(AGENPARL) – Wed 28 May 2025 Florence, 28 May 2025
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IS BACK AT THE UFFIZI GALLERIES: A DECADE LATER, AN IMPORTANT EXHIBITION REVIVES IT.
The ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (and of reforms) is narrated through some 150 works set up in the ground floor rooms of the Gallery, with masterpieces by Goya, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Vigée Le Brun, Liotard, and Mengs: many never seen before, others hidden for over a decade due to the work to extend the exhibition route.
And not only that: there is also the impressive painting by the French master Pierre Subleyras, recently acquired and ‘restored live’ during the exhibition. And more: the Cabinet of Erotic Antiquities, reconstructed according to the fashion of the time, and spectacular views painted of iconic places on the Grand Tour.
Director Simone Verde: “We tell the story of a complex century through its aesthetic culture and at the same time the transformation of the Uffizi Galleries into Europe’s first modern museum”.
Masterpieces by Goya, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Le Brun, Liotard, Mengs and many other masters; spectacular views of iconic places of the Grand Tour in Italy; the monumental Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by French painter Pierre Subleyras, restored live on display before the public’s eyes; the sensual curiosities of the Cabinet of Erotic Antiquities reconstructed according to the fashion of the Age of Enlightenment. The Uffizi Galleries bring the 18th century back to life with an impressive exhibition titled “Florence and Europe. Arts of the Eighteenth Century at the Uffizi”, curated by the director Simone Verde and the head of Eighteenth-Century Painting Alessandra Griffo, and set up from today until 28 November in the airy frescoed rooms on the ground floor of the museum. A careful selection of around 150 works, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, porcelain, prints, and a large tapestry, many exhibited for the first time in the Gallery, and others that have not been accessible for more than ten years due to the museum’s extension works.
The aim of the exhibition is to recount, through art, an era of crucial changes for Western thought, aesthetics, and taste, and also for the Uffizi itself, which, in the 18th century, was completely transformed from a dynastic treasure chest of royal collections into a modern museum, the first in the world. It was precisely at this time, in fact, that the pact established by the last Medici descendant, Anna Maria Luisa, certifying the end of the dynasty in 1737, bound the boundless store of works to Florence “for the ornament of the State”; and it was Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who in 1769 allowed citizens, on the feast day of Florence’s patron saint, St. John (24 June), to visit the museum freely. Structural changes intertwined with the great wave of political, cultural, and aesthetic transformations throughout Europe, which the Grand Dukes in Florence managed to intercept with the Uffizi Galleries, transforming the city and the museum into a microcosm where the new climate of the Continent could be felt.
The Director of the Uffizi Galleries, Simone Verde: “‘Florence and Europe’ aims to trace an extremely multifaceted century through its aesthetic culture, interweaving the general narrative of the context with the management of the Uffizi Galleries as Europe’s first modern museum. It’s a complex story rich in subtexts and nuances that we have constructed with patience and dedication, making works from the collection that have not been seen for many years, or have never been exhibited, available to the public”.
The curator of the 18th-century Painting of the Uffizi Galleries, Alessandra Griffo:”The works on display, besides being of great quality, have the merit of offering insights into a century that was crucial for the formation of the modern mentality, sensibility and even taste. Today, millions of people come to Florence every year, attracted by the myth of the early Renaissance: the rediscovery of this period occurred precisely during the 18th century”.
THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition begins with artistic production during the time of the last Medici, in the first decades of the 18th century. It was a period in which religion still played a predominant role in society, which was still feudal in nature. This is clear from the commissions of this type entrusted to great masters such as Giovan Battista Foggini (prie-dieu of the royal apartments), Sebastiano Ricci (Crucifixion), and others. Great artistic resources were also expended in the celebration of the outgoing dynasty, represented in the portraits of Cosimo III, Grand Prince Ferdinando, and Gian Gastone; of the latter, Joan Richter’s interpretation stands out, typically Ancien Régime, inspired by the pompous French court portraits, in a representation that conveys the splendour of a court in its twilight years engaged in an attempt to revive in the memory of its subjects its own glorious past.Here, then, are their successors, the Lorraines, immortalised in marble busts so that their effigies populate the public places of the city. This is the time when a sensibility influenced by the Enlightenment begins to assert itself: indeed, portraits of a less ‘official’ nature also appear. They testify to the expansion of the audience of models and patrons that occurred precisely in this century, with a focus on artistic inquiry increasingly based on the depiction of the real rather than the ideal or formal. Among the most famous are those by Goya, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Anton Rafael Mengs and Jean Marc Nattier.
In this pivotal moment for the Uffizi Galleries and their transformations, the eighteenth century sees an interest in new pictorial schools emerge, represented in an entire section of the exhibition, a mirror of the arrangement desired in 1782 by Abbot Luigi Lanzi, a grand ducal appointee, antiquarian and author of the ‘Storia pittorica della Italia’. The displayed paintings exemplify the output of schools throughout Italy: from Tuscany, Veneto, and Emilia, featuring notable figures such as Giovanni Domenico Ferretti, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi. One room is dedicated to sketches: here the 1701 work by Anton Domenico Gabbiani, dedicated to the dome of the Florentine church of San Frediano in Cestello, depicting the Glory of Saint Mary Magdalene carried to heaven by angels, stands out.
Among the aspects of the culture of the time that the exhibition documents is the rediscovery of the Primitives, the painters of medieval Christianity re-evaluated in anti-Enlightenment circles preparing for Romanticism, the authors of gold bases who had been completely removed from modern taste. Just like the growing fashion for the exotic, expressed in paintings such as Young Woman Dressed as a Turk by Jean-Étienne Liotard or Portrait of the Chinese Emperor Kangxi by Giovanni Gherardini, as well as Chinese porcelain and other curiosities from travellers that have arrived in the museum over the years.
A major novelty is the ‘live’ restoration of the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine de’ Ricci by Pierre Subleyras, a recent acquisition by the Uffizi Galleries. The great painting, considered a masterpiece of the 18th century and in need of a thorough cleaning so that its delicate colours can once again shine as they once did, will indeed be ‘treated’ live under the very eyes of the exhibition public.
The exhibition then gives ample space to nude and erotic-themed sculptures, an artistic category that experienced great fortune during the 18th century. The selection on display, in particular, echoes the composition of the imagined erotic cabinet that the Marquis de Sade described towards the end of the 18th century in his novel ‘Juliette’, an effective synthesis of the carnal seduction that classical marbles exerted on the imagination of his contemporaries, and which are now brought together in a room to express, according to the Marquis’s interpretation, virile love (the leonine phallus), love against nature (the Hermaphrodite), and incestuous love (the sculpted group of Caligula and Drusilla).As visitors advance through the exhibition to the latter half of the century, they encounter a room dedicated to the emerging aesthetic category of the Sublime: beauty is ‘transcended’ by feelings of awe and dismay, depicted here in iconographies of snow-capped peaks, ruins, and waterfalls. All these artistic movements will evolve over several years into the fullest expression of Romanticism, aligning with the narrative of an urgent modernity and often yielding startling outcomes, such as the French Revolution. The exhibition concludes with a series of souvenirs and works related to the Grand Tour, including two views of Venice by Canaletto and a spectacular view of Vesuvius in Eruption by Thomas Patch.
EXHIBITION DATA SHEET
Title: Florence and Europe. Arts of the Eighteenth Century at the Uffizi
Curatorship: Alessandra Griffo, Simone Verde
Location: Florence, Uffizi Galleries
Period: 28 May – 28 November
Number and type of works on display: About 150 paintings, sculptures, furniture, porcelain, tapestries, volumes and prints
The restoration of the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine by Pierre Subleyras is supported and directed by the Uffizi Galleries with the contribution of the Benappi Fine Art company in London.