For the first time ever, the three panels of Paolo Uccello's "Battle of San Romano" will hang side by side. The Uffizi Galleries in Florence announced that the celebrated trio — today divided between the Uffizi, the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris — will be reunited in "Magnifico 1492", an exhibition opening on 3 December at the Palazzo Pitti and running until 1 March 2027.

The show recreates the art collection of Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent, as recorded in the inventory drawn up in 1492, the year of his death. More than 100 works and objects will fill the rooms of the Treasury of the Grand Dukes, from paintings and sculptures to vases, gems, cameos, coins, illuminated manuscripts and geographical maps, evoking the breadth of Medici taste and the scholarship behind it.

The Uccello panels, painted around 1435–40, depict the Florentine victory over Siena at the battle of San Romano in 1432, and were once displayed together in Lorenzo's household. Their reunion is the centrepiece of the exhibition, which also brings Donatello's "Spiritello" on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a lavishly illuminated manuscript of Petrarch's "Trionfi", made for Lorenzo and lent by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

According to Uffizi director Simone Verde, the exhibition aims to show how the Medici's collecting was bound up with their political project — the consolidation and extension of their power. Patronage, the show argues, was an instrument of prestige and statecraft as much as a matter of taste. Lorenzo, a poet and diplomat as well as a patron, helped make Florence a centre of the Renaissance; his death in 1492 closed an era. Tickets go on sale on the Uffizi website from 2 November.