Exhibition | Florence and Europe: Arts of the 18th Century
Now on view at the Uffizi:
Florence and Europe: Arts of the Eighteenth Century at the Uffizi
Firenze e l’Europa: Arti del Settecento agli Uffizi
Curated by Simone Verde and Alessandra Griffo
The Uffizi Galleries, Florence, 28 May — 28 November 2025
Masterpieces by Goya, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Le Brun, Liotard, Mengs, and other masters; spectacular views of iconic places of the Grand Tour in Italy; the monumental Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine by French painter Pierre Subleyras, restored live on display before the public’s eyes; the sensual curiosities of the Cabinet of Erotic Antiquities reconstructed according to the fashion of the Age of Enlightenment. The Uffizi Galleries bring the 18th century back to life with the exhibition Florence and Europe: Arts of the Eighteenth Century at the Uffizi, curated by the director Simone Verde and the head of 18th-century painting Alessandra Griffo. Installed in the airy, frescoed rooms on the ground floor of the museum, the exhibition includes a selection of around 150 works, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, porcelain, prints, and a large tapestry, many exhibited for the first time in the Gallery and others seen for the first time in ten years due to the museum’s extension works.
The exhibition recounts, through art, an era of crucial changes for Western thought, aesthetics, and taste, and also for the Uffizi itself, which, in the 18th century, was completely transformed from a dynastic treasure chest of royal collections into a modern museum, the first in the world. It was precisely at this time, in fact, that the pact established by the last Medici descendant, Anna Maria Luisa, certifying the end of the dynasty in 1737, bound the boundless store of works to Florence “for the ornament of the State,” and it was Pietro Leopoldo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who in 1769 allowed citizens, on the feast day of Florence’s patron saint, St. John (24 June), to visit the museum freely. Structural changes intertwined with the great wave of political, cultural, and aesthetic transformations throughout Europe, which the Grand Dukes in Florence managed to intercept with the Uffizi Galleries, transforming the city and the museum into a microcosm where the new climate of the Continent could be felt.
Simone Verde states: “Florence and Europe aims to trace an extremely multifaceted century through its aesthetic culture, interweaving the general narrative of the context with the management of the Uffizi Galleries as Europe’s first modern museum. It’s a complex story rich in subtexts and nuances that we have constructed with patience and dedication, making works from the collection that have not been seen for many years, or have never been exhibited, available to the public.”
Alessandra Griffo states: “The works on display, besides being of great quality, have the merit of offering insights into a century that was crucial for the formation of the modern mentality, sensibility and even taste. Today, millions of people come to Florence every year, attracted by the myth of the early Renaissance: the rediscovery of this period occurred precisely during the 18th century.”
More information is available here»
Exhibition | Museum of Costume and Fashion in Florence Reopens
On view at the Museum of Costume and Fashion at the Pitti Palace:
New Arrangement of the Museum of Costume and Fashion
Museo della Moda e del Costume, Florence, ongoing
The history of fashion from the 18th century to the 2000s illustrated by captivating glimpses in an interplay between art and the historical environment of the Museum
After four years of renovation, the elegant historical premises of the Palazzina della Meridiana, the rooms that traditionally house the collections of the Museum of Costume and Fashion, have reopened completely. The Museum was inaugurated in 1983 at Pitti Palace—already known for being the ‘temple’ of fashion in the post-war period—and was the first Italian State museum dedicated to the history of fashion, haute couture, and the evolution of taste through the centuries. The new installation offers visitors a selection of rare and precious dresses accompanied by accessories—shoes, hats, fans, parasols, and bags—that exemplify through suggestions and samples a vast collection which in total has more than 15,000 items, and which will be put on display over time and according to rotations grouped by typologies, themes and leitmotifs, while always maintaining the criterion of the new arrangement which aims to propose a journey through the evolution of fashion and taste seen in their historical development, from the 18th century to the present day.
Another characteristic element of the new arrangement is indeed the interplay, strongly recommended by Director Simone Verde and the Museum’s curator Vanessa Gavioli, between the dresses and accessories and the most diverse forms of art, first of all painting, through the comparison between the gorgeous dresses on display and some fascinating coeval portraits and paintings, which help to make fashion also through the representations of painters such as Carle Vanloo, Laurent Pecheux, and Jean-Sébastien Rouillard, passing through the elegant portraits by the 19th-century ones such as Tito Conti, Giovanni Boldini, Edoardo Gelli, and Vittorio Corcos, to get to some of the most relevant artists of the Italian avant-garde including Massimo Campigli, Giulio Turcato, Corrado Cagli, and Alberto Burri. After all, fashion is by definition an art that has always lived in symbiosis with the most diverse disciplines, and the new arrangement of the Museum aims to recreate an ideal palimpsest in which, at a glance, one can also catch the relationships between different arts. Therefore not only between fashion and painting, but also between fashion and plastic arts (the match between the handles of porcelain vases and the sleeves of 18th-century dresses are intriguing); fashion, theatre, and sculpture (the relationship between Mariano Fortuny’s dress worn by Eleonora Duse and the actress’s face sculpted by Arrigo Minerbi is a particularly fascinating example); but also between fashion and architecture, with the dresses that stand in close connection with the historical space around, the furnishings and frescoes of the Palazzina della Meridiana; to end with a visual dialogue, virtually reconstructed thanks to the use of video screens, between the current arrangement and the historical ones, from the years in which in Florence, at Pitti Palace, in those same rooms that we can visit again today, Italian high fashion was establishing itself internationally according to a tradition that runs seamlessly to the present.
The Burlington Magazine, May 2025
The long 18th century in the May issue of The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 167 (May 2025) | French Art
e d i t o r i a l
• “Fashionistas,” p. 427.
The costume institute and its annual gala in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the Met), have become fixtures on the museum world’s map and calendar. Whether you delight in them or are bemused by the spectacle they provide, or indeed try and take no notice at all, they are hard to ignore. The alignment they represent between fashion history, contemporary celebrity and the gravitas of a major museum is immensely beneficial in terms of fundraising and profile.
l e t t e r
• “A Sleeping Apostolado at Wentworth Woodhouse,” pp. 428–29.
We are launching an appeal for the conservation, reframing, and rehanging of an important set of seventeenth-century paintings. We are making this appeal in honour of the art historian Alastair Laing, who died aged seventy-nine in 2024. It was he who identified the artist of this series as the Flemish painter Gérard Seghers (1591–1651). . . . By 1870 the thirteen paintings were framed in groups and fixed against the walls, as they are now, probably to give a more church-like feel to the simple prayer-book chapel of 1736, with its panelling and gallery of craved, unstained oak.
a r t i c l e s
• Yuriko Jackall, John Delaney, and Michael Swicklik, “Friendship Tokens: Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Paintings for Madame de Pompadour,” pp. 438–49.
Greuze’s paintings, known for their sentimentality and charm, were lauded by the artist’s contemporaries. Two early compositions, Simplicity and Young Shepherd Holding a Flower, were part of the collection of Madame de Pompadour; stylistic and technical analysis of them, in conjunction with another version of Simplicity, expands their early provenance.
• Humphrey Wine, “Napoleon Crossing the Alps: British Press Reaction to the London Exhibitions of David, Lefèvre, Wicar, and Lethière,” pp. 450–59.
Paintings by notable French artists were exhibited in Britain during the first third of the nineteenth century. Reactions to these works published in British newspapers and journals between 1814 and 1830 were often negative in tone and politically motivated. Despite this criticism, these accounts provide a valuable perspective on the art of the period that was shipped across the Channel.
• Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, “Bravery, Ingenuity, and Aerial Post: An Enamelled Bowl by Joséphine-Arthurine Blot,” pp. 470–77.
During the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Gaston Tissandier made a perilous balloon journey from Paris to deliver correspondence from the besieged city. The flight is commemorated in a small bowl by Joséphine-Arthurine Blot, a technically accomplished yet little-known enamellist. Her bold design celebrates Tissandier’s bravery as well as French resistance and resourcefulness.
r e v i e w s
• Alice Minter, Review of Christophe Huchet de Quénetain, Nicolas Besnier (1686–1754): Architecte, orfèvre du roi et échevin de la Ville de Paris (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), pp. 516–17.
• Céline Cachaud, Review of La Tabatière Choiseul: Un monument du XVIIIe siècle, edited by Michèle Bimbenet-Privat (Éditions Faton, 2025), pp. 519–20.
• Mark Evans, Review of Ulrike Müller, Private Collectors in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, ca.1780–1914: Between Public Relevance and Personal Pleasure (Brepols, 2024), pp. 521–22.
o b i t u a r y
• Christopher Baker and Stephen Duffy, Obituary for Rosalind Joy Savill (1951–2024), pp. 526–28.
An immensely successful director of the Wallace Collection, London, and a pre-eminent scholar of eighteenth-century Sèvres porcelain, Rosalind (‘Ros’) Savill had a profound and enduring impact both on the museum and the research she cared passionately about.
Prize for Research on South Netherlandish Art, 1400–1800
From The Burlington:
Prize for Research on South Netherlandish Art, 1400–1800
Applications due by 1 September 2025
The Burlington Magazine and the University of Cambridge are happy to announce the launch of a new annual prize established to inspire the development and publication of innovative object-based scholarship on South Netherlandish Art, 1400–1800. The winning entrant will receive a prize of £1000, with publication in The Burlington Magazine’s annual issue dedicated to Northern European Art, plus a one-year print and digital subscription.
We seek previously unpublished essays of 1000–1500 words from early career scholars worldwide. This is defined as within 15 years of their most recent post-graduate degree. Preference will be given to object-related scholarship such as is published in The Burlington Magazine. Submissions should be in English and should include candidate’s CV, all as a single PDF.
New Book | The Writer’s Lot
From Harvard UP:
Robert Darnton, The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0674299887, $27.
A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.
In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state kept them under constant surveillance. A few became celebrities, but most were hacks, and none could survive without patrons or second jobs.
The Writer’s Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography to take the measure of ‘literary France’ as a whole. Historian Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they fit into the social order—or didn’t. Reassessing long-standing narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. And while literary France contributed to the downfall of the ancien régime, it did so through its example more than its ideals: the contradiction inherent in the Republic of Letters—in theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected clique—dramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system.
Darnton brings his trademark rigor and investigative eye to the character of literary France, from the culture war that pitted the ‘decadent’ Voltaire against the ‘radical’ Rousseau to struggling scribblers, booksellers, censors, printers, and royal spies. Their lives, little understood until now, afford rare insight into the ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.
Robert Darnton is the author of numerous award-winning books on French cultural history, including The Revolutionary Temper. A MacArthur Fellow, chevalier in the Légion d’honneur, and winner of the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: Paths to Grub Street
1 Careers: The Ancien Régime
2 The Facts of Literary Life
3 Contemporary Views
4 Careers: Revolutionary Denouements
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Enfilade 
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