Uffizi, the Jovian Collection collected and told for the first time in a book

The secrets of the more than 560 portraits of illustrious women and men of history and legend hanging on the walls of the three corridors on the second floor of the Uffizi Gallery of Statues and Paintings are now collected for the first time in a book: The Gioviana Collection of the Uffizi (Volume I Essays 158 pp Volume II Catalogue 628 pp, Giunti Editore), a scholarly publication edited by Maria Matilde Simari and Alberica Barbolani da Montauto, accompanied by photographs by Antonio Quattrone, in fact recounts and documents the celebrated series of paintings, following four years of research and painstaking work.

The historic collection of faces of famous people is named after its creator, Paolo Giovio (1483-1552), a scholar, physician and bishop from Como. His collection was started in Florence itself, combining where possible portraits from life or taken from ancient visual evidence, such as coins, sculptures, paintings, and medals. Today of the approximately four hundred works in the original collection, a few dozen remain, preserved in Como or elsewhere in the world. The Florentine series, on the other hand, arose from the desire of Grand Duke Cosimo I, who knew and frequented Giovio, to have such a collection in his turn; the task of making copies was entrusted to Cristofano dell’Altissimo, who took ten years for this purpose. The first sixteenth-century nucleus was then joined by the works of continuators in the following centuries. The fame of the Jovian Collection spread everywhere in Europe and inspired imitations and reproductions even in print. The portraits have a unique format and the figures are grouped by role: popes, sultan emperors, soldiers, men of letters, scientists, nobles, saints, and artists. They include Romulus (recently rediscovered in the storerooms of the Pitti Palace), Tamerlane, Saladin, Suleiman, Attila, Emperor Charles V, Dante, Petrarch, Suleiman, Catherine de’ Medici, Vittoria Colonna, Elizabeth I of England and Ukrainian princess Roxelana.

“The Gioviana series, after these volumes, will no longer be a mere string of paintings hung between walls and ceiling in the Corridors of the Uffizi, nor even a banal ’Who’s Who’ of centuries and millennia past, but an intense and stimulating narrative that starts from the subjects and reaches the patrons, opening unexpected horizons on the various eras in which the depicted figures lived, and not only,” commented Uffizi Galleries Director Eike Schmidt. “For the Gioviana is an encyclopedia of knowledge, literary and historical tastes, likes, dislikes, opportunisms and the vicissitudes of international politics during the three centuries that have occurred up to the completion of this gigantic survey.”

Uffizi, the Jovian Collection collected and told for the first time in a book

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