The narrow courtyard between the Uffizi's two wings creates the effect of a short, idealized street; view toward the River Arno

View of hallway. The walls were originally covered with tapestries.

Ceiling frescos in the main corridor

The Uffizi Gallery (Italian: Galleria degli Uffizi, Italian pronunciation: [ˌɡalleˈria deʎʎi ufˈfittsi]) , is a museum in Florence, Italy. It is one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western world.

History[link]

Building of the palace was begun by Giorgio Vasari in 1560 for Cosimo I de' Medici as the offices for the Florentine magistrates — hence the name "uffizi" ("offices"). Construction was continued to Vasari's design by Alfonso Parigi and Bernardo Buontalenti and ended in 1581. The cortile (internal courtyard) is so long and narrow, and open to the Arno River at its far end through a Doric screen that articulates the space without blocking it, that architectural historians^[1] treat it as the first regularized streetscape of Europe. Vasari, a painter as well as architect, emphasized the perspective length by the matching facades' continuous roof cornices, and unbroken cornices between storeys and the three continuous steps on which the palace-fronts stand. The niches in the piers that alternate with columns were filled with sculptures of famous artists in the 19th century.

The Palazzo degli Uffizi brought together under one roof the administrative offices, the Tribunal and the state archive (Archivio di Stato). The project that was planned by Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany to arrange that prime works of art in the Medici collections on the piano nobile was effected by Francis I of Tuscany, who commissioned from Buontalenti the famous Tribuna degli Uffizi that united a selection of the outstanding masterpieces in the collection in an ensemble that was a star attraction of the Grand Tour.

Over the years, further parts of the palace evolved into a display place for many of the paintings and sculpture collected by the Medici family or commissioned by them. According to Vasari, who was not only the architect of the Uffizi but also the author of Lives of the Artists, published in 1550 and 1568, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo gathered at the Uffizi "for beauty, for work and for recreation."^[2]

After the house of Medici was extinguished, the art treasures remained in Florence by terms of the famous Patto di famiglia negotiated by Anna Maria Luisa, the last Medici heiress; it formed one of the first modern museums. The gallery had been open to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1765 it was officially opened to the public.

Because of its huge collection, some of its works have in the past been transferred to other museums in Florence — for example, some famous statues to the Bargello. A project is currently underway to expand the museum's exhibition space in 2006 from some 6,000 metres² (64,000 ft²) to almost 13,000 metres² (139,000 ft²), allowing public viewing of many artworks that have usually been in storage.

In 1993, a car bomb exploded in Via dei Georgofili and damaged parts of the palace, killing five people. The most severe damage was to the Niobe room, the classical sculptures and neoclassical interior of which have been restored, although its frescoes were damaged beyond repair. The identity of the bomber or bombers are unknown, although it was almost certainly attributable to the Sicilian Mafia who were engaged in a period of terrorism at that time.

Today, the Uffizi is one of the most popular tourist attractions of Florence. In high season (particularly in July), waiting times can be up to five hours. Visitors who reserve a ticket in advance have a substantially shorter wait.

In early August 2007, Florence was caught with a large rainstorm, and the Gallery was partially flooded, with water leaking through the ceiling, and the visitors had to be evacuated. There was a much more significant flood in 1966 which damaged most of the art collections in Florence severely, including the Uffizi.

Collections[link]

Here is a selection from the collection of paintings:

• Leonardo da Vinci (The Annunciation, The Adoration of the Magi)
• Sandro Botticelli (Primavera, The Birth of Venus, The Adoration of the Magi and others)
• Giotto (The Ognissanti Madonna, Badia Polyptych)
• Titian (Flora, Venus of Urbino)
• Michelangelo (The Doni Tondo)
• Raphael (Madonna of the Goldfinch, Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi)
• Cimabue (Maestà)
• Duccio (Maestà)
• Simone Martini (The Annunciation)
• Paolo Uccello (The Battle of San Romano)
• Piero della Francesca (Diptych of Duke Federico da Montefeltro and Duchess Battista Sforza of Urbino)
• Fra Filippo Lippi (Madonna with Child and Two Angels, Incoronation of the Virgin)
• Andrea del Verrocchio (The Baptism of Christ)
• Hugo van der Goes (The Portinari Triptych)
• Piero di Cosimo (Perseus Freeing Andromeda)
• Albrecht Dürer (The Adoration of the Magi)
• Parmigianino (The Madonna of the Long Neck)
• Caravaggio (Bacchus, The Sacrifice of Isaac, Medusa)
• Artemisia Gentileschi (Judith and Holofernes)
• Rembrandt Van Rijn (Selfportrait as a Young Man, Selfportrait as an Old Man, Portrait of an Old Man)

The collection also contains some ancient sculptures, such as the Arrotino and the Two Wrestlers.

Popular culture[link]

• The museum is mentioned in chapter XII of Henry James's 1875 novel Roderick Hudson. It is said that, 'There are very fine antiques in the Uffizi.'
• The museum is mentioned in Book 1, chapter 24 of Henry James's novel "Portrait of a Lady." "You'd have liked a few things from the Uffizi and the Pitti--that what you'd have liked," said Madame Merle.
• In the E.M. Forster novel A Room with a View, Lucy Honeychurch is carried to "some steps in the Uffizi Arcade" by George Emerson, when she faints after witnessing a murder in the Piazza della Signoria.
• The Thomas Pynchon novel V. contains a chapter centered around an attempted robbery of The Birth of Venus from the museum.
• In the spy-parody television show "Archer," Mallory reminds her son, Sterling Archer, about an unfortunate "Uffizi fiasco," which shows the facade of the famed museum in flames.
• A racetrack of the same name is featured in the game Project Gotham Racing 2 for Xbox.
• Mentioned in the Phish song "You Enjoy Myself".
• A portion of the 1996 Dario Argento film The Stendhal Syndrome was filmed in the museum.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli

The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci

Madonna in Sorrow by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato.

See also[link]

• Collections of the Uffizi

Notes[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Uffizi

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Galleria degli Uffizi

• Official website
• Museum expansion project official website - The New Uffizi
• Uffizi Gallery, Florence by Turismo InToscana

Coordinates: 43°46′07″N 11°15′19″E / 43.768639°N 11.255214°E / 43.768639; 11.255214

• http://www.googleartproject.com/museums/uffizi

v t e Landmarks of Florence Religious sites Battistero | Brancacci Chapel | Orsanmichele | San Lorenzo | San Marco | San Miniato | Santa Croce | Santa Maria del Fiore | Santa Maria Novella | Santo Spirito | Great Synagogue Museums, galleries, and palaces Accademia | Bargello | David | Institute and Museum of the History of Science | Museo dell'Opera del Duomo | National Archaeological Museum | Palazzo Gondi | Palazzo Medici | Palazzo Pitti | Palazzo Strozzi | Palazzo Vecchio | Uffizi Notable landmarks Giotto's Campanile | Ponte Vecchio | Theatres Gardens and parks Boboli Gardens | Medici villas

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Giorgio Vasari
Vasari's self-portrait
Born	(1511-07-30)30 July 1511 Arezzo, Tuscany
Died	27 June 1574(1574-06-27) (aged 62) Florence, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Field	Painting, architect
Training	Andrea del Sarto
Movement	Renaissance
Works	Biographies of Italian artists

Giorgio Vasari (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒordʒo vaˈzari]; 30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574)^[1] was an Italian painter, writer, historian, and architect, who is famous today for his biographies of Renaissance artists, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing.

Biography[link]

Vasari was born in Arezzo, Tuscany.^[1] Recommended at an early age by his cousin Luca Signorelli, he became a pupil of Guglielmo da Marsiglia, a skillful painter of stained glass. Sent to Florence at the age of sixteen by Cardinal Silvio Passerini, he joined the circle of Andrea del Sarto and his pupils Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo where his humanist education was encouraged. He was befriended by Michelangelo whose painting style would influence his own.

In 1529, he visited Rome and studied the works of Raphael and others of the Roman High Renaissance. Vasari's own Mannerist paintings were more admired in his lifetime than afterwards. In 1547 Vasari completes the hall of the chancery in Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome with frescoes that received the name Sala dei Cento Giorni. He was consistently employed by patrons in the Medici family in Florence and Rome, and he worked in Naples, Arezzo and other places. Many of his pictures still exist, the most important being the wall and ceiling paintings in the great Sala di Cosimo I of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he and his assistants were at work from 1555, and the frescoes he started inside the vast cupola of the Duomo, completed by Federico Zuccari and with the help of Giovanni Balducci. He also helped organize the decoration of the Studiolo, now reassembled in the Palazzo Vecchio.

As an architect, Vasari was perhaps more successful than as a painter. His loggia of the Palazzo degli Uffizi by the Arno opens up the vista at the far end of its long narrow courtyard, a unique piece of urban planning that functions as a public piazza, and which, if considered as a short street, is the unique Renaissance street with a unified architectural treatment. The view of the Loggia from the Arno reveals that, with the Vasari Corridor, it is one of very few structures that line the river which are open to the river itself and appear to embrace the riverside environment.

The Uffizi Loggia

In Florence, Vasari also built the long passage, now called Vasari Corridor, which connects the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti on the other side of the river. The enclosed corridor passes alongside the River Arno on an arcade, crosses the Ponte Vecchio and winds around the exterior of several buildings.

Vasari also renovated the fine medieval churches of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, from both of which he removed the original rood screen and loft, and remodelled the retro-choir in the Mannerist taste of his time. In Santa Croce, he was responsible for the painting of The Adoration of the Magi which was commissioned by Pope Pius V in 1566 and completed in February 1567. It was recently restored, before being put on exhibition in 2011 in Rome and in Naples. Eventually it is planned to return it to the church of Santa Croce in Bosco Marengo (Province of Alessandria, Piedmont).

In 1562 Vasari built the octagonal dome atop the Basilica of Our Lady of Humility in Pistoia, an important example of high Renaissance architecture.^[2]

In Rome, Vasari worked with Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Bartolomeo Ammanati at Pope Julius III's Villa Giulia. Vasari enjoyed high repute during his lifetime and amassed a considerable fortune. In 1547, he built himself a fine house in Arezzo (now a museum honouring him), and laboured to decorate its walls and vaults with paintings. He was elected to the municipal council or priori of his native town, and finally rose to the supreme office of gonfaloniere.

In 1563, he helped found the Florence Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, with the Grand Duke and Michelangelo as capi of the institution and 36 artists chosen as members. Vasari died at Florence on 27 June 1574.^[1]

[edit] The Lives

A cover of the Lives

As the first Italian art historian, he initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. Vasari coined the term "Renaissance" (rinascita) in print, though an awareness of the ongoing "rebirth" in the arts had been in the air from the time of Alberti. Vasari's Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) — dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de' Medici — was first published in 1550. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568, with the addition of woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).

The work has a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the developments in Renaissance art — for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular (along with arts from other parts of Europe), is systematically ignored in the first edition. Between the first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and while the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) it did so without achieving a neutral point of view.

Vasari's biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, while others are inventions or generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. With a few exceptions, however, Vasari's aesthetic judgement was acute and unbiased.^{[citation needed]} He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and those of the immediate past. Modern criticism — with new materials opened up by research — has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions. The work remains a classic, though it must be supplemented by modern critical research.

Vasari includes a sketch of his own biography at the end of his Lives, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati.

Competition and "Competition"[link]

According to the historian Richard Goldthwaite, Vasari was one of the earliest authors to use the word "competition" (or "concorrenza" in Italian) in its economic sense. He used it repeatedly, but perhaps most notably in the introduction to his life of Pietro Perugino, while explaining the reasons for Florentine artistic preeminence.

In Vasari's view, Florentine artists excelled because they were hungry, and they were hungry because their fierce competition amongst themselves for commissions kept them hungry. Competition, he said, is "one of the nourishments that maintain them".

Gallery[link]

See also[link]

• Accademia delle Arti del Disegno

References and sources[link]

The Castration of Uranus: fresco by Vasari & Cristofano Gherardi (c. 1560, Sala di Cosimo I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence).

;References

Sources

• The Lives of the Artists Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-283410-X
• Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Volumes I and II. Everyman's Library, 1996. ISBN 0-679-45101-3
• Vasari on Technique. Dover Publications, 1980. ISBN 0-486-20717-X
• Life of Michelangelo. Alba House, 2003. ISBN 0-8189-0935-8

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links[link]

• Biography of Vasari and analysis for four major works
• Brief Vita

Copies of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists online:

• “Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists.” Site created by Adrienne DeAngelis. Now largely completed in the posting of the Lives, intended to be re-translated to become the unabridged English version.
• “Le Vite." 1550 Unabridged, original Italian.
• “Stories Of The Italian Artists From Vasari.” Translated by E L Seeley, 1908. Abridged, in English.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Giorgio Vasari

• Le Vite - Edizioni Giuntina e Torrentiniana
• Gli artisti principali citati dal Vasari nelle "Vite" (elenco)
• Excerpts from the Vite combined with photos of works mentioned by Vasari.

Trainer performing with Shellac in São Paulo, 2008

Todd Stanford Trainer is the drummer for the band Shellac. He also performs as a solo artist under the name Brick Layer Cake. He previously played drums for the bands Breaking Circus and Rifle Sport, and he played drums with Scout Niblett in 2005.

Personal life[link]

Trainer resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, manages a warehousing and shipping company, and maintains close ties to his parents and sister Terri. His Italian greyhound, Uffizi, inspired the title of Shellac's fourth studio album, Excellent Italian Greyhound.

	"Dog and Pony Show" (1994) noicon "Dog and Pony Show" by Shellac showcases the "primal" aesthetic of Trainer's drumming
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

Drumming style[link]

Critics have generally favored Trainer's brutal, primitive approach to rock drumming. A New York Times review of a 2001 Shellac performance described the "stubborn crack and thud Todd Trainer's drums",^[1] while former Pitchfork Media critic Brent DiCrescenzo wrote that "Trainer beats his drums so primally, you'd swear he's only wearing a loincloth."^[2] A Spin review of the Shellac album Terraform declared that Trainer "gracefully resurrects the lost art of the Bonham stomp",^[3] a reference to the acclaimed Led Zeppelin musician John Bonham.

Onstage attire and persona[link]

Trainer in an assortment of frilly and diaphanous blouses

During Shellac's 2006-07 tours, Trainer sported a pronounced, spiky mullet and favored multiple layers of gauzy, iridescent blouses, leading to the observation from bandmate Steve Albini that the drummer was "double-bloused."^{[citation needed]}

Brick Layer Cake[link]

Brick Layer Cake is the solo project of Todd Trainer, who plays every instrument and sings in a deep, spoken word monotone. The music of Brick Layer Cake features very slow tempos and "drone-like" compositions, which Steve Albini described as follows: “Think of Nick Drake on downers fronting Black Sabbath, if Black Sabbath played only the good parts of their songs."^{[citation needed]}

Discography[link]

• Eye for an Eye - Tooth for a Tooth (Ruthless Records) 1990
• Call It A Day (Touch and Go Records) 1991
• Tragedy Tragedy (Touch and Go Records) 1994
• Whatchamacallit (Touch and Go Records) 2002

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Todd Trainer

• Touch and Go Records Artist Page
• Myspace Band Page