Visiting the Uffizi Gallery, Florence’s premier art museum, is like walking through an art history book. Famous artworks abound. It’s no wonder, since the city of Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance. At the heart of Tuscany, it’s where some of the world’s best wine, food, art, and architecture come together in orgiastic perfection. If Western art history’s greatest Renaissance artists weren’t from Florence, they lived, worked, and studied in Florence for at least a part of their careers—Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Botticelli among them.
The Uffizi building, which houses a collection of works dating primarily from antiquity through the 18th century, is itself a notable work, as are so many buildings in Florence. Perched on the banks of the Arno River, it was commissioned by Cosimo di Medici in the mid 16th century and designed by artist Giorgio Vasari (whose book, The Lives of Artists, is still a primary source of information on artists of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries) to house the city’s administrative and legal offices–uffizi in Italian. The Medici name is synonymous with Florence and the Renaissance. For generations, members of the wealthy banking family were collectors of Greek and Roman antiquities and patrons of living artists.
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In addition to royal courts and nobility, the Catholic Church was a major patron of artists—it’s no wonder that many of us learned more about the Bible in art history classes than in years of Sunday school—and the amount of religious art on view at the Uffizi can lead to Christian fatigue. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the number of annunciations, adorations, crucifixions, Madonnas, and beheadings, not to mention portraits of the intermarrying wealthy. To help you navigate through all the masterpieces, here’s a hot list to get you started.
Note: The location of each artwork is listed below its description. You can refer to the Uffizi Gallery’s map to navigate.
Source: artnews.com