AGI – The art historian Antonio Paolucci, minister for cultural heritage in the Dini government, former superintendent of the Florentine Museum Complex and director of the Vatican Museums, has died in Florence at the age of 84.
Born in Rimini on 29 September 1939, Paolucci graduated in art history in 1964 with Roberto Longhi, starting his career in the state administration as an official of the Ministry of Public Education (which until 1975 held the responsibilities later devolved to the Ministry of Culture) in 1969, approaching the world of superintendencies.
“With the passing of Antonio Paolucci, Italy loses a passionate and rigorous man of culture, a tireless scholar who dedicated his life to the protection, promotion and enhancement of our artistic and cultural heritage. To his family and loved ones deepest condolences.” This was stated by the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano.
The Uffizi will name a museum auditorium after him
“Tonight, a statesman and one of the most significant Italian scholars of recent decades left us, with unparalleled speaking and writing skills and a natural talent for spreading knowledge. Not only that: Antonio Paolucci possessed the ability to govern art and his world, to supervise its very delicate balances. As minister and head of the Florentine Cultural Heritage he was the guide, for many years, of the protection system, therefore his disappearance is an unbridgeable loss”. Thus the director of the Uffizi Galleries, Simone Verde, on the death of Antonio Paolucci who adds: “the Uffizi Galleries, which include numerous employees who grew up in his shadow, join the family in mourning. In his honour, the museum’s Auditorium where he so often enchanted people with his words, will bear his name, while his intellectual legacy will be of scientific inspiration.”
Rai’s tribute
To pay homage to Antonio Paolucci, one of the greatest experts in the History of Art, who passed away today, Rai Cultura is re-proposing its “Museo Italia”, broadcast until Friday 9 February at 7.15pm on Rai 5. The program is a guided journey by Paolucci – in some of the largest museums in our country, from the first public collection in the world, the Capitoline Museums: from the Michelangelesque Piazza del Campidoglio to the Cortile dei Conservatori and from there, among infinite archaeological treasures, to the Palazzo Nuovo and the Pinacoteca which it opens onto the Caffarelli terrace and the great beauty of Rome.
The journey then continues in the “wonderful confusion” of the Borghese Gallery in Rome, an extraordinary collection born in the early 1600s from Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s passion for art and beauty and housed in the villa built and decorated to accommodate it.
In Florence, however, Professor Antonio Paolucci starts from the Loggia dell’Orcagna at the Uffizi, the museographic invention that has conquered the world. The Gallery, a true anthology of great art history, is explored among absolute masterpieces by Italian masters, with a look at the extraordinary Vasari Corridor. And again, the museum that goes beyond its borders, occupies every corner of the city and is in the shadow of every bell tower: this is the case of the ‘museum of the small homeland, identity of a people, of a history, like that of the Collegiate Church of S Andrea in Empoli, or that of the ‘sanctuary museum’ of the Orvieto Cathedral.
The journey ends following in the footsteps of Piero della Francesca, from Sansepolcro to Monterchi, to Urbino where Professor Antonio Paolucci illustrates some of the painter’s masterpieces, focuses on the relationship between art and landscape and explains how a great artist of the past can be the protagonist of history and the very identity of a place.