After work lasting more than a year, some major unveiling has just taken place at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. The first floor of the gallery now has 14 new rooms, each with a new colour scheme to reflect the works on show. Over 100 paintings, a third of which have not been on show for many years, are on show to the public after an enormous amount of work, creating what the museum’s Director has called ‘a museum within a museum’.
Titian’s famed ‘Venus of Urbino’ has a room dedicated to it, and, having not been on show for over 10 years, Federico Barocci’s enormous ‘Madonna del Popolo’ can once again be admired. There are rooms dedicated to Venetian styles, others for the works of Tintoretto and Veronese, and there are changes too to the building itself – a focus on architectural detail and a re-opened window offering views of the river and the hills to the south of Florence, an attempt to re-frame the gallery in its urban setting.