Landmark
Uffizi Gallery
The Uffizi Gallery is one of the world’s most important museums, with an immense artistic heritage. An eighteenth-century reorganisation made it primarily a painting museum, with thousands of works from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries. Other collections—arms, scientific instruments, archaeological finds and ancient and modern bronzes—were transferred elsewhere to establish new museums.
Suppression of churches and convents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought many ecclesiastical works to the Uffizi, while important paintings were acquired in the early twentieth century. Masterpieces include Cimabue’s and Giotto’s great altarpieces; fourteenth-century Sienese art, notably Simone Martini’s Annunciation; and a rich survey of fifteenth-century Tuscany and central Italy. This ranges from Masaccio and Masolino’s Madonna and Child with St Anne through Filippo Lippi to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, and from Piero della Francesca’s portraits of the Dukes of Urbino to Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi.
The sixteenth-century rooms bring together masters of the principal Italian schools: Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi, Michelangelo and Raphael; Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Veronese and Tintoretto representing the great age of Venetian painting. Artists from other countries include Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein and El Greco.
Caravaggio’s Bacchus opens the seventeenth-century sequence, with major European schools represented by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Canaletto, Guardi, Longhi and Tiepolo provide a view of the eighteenth century.
The gallery also holds ancient sculpture, miniatures and tapestries from the Medici collections. Work on the Nuovi Uffizi is under way to double the exhibition capacity and display works previously inaccessible to the public.
A map of suggested routes with their walking times is available on the museum’s official website.
The Uffizi Galleries also include the Vasari Corridor.