The David Museum, the Accademia Gallery in Florence
In 1784, the grand duke Leopold of Lorraine transferred the Accademia di Belle Arti, founded in 1563, from the Santissima Annunziata to where it is today.
He provided an exhibition gallery dedicated to Florentine art which allowed students to study painting and sculpture. Over the centuries the collection has been modiefied and enriched. Many of the works come from the closure of the convents but also from the return of exhibits from the Uffizi.
The Accademia Gallery in Florence is reached through the Anticolossus Room so called for the plaster of one of the Dioscuri of Montecavallo in Rome, which was placed there in the last century.
Exhibits include a stutue by Giambologna, The Rape of the Sabines, a Pietà by Andrea del Sarto and a deposition by Filippo Lippi. In 1873, Michelangelo's David was transferred from Piazza della Signoria, and for it, at a later date, the scenographic Tribune was designed. This is reached through the Gallery of the Prisoners where there are other works by Michelangelo: Saint Matthew, the Pietà Palestrina and the four famous Prisoners, destined to JuliusII's mausoleum. In three Florentine Rooms are paintings from the 1400's documenting the production of the main Florentine studios at the time of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Botticelli, the latter's Madonnawith Child can be seen here.
To the side of the Tribune of David are paintings by Florentine artists from 1500's, such as Venus by Pontormo. Of particular interest are the plaster casts in the so called Room of the Eighteenth Century, prepared in that epoch to house casts of two Tuscan sculptors of the period: Lorenzo Bartolini and Luigi Pampaloni. The Byzantine Rooms have works from the 1200's to the mid 1300's, by contemporaries of Giotto, such as Pacino di Buonaguida, Taddeo Gaddi and Orcagna.
