The entrance to the museum ‘for all’ wanted by the Grand Duke reappears at the Uffizi

“Peter Leopold, son of Emperor Francis, of the House of Austria and Grand Duke of Tuscany, took care of reorganizing the Medici Museum, increasing its spaces and the number of works and embellishing it with an even more splendid appearance for the prestige of his city and for the development of the Fine Arts”: this is the inscription (in Latin) placed on the entrance of the Gallery to greet visitors. Above the ‘dedication’ of the new Grand Duke, handwritten in Latin by Abbot Luigi Lanzi, director of the museum, of Pietro Leopoldo, the ancient-style bust, created by the eighteenth-century sculptor Francesco Carradori, is placed in plain sight.

To greet the “foreigners”, as they used to say in the eighteenth century, at the top of the newly renovated staircase are also the faces of the predecessors at the helm of the Grand Duchy, the Medici, who had founded and expanded the Gallery (from Cosimo I to the last, Giangastone). For each of them, too, Lanzi had composed Latin inscriptions for future memory, paying homage in particular to their merits and collecting exploits, fundamental for the construction of the immense art heritage of the Uffizi. Now, in their sumptuous wigs, the busts are placed on massive wooden stools. And, also wooden, the large polychrome wooden coat of arms of Baccio d’Agnolo dominates the marble parade from the top of the wall.

The majestic entrance was no longer visible (and entirely surrounded by a construction site as part of the works on the New Uffizi) since 2018, when the need emerged for a consolidation and restoration of the wooden structure supporting the vaults of the staircase (called Lorenese, as it was designed by the famous architect Zanobi Del Rosso at the time of Pietro Leopoldo): the delicate architectural reinforcement operation was completed in the past few weeks.

The entire staircase was restored between 2005 and 2007 in the plaster, stucco and decorative parts. The ‘Lorraine green’ painting of the walls was carried out on the basis of a series of essays which brought to light the color chosen by the Lorraine Grand Dukes also used in other places on which the grand ducal dynasty intervened: Poggio Imperiale, Specola, Kaffeehaus, as well as the Boboli Limonaia. The particular coloring that historical documents define as “greenish with green earth, verdigris and more” is in line with what was done in the Austro-Hungarian empire, following the dictates of an elaborate Rococo.

The director of the Uffizi Galleries Simone Verde explains: “After the reopening of the Vasari Corridor and the dismantling of the crane that had been disfiguring the Piazzale degli Uffizi for two decades, the Galleries are finally closing another historic construction site which had lasted for eight years, namely that of the Lorraine Staircase which we are reopening to the general public by rearranging all the antiquities it has contained since the eighteenth century. This staircase, designed by Zanobi del Rosso, the court architect of the Lorena, is a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture and has always represented the monumental entrance to the most beautiful galleries in the world”. (by Paolo Martini)