not many, but they well represent the youthful phase of
the master, full of famous masterpieces from the first artistic
productions. The Bacchus stands out, so disenchantingly realistic, and
the Head of Medusa, actually a wooden shield for representation
occasions, such as tournaments. Medusa's expression of terror impresses
with the raw violence of the representation. A more typical work of the
mature style is the Sacrifice of Isaac, where the violence of the
gesture is miraculously suspended.
Other works allow an immediate
comparison with works of similar themes by followers of Caravaggio:
Artemisia Gentileschi with Judith beheading Holofernes (one of the few
female artists to have an important place in the history of art),
Battistello Caracciolo, Bartolomeo Manfredi (special room) , the Dutch
Gerard van Honthorst, Italianized in Gherardo delle Notti (special
room), Rustichino, Spadarino, Nicolas Regnier and Matthias Stomer.
The last room of the gallery is dedicated to Guido Reni, the
Bolognese leader of the seventeenth century. He was a master of
seventeenth-century classicism, even if the work of David with the head
of Goliath is linked by the dark background to the Caravaggesque works
of the previous rooms. More abstractly idealized is the Ecstasy of Saint
Andrew Corsini, which entered the Gallery in 2000, with a supernatural
luminosity.
On the first floor of the Gallery, in the premises obtained from the
former Medici Theater, is the headquarters of the collection of graphic
arts, begun around the mid-17th century by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici
and transferred to the Uffizi around 1700. Of the ancient theater only
the elevation at the height of the staircase remains today, with a bust
of Francesco I de' Medici by Giambologna (1586) on the central door; on
the sides there is a Venus, a Roman copy of an original from the 5th
century BC, and a Hellenistic female statue.
The collection of
drawings and prints, among the largest in the world, includes
approximately 150,000 works, dating from the end of the fourteenth
century to the twentieth century, among which stand out examples of all
the greatest Tuscan masters, from Leonardo to Michelangelo and many
others, which allow often to establish the creative path of a work,
through the preparatory drawings, or sometimes testify, through the
ancient copies, works now irretrievably lost, such as the frescoes of
the Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci and the Battle of Càscina by
Michelangelo, which once were to decorate the Salone dei Cinquecento in
Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari himself collected the sheets and consecrated
drawing as the "father" of the arts and a prerogative of Florentine art.
Temporary exhibitions are periodically held in the small room in front
of the staircase or in the access vestibule to the Cabinet, with
material from the collections or new acquisitions.
Previously located in the right wing of the loggia, with the entrance from via Lambertesca, and now arranged in the former blue rooms of the west wing, the extraordinary collection gathered in the first half of the twentieth century by the Contini Bonacossi spouses has entered the normal visit itinerary of the museum. It was donated to the Uffizi in the 1970s, thus representing the most important addition to the museum in the last century. The collection includes furniture, ancient majolica, Della Robbia terracottas, and above all a very remarkable series of works of Tuscan sculpture and painting, among which stand out a Majesty with Saints Francis and Dominic from the Cimabue workshop, the Altarpiece of the Madonna della Neve by Sassetta (about 1432), the Madonna of the Pazzi house by Andrea del Castagno (about 1445), the Saint Jerome by Giovanni Bellini (about 1479), the marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini of the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence (about 1616), the Madonna and Child and eight saints by Bramantino (1520-1530) or the Bullfighter by Francisco Goya (around 1800).
Of the church that once stood next to Palazzo Vecchio, only a few
arches remain visible from via della Ninna, and a nave that is part of
the Uffizi, adjacent to the ticket office used in the second half of the
twentieth century.
The hall of San Pier Scheraggio is used for
conferences, for temporary exhibitions or to exhibit works that do not
find space in the exhibition itinerary due to their singularity.
In the past it housed a collection of Medici tapestries, as well as the
detached frescoes of the cycle of illustrious men and women by Andrea
del Castagno, coming from Filippo Carducci's Villa Carducci-Pandolfini
in Legnaia, or Botticelli's fresco of the Annunciation from 1481,
detached from the wall of the loggia of the hospital of San Martino alla
Scala in Florence, or the large canvas of the Battle of Ponte
dell'Ammiraglio by Guttuso and The archaeologists by Giorgio de Chirico.
This area (corresponding to the stretch between via Lambertesca and the loggia de' Lanzi) was in ancient times the establishment of the Florentine Mint, whose history is closely linked to the gold florin that was fought here. It was incorporated into Giorgio Vasari's project, so as to present itself in absolute continuity with the Uffizi, were it not for the basement part, closed and not open as a loggia. During the period of Florence as capital (1865-1871) it was decided to allocate this portion to house the new city post office (the previous one located in the Pisani shed in piazza della Signoria where the Assicurazioni Generali building now stands no longer stands), entrusting the project to the architect Mariano Falcini. These, between 1865 and 1866, obtained from the pre-existing carriage courtyard a large room (now paved with white and red marble), covered by a pavilion skylight supported by four slender columns with a cast iron supporting structure and ennobled by friezes and cornices stucco on the walls. Used as a post office until 1917, the environment subsequently experienced a period of abandonment to then be identified in 1934 by the Superintendent of the Galleries Giovanni Poggi as the site of a modern restoration laboratory, no longer thought of as an 'art workshop', but as a scientific and experimental center of new methods, techniques and materials. Given the institute's different location, the rooms were recovered in their original configuration with a restoration operation which was completed in 1988 under the direction of Romeo Zigrossi (director of the Technical Office of the Superintendence), in the context of which the new flooring was replacement of the previous one in vitreous tesserae, in a poor state of conservation and in any case limited to the central part of the room. From this date the space has been used for setting up temporary exhibitions related to the activity of the Uffizi Gallery. As part of the New Uffizi project, it is planned to create a service area for visitors here, in particular a gallery restaurant. As regards the external elevation (for the ground part), Mariano Falcini's will to operate an intervention in a neo-medieval sense is evident, aimed at reconnecting more to the nearby loggia de' Lanzi than to the Vasari factory. The double access, in addition to the inscription identifying the 'Reali Poste', is marked by four shields with the arms of the historic districts of Florence and, in the centre, by the shield with the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Italy (Savoyard cross: of red to silver cross).