If it is difficult to speak with justice and a sense of proportion of
the Accademia delle Belle Arti, how may I hope to succeed with the
Uffizi Gallery, where the pictures are infinitely more varied and
numerous. It might seem impossible to do more than to give a catalogue
of the various works here gathered from royal and ducal collections,
from many churches, convents, and monasteries, forming, certainly, with
the gallery of the Pitti Palace, the finest collection of the Italian
schools of painting in the world. And then in this palace, built for
Cosimo I, by Giorgio Vasari, the delightful historian of the Italian
painters, you may find not only paintings but a great collection of
sculpture also, a magnificent collection of drawings and jewels,
together with the Archives, the Biblioteca Nazionale, which includes the
Palatine and the Magliabecchian Libraries. It will be best, then, seeing
that a whole lifetime were not enough in which to number such treasures,
to confine ourselves to a short examination of the sculpture, which is
certainly less valuable to us than to our fathers, and to a brief
review, hardly more than a personal impression, of the Italian pictures,
which are its chiefest treasure.
Of the rooms in which are hung the portraits of painters, those
unfortunate self-portraits in which some of the greatest painters have
not without agony realised their own ugliness, exhibiting themselves in
the pose that they have hoped the world would mistake for the very
truth, I say nothing. It is true, the older men, less concerned perhaps
at staring the word in the face, are not altogether unfortunate in their
self-revelation; but consider the portrait of Lord Leighton by
himself,--it must have been painted originally as a signboard for
Burlington House, for the summer exhibition of the Academy there, as who
should say to a discerning public: Here you may have your fill of the
impudent and blatant commonplace you love so much. And if such a thing
is really without its fellow in these embarrassing rooms, where Raphael,
Leonardo, Titian, and Velasquez are shouted down by some forgotten
German, some too well remembered English painter, it is but the perfect
essence of the whole collection, as though for once Leighton had really
understood what was required of him and had done his marvellous best.
It is on the top floor of this palace of Cosimo I, after passing the
busts of the lords and dukes of the Medici family, that one enters the
gallery itself, which, running round three sides of a parallelogram,
opens into various rooms of all shapes and sizes. It was Francesco I,
second Grand Duke of Tuscany, who began to collect here the various
works of art which his predecessors had gathered in their villas and
palaces. To this collection Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, his brother,
added, on his succession to the Grand-Dukedom, the treasures he had
collected in the villa which he had built in Rome, and which still bears
the name of his house. To Cosimo II, it might seem, we owe the covered
way from this Palazzo degli Uffizi across Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo
Pitti, while Ferdinand II began the collection of those self-portraits
of the painters of which I have spoken. Inheriting, as he did through
his wife, Vittoria della Rovere, the treasures of Urbino, he brought
them here, while it is to his son, Cosimo III, that we owe the presence
of Venus de' Medici, which had been dug up in the gardens of Hadrian's
villa, and bought by Ferdinando I when he was Cardinal. Most of the
Flemish pictures were brought here by Anna, the sister of Gian Gastone,
and daughter of Cosimo III, when she returned a widow to Florence from
the North. The house of Lorraine also continued to enrich the gallery,
which did not escape Napoleon's generals. They took away many priceless
pictures, all of which we were not able to force them to restore, though
we spent some £30,000 in the attempt. We were, however, able to send
back to Italy the Venus de' Medici, which Napoleon had thought to marry
to the Apollo Belvedere.
As may be supposed, the Gallery of the Uffizi, gathered as it has thus
been from so many sources, is as various as it is splendid. It is true
that it possesses no work by Velasquez, and if we compare it with such
collections as those of the National Gallery or the Louvre, we shall
find it a little lacking in proportion as a gallery of universal art. It
is really as the chief storehouses of Italian painting that we must
consider both it and the Pitti Palace. And both for this reason, and
because under its director, Signor Corrado Ricci, a new and clearer
arrangement of its contents is being carried out, I have thought it
better to speak of the pictures in no haphazard fashion, but, as is now
becoming easy, under their respective schools, as the Florentine, the
Sienese, the Umbrian, the Venetian, thus suggesting an unity which till
now has been lacking in the gallery itself.