Description: Few museums offer us such an ample range of masterpieces arranged inside a historic palace in the heart of one of the great art cities of the world. The palace itself is a Renaissance creation and it is just steps from the places where the passions and new Renaissance ideals took form, where the great artists of the time walked, painted, and dreamed. We invite you for a memorable experience of discovery and comprehension through a careful selection of artworks that will bring to life the historical events, the cultural changes, the language of art, and the personalities of the artists, rulers, scientists, and humanists who were the face of the Italian Renaissance.

The Uffizi Gallery: In 1559 Cosimo de' Medici decided to transform the Palazzo Vecchio - symbol of liberty of the Florentine republic and seat of the magistrate - into his official residence. He commissioned the architect Giorgio Vasari to build a majestic structure for the magistrates who, though deprived of effectiveness and autonomy, continued to exist. Thus in April of 1561, following a tradition of ancient Rome, construction of the Uffizi was officially initiated with a solemn ceremony in which some bronze medallions, coined specifically for the occasion, were set into the building's foundation. 

The enterprise, according to Vasari himself, was bold in that the building consists of two arms connected in a horseshoe, which backs up to the Arno with its foundation just a few yards from the waters of the river. The entire structure appears to be suspended in the air as if by magic.  But after just four years, on the occasion of the wedding of his heir Francesco to Giovanna of Austria, Cosimo de' Medici took this project a step further with the incredible Corridoio Vasariano (the Vasari Corridor). A long corridor, much of which is suspended on arcades, passes across the Uffizi, runs along the bank of the Arno, crosses over Ponte Vecchio and the church of Santa Felicita, to create a secluded passage in the middle of the city. This allowed the princes to move undisturbed from their official residence at the Palazzo Vecchio to the new royal seat, the Pitti palace, on the other bank of the river.

Shortly thereafter in 1574 the Uffizi would become the first public museum in history, initially fascinating European nobles and art connoisseurs, then attracting the whole world.  The collections housed there are indeed unique and they permit us a grand journey through Renaissance culture and the changes that characterize it. The profound stylistic and technical innovations that we associate with the Italian Renaissance have defined the values we seek in art and have determined the manner in which we write its history.

The Collections
We begin where the first Renaissance art historians began their story.  It is a story of the artistic conquest of naturalism. The Renaissance conception of a picture as a believable material world on the other side of a frame still conditions to this day our expectations of what art ought to be. Thus, the story told by the unfolding technical and stylistic changes in the galleries of the Uffizi is a familiar one: progress, increasing naturalism, the contribution of the individual genius. We will make these changes clear to you as we go, but we will also explain how they represent a concept of history written after the fact, to glorify the art and the world-view from the age of the Medici.

We encounter first the late medieval work of Cimabue and Giotto, whose static and iconic figures float in a profusion of gold, depicting the unearthly holiness of the figures and their separateness from the world of man. Representing attitudes and beliefs almost contrary to those of the Renaissance, these works have often been misunderstood. We will then see the famed development of three-dimensional space and corporeality in the early Renaissance paintings of artists such as Masolino and Masaccio, whose humanist context led them to seek more earthly expressions of the divine. There is also the wonderful Fra Angelico, who gives us naturalistic settings but refuses to profane the Virgin with too much corporeal substance. We will see the beautiful Madonna and Child with Two Angels (1455-1466) by Filippo Lippi that harmonizes in a single poetic atmosphere the faces of the Mother and Child with the landscape of the background, and the portraits of Battista Sforza and Federico di Montefeltro where the emphasis on the actual features of the individuals expresses the new values of Renaissance man. 

Numerous works of Sandro Botticelli - conspicuous representative of the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent - are present in the Uffizi and nearly all deserving of our attention. La Primavera (c. 1481) with its graceful figures suspended in an eternally flowering garden, and La Nascita di Venere (the Birth of Venus, c. 1484) blown toward the shore among swirling rose petals by the breath of Zephre, the god of the winds both represent ancient classical myths with a sense of wonder, grace, and beauty meant to participate in the humanist dialogues about the arts themselves and the role of beauty in man's development.

After a few beautiful paintings by Perugino, we will reach the room of the great masters. The Annuciation (1472) and the Adoration of the Magi (1481-82) by Leonardo da Vinci then just over 30 years old, will introduce us to his uncommon genius. With tireless curiosity for the natural world, da Vinci studied and analyzed man and nature, far beyond the realm of painting, yet his vast understanding produced anything but cold and scientific pictures. With his characteristic chiaroscuro (light and shade) he conveyed psychological interaction and thoughtful moods in his figures. During the course of our visit we will tell you of his other fields of study, his uncommon capacity for extreme formal rigor and expressive detail, his own sense of being an "unlettered" man, as he sadly considered himself on account of his inability to read the classic texts in their original Latin and Greek as did the intellectuals of the day.

The many works of Raphael Sanzio deserve no less attention. Among them we will see the Madonna del Cardellino (1505) in which the artist elaborates on the emotional relationship between the sacred figures, and the Portrait of Pope Leo X (1518) where a sublime play of light exalts the carefully ordered hierarchy of figures, immersed in tonal gradations of intense red. Finally we encounter the Tondo Doni (Doni family's tondo or round panel) by Michelangelo (1506) with its whole compositional order subverting the usual schemes and with the plasticity of the figures enveloped in a single marvelous embrace. These last two famous artists in Florence would soon after leave the city, following the changed political conditions, and turn toward Rome. (For their artworks in Rome, please consult our private tours Rome or our group tours Rome).

Some Venetian artists like Giorgione and Titian will deserve our attention, as will a selection of works from the Mannerist phase of Renaissance art represented by Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Bronzino.

The last artist that we will fully attend to will be Caravaggio. His new pictorial language, tied in part to his own exuberant vitality and hedonistic pleasure in life, was also a product of his Counterreformation context and the Church's search for compelling, dramatic, and theatrical imagery. The Medusa (1596) with hair transformed into serpents by the ire of the gods and with an icy gaze of death, no less than the Sacrifice of Isaac  (1603) whose immanent slaughter is dramatically arrested by the hand of the angel, are both representations of essential dramas painted in the raw and unrestrained style of another great genius of Italian art.

We will conclude our guided visit walking along the outside of the Vasari Corridor to the Ponte Vecchio where we will let the waters of the river accompany you in a romantic reflection of an intense emotive and cognitive experience.