Florence — From 3 December 2026 to 1 March 2027, the Uffizi Galleries will present “Magnifico 1492” at Palazzo Pitti, a landmark exhibition devoted to the art collecting of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Set within the rooms of the Treasury of the Grand Dukes (Tesoro dei Granduchi), the show reconstructs the celebrated Medici collection once housed at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, as documented in the famous inventory drawn up in 1492, the year of Lorenzo’s death.
More than one hundred works and objects will be on display — including paintings, sculptures, vases, gems, cameos, coins, illuminated codices and geographical maps — offering visitors an extraordinary picture of the breadth of Medici interests and of the historical, artistic, philosophical and theological context in which the dynasty’s collecting took shape. The exhibition is the fruit of extensive scholarship and recent art-historical discoveries.
Among the exhibition’s most anticipated milestones is the first-ever reunion of the three panels of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, today divided between the Uffizi in Florence, the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris. It is the first time the three paintings, commissioned for the Medici palace, will be shown side by side.
Other major loans include the Spiritello by Donatello, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and a lavishly illuminated manuscript of Petrarch’s Trionfi, produced especially for Lorenzo and lent by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
According to Uffizi director Simone Verde, the exhibition aims to clarify how the Medici’s collecting choices were intimately bound up with the family’s political project — the consolidation and extension of their power and influence. Patronage and connoisseurship, the show argues, were never merely matters of taste, but instruments of prestige and statecraft.
Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449–1492), poet, diplomat and one of history’s greatest patrons, played a decisive role in making Florence a fundamental centre of the Renaissance. His death in 1492 marked the end of an era, and the inventory compiled that year — the exhibition’s guiding document — remains an invaluable window onto the splendour of his household.
Tickets will be bookable on the Uffizi website from 2 November. The exhibition will be open Tuesday to Sunday, from 8:15 am to 6:30 pm, with last entry at 5:30 pm.
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