Image: Museo delle Porcellane, Florence
An international conference in Florence will revisit the provenance, attribution and reconstruction of the so-called Vasari/Mariette album, an architectural-drawing volume once owned by the collector Niccolò Gaddi. The event, held from 10 to 12 September 2026, will be hosted by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze and the Uffizi’s Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe.
The album’s history is marked by a succession of private owners and a disputed artistic identity. After belonging to Gaddi, it passed through the collections of Pierre-Jean Mariette and Séroux d’Agincourt before entering the Uffizi in 1798. Its attribution to Giorgio Vasari remains controversial, and the conference will treat that question alongside an examination of how the volume was assembled and graphically arranged.
Speakers will analyse the album’s sophisticated presentation of architectural works associated with Bramante, the Sangallo family and Scamozzi. The programme also frames the volume within Gaddi’s wider graphic collection. Described as a key figure in late-sixteenth-century Florence, Gaddi will be considered through the intellectual outlook suggested by his holdings and collecting activity.
The meeting is structured as six sessions, together with a study session at the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, an evening lecture and a concluding round table. Curators, professors and scholars from institutions around the world will contribute to the discussion, which is organised in collaboration with ETH Zürich and the University of Notre Dame.
Beyond the question of who made the album, the conference uses its changing ownership as a case study in the movement from private collecting to public museum heritage. Its passage from Gaddi and later collectors into the Uffizi places the volume within a longer history of how Renaissance graphic material is preserved, interpreted and reconstructed.
