The well-known Galleria degli Uffizi (the Uffizi Gallery) in Florence is a state museum located in the city of Florence, comprising the Vasari Corridor, the collections of the Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens. The complex appears in the list drawn up in 1901 by the General Directorate for Antiquities and Fine Arts as a monumental building to be considered Italian national artistic heritage. It houses the largest existing collection of Raphael and Botticelli, as well as major groups of works by Giotto, Titian, Bronzino, Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Dürer, Rubens, Leonardo da Vinci and others.
The museum houses a collection of priceless works of art, deriving from the Medici collections, enriched over the centuries by bequests, exchanges and donations, among which stands out a fundamental group of religious works derived from the suppression of monasteries and convents between the 18th and 19th centuries. The Gallery occupies entirely the first and second floors of the great building constructed between 1560 and 1580 to a design by Giorgio Vasari. It is one of the most famous museums in the world for its extraordinary collections of ancient sculptures and paintings (from the Middle Ages to the modern age). The collections of paintings from the Trecento and the Renaissance contain some absolute masterpieces of the art of all time.
In addition to the permanent collections, the museum offers temporary exhibitions. At this moment it is hosting the exhibition “A misura di bambino. Crescere nell’antica Roma” (Child-Sized. Growing Up in Ancient Rome).
The exhibition presents more than 30 works: from sculptures of deities resembling small ‘action figures’, games and toys thousands of years old, to sculptures of deities depicted in their childhood and works placed at child height, in order to meet the needs of the youngest visitors. “Crescere nell’antica Roma” addresses, in innovative ways, a theme so far unexplored. Along the route, indeed, various moments of the daily life of children in the times of the Roman Empire are described. Birth, the rites of passage to adulthood, school, entertainment, the relationship with animals and fears are just some of the themes that visitors will find represented in statues, sarcophagi, reliefs and everyday objects such as toys.
Among the most significant works are a statue of Mercury with the infant Bacchus, restored for the exhibition and returned to the public from the storerooms of the Uffizi Galleries after decades, a rare ivory doll from the 3rd century AD never exhibited before, and a toy figurine of a gladiator fitted with modular accessories, much like what happens with today’s action figures. It is said that History is made by great men, but sometimes it is forgotten that they too were once children. In the same way, the deities of the Roman pantheon also lived sometimes adventurous and difficult childhoods, like Hercules or Bacchus. To this theme the exhibition devotes a section in which the visitor will have the surprise of recognising the gods of Olympus in chubby-cheeked children.
The exhibition, although designed for an adult audience, also offers keys to interpretation and routes conceived for the very young. Accompanying the display there is in fact a series of educational aids, such as captions written in ‘child-friendly’ language, comic-strip plates drawn by Stefano Piscitelli and a series of mp3 audio guides produced by Carlotta Caruso and Sara Colantonio of the Museo Nazionale Romano.
The director of the Uffizi, Eike Schmidt: “The exhibition opens just before international Children’s Day, which falls on 20 November and which must not remain an empty celebration. For the Uffizi it is a chance to address an age group little considered in the artistic field, both as a subject and as an audience. Art is not just a thing for grown-ups, and this exhibition proves it, setting in motion an engagement among peers that spans centuries of history. The children of Roman antiquity speak to the children of today, in the same language.”
Photo: Federica Moalli
