Last year, the Uffizi, Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens merged into one entity, and 3.4 million people visited, resulting in 17.3 million euros, or about $19.2 million, in ticket revenue for the state, making it the most profitable museum in Italy. Mr. Schmidt’s goal is to improve the museum’s flow; oversee a building renovation; reorganize the administration; rationalize a haphazard exhibition schedule; foster serious scholarship; rewrite wall labels; and find innovative ways to showcase a collection that has more than 12,000 paintings, 3,500 ancient sculptures, and 180,000 prints and drawings, including works from Latin America collected over the centuries but rarely shown.
Overseeing the Uffizi, with its world-class holdings and public-sector staffing, is a bit like running the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority at the same time. [...]
In what was perceived as a bold move, the Ministry opened directorships, for the first time, to an international search, eventually hiring seven non-Italians. Mr. Schmidt, a scholar of the Medici collection that formed the basis of the Uffizi, had lived in Florence in the past. [...]
Italy has pledged €58 million, or $65 million, to double the Uffizi’s exhibition space by converting offices into galleries, and to build a new exit for better flow. Mr. Schmidt hopes to move the paintings to a space in the Uffizi with climate control and to display Greek and Roman inscriptions that are less sensitive in the corridor, allowing visitors to cross from one museum to the other.
But with change comes resistance. Private tour groups don’t want to lose revenue. Marco Agnoletti, a spokesman for Florence’s mayor, said the director’s plan to open the corridor to the public “has created some perplexity.” In July, a prominent Italian architect who serves on the Uffizi’s advisory committee, Stefano Boeri, said in the press that he didn’t want to remove portraits from the corridor for aesthetic reasons.
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