Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence

In the spring of 1864 the British poet, writer and playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne had the chance of spending many days in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, and in the Uffizi Gallery on the study of its several collections. He immediately realized that statues and pictures were ranged and classed, as all the world knows they are, with full care and excellent sense, but one precious division of the treasury was then unregistered in catalogue or manual. The huge mass of original designs, in pencil or ink or chalk, swept together by Vasari and others, had then been but recently unearthed and partially assorted. Under former Tuscan governments this sacred deposit has been left unseen and unclassed in the lower chambers of the palace, heaped and huddled in portfolios by the loose stackful. To this extraordinary and still little-known treasure Swinburne dedicated his essay Notes on Designs of the Old Masters at Florence, one of the most beautiful art history essays ever written. A fundamental work to understand the secrets of artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Filippo Lippi, Giorgio Vasari, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna and many others.