Farewell to Anna Forlani Tempesti, historic director of the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet

Art historian Anna Forlani Tempesti, a great scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drawing and longtime director of the Uffizi Gallery’s Prints and Drawings Cabinet, passed away yesterday in Florence at the age of eighty-eight.

A graduate in art history from the University of Florence with Roberto Longhi, she specialized in Renaissance graphic design (in which she became one of the world’s foremost experts) but her many interests also ranged to other areas of the art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She joined the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe in the 1950s and later became its director. She also worked at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure (she was its superintendent in the 1980s) and taught history of drawing at the University of Udine and the University of Bologna. Among his many publications are the monographs on Pontormo, the one on Raphael’s drawings, the complete catalog of Piero di Cosimo, the many books devoted to the drawings of Tuscan artists (in 1979 he curated, in Florence, an exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings together with Luciano Berti and Paolo Galluzzi) such as the one on the drawings of the founders of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (of which Anna Forlani Tempesti was, moreover, an honorary academician), published for Olschki in 1963. During his career he also curated numerous exhibitions of graphic art.

Great mourning at the Uffizi, for many years the “home” of Anna Forlani Tempesti. “The ’historical soul’ of the Prints and Drawings Cabinet of the Uffizi has left us,” said director Eike D. Schmidt. “Anna Forlani Tempesti was the embodiment of rigor and at the same time passion for art history. As an Erasmus student, I too had the good fortune to take her History of Drawing course at the University of Bologna: I remember her unflinching methodological precision, her boundless knowledge of drawing, particularly sixteenth-century Florentine drawing, but also her kindness to her students, her sunny and smiling personality. For over half a century she put herself and her great abilities at the disposal of the Uffizi, her students and colleagues: her passing marks us all deeply. We will always remember her with great affection.”

Pictured is the Detti Room at the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet. Ph. Credit Finestre Sull’Arte

Farewell to Anna Forlani Tempesti, historic director of the Uffizi Drawings and Prints Cabinet

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