New-York tribune., 1919-09-21
The UffiSi Gallery

After being closed for a long in
terval, during the war, that its treas
ures might be stored in safer places,
tho Uffizi Gallery is once more open
to the public.
The opportunity has been taken,
under the able directorship of Com
mendatore Corrado Ricci and Signor
Poggi, to redistribute and rearrange
the pictures; and although the work
10 not yet wholly completed, the many
halls which have been reopened show
an immense improvement upon the
former arrangement, and students will
gratefully welcome the changes which
have been made.
These consist chiefly in more
intelligent grouping of the works
Of each master; and a moro help
full coordination of the sequence
Of masters and schools. Also in a
wider distribution, which leaves the
pictures ample space, instead of their
being hung close beside, above and
below each other.
Moreover, pictures have been brought
from other galleries to complete the
groups, 50 that one may study, side
by side, so far as may be possible,
the works of one master; while pict-
ures from the Uhizi have been sent
away when there was good reason to
regard some other as their more right
full place.
No longer, for instance, are any
works by Fra Angelica to be seen at
the Uffizi. They have been carried
across to his~own convent Of San Mar
CO, where so many of them were paint
ed; fitted back, in some cases, into
the very inches for which they were
designed. Thus, that beautiful old
building, with its white cloisters and
wide halls and little, quiet cells, the
scene of so many years of the happy
activities of the "Angelic Painters"
life, now contains not only the price
less frescoes, great and little, which he
left upon it's walls, but also the altar
pieces and other paintings which, for
all their loveliness, had never seemed
quite at home in the Uffizi rooms, but
here are at home indeed, and enable
the student to study and enjoy them,
undistracted by the works of others,
in the very surroundings where they
came into being under the painters
hand.
Ri1t tn rot, 70
The long entrance corridor. running
the whole length OF the building, and
once SO crowded with a mingling Of
ancient statuary, and paintings Of the
earliest Tuscan school, and cases full
Of drawings and prints, that it was
difficult not to be distracted both BY
the close proximity and the confusion
of period, has now been wholly cleared
of pictures.
It's wall space is entirely empty
save for an occasional tapestry; its
glass side is no longer cncumbered by
the cases of prints; and nothing re-
mains but the old Greek and Roman
statues and busts and sarcophagi thus
better exhibited in its broad empty
spaces than ever before.
On entering the first hall of paint
ings one is as delighted with what
one finds IS with the arrangement.
The pictures are hung at wide in
tervals against the quiet coiored walls,
and only one line of them around the
room; and there is the delightful sur
prise of discovering, in.elligently
grouped among the others, paintings
which. formerly hung in tthe "Ac-
cademia dele Belle Arti," now find a
place here in a better grouping and
better light.
Here, for instance, now hangs that
great Madonna of Cimabues, sister
to the one in Santa Maria Noyella,
which SO enchanted the people with
its beauty that they bore it in triumph
through the streets; legend claiming
that the "Borgo Allegro" the "Joy-
Gus Suburb" took It's name from tina.
event. And close by Il splendid Ma
donna by his pupil, Giotto; and other
prlWltlNeS Whlch, previously, were
little lost in the crowded corridor
and now can be seen and appreciated as
never before
And one finds the same improved
arrange in each room one enters
Botticelli's greatest works hang in
a large sala, where the "Primavera .
brought from the Academia, now finds
itself once more, rightfully, near
the Birth Of Venus; The Two having
been painted for single room OF one
of the villas of Lorenzo de Medici
Here, too, brought from the Acca-
demia, hangs his great Virgin With