The Uffizi Gallery Museum/The Pitti Palace Collections

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THE
Uffizi Gallery
MUSEUM
by Alexandra Bonfante-Warren
T
^he Galleria degli Uffizi is the world's oldest museum. The building itself is a masterpiece, originally designed by Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter, and telltale author of the lives of the Renaissance artists. Its aristocratic walls house two unparalleled collections: The Galleria displays masterpieces of painting dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as great works of sculpture from classical antiquity. The second collection, known as the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, holds nearly 120,000 drawings and prints; begun as a collection in the mid-sixteenth century, it is still expanding today.
The Uffizi Gallery Museum tells the story of these incredible collections, begun in the mid-i500s by history's greatest art patrons and singular family, the Medici. With more than 300 outstanding full-color illustrations and a... Tovább

Fülszöveg

i"!',
i', ; ¦¦

¦ ¦ i
¦ .M'l
'VrY
¦' I i 1,
'' llH
!I- ' 'i ' I

THE
Uffizi Gallery
MUSEUM
by Alexandra Bonfante-Warren
T
^he Galleria degli Uffizi is the world's oldest museum. The building itself is a masterpiece, originally designed by Giorgio Vasari, architect, painter, and telltale author of the lives of the Renaissance artists. Its aristocratic walls house two unparalleled collections: The Galleria displays masterpieces of painting dating from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as great works of sculpture from classical antiquity. The second collection, known as the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, holds nearly 120,000 drawings and prints; begun as a collection in the mid-sixteenth century, it is still expanding today.
The Uffizi Gallery Museum tells the story of these incredible collections, begun in the mid-i500s by history's greatest art patrons and singular family, the Medici. With more than 300 outstanding full-color illustrations and a remarkably insightful text, the brilliance of the Renaissance in Florence, Italy—a magnet city for the greatest painters, sculptors, artisans, and writers of that era— comes to life, and with it the story of this incomparable building, its history, and its collections.
Here, between the two covers of The Uffizi Gallery Museum, much like within the two "arms" of the Uffizi Museum itself, readers will delight in the beauty of Botticelli's incomparable Primavera, with its sensuous and complex iconography of winds blowing and flora blooming, and his Birth of Venus, with its iconic image of the idealized Venus, the goddess of love, emerging full grown out of her shell. Here also is Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, his only painting other than those of the frescoed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Da Vinci, Raphael, Bronzino, Titian, and other sixteenth-century masters astound the reader with the beauty, depth, and vision of their work. The seventeenth century is represented by paintings wiUl haunt-ingly erotic images, such as Caravaggio's Bacchus or Artemisa Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holophernes.
One of the world's richest and most complete assemblages of drawings, the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, featuring the hand of masters including Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Buontalenti, is also proudly represented within the Uffizi and within this volume. Drawn from the lines of these sketches, the genesis of die creative process itself is revealed.
The Uffizi Gallery Museum is an incomparable book, and one that will delight readers with magnificent illustrations and its well-researched and engaging text.
(Continued on back flap)

PlTTI^ALACE
COLLECTIONS
by Alexandra Bonfante-Warren
The Pitti Palace is a long, aristocratic dwelhng that seems to have landed—along with the somewhat awkward piazza in front of it—amid a warren of small buildings, boutiques, cafés, and repair shops in Florence, across the Arno River from the busy city center. For 300 years the Pitti served as a palace, with its bright and serene expanses serving as a mirror of history, home first to the Medici, Florence's ruling family and the greatest art patrons of their time, and later to the House of Savoy, the imperial family of Europe. Upon its silk- and damask-lined walls hang some of the fmest masterpieces in the world.
The Pitti Palace Collections features nearly 300 full-color illustrations of the greatest works of art housed within and beyond the glamour of the Pitti itself Reflected in the pages of this magnificent book are several different self-defined collections currenfly housed within the edifice. The Pitti Palace Collections focuses first on the palace itself; then on the paintings in the Palatine Gallery and GaUery of Modern Art; the porcelain and silverworks coUections, as encompassed by the Decorative Arts section; and finally, the unparalleled BoboU Gardens, one of the finest examples of classical Italian garden design anywhere in the world.
View the palace itself, with its gilded opulence, fres-co-laden walls, vaulted Baroque trotnpe /'oei7 ceilings, and some of the world's finest examples of stuccowork These rooms serve as the ultimate background for the Pitti's personal histories and diree centuries of mhabitants, mclud-ing no less than die King of Italy and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Paintings encompassing devotional Giottos and Duccios of the fifteenth century, to Raphael's gentle portraits of Madonnas, as well as his double portraits of Agnolo and Maddalena Strozzi Doni, portray Renaissance Florence as clearly as if a camera had been transported through time. Mannerist masterpieces by Bronzino, Pontormo, and Vasari are glimpses into the quirky artistic style that breached the high Renaissance and early Baroque pamting. There is Mtde to compare with the luxurious and opulent painting technique found in Rubens's The Four Philosophers or Titian's Pietro Aretino and his Portrait of a Lady, also lovingly known as La Bella. Moving away from stricdy Itahan pamters, the Palatine collection, and subsequendy paintings in the Modern collection (representing the eighteenth through twentieth centuries), present a more worldly view of the Pitti's inhabitants who consciously sought out and meticulously selected the works.
(Continued on bacic flap) Vissza