La Galerie de Florence

Five years ago, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence made a remarkable discovery: a handwritten manuscript by Alexandre Dumas hidden in its archives. Commissioned by the Medici family (the gallery’s founders), Dumas had written "The Uffizi Gallery as Told by Dumas”, commenting over 200 art pieces while exiled in Florence towards the end of his life.

The project, which was entrusted to Éditions Chêne, was to restore, decrypt and revive this forgotten treasure by Alexandre Dumas and to publish it for the first time, with the collaboration of the Uffizi Gallery Museum. The work was structured in 7 volumes and published as a luxurious boxset to reflect the unique dimension of this piece, for all lovers of literature and art history.

Bureau Berger introduced a binary design approach to reflect this unique exchange between past and present, as well as the duality in imagery (engraving vs original painting) and in dialogues (Dumas vs curators). This binary approach can also be found in the choice and use of fonts: the studio has exclusively used serif fonts for Dumas’ historical words, and sans serif for curators’ words.