Simon Verde became the new director of the Uffizi Gallery

The new director of one of the most famous art museums in Italy and the world, the Uffizi Gallery (Galleria degli Uffizi) in Florence, has taken office. Simon Verdet, 48, succeeds the charismatic and radical Eike Schmidt, who has ruled the gallery for the past eight years. Kommersant’s art columnist says Kira Dolinina.

Rotation of museum directors in Europe is common. Moreover, at the end of 2023, Eike Dieter Schmidt’s second tenure was supposed to end, the contract was coming to an end, and no one doubted that something new was in store for the first non-Italian director in the history of the Uffizi. However, the very figure of Schmidt and the period that fell in his Florentine life turned out to be so striking that the usual relocation of museum bosses from office to office was discussed by almost the entire world press, not indifferent to culture.

The German Schmidt headed the Uffizi in 2015. He was not alone in this “cultural expansion” into Italian museums: the then Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini came up with the idea of ​​​​giving new superdirettori to the 20 largest Italian museums, and he invited seven of them from abroad. It was a foregone conclusion that such a decision would be met with criticism, if not curses, in heavily right-leaning Italy. However, you can’t argue with statistics and financial reports: the number of visitors in most of these museums has increased, profits have grown, the technical base of not the most, let’s be honest, collections in this regard has improved, and the blockbuster exhibitions familiar in world capitals, but not in Italy, have enjoyed enormous in demand among domestic and foreign tourists.

Schmidt’s professional biography is as beautiful as a multiplication table: born in Freiburg, he studied medieval and modern art at the University of Heidelberg. In the 1990s, he studied in Bologna as an exchange student, then in Florence. A classic leap overseas for a career art critic (he was a curator at the prestigious Washington National Gallery of Art and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles), returning to Europe via London, receiving a doctorate in Heidelberg and being appointed curator of the department of sculpture, decorative arts and textiles at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. All this is a luxurious resume, but Schmidt was brought closer to Italy not only by student internships and crazy love (which art critic doesn’t love Italy!), but also by a major exhibition of baroque sculpture Diafane Passioni in Florence’s Palazzo Pitti in 2013. From Pitti to the Uffizi there was only one step left. And Schmidt entered the gallery as the first foreign director. He managed to stay there even when far-right politicians tried to cancel the museum revolutions of the previous government, survived another change of republican authorities and became even more famous for the fact that in August 2019 he refused the offer to head the dream of any art historian – the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum – and remained in Uffizi.

There he was noted not only for his “games” with fashionable concepts (he brought women artists to the fore; he introduced objects of decorative and applied art and everyday life into the exhibition, which were supposed to comment on great paintings, which at all times were considered absolutely not in need of commentary; he opened the first (!) in the history of the gallery there is a full-fledged website). Schmidt’s real challenge was not the onslaught of right-wing critics, but the pandemic. The absence of tourists as such was a disaster for the Uffizi. But Schmidt turned it to his museum’s advantage: the Uffizi’s TikTok attracted a young audience locked in at home, and after the borders opened in a deal worth more than €2 million, he decided to send some of his masterpieces to the Bund One Art Museum in Shanghai for a temporary exhibition for a series exhibitions, starting with the Botticelli exhibition in spring 2022. A courage that is generally unthinkable for Italy.

Throughout the fall of 2023, there were rumors that Schmidt would leave the Uffizi, but would compete for the post of mayor of Florence. However, today it has already been officially announced that the most famous German of the Italian cultural scene is moving to Naples – he has received the post of director of one of the largest Italian collections, the Capodimonte Museum.

Simone Verde, who replaced Schmidt, is six years younger than his predecessor, and his career is also impressive, but without the roller coaster ride on which survival is the main trump card for the director of a large museum. Verde moves to the Uffizi from the Palazzo della Pilotta in Parma, which he has led since 2017. Previously, he headed the research and publications department of the Louvre Abu Dhabi (French Museums Agency), studied theoretical philosophy in Rome and Paris, and holds a PhD in the anthropology of cultural heritage, as well as a degree in museology and art history from the École Louvre. He has already announced the continuation of Schmidt’s reforms. But Verde is clearly much more of a museum administrator than an art critic. Alas, this is the fashion today – managers themselves do not always distinguish Michelangelo Buonarroti from Michelangelo Merisi and Caravaggio, but their valor lies in knowing who will do it better than others. Along with the Uffizi and Capodimonte, eight more museums received new directors, and this time most of them are Italians.