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.

Always Changing

Printmaking

Woodcut

“Nightvision” by Penck 1982
Woodcut was the perfect choice for A.R. Penck’s Nightvision as the effect of the roughly cut away wood hightened Pencks tribal-like figures. These primitive stick figures of the piece are derived from a personal system of symbols and signs that embody a message of commonality. The thick, angular lines created by the figures in addition to the patterns that surround them would have been very hard to create with other techniques such as etching and lithography. In fact, the unrefined aesthetic of the piece is commonly associated with woodcuts. 

Etching

“The Skull” by Otto Dix 1924

Skulls have always been used in the past as messages of wartime. Dix’s Skull is a gruesome image of decay and worms investing a human skull, which is meant to symbolize the indescribable horrors of the first World War. The details of the piece are qualities that are often attributed with etchings. These details and precision are achieved by the fine tools that are used to incise the designs on metal plates and would have been extrememly hard to do with woodcarving, where the grain of the wood might not permit it, or lithography, which would have left much room for error.

Lithography

“Profile of Light” by Redon 1886

Lithographs are known for their similarities to drawings themselves and are one of the most direct methods of printmaking. This is due to the process behind this technique. Instead of using a specific tool in a subtractive manner, lithographs are drawings in either crayons or tusche on polished slabs of limestone or metal. Many artists find this method preferable for a variety of reasons like Rodin who appreciated lithography’s proximity to drawing and the deep, mysterious blacks it can produce as seen in Profile of Light. This drawing-like quality is seen in the headpiece of the woman and in the lines of her face.

Serigraph

“Brushstroke” Roy Lichtenstein 1965

This hard-edged image was one of a series of paintings depicting enlarged brushstrokes that Lichtenstein created in 1965-1966. This series was created to make a direct comment on the elevated content and loaded brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. This piece is very clearly a screen print as evident in not only the clean, and sharp lines of the ‘brushstroke’ but in the bold areas of solid color. These qualities would have not been as easily produced through other techniques such as lithography and etching. 

Painting

The Birth of the Virgin Wiki Commons

Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella is truly a wonderful example of an exquisite fresco cycle. Using classical pilasters and entablatures, Ghirlandaio divided the two enormous walls under the wall rib in this Gothic chapel into six horizontally rectangular picture fields. In this particular piece, The Birth of the Virgin, set in a 15^th century Florentine Palazzo, the Tornabouni family are active participants in the piece, crowding around the bed of Mary’s mother. The painting is a truly a fresco as seen in the texture of the piece. Unlike oil and tempera, fresco is rougher and lends more to the shape of the pigments that the binding agent. The fresco also lacks the vibrancy of color that oil and tempera can achieve as seen in the blue cloaks of the 3^rd and 6^th women from the right. Also typical of fresco’s, The Birth of the Virgin, has seen better days. The lower right hand corner has loss o pigment and crumbling plaster.

Descent from the Cross Wiki Commons

Fra Angelico’s move into San Marco in Florence was beneficial for both parties, as Angelico had a peaceful place to work on and further develop his art and the church and cloister gained a collection of art that has placed it on the map. In Angelico’s 1440 triptych tempera, Descent form the Cross, the artists development of space and lines is evident. This early Renaissance piece is the quintessential tempera. The bright colors in the shades of red in the work are due to the vibrancy that came from the mixture o the pigments and egg yolk, something that was lost with fresco paintings.  There are few gradations of tone, seen in the figure to the far left, a quality that would have easily been achieved with oil.

The Holy Family with Saint Agnes, Wiki Commons

Fra Paolino’s oil painting, The Holy Family with Saint Agnes done in 1525 and hanging in San Marco, is a beautiful example of a High Renaissance oil painting. It is evident that this piece is an oil painting due to the overall sheen of the painting. Unlike frescos, which appear matte, and tempera, which have more of an eggshell appearance, oil paintings have a decidedly shiny appearance due to the glazes that an artist applies over time. When areas such as Mary’s blue mantle and the dress of the angel are examined, one can see the blending of the paint, something that is achieved quite easily with the slow-drying medium.  

A Universal Language

After Raphael, pencil

 “The art of life is to show your hand.” 
– E.V. Lucas

The hand has played a part in the creative life of every known society, and it has come to be symbolic or representative of the whole person in all forms of art.

They are the organs of the body that, except for the face, have been used most often in the various art forms to express human feeling. The hands point or lead or command; the hands cry out in agony or they lie quietly sleeping; the hands have moods, character, and, in a wider sense, their own particular beauty.

Caliari, chalk

Throughout the history of art hands in particular have played an important role in communicating meaning within paintings. In the Renaissance with the importance on humanism and portraying the human form as accurately as possible, it became vital that artists be able to capture hand gestures. Thus hand studies became common. The four studies of the human hand, done by Carlo Caliari, Bartolommeo Passarotti, Leonardo da Vinci, and a sixteenth century drawing done in the style of Raphael, all reflect on the time and trials that the artist underwent in the search for the perfect pose, the ideal lighting and placement.

The work of Carlo Caliari is precise and delicate, both technically and in the physical types. Caliari’s oily black chalk, heightened with white on gray paper study of hands and arms are more developed than the black and white sketches of the other artists. In his sketches, Caliari seems to be developing and grasping the highlights and shadows of the bones and muscles visible in the hand. He explores the grip of the hand in the second from the top sketch can indicate much. If the hand is tight on an object, the individual controlling it may be experiencing heightened emotions, fear anger etc. whereas if they have a looser grip such as the one in the sketches, they may be calmer, and more collected.

Passaroti, pen and ink

Praised by early biographers as a draftsman and engraver, Bartolommeo Passarotti employed a distinctive cross-hatching technique in most of his drawings. His anatomical interest in powerful, acrobatic figures is dramatically evident in his drawings. In this particular sketch, done in the last half of the 16^th century, eight different hand gestures are being studied. Whereas some have slight variations from another, it is obvious that Passarotti was working through them in order to find the perfect one that spoke to him for his piece. Passarotti’s choice in medium of pen and ink allowed for him to develop shadows and highlights with cross-hatch only. The cross-hatching technique creates the illusion of three dimensionality on the two dimensional surface.

Leonardo da Vinci is known for his Mona Lisa and Madonna of the Rocks, but his true fascination lied in the human anatomy. Truly revolutionary for his time, da Vinci spent time observing the human body, dead and alive. Therefore, it is no surprise that Da Vinci’s sketches are still captivating artists to this day. Da Vinci employed specific symbolism within the hand gestures in his paintings, symbolism which have been easily understood in the 15^th Century. This particular silverpoint collection of sketches shows the same female hand and it’s many gestures. He studies how the slightest turning of the hand can change the meaning of the motion. The grace that he gives to the subject truly reflects on his skill as an artist.

Leonardo da Vinci, silverpoint

The final sketch was completed in the 16^th century in the style of Raphael. The sketch is done in pencil captures two simple gestures. In the upper left-hand corner two hands appear to be folded inwards, possibly towards a chest and in the center two hands of the same figure are being held out, almost as though the figure has raised them in either blessing or is about to put both down. The shading of the piece is done in horizontal lines and the foreshortening is truly amazing for a study.