Presented the Uffizi Galleries' calendar of exhibitions from fall 2019 to summer 2020

Announced the Uffizi Galleries ’ exhibition calendar for the period between next fall and summer 2020 designed for the tastes and interests of all visitors. Twelve months of art featuring exhibitions on great classical sculpture, 19th-century painting , contemporary art, the Carabinieri’s recovery of stolen ancient manuscripts, and even a special exhibition dedicated to the history and evolution of footwear.

It will start on September 18 at the Pitti Palace with Shaped by Fire. Bronze Sculpture in the Florence of the Last Medici, which can be visited until January 12, 2020.
For the first time, a reasoned overview of bronze sculpture in Florence in the Baroque age will be offered, focusing on the period of the last grand dukes of the house of Medici. Starting with a selection of bronzes by Giambologna, his school, and the most important masters in early 17th-century metalwork, the exhibition will focus on commissions that arose at the direct impetus of the Florentine court or were linked to it.

From October 16, 2019, to January 12, 2020, Palazzo Pitti again, in theAndito degli Angiolini, will host the retrospective Neo Rauch. Works from 2006 to 2019. The artist is considered the greatest exponent of East German painting after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His works will be in Italy for the first time, and many paintings made especially for the spaces of Palazzo Pitti will be on display. Rauch’s are poetic and often enigmatic visions, challenging the viewer by drawing on figurative sources and German Romanticism, and revealing in his deep investigation of the human condition the influence of Socialist Realism and Surrealism.

TheMagliabechiana Hall of the Uffizi will instead host the exhibition Pietro Aretino and the Art of the Renaissance from November 26, 2019 to March 3, 2020. Through a hundred paintings, sculptures, objects of applied art, tapestries, miniatures and printed books, the world of a great 16th-century intellectual, Pietro Aretino, will be reconstructed. Five sections will illustrate the most significant moments in the artist’s story and the succession of different scenarios, from his beginnings between Arezzo and Perugia, to his landing at the papal court Rome, to his move to northern Italy, first to Mantua and finally to Venice.

At the Sala Detti and the Sala del Camino of the Uffizi, the exhibition I Cieli in una stanza. Wooden Ceilings in Florence and Rome in the Renaissance, from December 10, 2019 to March 8, 2020. Wooden coffered ceilings, called cieli in the Renaissance, will be illustrated on this occasion: constructive and ornamental elements of interior space, ceilings are a compendium of technique, art and symbolic representation, updating ancient culture in the refounding that affected churches and palaces in Florence and Rome between the 15th and 16th centuries.

It continues with At the Feet of the Gods. Footwear from the Classical to the Contemporary World: the exhibition will be on view from December 16, 2019, to April 19, 2020, at the Fashion and Costume Museum in the Pitti Palace. The history, social role and symbolic value of footwear from the classical world to the contemporary will be told here. The main types of shoes used in the period between the fifth century B.C. and the fourth century B.C., found in archaeological contexts in northern Europe, will be on display; depictions on reliefs, figured vases and statues will complement the archaeological nucleus, which will be flanked by a section devoted to the fortunes of ancient footwear in twentieth-century culture. To conclude, there will be shoes by major Italian designers of the last century along with models from Italy’s most famous manufacture of shoes for the cinema.

The Rediscovered Myth. The Niobids from the Horti Lamiani and the Villa of Valerius Messalla Corvino in comparison will be the next exhibition at the Uffizi, in the Sala della Niobe, from December 18, 2019 to March 15, 2020. In 2013, exactly 430 years after the discovery of the thirteen statues of the Niobe group not far from St. John Lateran, seven sculptures depicting the same myth were found in the remains of what was most likely the villa of Valerius Messalla Corvinus. The statues, which adorned the perimeter of pools, reiterate the link between this subject and the decoration of grandiose nymphaea, such as that of the Horti Lamiani, inside which the sculptures now in the Uffizi were found in 1583. Ciampino marbles will then be compared with those belonging to the ancient Medici collection to illustrate the myth of Niobe punished.

It will be Palazzo Pitti’s turn again: theAndito degli Angiolini will host the exhibition ’The Greatness of the Universe’ in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni from March 6 to June 7, 2020. A recognized protagonist in the evolution of scientific illustration, Giovanna Garzoni is less known as an illustrator of the geographical imagery of the Baroque era. Her works collected by the Medici, which are still the property of the Galleries, will be on display, as well as loans that will illustrate the artist’s field of action and her skill as a portrait painter. Based on an unpublished inventory, a section will reconstruct Vittoria della Rovere ’s Wunderkammer housed in the Sala dell’Aurora at the Poggio Imperiale, thus shedding light on a leading figure of the Grand Ducal family.

The Sala delle Nicchie in Palazzo Pitti will be the setting for Stories of Painted Pages. Manuscripts and Miniatures Recovered by the Florence Heritage Protection Unit, from March 21 to June 23, 2020.

And again, Giuseppe Bezzuoli, one of the protagonists of nineteenth-century painting, will be the protagonist of the first monographic exhibition dedicated to the artist. Giuseppe Bezzuoli (1789-1855). A Great Protagonist of Romantic Painting will be on view from April 2 to July 31, 2020 in theAula Magliabechiana and Sala Detti of the Uffizi. On this occasion, paintings by Bezzuoli will be compared with those of Francesco Hayez and Massimo D’Azeglio and with magnificent portraits by Ingres and Thomas Lawrence.

The calendar concludes with Hierapolis, Lady of the Nymphs. Myths and Realities of a City of Asia, an exhibition that will be mounted in the Limonaia Grande of the Boboli Gardens from May 26 to October 18, 2020. The exhibition will aim to acquaint visitors with the city of Hierapolis, its artistic productions, its social and religious history, and its monuments, through a wide selection of artifacts kept mainly at the Pamukkale Archaeological Museum (Denizli), in the warehouses of the Italian Archaeological Mission, and others from Italian and European museums.

“With this choice of exhibitions we have taken into consideration all categories of visitors. We thought to intrigue them, to involve them in the discussion of burning issues such as art theft (the illuminated codices) and protection (the Renaissance ceilings); we wanted to transport them from Asia Minor of antiquity to the world of Renaissance intellectuals; to make them range from the myth of the Niobids to the anguished human sampler of Neo Rauch, one of the leading figures of contemporary art in Europe; to make the sculptures of the great Florentine Baroque season dialogue with events happening now in the city, such as the Biennale at Palazzo Corsini. Everything is based on new research, and often also on recent acquisitions by the Uffizi Galleries, which towards the city, visitors and young people continue to activate a purposeful dialogue. In the spaces of the Museum and the Boboli Gardens, the exhibitions thus become an exchange of ideas and an opportunity for conscious growth,” said the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt.

For info: www.uffizi.it

Image: View of the Hall of Niobe at the Uffizi.
Uffizi Galleries, Florence

Presented the Uffizi Galleries' calendar of exhibitions from fall 2019 to summer 2020

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