Uffizi, Florence's Trea­sure House Of Art: The Story Of The Museum

The Uffizi museum, located in Florence, Italy, welcomes some 20,000 people per day through her doors. Built during the end of the 16th century, under the reign of the Medicis, the museum has undergone numerous transformations in its long and salutary history. Home of some of the finest Italian Renaissance, Flemish, Dutch, German, and French architecture, sculpture, and more than 100,000 paintings, the museum has rightly become an object of pilgrimage for art aficionados visiting Europe. Unfortunately, for all its innate beauty, the filmmakers have added nothing, and at times seriously detracted. It is all too common to find non-native English speaking narrators droning on in an elevated foreign accent about the wonders of such and such, but all too often words are mispronounced, and syntactical errors abound. Redundant phrases such as "the institution of the museum", when either would have done nicely, make for the kind of vague and vapid presentation that put us all to sleep in high school. We're not saying that MTV should have stepped in; we are saying that, at the very least, someone who knew the language should have been given the job of narration. Serious art students will find much of interest here, but for the average viewer, Charles Boyer in the Louvre will be better, by far. Recommended for libraries with strong art collections. (Available from most large distributors, or direct from: VPI/AC Video, 381 Park Avenue South, Suite 1601, New York, NY 10016.)