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The Collection of Master Drawers. The Hotbed of Invention

An encounter with great Western art: an everlasting wonder

The Uffizi

Department of Prints and Drawings

Located on the first floor of the Gallery of the Statues and Paintings of the Uffizi, the Department of Prints and Drawings occupies one of the stately spaces which housed the Theater built in the second half of sixteenth century by Bernardo Buontalenti under the Medici family&rsquo;s rule. Between 1952 and 1960 a series of important maintenance works to systematically restore the interior was entrusted to Florentine architect Edoardo Detti (1913-1984), a leading advocate of the Italian Rationalism movement who worked according to the most avant-garde museographic criteria. More recently a new Study Room with over 30 equipped workstations has been installed, designed to offer the many Italian and foreign students who visit the Galleries an atmosphere which is more conducive to research. The Institute houses one of the most important collections of images in the world. Composed of over 177,000 drawings and prints, the collection was started around the mid-seventeenth century by Cardinal Leopoldo de&rsquo; Medici and continues to grow thanks to direct acquisitions and donations. Its huge paper archive dates from the end of the fourteenth century to present day, with a predominance of works from the Italian Renaissance and Tuscan seventeenth century Tuscany. As well as offering academics and researchers access to a photograph gallery and a specialist library, the Department also curates periodic exhibitions and restores its own assets in a highly specialized laboratory.
Browse here <a href="https://euploos.uffizi.it/">Euploos </a>digital catalogue project.

Books and Archives

Established in the second half of the 18th&nbsp;century by Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine, the Library had been originally housed in the Foyer of the Medicean Theatre designed by Giorgio Vasari.&nbsp;On December 16, 1998 it was moved into the restored premises of the former Magliabechiana Library.&nbsp;It preserves many manuscripts belonging to the collections of the Florentine museums and is specialized in the historical-artistic publications for scholars and researchers.&nbsp;The total number of items is 78,600, including: 470 manuscripts, 5 incunabula, 192 sixteenth-century editions, 1,445 books printed between 1601 and 1800 and 1,136 periodicals (approximately 140 are still printed).The transfer of the Medici and Lorena Archives was concluded in 1892, leaving two sections in the Galleries considered at the time as the &ldquo;current&rdquo; archive: the first houses the archive containing the documents referring to museums from the Lorena and pre-unification era and is still an &lsquo;open&rsquo; archive, while the second, housed in the Pitti Palace, comprised the Galleries&rsquo; inventories drafted during the Unification of Italy.