The Gabinetto Stampe e Disegni degli Uffizi and the British Museum’s Department of Print and Drawings gave life to this exhibit made with the preparatory drawings of the great Italian artists of 1400.

You have to hurry because this beautiful exhibition is about to end: only 1 month is left. In the entrance hall of Poste Reali, just across gate #1 of Uffizi Gallery there is this room where you can admire the drawings of Pisanello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Ghirlandaio, Fra Angelico, Leonardo … .

I saw it yesterday and I found it so emotioning!
These little drawings are displayed in glass panels are arranged like in a maze. You have to follow the path to discover one after the other the different techniques and the preparatory work of very famous paintings and frescoes.
Perhaps it touched me so much because, for the first time, I noticed the work behind the execution of a painting or a fresco (as if I was on the backstage of a movie).
The drawing represents the creative moment of the artist. When he is alone with the paper and has to decide what to do.
Really exciting to see all the attempts being made.
Where should the wall be built and what should be put on the back of it ? Look and recognize the scene the scene of Elizabeth’s visit that Ghirlandaio frescoed for the apse of Santa Maria Novella.
It is fantastic to see how Raphael was fascinated by Michelangelo’s St. Matthew that he had just started (the not finished statue is not is at the Academy). Raphael took Michelangelo’s statue as a model for his deposition of Christ. But what about the legs? And what position to give this body: the dramatic twisted body of St. Matthew’s or something less tormented ?

The exhibition also hosts the first ever done landscape with even Leonardo‘s signature. Incredible to see how Leonardo was able to reproduce the idea of the landscape that is slowly fading away and recognize the different way of marking the outline.

The exhibition has three locations: Reali Poste where the entrance is free, and two other rooms inside the Uffizi . The first one is on the first floor, half way on the staircase leading to the Uffizi and the second one is within the Gabinetto Stampe e Disegni.