Love Day at the Uffizi: couples get in for half price on Feb. 2

On the occasion of the Festa dei Doni, the anniversary of the sumptuous wedding between Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi celebrated in Florence on January 31, 1503, the Uffizi Galleries is proposing Love Day on February 2, 2021. The famous Florentine museum commemorates the happy event by letting couples in at half price (they will pay only one ticket instead of two). Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Strozzi commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the Tondo Doni, now among the masterpieces in the Uffizi collections; the couple is also depicted in the double portrait painted by Raphael. Wealthy Florentine collectors and patrons, the Doni family were major players in the art market between the 15th and 16th centuries.

In addition to the special promotion for couples, the Uffizi has also planned a series of online initiatives to commemorate the anniversary of the union of the Doni: on January 31, a special episode of the #uffizidamangiare format will be released on the museum’s facebook page, in which pastrichef and entrepreneur Debora Massari will present a triptych of desserts specially created for the Feast of the Gifts: one reproduces the iconic frame of Michelangelo’s famous Tondo, the others interpret the portraits of Agnolo and Maddalena created by Raphael.
A second video will be dedicated to these paintings and their image will be accompanied, in voice over, by the declamation of a love sonnet composed by the Urbino painter.

Finally, in the two weeks from the 31st to Valentine’s Day, the social networks of the Uffizi Galleries will be flooded with love-themed posts, dedicated to every form of this feeling (carnal, conjugal, filial, brotherly, and so on) through lyrics by poets, writers, playwrights and artists from antiquity to the present: Sappho, Ovid, Tasso, Shakespeare, D’Annunzio, Emily Dickinson, Hermann Hesse, Walt Whitman, Alda Merini, Sylvia Plath, Baudelaire, among them.

Galleries Director Eike Schmidt commented, “Gift Day is dedicated to couples, whose love is an art form. It is an opportunity to celebrate it at the museum, which is never as quiet as it is now. There are so many works there that, both because of their subjects and the way the artist has depicted them, reflect our highest feelings and involve the sphere of our affections, including the marital one.”

The following is Raphael’s love sonnet.

Amor, che m’envocasti con doi lumi
Of doi beli occhi dov’io me strugo e (s)face,
By white snow and by lively rose,
By a beautiful speech in donnessi costume.

Such that so much I burn, that neither sea nor rivers
Could quench that fire; but I am not sorry,
For so much of good my ardour makes me,
That burning onior piud’arder me consu(mi).

How sweet was the yoke and the chain
Of thy white embers to my will(ti)
That, removing me, I feel mortal pen(a).

Of other things I say not, that for m(olti)
For soperchia docenza a mo(r)te men(a)
And yet I keep silent, to thee the pens(er) turned.

Pictured is the layout of Room 41 of the Uffizi with the Tondo Doni and Raphael’s double portrait. Ph. Credit Finestre Sull’Arte

Love Day at the Uffizi: couples get in for half price on Feb. 2

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