There is simply too much demand nowadays for everything that is beautiful or famous—or, worse still, beautiful and famous. We go to see great art to feel joy, to learn, at least to be able to say that we have clapped eyes on a celebrity such as Botticelli’s Venus. But these days visitors to the Uffizi enjoy none of this. Craning to see over rows of heads, one is jostled and swept along the galleries by such a crowd that the museum has had to surround the very fine statues with red ropes like the ones outside night clubs.
This is the most visible challenge facing its talented new director, Simone Verde. It has been nine months since he succeeded Eike Schmidt, with a remit that also includes the Palazzo Pitti—the immense residence of the Medici, then the Hapsburg-Lorraine dynasty and the kings of Italy—and the Renaissance Giardino di Boboli.
He comes with the reputation he earned at the Pilotta, that vast complex built by the Farnese rulers in Parma, for a whirlwind ability to transform a fragmented, dynastic museum and library complex into an intellectually coherent whole with an elegant, stimulating presentation. But if in Parma his challenge was to bring in more people, in Florence it is first and foremost to make the visitor experience bearable, while not being able to limit their numbers for economic reasons. At the same time, with a French academic background in cultural anthropology and a deep knowledge of historic museology, Verde has a clear, comprehensive idea of what the Uffizi represents and the role it should play on the Italian and world stage.
At the job interview, he presented a scholarly project that emphasised the Uffizi’s importance from a museological point of view. For him, it is the museum of the various schools of Italian painting in dialogue with the antiquities of the Medici collection, but it is also the first modern museum, at least in its architectural lay-out, which has been copied in many other museums. Verde points out that the Uffizi has gone through all phases of museum development: the Wunderkammer, the studiolo, the gallery, the 16th-century museum, the 17th-century museum, the 18th-century antiquarian museum, the romantic museum, the national museum, and now, he says in a throw-away manner, “It’s the museum of tourism.”
In 2023, the number of visitors to the three sites was around five million, and while the ticketing system does not reveal exactly how many of them entered the Uffizi, the institution boasted of an overall revenue increase of 70% compared with 2022. Revenue from ticketing was €40m (20% of which is reclaimed by the state). In short, the Uffizi is business, but Verde does not think that its success should be judged primarily by this crude parameter.
Verde would like to see the Uffizi develop a stronger identity within Italy’s museum system, which would give it more visibility abroad, like the role played by the Louvre in France. He says that its identity has been weakened since the Second World War by rearrangements of the collection. As in Parma, he has already begun to revive displays that were models for the development of European museums. For example, the entrance filled with classical inscriptions has been recreated exactly as it was constituted in 1823.
He would like to help visitors understand the context of the ultra-famous artists, Michelangelo and Leonardo and so on, who have been concentrated by his predecessor Schmidt in the largest rooms. It is not a bad idea, Verde says, because these are the icons that most people come to see and it reduces the crowding in rooms that are of interest mainly to the cognoscenti. But people need more context, so, for example, he has had the Andrea del Sarto room hung with the followers of his rival, Raphael.
Speeding towards the exit
Verde admires the displays at the Natural History Museum in London, which has a central corridor displaying the species, while the subspecies are in smaller, lateral spaces. In the future, if you want to take a quicker tour of the Uffizi, you will be able to follow a straight line, seeing the major masterpieces in the main rooms, but speeding towards the exit (although Verde does not say that that is the objective).
Late July saw the opening of the redisplayed Netherlandish rooms, the largest collection in Italy, with absolute masterpieces such as the monumental triptych by Hugo Van der Goes, commissioned around 1475 by the merchant Tommaso Portinari for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Verde says that their location in the gallery also reminds us of the Uffizi’s director in the 1950s, Roberto Salvini, who was one of the first to overcome the separation that had developed in art history between Italian and Northern art.
But you will still not be able to enter the Tribuna. The days are past when you could just walk into this exquisite “holy of holies”, created in 1581-83 for Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici to symbolise the Elements, and where he displayed the greatest treasures of his collection. It is here, for example, that the famous Venus de’ Medici, the most renowned and ancient version of the lost Venus of Knidos, once venerated throughout the Hellenistic world, is located. “There is simply not enough space,” Verde says. “The Tribuna is too intimate, too fragile for today’s crowds; it was created for the delectation of the grand duke’s friends and guests.” But he is having dismountable, enclosed balconies built into the door spaces so that visitors can at least get a feel of being in the room, while the University of Roma Tre and Milan Polytechnic are working on imitatingthe candlelight under which so many travellers record having visited it.
Crowd control
There are serious crowd management problems also for the Corridoio Vasariano, the nearly 1km-long gallery crossing the Ponte Vecchio and connecting the Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti, which housed the self-portraits of renowned artists until 2016 when it was closed for building work. Because of its location, high above the river, it cannot have fire exits every 30m as required by health and safety; the fire brigade will only allow 25 visitors in every 15 minutes (armed with an extra ticket, of course). “So whatever we display there will have to be of the highest quality,” Verde says, tantalisingly, while promising that, whatever it is, the Corridoio will be open by the end of the year, structurally stabilised and fully air-conditioned.
He has a many-pronged plan to improve the experience for the visitors. Almost his first move has been to open the Uffizi on Tuesday nights until 10pm, which gives people a chance to see the collections in peace and quiet. “But our main policy is to encourage visitors to go to the other sites, especially the Palazzo Pitti, which is underrated but very beautiful because, unlike the Uffizi, it has not been messed about over the centuries. It needs a star attraction”, he says. He is going to focus on the part of the collection that the 16th- and 17th-century grand-dukes themselves valued most highly and much of which was kept in the Tribuna: the exquisite small sculptures of enamelled and bejewelled gold; the vessels carved in lapis lazuli, rock crystal, agate, heliotrope and jasper; and the astonishingly intricate ivories. “We own one of the most beautiful Wunderkammers in the world,” he says, “but it is displayed according to 1950s criteria. I want to make it spectacular, and at its heart there will be the death mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent together with the Medici funerary garments.”
Verde has already made his mark on the Museo della Moda. When the final eight rooms in its redisplay opened in July, he had moved some paintings from the decidedly under-visited Galleria d’Arte Moderna on the second floor to the costume displays to integrate the collections better and give context to both of them.
And then there is the Galleria Palatina, Verde says, with its works by Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio and Rubens, in rooms with sumptuous furnishings; at the end of the year he will have opened the Royal Apartments, which have been closed for two years. All these are subsets of the Pitti Palace and would be appreciable museums in their own right if the fame of the Uffizi were not the magnet that attracts most of the attention.
More space
In the Uffizi itself, there will be 30% more space when the 12 rooms of the New Uffizi on its east side are opened. The entire ground floor will become an exhibition area and, being a museologist, Verde also wants to remind visitors of the variety and mindset of the 16th- and 17th-century Uffizi by creating a space with pieces from the scientific collections that were removed in the late 18th century. With a donation from the Friends of the Uffizi he will have a children’s museum on the ground floor, “with real works of art, not kiddy stuff that doesn’t help children understand the authentic nature of the museum”.
Asked if he plans to carry out the proposal of a recent distinguished predecessor, Antonio Paolucci, to create a diffuse museum by sending works out into surrounding Tuscany, he replies: “It is certainly one of our missions, but it has to take its place in the context of everything else we need to do”.
So, it is clear that, for the time being, Simone Verde wants to focus on making the Uffizi a centre of museum excellence and research. He is going to establish a Study Centre in the beautiful Casino del Cavaliere in the Giardino di Boboli (“How I wish I had the army of gardeners that the grand dukes had,” he adds as an aside, lamenting the damage that recent monsoon-like rains have done to the paths). It will have a scientific committee and elect a president. It will hold conferences, do research, organise exhibitions and have an online journal. He wants to make it a hub for international museologists, “not only to have an impact internationally, but also to assimilate here, in Italy, the best aspects of scientific research abroad”.
