Galleria dell’Accademia

The birth of the Gallery dates back to 1784, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo reorganized the Academy of Drawing Arts, founded in 1563 by Cosimo I de’ Medici, into the modern Academy of Fine Arts. The new institution occupied the premises of the fourteenth-Century hospital of San Matteo and those of the convent of San Niccolò di Cafaggio. The museum was enriched with the suppression of churches and convents ordered by Pietro Leopoldo in 1786 and by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810. In August 1873, Michelangelo’s David was transferred from Piazza della Signoria to the museum, arguably marking the most important event in the history of the Uffizi. However, the famous sculpture had to wait for nine years in a wooden box for the completion of the construction of its tribune, designed by the architect Emilio De Fabris. Today’s Galleria dell’Accademia was established in 1882.