One million dollars to create the new layout of the Vasari Corridor, whose setting is currently underway. It was donated yesterday by the Edwin L. Wiegand Foundation of Reno, Nevada, represented by Raymond Avansino, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Marisa Avansino, Co-Vice Chair and President. The signing of the agreement was held in the Vasari Auditorium of the Uffizi Galleries. No paintings will be displayed in the "new" Vasari Corridor, due to an express prohibition by the Fire Department to introduce flammable material. Instead, the Uffizi's formidable collection of ancient Greek and Roman marble epigraphs, which until now has remained closed in storage, will finally be unearthed. It consists of nearly three hundred marble inscriptions, Greek and Latin, which constitute the main nucleus of the Grand Ducal epigraphic museum established between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a few additions from the early nineteenth century. Thus was reassembled an epigraphic collection that had been the subject of wide fame in scholarly and traveler literature since the 1700s; a collection to be counted among the oldest in an Italian public museum. The epigraphs remained on display at the Uffizi for nearly three centuries, until 1919, when the collection was dismembered and then placed in storage. Its recomposition in the Corridor just above Ponte Vecchio will be supplemented with didactic apparatus adapted to modern criteria of accessibility.
|