The Uffizi Gallery has unveiled three rooms dedicated to Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo and the Florentine painters of the early 16th century on the second floor of the gallery, showcasing 25 paintings that outline the multifaceted mastery of the Tuscan school.
The spaces located at the end of the third corridor detail the creative and cultural life of Florence in the early 16th century, with the masters on show greatly contributing to the development of the late Renaissance. The first room features Fra Bartolomeo’s ‘The Vision of Saint Bernard’ (1504-6) as its centrepiece, placed in dialogue with the ‘Visitation’ by Mariotto Albertinelli (1503). Both artists works are characterized by solemn and expressive candour, with large, luminous landscapes.
The next room is entirely dedicated to Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530). His large-scale works that were originally intended for altars provide an overview of each phase of the painter’s output. The back wall displays ‘Madonna of the Harpies’ (1517), intended for the San Francesco dei Macci Church in Florence, exemplifying the skills of the painter who was a point of reference during the period, so much so that Vasari defined him as “the painter without errors”.


The final room conveys the varied and avant-garde artistic panorama of Florence, including works by Franciabigio, a great friend of Andrea del Sarto, whose San Giobbe altarpiece (1516) goes on display once more following a six-year absence. Next to it, you can admire works by Spanish painter Alonso Berruguete who came to Italy in around 1508 to study the works of Michelangelo and Raphael, as well as works by Domenico Beccafumi and Domenico Puligo.
Significantly, four panels that were part of the Borgherini Room have been brought together. A number of works from the cycle of paintings designed as decoration for the palace of the powerful banking family had been divided between the Uffizi Gallery and the Palatina Gallery, but have now been reunited.

Director of the Uffizi Galleries, Simone Verde, comments: “These three new rooms allow us to contextualize the Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raffaello rooms on the second floor of the gallery, reconstructing the richness and vivacity of Florentine painting in the first twenty years of the 16th century, revealing how the sublime example of da Vinci, Buonarroti and Sanzio inspired and guided Tuscan artists in their creative and stylistic practice at the dawn of the 16th century. Those exhibited in the spaces inaugurated today are all true masters, capable of expressing their personality and remarkable pictorial genius, as well as being of fundamental importance for the history of art”.
The curator of 16th-century painting, Anna Bisceglia, elaborates: “In this exhibition we intended to convey, in a single glance and in a natural sequence, the sheer quantity and quality that Florence expressed through the many artists during those twenty extraordinary years artistically.”