How COVID helps reveal art treasure

MILAN — The Uffizi Gallery in Florence used the winter COVID shutdown to push ahead with renovations, discovering lost frescoes that will greet visitors when the leading repository of Italian Renaissance art reopens on May 4.

Uffizi director Eike Schmidt said the six months of closure were put to good use: renovating 14 new rooms that will open to the public next month, and discovering frescoes that would otherwise have remained hidden.

But he hopes that the most recent reopening — the third during the pandemic — will be the last.

“We very much hope that now we will be able to open stably and without further closures. We hope so for the museum, but we hope it also for the world and for human society,” Schmidt said.

The previously hidden frescoes include a life-size figure of a young Cosimo II de Medici — part of the Renaissance family that commissioned the Uffizi — dating from the 1600s, as well as decorative plant motifs from the 1700s on the walls and ceiling of nearby rooms.

They are located in the museum’s west wing, which is where the new visitors’ entrance will be when the Uffizi reopens.

Schmidt said the new entrance facing the Arno River would provide “a glorious introduction” for visitors. Classic statuary will be added to the entrance in the future.

Workers also completed restoration on new rooms dedicated to 16th century high and late Renaissance art from central and northern Italy, beyond Tuscany. They complete the sweep through art history from the Middle Ages with Giotto, to the Renaissance masters Botticelli, Raphael and Michelangelo, beyond to the counter-reformation and Venetian galleries.

“You can now seamlessly walk through, or hike through, art history if you wish to do so,” Schmidt said.