Un racconto fotografico (parziale) degli allestimenti della Galleria degli Uffizi nel secondo dopoguerra

A selection of photographs of the Uffizi’s renewals and displays, taken mainly before and after World War II, represent the core of the visual essay. The images belong to four distinctive photographic documentations of the gallery, commissioned in order to record the exhibition designs each time they were dismantled and renewed. The photographs were shot by the photographers of the Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi (1904-on going). The ones reproduced here are held in the central photo archive of the former Direzione Generale Antichità e Belle Arti. Their documentary value lies in both the image and its recto, where information such as the inventory number of the photography was printed. Many other traces of their afterlife can be found in the many notes, dates and comments which proved to be strategic in dating, even “to the month”, the renewal of the spaces and the arrangement of the pictures. The images are ordered in three discursive sections that link the on-going renewal of the Galleria in these decades to the contemporary critical debate on museum arrangements.