A selection of 150 works (including paintings by Goya, Canaletto, Tiepolo, Mengs, Liotard) on display at the Uffizi until Nov. 28, to relive the Age of Enlightenment. While the Uffizi Gallery is commonly known around the world as a shrine of Renaissance masterpieces, this exhibition tells the story of the aesthetics of a lesser-known period, such as the 18th century, which coincided with the transformation of the Uffizi Gallery, opened to the public in 1769, first modern museum of Western culture. Not only paintings from the Gallery and its storerooms, but also sculpture, porcelain, and furniture, to which is added the monumental Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by French painter Pierre Subleyras, a recent acquisition, restored live for the exhibition. Works from the first decades of the 18th century, at the time of the last Medici, still testify to the prevalence of religious subjects, while portraiture from the Lorraine period (Goya, Le Brun, Mengs) already denotes an Enlightenment climate. Individual exhibition sections are devoted to the regional schools of painting (works by Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Giuseppe Maria Crespi) and the “Primitives” (pre-Renaissance painters), according to the methodology of Abbot Luigi Lanzi, “antiquarian assistant,” deputy director of the Uffizi Gallery since 1775 and founder of modern museography. By Jean-Étienne Liotard is the splendid Young Woman Dressed Turkish Style, the embodiment of the taste for the Exotic, while other works are representative of the new pre-romantic aesthetic of the Sublime, and the increasing phenomenon of the Grand Tour. The collection of antique sculptures with erotic subjects - partly inspired by the work of the Marquis De Sade, who moreover visited the Uffizi in 1775 - witnesses the great development that this artistic category had precisely in the 18th century.
