Uffizi Gallery

The Uffizi Gallery, at Piazzale degli Uffizi, 6 in the historic centre of Florence, Tuscany, ranks as the most important Renaissance art museum in the world and the largest repository of Italian Renaissance painting ever assembled under one roof. Commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici and built between 1560 and 1581 by Giorgio Vasari, the long U-shaped building was designed as administrative offices — uffizi meaning offices in Italian — for the magistrates of Florentine government. Francesco I de' Medici converted the upper floor into a gallery in 1581 to display the expanding Medici art collection. The collection was secured for Florence in perpetuity when Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, the last of the dynasty, bequeathed the entire holdings to the city in 1737, stipulating that no work could be alienated, removed, or transported outside Tuscany. The permanent collection spans approximately 50 rooms arranged chronologically across two principal floors, charting the development of Western painting from Cimabue and Duccio in the late 13th century through Caravaggio and Rembrandt in the 17th. The medieval rooms open with Cimabue's Santa Trinità Maestà, Duccio's Rucellai Madonna, and Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna, the last demonstrating the pivotal shift from Byzantine flatness towards naturalistic form. The sequence proceeds through Early Renaissance Florentine and Sienese painters before reaching the Botticelli rooms, home to the Birth of Venus (c.1484) and Primavera (c.1482), the most celebrated mythological paintings of the Renaissance. Subsequent rooms contain Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (c.1472) and his unfinished Adoration of the Magi, Michelangelo's Doni Tondo — his only finished panel painting in Florence — and Raphael's portraits of Pope Julius II and Pope Leo X. The later galleries display Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), the paradigmatic Renaissance nude, and Caravaggio's Bacchus and Medusa, marking the transition into Baroque. The museum holds approximately 3,000 paintings in total, with around 1,700 on permanent display. The Uffizi sustained serious damage in the 1993 Mafia car bombing that destroyed five rooms and damaged the adjoining Biblioteca dei Georgofili; all affected rooms and works have since been restored. The ongoing Nuovi Uffizi expansion project, begun in 1990 and still in progress, has doubled displayable floor space and brought thousands of previously inaccessible works into the public galleries.