The 'Galleria degli autoritratti' of the Uffizi Gallery. Patterns of production, perception and display of an early modern collection of artists self-portraits

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The >Galleria degli autoritratti< of the Florentine Uffizi houses by far the most extensive and ambitious of all the collections of self-portraiture in early modern times. The Collection was founded by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici (1617-75), who also narrowed its scope towards an inner-pictorial focus on the artist’s self-creative activity. Later, Grand Duke Cosimo III. (1670-1723) significantly expanded, arranged and systematized the collection, specifically involving the portraits of foreign artists. He not only transferred encyclopedic notions of the utmost completeness to a special collection, but also retained the genuine interest in the productive aspect of artistic self-expression in the act of painting. Due to the donation of the Medici possessions to Tuscany by his daughter Anna Maria Luisa in 1743, the collection of self-portraits, by the time approximately two-hundred works, gained traction and essentially a new profile. In close collaboration with the Habsburg-Lorraine Grand Dukes, the first >directors< of the >museum< devised projects in terms of promotion the collections to a wider public audience, both by publications and opening the museum to visitors. Consequently, the collection increasingly attracted artists from various European countries, who manufactured and donated their own portraits, frequently with reference to existing portraits within the collection. In addition, the Lorraine-Habsburg Grand Duke of Tuscany Peter Leopold (1765-1790) expanded the holdings considerably by granting donations from his ancestral possessions. Since the death of Peter Leopoldo in 1790, the collection of self-portraits continued to grow through various donations, but had not been expanded systematically. Currently, the collection holds more than 2.000 works.This project is focused on the period between the construction and systematization of the collection by Leopoldo and Cosimo III. de’ Medici and the completion of their transformation into a public, generally accessible and well-publicized collection towards the end of the 18th-century. Based on rich and so far, only partially evaluated archival material and the autopsy of paintings (hitherto not even accessible to the scientific community), this project aims to reconstruct the relevant practices associated with the construction, the order and visualization of a collection that was genuinely developed as a special-collection, directed towards solely to early modern self-portraits. Furthermore, by means of evidence of communication regarding the portraits, the project endeavors to reconstruct the modes of reception of early modern self-portraits, with the premise that these verbal testimonies of reception also shed new light on the productive framework of these pictures.