Vasari Corridor, the new display with Roman busts

From Cicero to Sabina: more than 50 statues recovered from storage

The Uffizi Galleries' Future in Antiquity project is enriched with a beautiful new chapter: 47 Roman busts, true masterpieces of imperial-era portraiture, adorn the section on the Ponte Vecchio of the aerial route over the heart of Florence. They had been in storage since the 1990s. Intellectuals such as Cicero, emperors such as Augustus, Antoninus Pius, and Commodus, empresses such as Sabina, consort of Hadrian, and Faustina, wife of Antoninus Pius: these are some of the protagonists of the new display of ancient Greco-Roman busts that embellishes the section on the Ponte Vecchio of the Vasarian Corridor of the Uffizi Galleries.

Almost fifty sculptures of such great value that until 1993 they were located in the three main corridors on the second floor of the Uffizi Gallery. They were removed because in that year it was determined to reconstitute the sculptural furnishings of the museum as they were illustrated by the iconographic and documentary sources of the mid-18th century. All the portraits that flowed into the grand ducal collections after that date were therefore destined for storage, and among them were the sculptures carefully selected and purchased by the Uffizi's historic deputy director Luigi Lanzi in the eighteenth century on the antiquities market to supplement the collection of antiquities of imperial portraits in Vasari's rooms. In the Corridor are faces of women, men, young men... that tell of the customs and traditions of an era but also of the eighteenth-century style in presenting them. As Director Simone Verde explains, lacking the scientific basis to corroborate a certain chronological or historical order for many of the busts, a presentation in the style of the era in which they were collected is a valuable starting point.

Corridoio Vasariano

Fabrizio Paolucci, head of the Galleries' Collections of Ancient Art, again specifies that each work on display is able to tell a story and the temperature of a season: the importance of women as guardians of the home and the hearth but also the moralizing tendency of the Augustan era with women veiled in shawls, never flaunting physicality. The introduction of the series of busts in the Corridor thus assumes not only the sense of a fitting arrangement for a courtly itinerary such as the one that led the lords of Florence from the Palace of Pitti to the Uffizi complex, but it acquires the significance of a fundamental restitution to public enjoyment of an important corpus of Roman portraiture of such a level that by the end of the 18th century the Uffizi was able to compare itself as an equal with the greatest Roman collections and, in particular, with the Capitoline Museums.

Director of the Galleries Simone Verde: "After the reconstitution of the Hall of Ancient Marbles on the second floor of the Gallery, this installation is a further step forward, under the motto ‘Future in Antiquity,’ for the enhancement of Medici archaeological collecting, which at the Uffizi is present with such exemplary complexes as the Hall of Niobe, the series of sculptures in the corridors recomposed on the basis of the eighteenth-century arrangement, later historicized, by the then deputy director of the Gallery Luigi Lanzi, and the ambitious and evocative project, currently underway, of reconstituting the ancient ricetto delle iscrizioni."