Photographic Departement

The Uffizi Photographic Department was founded in 1903. Since then it has held one of the most conspicuous public photographic collections in Italy and has been intensively documenting the cultural heritage. Throughout the 20th century, our museum photographers have portrayed the works of art in the Florentine Galleries, but also the monuments of the Tuscan and national territory.

The panorama of images preserved in the Department's archives is vast and multifaceted. It is composed mainly of photographs taken for institutional purposes, but also includes, through purchases or bequests, historical funds of great importance such as Brampton Philpot's calotypes, Braun's folio albums of photographs in carbon, the negatives of Vincenzo Giani, Lodovico Pachò, Ugo Ojetti, Giuseppe and Vittorio Jacquier, and the plates of the Cipriani Fund of the Italian Photo Library. Other historically significant sectors are those dealing with the damage of the Second World War, with photographs taken by the Allied Command of the Fifth US Army, the disasters caused by the 1966 flood, the dramatic images of the 1993 mafia attack in Via dei Georgofili, as well as those of the various exhibitions that have taken place over time in the Uffizi and the Florentine Galleries.

The Department currently holds around 630,000 negatives of different formats and media, which can be consulted thanks to printed reproductions and online databases. A particularly valuable sector is represented by the Royal Photographic Archive, one of the most important and oldest photo archives of Italian museums, now completely digitised.

This immense heritage, in addition to being progressively filed and made available on our site, is continuously enriched by new digital shots taken day by day in the Florentine state museums, also thanks to the use of advanced technologies that allow the creation of complex images.