Sculpture

The tribute by the Academy of the Arts of Drawing, five hundred years after his birth

The idea of digitising the restoration documents for the ancient sculptures in the Uffizi, using SICaR goes back to 2014. SICaR is an open-source software that makes it possible to collect, organise and consult, online, all types of documents about an intervention, with the added possibility of being able to map the information on a measurable 2D image of a sculpture.

The article reconstructs the significance and structure of the theory behind the Medici-Lorraine busts which have been on display in the antiricetto of the Gallery of Statues and Paintings since the 1880’s, each one accompanied by an encomiastic text (from the Latin term elogium) regarding the contribution to the development of the museum and its collections. This display came about thanks to the Grand Duke of Tuscany Peter Leopold to honour the by then extinct Medici family in a period in which the study of pictorial history began to reflect on a period in Florentine history that had come to an end. Over time the number of portraits and the order in which they are displayed has undergone changes, eventually losing the original meaning of the Gallery’s emblematic ‘historical introduction’. The early years of the twentieth century saw a loss of esteem for Cosimo III and the elimination of his portrait once it had been ascertained that the bust did not really portray him. The discovery of the absence of this ‘forgotten Grand Duke’ from the collection of portraits, which are still exhibited in the same area, was the starting point of this analysis. In the appendix, for the first time, there are explanatory notes and a translation of the descriptions of each portrait.

Thanks to a targeted selection of works, the exhibition sets out to offer a complete overview of the art of bronze sculpture in the Tuscan capital particularly in the age of the last Medici Grand Dukes.