The Uffizi Gallery has reopened three rooms dedicated to Northern European art. The selection of 31 paintings, arranged in frescoed rooms on the second floor, includes works by Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden, Dürer, Cranach, and Nicolas Froment. Among the paintings on display, portraiture is particularly well represented.

The collection was originally brought together in the first decades of the last century by Roberto Salvini, director of the Uffizi in the post-war period, who put these masterpieces in dialogue with those of the Italian school, highlighting mutual influences in an ‘internationalist’ approach that today we would referred to as ‘global’.

The new arrangement aims to re-introduce this dialogue by illustrating the expressive forms of Renaissance culture in Northern Europe (Flanders, the Netherlands, Germany) in comparison with the works of the Florentine Quattrocento. Tuscan Renaissance painting, through the cosmopolitan collecting of the Medici, was significantly influenced by northern painters. The latter excelled in the technique of oil painting, which created a luminous and metaphysical three-dimensionality, an alternative to the Italian linear perspective.

In addition to portraiture, the reinstalled rooms also include Rogier van der Weyden’s Lamentation of Christ, which is listed in the 1492 inventory of Lorenzo de’ Medici as coming from the altar of the Medici Villa in Careggi. Also noteworthy is the large triptych by Nicolas Froment, which, after many years of absence from the gallery, now occupies a central place in the new display.

 

Last year, the Uffizi also opened twelve new rooms on the first floor dedicated to self-portraits.