Galleria dell’Accademia

The Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze’s visual identity project, which Director Cecilie Hollberg has been extremely eager to see come to fruition, has been managed by Mybosswas, a creative multidisciplinary studio from Turin, in conjunction with an expanded working group coordinated by the Gallery’s Director and staff and including architect Piero Guicciardini, from Florence-based practice Guicciardini & Magni, who has designed the new entrance layout and the new signposting and exhibition hall caption supports currently in the production phase.

“Even before I came to Florence to take up the post of Director here – explained Galleria dell’Accademia Director Cecilie Hollberg – I noticed very clearly that the name of the museum, which has a very important historical origin and which absolutely needs to be maintained, isn’t immediately associated either with the universally acknowledged masterpiece that we’re privileged to host, namely Michelangelo’s David, or indeed with the rest of the superb collections in our exhibition halls. My efforts over the past few years have focused a great deal on what we needed to do first and foremost to offer the public a safe but at the same time also a functional and a pleasant visitor experience. So in parallel with the drive to bring the museum into line with today’s legal standards and with the start of work on the museum’s structural consolidation, architectural restoration and plant and system renewal, we’ve completely rethought its internal and external signposting, visitor reception facilities at the entrance and a system of explanatory panels and captions designed to allow every category of visitor to make the most of their visit. Upstream of this whole process, it was crucial for us to endow the museum with a strong logo immediately recognisable to all, and that everyone – Florentines and non-Florentines alike – will finally be able to associate unequivocally with our name and location in what has always been our historical premises, the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.”

His complex investigation and comprehensive rethinking process has involved the museum as a whole and every single area of its activities, and today the Galleria dell’Accademia is presenting the first crucial step in that process: its new logo, the product of lengthy research, as MyBossWas Creative Director Giorgio Ferrero explains: “We followed a few simple guidelines from day one in our effort to succeed in visually encapsulating the values embodied by the Galleria dell’Accademia. Our keywords were: sign, colour, font and iconography.To come up with the right colour, we analysed the colour matrix of some of the paintings in the museum and we found this dark cerulean blue – immediate, little-known and pregnant with meaning – in the Virgin’s mantle in the collections’ panel paintings, while warm white, our secondary colour, was inspired by the marble that Michelangelo used to carve his David. So the museum’s two complementary aspects, painting and sculpture, coexist in the two colours chosen to represent it.

We also sought inspiration in the inscriptions that are a fairly recurrent feature of the Renaissance paintings on display in the museum, to come up with the font that we’ve designed and that is going to be used henceforth for all the titles in the museum and in a range of different circumstances”.

Project team

Creative direction and photography
Giorgio Ferrero

Interior design
Piero Guicciardini (Guicciardini e Magni)

DOP
Federico Biasin

Art direction
Arianna Grasso

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