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In the Garden of Eden and the woods of Olympus Never Seen Before: nudes
[Susan Glasspool]
Just that, for this exhibition presents paintings that have never been displayed in public before and are normally conserved in the Uffizi storerooms. The reasons are many, first and foremost a lack of room compared to the enormous collection that the Medici family left to the city.
This year the selection is based on the nude, more specifically around the words in Genesis “And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it”. The title and subject are therefore not profane but come straight from the Bible, describing the human body in all its purity before Adam and Eve sinned before God and were exiled from Eden. In fact “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed”.
The result is a fascinating display of paintings, 35 in all, by an incredible range of painters from antiquity to today. We can admire works by Cranach, Titian, Veronese, Ribera, Tiepolo and even great contemporary masters like Rauschenberg.
There are also a large number of paintings by important 17th century Florentine artists like Empoli, Bilivert, Giovanni da San Giovanni, Dandini, Cecco Bravo, Martinelli, Volterrano and Gabbiani.
The two sections differ between each other in that the first displays religious subjects, in other words, paintings of stories about Adam (the creation of Adam by Jacopo da Empoli), according to the principle that he was reborn as Christ - the new Adam - and therefore linking Old and New Testaments together.
Other works portray events from the life of Jesus (like the Madonna of the book by Pontormo). The second presents a selection of profane paintings, with reclining gods, allegories and love scenes, among them, the Justice of Paris by Lucas Cranach, Venus and Love by Titian, Venus and Mercury before Jove by Veronese, Flying cupids by Tiepolo, alongside one of the Uffizi’s latest acquisitions: the splendid St. Jerome by Jusepe de Ribera. Other works include self-portraits by contemporary artists.
Last but not least we can admire a series of paintings by artists who have always used the nude as their subject matter. They are however present here in the form of self-portraits, in three great works by Robert Rauschenberg, Laszlo Lakner and Mario Fallani, adding an original and somewhat unusual slant to the overall display.
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