Category Archives: Florence, Tuscany, Umbria

Eleanor of Toledo, Duchess of Florence

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Portrait of Eleanor of Toledo by Bronzino (detail), in the Uffizi

The colour always favoured by Eleanor was red, and the entrance to this exhibition devoted to her life and patronage, which has just closed at Palazzo Pitti, was hung with a sumptuous crimson curtain. Beyond it, the visitor was at once confronted by what at first glance seemed to be the most famous portrait of Eleanor and her son, by Bronzino, but on closer inspection it turned out to be a good replica made some 40 years later by a pupil, the little-known painter Lorenze Vaiani, or Lo Sciorina. He replaced the portrait of Eleanor’s son Giovanni with another son, Garzia. The significance of giving this work pride of place as an introduction to the exhibition is that it demonstrates how Eleanor’s image was often replicated to perpetuate her importance as a member of the Medici court.

Two Utens lunettes, from his famous series of paintings of the Medici villas around Florence, depict Poggio a Caiano (with its garden and extensive estate) where Eleanor was received on her arrival in the city, and which remained her favourite residence, as well as the place where she chose to rest before the birth of each of her eleven children. The lunette of the Boboli behind the Pitti reminds us of how much Eleanor did to create that famous garden, ten years after she had married Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1539. It was her immense wealth that enabled her to purchase Palazzo Pitti and the park behind it.

Eleanor’s family background was Spanish: on loan from the Alte Pinakothek in Munich came an imposing portrait of her father, Don Pedro de Toledo, Viceroy of Naples. Holding a long pilgrim’s staff, symbol of the Spanish military order of the Knights of Santiago, the portrait has been attributed to Titian. The beautiful marble statue of a young river god, by Pierino da Vinci (now in the Louvre), was a gift from Eleanor to her father. Many ancient Roman statues, often reworked or restored by 16th-century sculptors, were chosen to adorn the Boboli gardens. Alongisde these, there were a number of much less pretentious ones, recording ordinary farmers about their work. These were a particular feature of the gardens which were largely created by Eleanor, and a genre sculpture of a peasant emptying a small barrel (designed as a fountain), which was part of the exhibition and is now replaced in the gardens by a copy, is known to have been specially commissioned by her from Baccio Bandinelli (his was the design but not the execution). The peasant, dressed in his work clothes, has a very expressive face and he introduced an entirely new type of sculpture to populate Italian gardens, a type which was to remain a feature of all subsequent formal gardens of this kind.

In quite a different spirit, Bandinelli was also responsible for the pair of small bronze busts, very refined portraits of Eleanor and Cosimo. The couple are also depicted, with five of their children, in a precious little agate cameo made by Giovanni Antonio de’ Rossi (displayed beside a drawing of it by Vasari from Christ Church, Oxford).

The most magnificent portraits of Eleanor and her husband, however, are those by Bronzino, and it is he who was inevitably the star of the show. His portraits are all still in Florence, including some very small portraits of the children, in oil on tin. He also possessed extraordinary skill as a draughtsman, producing studies for the chapel in Palazzo Vecchio which he painted for Eleanor.

It is known that Eleanor kept two weavers at her court and some very fine 16th-century tapestries survive.

Also part of the show were Eleanor’s exquisite little Book of Hours (now in the V&A in London) and a very small Deposition by Gérard David (1515–20), which is in the Uffizi but not normally on view and is thought to have been owned by Eleanor’s mother. Some of the most precious pieces of jewellery were fashioned by setting engraved Roman gems in gold mounts worked by Florentine jewellers. Two rings found in Eleonora’s tomb (opened in 1947) are Roman but refashioned by a Florentine craftsman, and almost certainly commissioned by Eleanor herself.

Also found in Eleanor’s tomb was a corset and pair of knitted stockings, both in her favourite red, apparently worn in her lifetime to keep her warm and taken with her to the tomb for the same purpose (she died of malaria in 1562). Displayed close by was an alarming steel corset which we are told she also wore on occasion.

The closing images were a pair of oval portraits of Eleanor and Cosimo, carved in maroon and green porphyry, an exceptionally hard rock occasionally used for imperial portraits in ancient Rome: these are certain to perpetuate for all time the couples’ remarkable lives.  

by Alta Macadam, author of Blue Guide Florence

Perugino: Italy’s best maestro

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Pietro Vannucci, the artist always known as Perugino, after Perugia, the chief city of his native Umbria, was born c. 1450. A superb new exhibition, which celebrates the 500th anniversary of his death in 1523, is currently on show at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria.

It was probably in Umbria that Perugino’s apprenticeship began and the exhibition begins with that background, with works by Benedetto Bonfigli (d. 1496) and Bartolomeo Caporali (d. before 1505), then considered the best artists of the Umbrian school. However, it was in Florence that Perugino reached his artistic maturity, in the workshop of Verrocchio—whose members included Botticelli and Leonardo. Looking at examples of the art of Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio and the Florentines, of which this show has several examples, it is clear how Perugino’s pictorial imagination was shaped. Altarpiece after altarpiece is populated with colourfully clad characters of somewhat ambiguous gender, standing in sinuous contrapposto, eyes rolling almost epileptically heavenwards.

Detail of Perugino’s ‘Scarani altarpiece’ (c. 1500), now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. Image: Blue Guides.

Perugino’s reputation was made when, together with a group of Florentine painters, he was called to Rome in 1481 to produce works for St Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. As a result, some of the finest connoisseurs of the age, among them Lorenzo the Magnificent and Isabella d’Este, sought his services. He was described as “Italy’s finest maestro”; the colours of his palette were acknowledged to possess a special “sweetness”—a quality he is thought to have learned to convey from time spent in the lagoon light of Venice in the mid-1490s. The quality of his palette seems to suggest an everlasting sunny springtime.

Perugino, in his heyday, was formidable and prolific and maintained a large workshop. His self-portraits reveal a man of stocky, thickset appearance, probably capable of driving a hard bargain. He had no interest whatsoever in God, Vasari tells us, and an obsessive compulsion to make money. The star exhibit in this show is his Marriage of the Virgin, painted for the cathedral of Perugia in 1504. It hung there, in the Chapel of the Holy Ring, until 1797 when it was stolen by Napoleon. It is still in France, in Caen, but has returned to Umbria for this show. It contains many of the elements for which Perugino is distinctive: the serene and idealised backdrop; the rolling eyeballs; the outlandish headdresses; the rich colour blocks provided by the protagonists’ robes; the acute portrait studies in some of the faces.

Detail of Perugino’s ‘Marriage of the Virgin’ (1504), painted for the cathedral of Perugia and now in Caen. Image: Blue Guides.

But Perugino often overstretched himself. “Pietro always had so much to do,” Vasari tells us, “that he frequently repeated himself, and his theory of art led him so far that all his figures have the same air.” It is true. There are undeniable similarities between his Holy Ring and the Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter, which he had painted for the Sistine Chapel in 1481–2. The Renaissance building in the centre, the enigmatic figures in the middle ground, the crowd at the front, the mountainous backdrop, the heavily stylised trees, the mixture of idealised, androgynous faces and contemporary portraits from life. It was the formula which had made him famous and he saw no reason to diverge from the tried and tested path. All of its elements can be found again in his Marriage of the Virgin.

‘Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter’ (1481–2), in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Here Perugino introduces the device of people pointing at each other, which Ruskin later noticed in the work of Perugino’s pupil Raphael and which greatly irritated him. “Of Raphael I found I could make nothing whatever,” Ruskin wrote. “The only thing clearly manifest to me in his compositions was, that everybody seemed to be pointing at everybody else, and that nobody, to my notion, was worth pointing at.” Photo: Wikipedia Commons.

Perugino, at his height, was very influential. The Marriage of the Virgin painted in the same year by Raphael is nothing short of a downright copy (though Raphael places his signature very prominently on the central building).

‘Marriage of the Virgin’ by Raphael (1504). Now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.

Raphael—Perugino’s greatest pupil— went on to far surpass his master, even though he predeceased him. Perugino, on the other hand, remained a painter of the 15th century, and as the 16th century wore on and revolutionary younger artists began to break the old moulds, he found that he could no longer get away with recycling past successes. Vasari tells a story about an altarpiece for the Annunziata in Florence, completed by Perugino after the death of Filippino Lippi. “But when this work was uncovered it was severely criticised by all the new artists, chiefly because Pietro had employed figures of which he had already made use. Even his friends declared but he had not taken pains, but had abandoned the good method of working, either from avarice or in order to save time. Pietro answered, ‘I have done the figures which you have formerly praised and which have given you great pleasure. If you are now dissatisfied and do not praise them, how can I help it?’” This was 1507, four years after Leonardo had painted his Mona Lisa and three since Michelangelo had sculpted his David. Perugino could not cling on forever to his spot at the top of Fortune’s wheel.

Perugino’s Self-portrait (1495–7). Uffizi, Florence. Image: Blue Guides.

This show is clever, though, in that it ends on a high note. One skill that Perugino had that perhaps neither Michelangelo nor Raphael could ever equal was his gift at taking a keen and vivid likeness. In one of the last rooms of the exhibition are displayed a number of his portraits, many of them from the Uffizi. His own self-portrait is among them and there is something about the face that is instantly knowable. You feel you’ve seen this man. He might be the municipal carpark attendant or the man behind the fish counter in the supermarket. The waiter at the corner café. The man who came to fix the boiler. Back in Renaissance central Italy, he was the painter of softly serene altarpieces who didn’t believe in God.

Italy’s Best Maestro: Perugino and his Day, curated by Marco Pierini and Veruska Picchiarelli, runs until 11th June at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia.

Donatello. The Renaissance

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The simplicity of the title of this marvellous exhibition (open until 31 July at Palazzo Strozzi and the Bargello in Florence) prepares us for the presence of a series of masterpieces by the greatest Western sculptor of all time. On show in two Florence venues, there are loans from all over the world, especially from the V&A in London. Some of the works have just been restored while others are in the process of restoration. The decision was taken to exhibit some of the statues much higher than usual, following documentation about their original pedestals, or quite simply by looking at their stance.

Equestrian statue by Donatello of the Venetian mercenary general Gattamelata (1453). Mounted on an exceptionally high base, outside the Basilica of Sant’Antonio in Padua, it was the first large-scale monumental bronze to be cast since ancient times. Donatello perhaps studied the 4th-century BC bronze horse’s head pictured below when creating this masterpiece.

The exhibition gives us a unique opportunity to see up close some bronzes Donatello carried out for the baptistery font in Siena and for the high altar of the Basilica of Sant’Antonio (the ‘Santo’) in Padua. For the hexagonal font in Siena, six gilded bronze panels were commissioned from different Tuscan masters: two from Ghiberti, two from Turino di Sano and his son, and two from Jacopo della Quercia. But in 1423 Jacopo asked Donatello to take on one of his scenes, the Banquet of Herod. This has just been restored in Florence and is exhibited here before being returned to Siena. In the dramatic scene with the Baptist’s severed head presented at the table, it is fascinating to see all Donatello’s innovative details and his use of extraordinary architectural perspective (derived from Brunelleschi). It at once overshadowed the panels by all the other sculptors.

Three works in bronze have been removed from their setting, especially for this exhibition, from Donatello’s famous high altar of the Santo in Padua. When in situ in the dark sanctuary they are very difficult to see. The Miracle of the Mule (one of the miracles performed by St Anthony, to whom the Santo basilica is dedicated) shows a mule owned by a non-believer showing the way to Christ by kneeling in front of the Host. This charming scene is in quite a different spirit to the life-size Crucifix(the technical difficulties overcome by Donatello in creating this work in bronze, unique for its size in the 15th century, are described in the catalogue). Not content to show just the drama of Christ on the Cross, he gives a delicate flick to the loin cloth, as if caught in a gust of wind. The third work on show from the Padua altar is a relief of Christ as the Man of Sorrows.

Marble reliefs by Donatello using his famous ‘schiacciato’ technique are displayed throughout the exhibition, culminating in the last room at the Bargello, which celebrates the ‘Dudley’ Madonna (so named because it was acquired by the V&A from the Dudley family in 1927, although we know it was once in Cosimo I’s study in Florence). This tiny work, thought to date from c. 1440, was only recognized as being by Donatello’s hand around 1992. It had an extraordinary influence on generations of artists, including Leonardo (represented by a drawing from the British Museum) and Michelangelo (his famous relief, recently restored, from the Casa Buonarroti in Florence). It is not always easy to see a direct influence in all twelve works displayed here, but the very fine painting by Artemisia Gentileschi demonstrates an affinity with the marble panel at late as the 17th century.

Much attention has been given to works in terracotta, a medium frequently used in Antiquity but which only came back into favour with sculptors in the first years of the 15th century. The curators have exhibited a number of Madonna reliefs in terracotta, some of them painted, which they believe to be by Donatello’s own hand and which show his early interest in terracotta. They write amusingly that they are fully expecting scholars to contest these new attributions. The majestic Madonna with a playful Christ Child from the Museo Bardini in Florence, and always recognized as by the master, stands out above the others for its remarkable beauty.

Donatello clearly enjoyed experimenting with media other than bronze and terracotta: he even used pietro macigno in three of his works, one of which, his genial Marzocco lion with an almost human face, guards the ‘entrance’ to the exhibition in the Bargello. The name Marzocco, apparently used since the Middle Ages to denote the protector of the city, has mysterious origins. It was originally intended to sit on a column.

There is a room of Donatello’s bronze ‘spiritelli’, or what we now usually call putti. These winged nude children are also familiar from Antique sarcophagi. The most beautiful of these are the small-scale dancing figures – perhaps the one dancing on a scallop shell (from the Bargello) is the most memorable for its joyful grace. Some of these small bronzes used to be taken for Antique works.

Almost all Donatello’s most famous contemporaries are represented, even if only with one work: Luca della Robbia, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Brunelleschi, Fra’ Angelico, Andrea del Castagno. But there are also works by the far less famous, including Nanni di Bartolo, who is here recognised as the author of the statue of a prophetin the Florence Duomo (which up to now has usually been attributed to Donatello). Bertoldo di Giovanni, one of Donatello’s most devoted pupils, is also re-evaluated: the lovely bronze bust of a young philosopher in the Bargello is now recognized as his work and not that of Donatello. A drawing from the Ashmolean of four soldiers (one of which is a direct copy from Donatello’s St George) is touching evidence that Raphael was in Florence at the age of 20 when he came to the city to study her works of art.

In the last room in Palazzo Strozzi is the astonishing sight of a huge horse’s head from Naples (much larger than life-size), until recently considered a Classical work but now attributed to Donatello and thought to have been made for an equestrian monument that was never carried out. It was owned by Lorenzo the Magnificent, who donated it to the court of Naples. The sculptor would have been proud to see it displayed beside a magnificent horse’s head of c. 340 BC, one of the least-known treasures in Florence’s archaeological museum but perhaps the most important ancient bronze in the city. Scholars believe it must have been seen in the Medici palace by both Verrocchio and Donatello before working on their equestrian statues in Venice and Padua.

Ancient bronze horse’s head of the 4th century BC, from the Museo Archeologico in Naples. It is thought that Donatello was familiar with this work and that he drew on it for his equestrian statue of Gattamelata in Padua pictured above.

The catalogue, although expensive, is full of interest. Once again, as in so many art historical contexts, it is interesting to note that Vasari is still taken as a fundamental source when describing works of art and their history.

This is an exhibition not to be missed.

By Alta Macadam. For descriptions of the places in Italy with works by Donatello see Blue Guide Florence, Blue Guide Venice & the Veneto, Blue Guide Central Italy. Alta Macadam is currently at work on a new edition of Blue Guide Venice.

Book Review: The Bookseller of Florence

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Four hundred and eighty pages might seem a lot to fill, when one has chosen as one’s subject a man about whom next to nothing is known. But Ross King, in this ambitious book published last year, has managed to fill them nonetheless, and the result is eminently readable. 

Vespasiano da Bisticci (the eponymous bookseller) was born c. 1422 into a poor family. His improvident father died early, leaving an indigent widow with more children than it seems reasonable to expect her to have clothed and fed and educated, when all she had been left with were debts. But somehow she managed it. One would like to know more about her, but there is no more to say. Florence in the early 15th century, we learn, was a city where 70–80 percent of boys attended school but where girls were largely encouraged never to leave the house, certainly not to go ‘leaping about the piazza’ in gaudy gowns. 

Vespasiano grows up and is apprenticed to Michele Guarducci, a bookbinder and stationer. Florence at the time is enjoying its golden age and in Guarducci’s shop Vespasiano meets a number of illustrious men. He seems to have had a natural instinct for endearing himself to them. He knew how to cultivate the right people, was obviously a good networker, and though not a scholar himself, was skilful at understanding his product, at knowing how to talk knowledgeably about it and how to source exactly what his customers might want. By dint of quite a lot of obsequious fawning, he goes on to obtain important patrons such as Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence, Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino and King Ferrante of Naples, acting as their agent and procuring manuscripts for their libraries. 

As far as Vespasiano the man goes, that is just about it. The rest of the book consists of lengthy digressions on various subjects, with the persona of Vespasiano forming the link between them. There is the story of the texts of Vespasiano’s books (notably Greek and Roman classics): the means by which they were retrieved from oblivion and the part that Florence played in this fascinating saga, complete with vignettes of the misogynist scholars, cultivated thugs and dilettante noblemen who had an appetite to acquire them. Then there is the story of the manuscripts those texts were turned into: vellum versus parchment; ‘modern’ Roman versus Gothic script; styles of illumination. Then comes the wider history of 15th-century Italy: the infighting in the city states (King gives us a lengthy account of the Pazzi Conspiracy in Florence), tussles with a warrior pope and the conquest of Otranto by the Ottomans in 1480. Badly shaken by this, Italy begins a gradual descent from enlightened humanism to something more inward-looking and defensive. Savonarola makes bonfires out of half a century of learning before ending up on a pyre himself. As for Vespasiano, having been personally reponsible for the production of around one thousand manuscripts, he abandons his faith in the power of Aristotle to guide mankind and reverts to an uncompromising and depressing form of apocalyptic Christianity.

And of course, along the way, there is the elephant in Vespasiano’s bookroom: the printing press. King takes us to Germany for its invention and then to Subiaco, near Rome, for its arrival in Italy. Florence proves a late adopter of the new technology; perhaps because her high literacy rate meant that she was ahead of other cities in terms of manuscript books and thus was slower to feel the need of printed ones. Vespasiano does not seem to mind that a printing press has been set up a few blocks away from his shop; at any rate, he does not feel threatened by it. He is like one of those people who scoffed at the first smartphones, blithely certain that no one will ever really want to do anything else with their handset than make phone calls. Vespasiano was not alone in his disdain. The printing press, many believed, would spread fake news. It would turn out books that were riddled with errors. It would bring texts before the sort of people ill-equipped to digest and understand their meaning. 

There is no climactic finale, though. Vespasiano sees that business is no longer what it was and chooses to retire. He decides that he himself will become a writer and sits down to compose biographies of 103 of the ‘illustrious men’ he had known during the course of his career. He could name-drop like mad; the illustrious men of his acquaintance included popes and princes, scholars and sculptors, many of them still household names today. 

There was also a single woman, Alessandra de’ Bardi. This seems exciting, not for tokenistic reasons but because so few such biographies exist and it might shed light on the lives that medieval Florentine women led and the prospects that were open to them beyond the hearth and the dowry chest. Unfortunately it seems that Vespasiano believed that no other prospects were appropriate and took the opportunity to turn Alessandra’s life into a disquisition on virtuous female behaviour, vigorously channelling his inner Cato the Elder. Interestingly, King does not actually tell us this. He remains completely silent about the single female Life, perhaps, one feels, out of disappointment and frustration that his bookseller was not more ahead of his time. What does emerge from King’s narrative is an impression that the Renaissance Florentine convent offered more scope to a lively-minded woman—of any class—than marriage did. King includes delightful details about a nun called Sister Marietta who worked as a compositor in the San Jacopo printing works. 

But what became of the text of Vespasiano’s Lives? ‘A terrible irony befell Vespasiano’s project,’ King tells us. ‘As well he knew, the fame of illustrious men was sometimes lost to history not because no one preserved their deeds but because the manuscripts that celebrated these deeds had perished or been lost. Such could have been the fate of Vespasiano’s manuscript. Since his presentation copies were all copied by hand, their readership was circumscribed, and his praises of illustrious men, as the decades passed, went largely unheard. A few more handwritten copies were made from his manuscripts in the centuries that followed, but all quickly disappeared into libraries or simply vanished from sight in a sorry reprise of the loss of knowledge during the “Dark Ages” that he had done so much in his lifetime to reverse.’ 

Ironically, Vespasiano’s text is known to us not through the offices of its own author but because a stray manuscript from the Vatican Library, rediscovered and issued in printed form in 1839, came to the attention of Jacob Burckhardt, who was electrified by it and used it as the basis of his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1878), hugely influential and still in print. It is through Burckhardt, via the printing press, that the existence of such a man as Vespasiano da Bisticci and the concept of such a thing as the Renaissance is known to us at all.

All of this must make us wonder about the technology shift that is taking place in our own time. We are abandoning print on paper and, in a bizarre about-turn, going back to scrolling. But our electronic medium is far more ephemeral and fragile than any book, either written or printed. And the risk of unedited, inaccurate, misleading information finding its way onto the internet is infinitely greater. We do not know what Vespasiano would have made of this. We do not really know what he thought about anything except that he was prudish; that he was a good businessman so long as established markets remained strong; and that he lacked vision when faced with a disruptive technology. He died in 1498 and lies beneath the floor of Santa Croce, under a worn and faded slab that bears only his brother’s name. King’s book is his eloquent epitaph.

Reviewed by Annabel Barber

Ross King: The Bookseller of Florence. Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance. Chatto & Windus (Penguin Books) 2021.

News from Florence: The Uffizi

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At the time of writing this article, Italy was experiencing its second wave of Covid-19 and we were all being invited to stay at home as much as possible to avoid another lockdown. Museums and galleries were still open, even though theatres and concert halls were closed. Since then, however, museums too have had to close their doors and—with the dramatic drop in visitor numbers that this necessarily means—directors are thinking hard about how to plan for the future. 

Until the latest closure, there was much to report about the activity of the Gallerie degli Uffizi. The director, Eike Schmidt (who, Florentines were concerned to hear, has himself fallen victim to Covid-19 and is isolating at home), has opened or reopened many more rooms: in 2019 masterpieces by Bronzino, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese were all rehung. The worksite, known for decades as the ‘nuovi Uffizi’ or ‘grandi Uffizi’ has finally been given an end date: 2024. 

Meanwhile the Corridoio Vasariano is set to reopen in 2022 and for the first time in its history it will be decorated with ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and inscriptions. Now that Palazzo Pitti and the Galleria degli Uffizi are united under a single directorship, the corridor will become the natural link between the two, with an exit to Palazzo Pitti. The walkway (nearly a kilometre long), which passes over the Arno by Ponte Vecchio, is especially wonderful for the unique views it gives of the city through its little round windows. Over the past 60 years, many directors attempted to reopen it fully but none succeeded and latterly it had become an expensive ‘extra tour’ offered by travel agencies, accessible only by booking months ahead and given a rather exaggerated ‘off the beaten track’ appeal. Now, thankfully, it is to become part of the visit to the Uffizi and work should begin in 2021.

Another piece of good news is that the Uffizi’s official website, with its easy booking system, is now up and running after the director successfully saw off a number of organisations with websites posing as ‘official Uffizi ticket vendors’. The website also has a catalogue of all the works on display and you can make a virtual tour of part of the gallery. 

Government funds have also been made available to proceed with the loggia designed by Arata Isosaki. In 1998, Isozaki won an international competition to design a new entrance to the Uffizi. Protests immediately ensued—understandably, since the new design would encroach on the integrity of the the remarkable urban space created by Vasari. Isozaki’s winning entry will now be used as a new exit, on the other side of the building (although its detractors still consider that the proposed gigantic loggia will represent an unforgivable intrusion into the heart of Florence, just metres away from Palazzo Vecchio). The present director argues that it should be seen as a contemporary interpretation of a classical Renaissance loggia. If, as he has suggested, it is up and functioning by Christmas 2024, we will find out whether others share his view. The area designated for its construction has for years been a building site, abandoned behind hoardings, so there will be some relief that at least the present unsightly exit will no longer exist. Nevertheless, it is tempting to wonder if the size of the loggia couldn’t be modified, to help it settle more comfortably into the Florence townscape.

The cityscape of Florence, with Palazzo Vecchio prominent in the centre. The Uffizi stretches behind it and the long façade of Palazzo Pitti is on the far right. How will this view be altered by Arata Isozaki’s new Uffizi Loggia? (Photo: © James Howells)

The dramatic drop in visitors because of Covid-19 remains a cause for concern. An experimental remedy by the Uffizi has been to take out advertisements in the national press, encouraging people to visit. This is an unprecedented move, aimed at Italians rather than tourists. This year Eike Schmidt even joined Chiara Ferragni, a famous influencer, who was at the Uffizi modelling for Vogue Hong Kong (an event which in itself must have brought a princely sum into the gallery’s coffers). The director made use of her visit for a much publicised ‘photo opportunity’—an Instagram selfie with Chiara in front of Botticelli’s Primavera—something which left many of Florence’s more traditional academics gasping. Schmidt was quick to point out that his photo-op had led to a considerable increase in young visitors to the gallery and had been an excellent marketing ploy, helping the Uffizi and its treasures to reach Chiara Ferragni’s 20 million followers. Critics from the ancien régime felt Schmidt had lowered himself to the role of ‘rock star’.

There has also been research into the attics and deposits of both the Pitti and the Uffizi, and three more ‘famous people’ have been found belonging to the series of portraits painted by Cristofano dell’Altissimo which forms an incredibly long frieze beneath the ceilings of the three corridors on the Uffizi’s second floor. They were commissioned by the Medici in 1552–89, copies of portraits collected by the historian Paolo Giovio, who died in 1552. One of the three is of the young Henry VIII of England, who will be able to take his place among this exalted company after restoration. We are told that another, better-known series of ‘famous men’, frescoed by Andrea del Castagno for a room in a villa in a suburb of Florence and which has been in the Uffizi (but rarely visible) since the mid-19thcentury, is finally to be given its own room in the gallery. 

In the last few months Schmidt has also suggested that some paintings could be returned to the churches from which they were removed. This might include Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, painted for a chapel in Santa Maria Novella. It was moved from there to the Uffizi in 1948. However, Schmidt has also publicly recognised the complications involved. Such a move would naturally open up a whole debate. The reasoning behind the idea is to draw visitors to other places in Florence and ‘decentralise’ the Uffizi, creating a network of museums along the lines of a museo diffuso (a concept much in vogue in Italy at present, where visitor overcrowding at certain key sights has been a growing problem—at least before Covid-19). One of the buildings suitable for use in such a project could be the Medici Villa at Careggi, which has been inaccessible for decades. 

And finally, the Uffizi has recently welcomed the loan of Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), from the National Gallery in London, which is the centrepiece of an exhibition exploring the relationships between art and science (for an English video, see here).

by Alta Macadam, author of Blue Guide Florence.