The Uffizi [antikvár]

introduction Today the Uffizi is famous above all as a magnificent picture gallery, comprising works from the thirteenth century by the 'founding father' of Florentine art, Cimabue, and on through the centuries up to Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi, Liotard and Chardin, or the two Goya portraits of 1783 and 1800. The more recent history of art is represented by the self-portraits in the Corridoio Vasariano by Canova and David, Ingres, Corot and Delacroix, the Tuscan Macchiaioli, Boldini, Puvis de Chavanne, Bocidin, Ensor, Denis, and Carra and Severini. it is a museum with an international range, therefore, but is incomparably rich in works of the Florentine Renaissance in particular suffice it to mention its twenty-seven Botticellis, including the Piimavera and the Birth of Veuus. On his death in 1574, Giorgio Vasari could never have imagined that a few years later (in 1581) the top floor of the magnificent building he had designed to house the niagistrati, or public offices in the 1560s would see the establishment of a galleria. Were he to rise from the grave today and pay a visit to the gallery, he would find represented there almost all of the major painters. Italian as well as Florentine, whose lives he chronicled in his Lives of tlw Artists of 1550 and in the later edition of 1568. The links between this pioneering work of art history and the formation of the gallery's extraordinary collection of sculpture and paintings - many of them masterpieces - are profound. What has happened in fact is that museology has adopted the historical and critical system brilliantly devised by Vasari. Naturally, it has been developed over the several centuries that have elapsed since his time, affected by all sorts of changes in habits of collecting, in connoisseurship, and in museum organization. In the 1568 edition of his Lives, Vasari had inserted woodcuts of artists' portraits (or presumed portraits). The idea was taken up again by Leopoldo de' Medici who initiated a collection of artists' self-portraits, this time including non-Italians. Cosimo III inherited the collection in 1675, continuing to add to it until the works totalled 180, and dedicating a large new room in the Uffizi especially to their display. Over the years, the collection continued to grow, albeit at a more irregular pace; it already consisted of more than one thousand paintings when, on the occasion of the gallery's hundredth anniversary in 1981, a further 230 self-portraits, representing the twentieth century, were donated from around the worid. Chagall had made an exemplary gesture when he came in person to Florence in 1976 to deliver his self-portrait. Another collection begun by the Medici of the sixteenth century is the Iconographic Collection of historical figures, and again this includes non-Italians. These works had, from the outset, been allotted a place high up on the walls of the Uffizi's three corridors, and in a reorganization of 1971 they were restored to their original site. Altogether, the collection comprises over a thousand works: some of those remaining in the Uffizi may be found at the end of the Corridoio Vasariano while the others, of which no thorough study has been made, have over the years ended up in various places outside the gallery. The overall picture would be incomplete without mention of the collection of miniatures, also begun by Leopoldo de' Medici. Today these number 1,392, fonming a body of works which of its kind is second only to that of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There is, furthermore, the magnificent archaeological collection displayed on the stairways and halls and ranged majestically along the corridors to form a counterpart to the Uffizi's collection of paintings. Other antique works are to be found in the Sala Archeologica, in the Tribuna and in the specially designed and sumptuously decorated Sala della Niobe. Such an arrangement would also have appeared to Vasari to constitute an excellent complement to the picture gallery. We need only recall the intense dialectic of revival, emulation and comparison with the antique among artists who, especially in Italy, had manifested a decidedly classicizing tendency from the beginnings of the Renaissance. The picture gallery was not at the outset the most important part of the Uffizi, being confined to Giovio's 'iconography' of historic figures in the corridors, and to the collection of prize works of art in the Tribuna. The first inventory of the latter, begun in 1589, lists one painting presumed to be by Leonardo, seven by Raphael, four by Giulio Romano, two by Fra Bartolomeo, nine by Andrea del Sarto, two by Pontormo and one by Beccafumi; Northern painters were represented by one Herri Met de Bles and one Sustris. Commercial and banking activities conducted by the Florentines in northem Europe ft-om the fourteenth century had resulted in an awakening of interest in the work of North-em painters, with a consequent absorption of certain North-em stylistic influences. The magnificent van der Goes in the Uffizi and several works by Memling were purchased in 1900 from the Spedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, which had acquired them in the fifteenth century. The continuing popularity of works by foreign masters meant that a component of non-Italian painting entered the gallery. By 1635, the Tribuna could boast Cranach's St George, joined shortly afterwards by Diirer's Two apostles, a gift to the Grand Duke from the Emperor. By 1704, the Tribuna had a particulariy rich collection of works by Venetian painters, including Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese; Holbein, Van Dyck and those seventeenth-century Dutch painters for whom Cosimo III had a special admiration were also represented. As early as the