Volume 43, Number 17 · October 31, 1996
The Myth of Florence
By Charles Hope
Florence: A Portrait
by Michael Levey
Harvard University Press, 498 pp., $35.00
When tourists began to visit Italy in large numbers in the eighteenth century, their favorite destinations were Venice and Rome. If they chose to stop in Florence they wanted above all to see the masterpieces from the ducal collection displayed in the Uffizi, notably ancient statues such as the Medici Venus and paintings produced after 1500, of which the most famous were by non-Florentine masters such as Titian and Raphael. In the course of the nineteenth century there was a gradual change in taste, as visitors began to admire the works of native Tuscans of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as the frescoes of Giotto and his followers, Ghiberti's bronze doors on the Baptistry, and the paintings of Fra Angelico, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio. A decisive step in the establishment of the new attitude occurred in 1853, when Botticelli's Primavera, which was probably painted in the early 1480s and had previously been kept in the reserves of the Uffizi, was first displayed to the public in the Accademia gallery. In 1859 a museum of medieval and Renaissance sculpture, the Bargello, was opened, and ten years later the monastery of San Marco was transformed into a museum devoted to the works of Fra Angelico.
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