Imagines 1

The new website opens a brand new season for the Uffizi Galleries: a new stage in which the public can finally enter into direct contact with the institution (which includes the Vasari Complex, Pitti Palace, and Boboli Gardens), created as an independent structure in 2014. This has also been an opportunity to create a new website that could be adapted to the requirements of current standards and regulations. In this way, not only have we made searches easier, but we have also complied with the rules governing transparency for administrative activities.

A white sheet of paper. It always begins this way, by asking yourself how and when, but there’s a question that’s more important, more pressing, more oppressive. It’s a fundamental one: you ask yourself ‘why’? It doesn’t matter whether it's an unusual job, a service, if it’s for a friend, or of extraordinary importance. It’s always about a new project: you have to bring something into being out of nothing. And you wonder ‘why’. Why produce a new identity for the Uffizi Galleries? Why?

By placing humans at the center, mirroring the founding principle of historic humanism, the development and design of the website focused on the user as the central element of the browsing experience. We wanted to develop a tool that would prove useful to anyone wishing to discover the treasures of the Uffizi Galleries, avoiding the temptation of creating a website that merely served as a self-aggrandizing showcase.

The Niches Room of Pitti Palace hosts an exhibition dedicated to Anton Raphael Mengs and his relationships with Florence. Painted by Mengs in Florence and today preserved in the Prado Museum, the three portraits of the children of Pietro Leopoldo of Habsburg-Lorraine and Maria Luisa of Bourbon are shown alongside the portrait of Ferdinand and Maria Anna recently acquired by the Uffizi Galleries. Around this central group are other portraits of the Habsburg-Lorraine family by other painters one of whom, Johan Zoffany, particularly stands out. The self-portraits of both these artists from the Uffizi collection are also present. The exhibition also includes two letters from Mengs and a manuscript dedicated to Correggio and to his works, written by the painter during his stay in Florence.

Archival research and meticulous stylistic studies have led to the complete reinterpretation of a painting of the Uffizi Galleries. Previously believed to be a portrait of a member of the Medici family by the hand of late sixteenth-century painter Jacopo Ligozzi, the work has now been identified as a fictional representation of the “Queen of Armenia”, realized almost a century later by artist Mario Balassi.

The publication of the reproductions of I Disegni della R. Galleria (The Drawings of the Royal Gallery) was launched in 1912 by Giovanni Poggi, the then Director of the Uffizi Gallery. He entrusted the task to the renowned book collector Leo Samuel Olschki, who went on to complete the work in 1921. To encourage sales of the so-called “Portafogli Olschki” and recuperate the initial costs, a connection was forged between the published reproductions and the annual exhibitions.

Article in italian