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Futuro Antico. Interview with Eike Schmidt
21 mar 2023
Marco Bassan
From his artistic sources of inspiration to the importance of sharing knowledge with new generations, a wide-ranging conversation with the Director of the Uffizi Galleries.
What are your inspirational references in art?
It’s absolutely crucial not to have a rigid set of references but to remain curious, constantly finding new sources of inspiration. As a museum director, my primary role is to keep an eye on all disciplines and have diverse models of reference, whether they are social figures like Falcone and Borsellino, or historical figures like Cardinal Leopoldo, who, despite being a man of the church, studied theological texts deemed heretical, explored religions outside Christianity, and collected scientific instruments, artist self-portraits, or portraits of artists by other artists. He's a distant but highly relevant model. I can’t cite contemporary artists or architects because they are too close—there are many, but it’s better to have a living, dynamic relationship with them.
What project represents you the most? Can you tell us about its genesis?
Among the recent ones, I would say the new Uffizi gallery layouts. After deciding to expand the museum by doubling the space, the project grew to a tripling of exhibition rooms, allowing us to rethink the collection without breaking up its original nuclei. This let people continue visiting while we simultaneously added 40% of the works that were in storage. Together with architect Antonio Godoli, we designed display cases with completely transparent surfaces, enhancing both the protection and the visibility of the artworks, allowing visitors to get within a few centimeters of them.
We emphasized contemporary aspects of the collection by including many works by female artists from the past and creating interesting tensions between artists from different eras, treating historical art as if it were a contemporary collective exhibition.
How important is the Genius Loci in your work?
It’s very important to define Genius Loci on multiple levels. It’s essential as a specific place, but even more crucial to remember that we are all human beings on planet Earth, and this is our ultimate Locus, uniting all humanity. It's one of many planets with life, but perhaps the only one we will ever know.
At the same time, the Genius Loci for me also includes the few square meters of my studio or the places where I go for walks in the hills around Florence. As a thinker, I’m quite Aristotelian, peripatetic—I move around a lot, just like Heidegger. I believe it’s necessary to give rhythm to thoughts. So, the Locus isn’t a fixed concept but a dynamic one, not necessarily by running, but by moving back and forth and seeing things from different angles.
How important is the past for imagining and building the future? Do you believe the future can have an ancient heart?
From a physical point of view, past, present, and future all exist on the same plane simultaneously, which helps us understand that works or ideas from the past can be just as relevant today or perhaps out of time, only to become of great importance again in the future. It’s crucial to recognize this timelessness across different eras.
In an era often defined as post-truth, does the concept of the sacred still have relevance and strength?
The concept of the sacred has nothing to do with time. It’s something we cannot do without, just like the concept of truth. The way we define these ideas changes, and today, of course, there is great uncertainty. What we might call post-truth could actually be pre-truth.
New technologies are redefining our era, which for a long time has been considered postmodern. It’s highly likely that, thanks to these technological revolutions, we will return to defining our time in terms of something that has already existed.
How do you imagine the future? Could you give us three ideas that you think will shape the coming years?
Our perception of the world is strongly shaped by our technologies, which influence our physical behavior, thinking, pauses, and hopes. In the past, the ability to have a camera on a cell phone radically changed our behavior, and today the challenge is to understand how our way of taking notes, thinking, or even not thinking will change.
A second important point is the ongoing globalization (also driven by technological development), which is evolving dialectically with thesis, antithesis, and, so far, few syntheses.
In our work, we see that we are communicating with the entire world, and we need to find ways to do this coherently, both digitally and with physical visitors. Today, visitors come from a wide range of countries as never before, each arriving with their own culture and concerns, and our goal is to make the museum a place of cultural exchange. There is enormous potential to create formats that bring together Americans and Koreans visiting the museum at the same time, each with their own cultural perspectives and reference points.
Finally, the third point is generational. In all highly industrialized countries, we face low birth rates. We must remember that all our knowledge has been accumulated over many years, even decades, and today it is necessary to share it with the younger generations. Every generation must define its own place in the world, but we find ourselves in a situation where there are fewer and fewer young people, who are increasingly marginalized, while power is held by older generations.