Uffizi Gallery

• Built in 1581 under request of Grand Duke Franciso de’ Medici, son of Cosimo I Original design was by Giorgio Vasari.
• In 1560, work was began to create the horseshoe-shaped building that reaches from the Ponte Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria, to and along the Arno river.
• Built rapidly despite minor difficulties and major social events taking place in he area.
• Originally intended for offices and to host bureaucratic meetings for various magistrates.
• Once construction of the Uffizi was complete, Cosimo I had Vasari, his favorite architect, create a passageway connecting the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, running atop the Ponte Vecchio which is just down river from the Uffizi Gallery.
• In 1584, the Octagonal Platform was built by Vasari’s successor Buontalenti.  It consists of a weathercock connecting to an inside pointer alluding to the air element.  The sky vault and red upholstery allude to the water and fire elements.
• On the other side of the building were the labs of smaller limbs, the foundry (or pharmacy) and over the loggia of the lanzi there was a hanging garden.
• The project to arrange the Gallery on the 3rd floor of this large building, conceived by Cosimo I Medici, was realized by his son Francesco I
• Later Cosimo III had the Gallery made larger in order to house the works inherited from his uncle Cardinal Leopold.
• With the extinction of the Medici dynasty, the last of the family, Anna Maria Ludovica, who died in 1737, with the so called "family-pact" held in Vienna in 1737, arranged that all the art treasures gathered by the powerful dynasty forever remain at the disposal of the Florentines and of the visitors of the entire world.
• The Lorraines, successors of the Medici, enriched the Gallery and built the beautiful room of Niobe to house the marble group called Niobe and her children struck by Apollo and Diana. After the expulsion of the Lorraine (1859), the Gallery passed under the State and was completely reorganized according to modern criteria.

Sculptures

David

Michelangelo

1501–1504

Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence

Perhaps one the most famous statues in the world, Michelangelo’s David is a universal icon of the Renaissance and the genius of the artist himself. Commissioned for the Piazza della Signoria, the David was rendered like no other interpretation before. The pose in particular sets it apart from previous David’s by Donatello and Verrocchio who had both represented the hero standing victorious over the head of Goliath, and Andrea del Castagno who had shown the boy in mid-swing, even as Goliath's head rested between his feet.  Carved out of a single piece of Carrara marble, the David is a statue created using the subtractive method. This freestanding sculpture is truly a marvelous work of the time balance-wise as Michelangelo so cleverly shifted the weight of the figure onto a stump attached to the back of the bottom right leg.

Judith and Holofernes

Donatello

1460

Copy in the Piazza della Signoria, Original in Palazzo Vecchio

As with virtually all of his other works, Donatello focused on naturalism in Judith and Holofernes. The base of the sculpture, for example, is cushion-like and reminiscent of a similar device used in Donatello's St. Mark. Judith's clothes are realistically mussed; her clothes fall naturally in folds along her raised arm. The bronze for the statue was cast in eleven parts to make the gilding easier. The sculpture was crafted in the round and has four distinct faces, providing the viewer with 360 degrees of intensely inspiring sculpture.

Pope Liberius Baptizing the Neophytes

Alessandro Algardi, European

Southern European

Italian, 1602 – 1654

This terracotta relief is the only known preliminary study for a sculpture adorning the fountain of Saint Damasus in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican. The relief shows Pope Liberius baptizing with water from this newly created source. In contrast to the reductive process of carving, modeling is essentially a building-up process in which the sculpture grows organically from the inside. The artist, Algardi, made this study in clay, an easily worked medium that allowed him to experiment and refine his ideas before carving the fountain relief in marble. By sculpting the foreground figures almost fully in the round and those farther away in increasingly shallow relief, Algardi achieved the illusion of spatial depth and three-dimensional volume on a two-dimensional surface.

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