Word: uffizi
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Florence sustained the greatest losses and is still partially under receding flood waters. Freedberg said that 350 paintings of "major importance" and about 600 of lesser value had been damaged in the city's Uffizi Gallery. The destruction was not confined to paintings, frescoes, and sculpture, but also included books, manuscripts, and valuable instruments in several museums...
Scholars had long had to take Vasari's word for it, since the frescoes seemed to have disappeared without a trace. But one who had not forgotten about them was Ugo Procacci, Florence's superintendent of galleries and formerly the Uffizi Gallery's chief restorer. While bundling off Florentine art treasures for safekeeping after the outset of World War II, he was struck by a five-paneled altarpiece in the Church of Santa Croce. Underneath the thick overpainting, his restorer's eye told him, might lie a masterpiece. So even in the haste of the moment...
With old masters bringing record prices at auction, what would happen if one of the great museums of Europe suddenly put its masterworks up for bids? Italian Art Historian Carlo Ragghianti and a committee of experts have just finished assaying the worth of masterpieces in Florence's Uffizi Gallery. At current prices, their top guesstimates...
...expects these highs to be tested. In fact, the commission found that the Uffizi had 50 paintings "without which it would be impossible to write the history of Western art," and each worth $2,000,000 or more. Which was just the point of the whole exercise -to shock Italians into realizing the value of their own patrimony...
...batches of Canaletto. Horace Walpole scorned Smith as "the merchant of Ven ice," but that shrewd gentleman sold his purchases for some $300,000 to the King on the installment plan-with interest. George Ill's wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg requested a sketch of Florence's Uffizi Gallery from a compatriot named Johann Zoffany. The elegant composite result (see opposite page) displeased the Hanoverian monarchs because of the prominence it gave to visiting Englishmen, even though it reproduced more than a dozen masterpieces of Italian art. Later scholars did blow ups of each of the copied paintings...