The Uffizi Galleries ★★★

Botticelli's
Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" (c. 1485) in the Uffizi Galleries, Florence.

Visiting the Uffizi is like taking Renaissance 101: a smorgasbord of paintings by Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Fra' Angelico, and Botticelli—including his iconic Birth of Venus

Gallerie degli Uffizi (Uffizi Galleries) ★★★
Piazzale degli Uffizi 6 (off the southeast corner of Piazza della Signoria)
tel. +39-055-238-8651
www.polomuseale.firenze.it/uffizi
Open Tues-Sun 8:15am–6:50pm (sometimes later in summer)
Closed Mon
Adm

Book tickets: tel. +39-055-294-883
www.firenzemusei.it or Select Italy
Firenze Card: Yes
Book a tour: Viator.com or Context Travel

Uffizi tours
• Skip the Line: Uffizi Gallery Tickets
• Context: Arte Firenze
• Skip the Line: Uffizi Gallery Tour
• Skip the Line: Uffizi Gallery and Vasari Corridor Walking Tour
• Context: Arte Firenze for Families
• Skip the Line: Small Group Uffizi Gallery Walking Tour
• Skip the Line: Accademia and Uffizi Tour
• Science and Art in the Age of Galileo  
• Florence Half-Day or Full-Day Sightseeing Tour
• Private Tour: Florence Sightseeing Tour
• Context: Vasari Corridor
• Context: Full Day Tour from Cruise Ship Florence

Sights nearby
★★★ Piazza della Signoria [square]
★★ Palazzo Vecchio [palace/museum]
★★ Ponte Vecchio [bridge]
★ Museum of Science [museum]
Orsanmichele [church]

Where to eat nearby
Gelateria Carrozze [gelato]
★ I Cche C'é C'é [meal]
★★★ I Fratellini [snack]
★★ Acqua Al 2 [meal]
Casa di Dante [meal]
★ L'Antico Trippaio [snack]
★ Alle Murate [meal]
★★ Le Mossacce [meal]
★★★ Vivoli [gelato]
★ Gelateria Perché No? [gelato]
Le Volpi e l'Uva [snack; across river]

Hotels nearby
Hotel degli Orafi [moderate]
Hotel Hermitage [moderate]
Relais Uffizi [moderate]
Relais Piazza Signoria [moderate]
La Casa Del Garbo [moderate]
Hotel Balestri [cheap]
Hotel Pierre [premier]
» More hotels near the Uffizi

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Boticelli's Birth of Venus
Botticelli's Primavera (Allegory of Spring) (c.1482).The Uffizi Galleries serve as a kind of real-life textbook on the development of the Renaissance from the 13th to the 18th centuries.

That's a fancy way of saying that this (relatively) tiny museum has some of the greatest paintings by some of the greatest artists of the early and High Renaissance, from Giotto to Botticelli to Michelangelo and beyond. It can be downright exhausting.

Although only a fraction of the size of galleries like the Louvre or Vatican, the Uffizi ranks in the world's top echelon of museums. What it lacks in quantity, it more than makes up for in quality, with room after room of unequivocal masterpieces.

These rooms open off corridors lined by ancient sculptures and elaborately painted to celebrate the history of Florence and the ruling Medici clan, whose private offices ("uffizi" in old Florentine dialect) these were and whose final heir, Maria Luisa de' Medici, in her will stipulated that this, the family's private art collection, be opened to the public.

Thank you, Maria Luisa.

The first corridor

Cimabue's Maestà in the Uffizi Galleries
Cimabue's Santa Trinita Maestà (c.1285).

Giotto's Maestà in the Uffizi Galleries
Giotto's Ognissanti Maestà (c.1310). You get off to a roaring start with the trio of giant Maestà paintings in the first room. Together, these "Madonna in Majesty"—the Virgin Mary seated on a throne as the Queen of Heaven, often bobbling a baby Jesus on her lap—show visually how the Renaissance began, what made it different from everything that came before.

Painting quickly moved from the rigid, Byzantine style of Cimabue's version—the so-called Santa Trinita Maestà—through some more earthy (and decorative) Gothic elements courtesy of the Sienese great Duccio, to the point where painting is completely transformed by the artist who broke all the rules and in the process catalyzed Renaissance painting, Giotto.

Giotto's Mary (right, bottom)—the Ognissanti Maestà—has actual and weight bearing down and bulk under her robes, the fabric of her silken blouse pulling against her breasts in a realistic way—compared with Cimabue's Madonna (right, top), who is free-floating above her throne in a typically Byzantine drapery of blue and red robes finely incised with a hatchwork of gold leaf.

Giotto's Mary face is a naturalistic study of a sturdy peasant woman, not the almond-eyed, arrow-nosed Byzantine ideal of unearthly beauty in Cimabue.

The attendant angels in the Giotto are all individuals (their faces unique) and are milling about, halos bumping into one another, while standing firmly on the ground, not identikit angelic clones floating around merely to decorate the margins.

(Also, Giotto—though still a generation from the development of true perspective—uses ingenious little tricks to show depth, like having two of the deep background angels peer at the scene through the windows in the side of the throne.)

The differences between these two works is staggering—not because one is "better" than the other (it isn't), but because of what each has to say about how a painting should be done.

Both artists were great masters. It's just that Giotto was the master who was pointing to the future, while Cimabue had only mastered what had come before. That this quantum leap in art happened within a single generation makes it all the more remarkable. The works were painted a mere 25 years apart.

The icing on the cake? Cimabue had actually been Giotto's teacher. Cimabue discovered the former shepherd as a lad, using a sharp rock to idly scratch sketches of his sheep into a boulder and took him under his wing.

Simone Martini's Annunciation (1333)
Simone Martini's Annunciation (1333) And all that's just in the first room—and I didn't even get to the Duccio, or any of the other works in this room.

Like I said: small museum; major collection. (OK, I promise: no more lengthy art history lessons.)

Move on through rooms featuring the work of early Sienese greats like Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini (love his 1333 Annunciation, in which the Virgin Mary draws back violently, looking distinctly disbelieving at the Archangel Gabriel's news of her impending motherhood), then on to Florentine and other Tuscan masters like Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Filippo Lippi (debauched monk, bon vivant, and teacher of a young Botticelli), and Paolo Uccello (a painter obsessed with the newly discovered technique of perspective; in one corner of his large, ingenious—and patently ugly—Battle of San Romano, one soldier has even, in the words of one great art historian, "managed to die in perspective").

Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation.
Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (1472-75).Now you come to a vast room dedicated to Botticelli, focused on his two most famous works, The Birth of Venus (that blonde-on-a-half-shell rising from the sea foam) and The Allegory of Spring.

The tour-bus crowds tend to plant themselves in front of these for 20 minutes at a time, so you may have to wait for a good look, but meanwhile you can entertain yourself with the rooms' lesser-known works by Botticelli and his contemporary Ghirlandaio (who first taught a young Michelangelo how to fresco).

Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation.
Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (1475-80).Beyond this room, you've got paintings by Luca Signorelli, Perugino (Raphael's first teacher), and another Annunciation, this one painted around 1475-80 by a young Leonardo da Vinci in his mid-20s.

In the same room you can see a bit more of Leonardo's early work in the form of Andrea del Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (1475–78), in which Verrocchio's young apprentice Leonardo da VInci likely painted the curly-haired angel in the lower left (another, older apprentice—Botticelli—may have painted the angel next to Da Vinci's).

According to Vasari, when Verrocchio saw Da Vinci's angel, he was so humbled by his student's mastery that he put down his brushes and vowed never to paint again. (Good thing he had a successful career as a sculptor to fall back on.)

Normally, you can also admire Da Vinci's russet-tinged Adoration of the Magi nearby, started around 1481 but left thoroughly unfinished when Leonardo decamped for Milan—evidence that Leonardo was already well into his habit of rarely finishing what he started. [Note: This painting was taken to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure—Florence's main restoration studio—in late 2012 for study and a subsequent restoration that is estimated to last one to two years.]

The Tribune (and rest of the first corridor)

Take the time to cycle through the small octagonal room called the Tribuna, designed by Buontalenti in 1584 with a pietra dura (stone inlay) floor, mother-of-pearl ceiling dome, and bloodred walls covered with High Renaissance and Mannerist paintings.

You shuffle around the perimeter of the room, admiring the saints and Medici portraits by the likes of Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and especially Bronzino (the best: a portrait of Eleonora da Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, with her son Giovanni de' Medici, arrayed fabulously in the same velvet and pearl-laced dress in which, it turns out, she was eventually buried).

In the center of the Tribuna is ranged a handful of choice ancient statues, including a pair of wrestlers displaying a rather, er, interesting hold that is extremely illegal today (let us just say this hold is only practicable if you happen to be male and wrestle nude, as the ancient Greeks did), and the famous Medici Venus, a 1st century BC copy of Praxiteles' original Aphrodite of Cnidos (Praxiteles was the Michelangelo of Ancient Greece, though most of what we know of his work is through copies like this one).

Following the Tribuna is a series of rooms filled with northern European art from the pre- and early-Renaissance eras (Dürer, Cranach, Hans Holbein the Younger) as well as paintings from Venetian masters like Correggio, Bellini, and Giorgione.

All of these are fine works, and many would likely be among the centerpieces of other collections. However, this is not other collections, This is the Uffizi, the most embarassingly masterpiece-laden museum of its size in the world. Most people—especially on a first visit—tend to blow through these northern Reniassance rooms pretty quickly.

The connecting hall

Zipping through the Flemish and Venetian stuff is all fine and well, because as soon as you move on around to the second corridor you're going to be right back into the biggest heavy hitters of Old Masters. First, however, most visitors pause to take a breather in the connecting hall between the two main corridors.

The Uffizi, built in 1560 by Giorgio Vasari for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, were built as a long, U-shaped building—two long corridors connected by a shorter hall at the Arno River end. The painting galleries are up on the top floor, and the connecting hall (at the base of the "U") offers some fine intimate views of downtown Florence.

Pause to look out the tall windows in one direction down the Uffizi's elongated courtyard that opens into Piazza della Signoria at the far end, and then out the opposite windows for a panorama over the Arno River, Ponte Vecchio, and the Corridorio Vasariano (below).

The Corridorio Vasariano

That odd covered corridor extending from the Uffizi, zig-zagging over to cross the Ponte Vecchio atop its famous little shops, then disappearing into the Oltrarno on the other side is the Corridorio Vasariano.

Vasari Corridor
The Vasari CorridorIt was built by Vasari for Cosimo I de' Medici so the Duke could walk the kilometer (0.6 miles) from his home at the Pitti Palace here to his downtown "uffizi" (which means "offices" in old Florentine) without having to mix with the hoi polloi on the streets.

Incidentally, those little shops once held butchers, who could conveniently toss their offal into the river below. Once the Duke started walking across the tops of the shops every morning, he found the stench unbearable. He evicted the butchers and replaced them with something more becoming for a duke to walk over: gold– and silversmiths. The bridge remains lined by jewelry shops to this day.

View from the Vasari Corridor
View from the Vasari CorridorYou can actually tour the corridor—lined by a remarkable collection of self-portraits by a variety of Renaissance and baroque artists and tiny windows offering ducal peekaboo views over Florence—though its only open to the public sporadically.

Last time around it was open Tues and Thurs 9am–11:30am, Wed and Fri 2–4:30pm. Call tel. +39-055-265-4321 to find out if and when it is currently open and to reserve an entry time (obligatory)—or book a tour:

The second corridor

Michelangelo's Holy Family
Michelangelo's Holy Family or Doni Tondo (1504–05).Michelangelo's bright and colorful Holy Family (a.k.a. the Doni Tondo, after the family that commissioned it for a wedding) signals our dive into the High Renaissance.

The startling colors and attention to the musculature of twisting bodies that Michelangelo used in groundbreaking works like this one influenced a whole generation of artists called "Mannerists"—Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, Andrea del Sarto, and Parmigianino—whose works fill next few rooms.

(Proof that all art is 'modern art'...at least in its own time. The High Renaissance offshoot movement we now call "Mannerism" is an abbreviation of how the works by these artists were referred to at the time: as painting done "nella maniera moderna," which means "in the modern manner." Hence, "Mannerism." It could have just as easily been called "modernism," but then what would we have called the new styles of art birthed in the late 19th/early 20th century? Actually, the irony of terming everything from the Impressionists to Abstract Expressionism "modernism" has led us to use the ridiculous and meaningless phrase "post-modern" to describe art from about 1960 on. Does that mean art now lives in an eternal future state, beyond the modern present? But I digress. Also, I broke my promise about no more art history. Sorry.)

They are continually rearranging the rooms in the latter half of the second corridor. Ever since a bomb damaged part of the Uffizi in 1993 (it was a political hit by a home-grown terrorist, nothing for you to worry about) they've been expanding and reinventing the museum to fulfill a new vision of the "Grande Uffizi," the project moving along with typical Italian speed and vigor, which is best described as "glacial, only without so much actual movement forward."

All this means is that you never quite know where the balance of the works will pop up, but you will be treated somewhere to paintings by other big guns of the High Renaissance and early baroque, like Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio.

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This material was last updated March 2013. All information was accurate at the time.

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