(courtesy of Italymagazine.com)
Fourteen completely renovated rooms have opened on the first floor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, forming a new large section of paintings dedicated to the 16th century, the golden century of Italian painting, featuring Venetian and Florentine masterpieces from the Medici collection.
The new arrangement comprises 105 works of art, a part of which have been in storage for a long time, and occupies a surface area of 1,100 square meters.
Among the works on display are Titian’s masterpiece Venus of Urbino, flanked on the right by Flora, also by Titian, and Fornarina by Sebastiano del Piombo on the left. The three female figures can now be admired in a specially dedicated room. Works by Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto, Veronese, many of which not on display until now, are now visible in nearby rooms, completing the collection of Venetian paintings of the Uffizi.
The colors of the walls are natural and have been applied using traditional methods: green for the Venetian school, inspired by the drapery and wall hangings seen in countless Venetian Renaissance paintings; for the Tuscan school, a dark grey echoing the pietra serena of the Uffizi itself was chosen, but with a warmer, more velvety textural feel to it, as the Uffizi website explains.
On the same side of the Gallery, a window overlooking the Arno, with a breathtaking view of the river and the hills south of the city, has been opened in an effort to establish a connection between the Uffizi and its urban context.
In addition, visitors can admire, after ten years of storage, the Madonna del Popolo by Urbino artist Federico Barocci, which the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo bought at a high price for the Florentine collections.
According to the Uffizi Gallery’s website, “The new arrangement of the rooms has been designed to improve the public’s visual appreciation and understanding of the paintings thanks, among other things, to new benches installed in the Gallery to allow visitors to pause and meditate before the paintings.”