Accademia Gallery (Galleria dell'Accademia), Florence

The Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence was established in 1784 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine as the teaching collection for the adjacent Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of Fine Arts), intended to give students direct access to exemplary works of Florentine art from the 13th to the 18th centuries. The museum's identity changed permanently in 1873 when Michelangelo's David was transferred here from its original outdoor position in the Piazza della Signoria, where five centuries of exposure had begun to damage the marble surface. The David (1501-1504) was originally commissioned by the Opera del Duomo as one of a series of Old Testament heroes intended for the exterior buttresses of Florence Cathedral's tribunes; the decision to position it instead in the Piazza della Signoria — as a civic symbol of the Florentine Republic — gave the work its political resonance. Michelangelo began work in October 1501 on a 5.17-meter block of white Carrara marble that had been quarried 40 years earlier and lay unused in the cathedral works yard. The statue was unveiled on 8 September 1504; Michelangelo was 26 years old. The David is displayed at the end of the Galleria dei Prigionieri, a hall flanked by Michelangelo's four unfinished Prisoners (Prigionieri, c. 1519-1534) — colossal figures intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, left incomplete as the commission was repeatedly revised and scaled down. The effect of walking past the Prisoners, figures emerging from the rough stone as if still being born from the marble, toward the completed David at the hall's end is among the most dramatic approaches to a single artwork in any museum. The statue's enlarged head and right hand were deliberate design choices: proportional exaggerations intended to appear naturalistic when viewed from far below at the height of the cathedral buttresses for which it was designed. Beyond the David rotunda, the permanent collection includes a significant holding of 14th-15th century Florentine Gothic and early Renaissance painting, including works by Botticelli and Pontormo, a plaster model room with 19th-century academic studies by Lorenzo Bartolini, and the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali, a collection of instruments from the Medici court that includes a Stradivari tenor viola. The museum is on Via Ricasoli, 60, Florence, managed by the Gallerie degli Uffizi directorate.