Galleria degli Uffizi

The Uffizi were begun for Cosimo I de' Medici in 1560 to Vasari's design and completed around 1580, the Medici making the building the stage for their collections. One straight riverside palazzo now holds paintings from Giotto to Caravaggio, ancient Roman sculptures along its upper corridors, and a viewing axis onto the Arno no other museum floor can copy.

Why it matters

The Uffizi Galleries describe their flagship as one of the most famous museums in the world, and the claim rests on two things that belong together: a Renaissance building conceived as a single urban gesture, and a collection formed by one family over three hundred years. The galleries' own pages set the framework — a large building constructed between 1560 and 1580 to Vasari's design, filling its first and second floors with ancient sculptures and paintings running from the Middle Ages to the modern period. The gallery rooms bring together works by Giotto, Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca, Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Mantegna, Correggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, with German, Dutch and Flemish schools extending the map north.

What to notice

Two experiences alternate inside. The first is the art: room after room of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Tuscan panels opening into the High Renaissance, a run that lets you watch changing approaches to perspective, colour and portraiture. The second is the architecture itself. The corridors are lined with ancient statues and busts from the Medici collections — the galleries call them ancient Roman copies of lost Greek sculptures — so that sculpture and painting frame one another the whole way along. At the far end, windows give onto the river and the church towers; from the top floor the building's short axis becomes a telescope aimed at Ponte Vecchio. The print and drawing collections, photograph library and architectural drawings make the Uffizi a research institution as much as a display.

Context and history

The building's story is bound to the Medici state. Vasari raised it for Cosimo I with speed and audacity, and in 1565 the same architect stitched it into the city's power map: the official history of the Corridoio Vasariano records that Cosimo commissioned the corridor for the wedding of his son Francesco to Joanna of Austria, completed in just five months, running 760 metres from the Uffizi over the Ponte Vecchio — sidestepping the Mannelli Tower — to the Buontalenti Grotto in Boboli. When the Medici line ended, the palace passed to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine from 1737, as the Pitti records note, and the dynastic collections became the patrimony the galleries administer today. Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici started the self-portrait collection in the seventeenth century; his painters' portraits hung along the corridor from the 1970s until 2016, and today the corridor welcomes visitors in its own right as a distinct venue of the Uffizi Galleries.