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Italy is to try to turn the Uffizi gallery in
Florence into Europe's premier art museum,
with an ambitious 56m euro ($69m) scheme
to double its exhibition space. Giuliano
Urbani, Italy's culture minister, said the
enlarged gallery would surpass "even the
Louvre". By the time work is completed,
visitors to the extensively remodeled Uffizi
will be able to see 800 new works, including
many now confined to the gallery's
storerooms for lack of space. The project -
the outcome of nine months of intensive
work by a team of architects, engineers and
technicians - is a centrepiece of the cultural
policy of Silvio Berlusconi's government.
With refurbishment plans also afoot for the
Accademia in Venice and the Brera in Milan,
Italy is bent on securing its share of a
market for cultural tourism that is threatened
by the Louvre and by the "art triangle" of
Madrid, which takes in the Prado, the
Thyssen collection and the Reina Sofia
museum of art.
Schemes for the expansion of the Uffizi's
exhibition space stretch back almost 60
years. The latest was mooted in the 1990s.
But the one adopted by the current
government has reached a far more
advanced stage than any of its forerunners.
Roberto Cecchi, the government official in
charge of the project, said last month that all
that remained to do was to tender for
contracts. The target date for completion of
the project is 2006.
But the first changes will be seen as early as
this month when a collection of pictures by
Caravaggio and his school, currently
crammed into a tiny room on the second
floor, is to be moved to larger premises on
the first.
Mr Cecchi said the biggest problem was
"inserting a museum into a building that is
itself a monument". The horseshoe-shaped
Palazzo degli Uffizi, begun in 1560, was
designed by the artist and historian Giorgio
Vasari.
The latest plans are bound to stir
controversy, involving as they do the
creation of new stairwells and lifts in the
heart of the building. There has already
been an outcry over one proposed element,
a seven-storey, canopy-like structure for a
new exit by the Japanese architect Arata
Isozaki.
At the heart of the plan is the opening up of
the first floor, which for decades was
occupied by the local branch of the national
archives. This will allow visitors to follow a
more extensive, and ordered, itinerary that
would turn the Uffizi into what Antonio
Paolucci, Tuscany's top art official, called "a
textbook of art history".
As at present, visitors will be channeled to
the second floor, where they will be able to
study early works by Cimabue and Giotto
before moving on to admire the gallery's
extraordinary collection of Renaissance
masterpieces, including Botticelli's
Primavera. Asked if the expansion might
increase the risk of inducing Stendhal's
syndrome - the disorientation, noted by the
French novelist, in those who encounter
dozens of Italian Renaissance masterpieces
- Mr Cecchi replied fatalistically: "Yes. It'll
double it."
Adapted from an original article by John
Hooper in The Guardian Weekly 20-03-04