It is on the top floor of this palace of Cosimo I, after passing the busts of the lords and dukes of the Medici family, that one enters the gallery itself, which, running round three sides of a parallelogram, opens into various rooms of all shapes and sizes.  It was Francesco I, second Grand Duke of Tuscany, who began to collect here the various works of art which his predecessors had gathered in their villas and palaces.  To this collection Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, his brother, added, on his succession to the Grand-Dukedom, the treasures he had collected in the villa which he had built in Rome, and which still bears the name of his house.  To Cosimo II, it might seem, we owe the covered way from this Palazzo degli Uffizi across Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, while Ferdinand II began the collection of those self-portraits of the painters of which I have spoken.  Inheriting, as he did through his wife, Vittoria della Rovere, the treasures of Urbino, he brought them here, while it is to his son, Cosimo III, that we owe the presence of Venus de’ Medici, which had been dug up in the gardens of Hadrian’s villa, and bought by Ferdinando I when he was Cardinal.  Most of the Flemish pictures were brought here by Anna, the sister of Gian Gastone, and daughter of Cosimo III, when she returned a widow to Florence from the North.  The house of Lorraine also continued to enrich the gallery, which did not escape Napoleon’s generals.  They took away many priceless pictures, all of which we were not able to force them to restore, though we spent some L30,000 in the attempt.  We were, however, able to send back to Italy the Venus de’ Medici, which Napoleon had thought to marry to the Apollo Belvedere.

As may be supposed, the Gallery of the Uffizi, gathered as it has thus been from so many sources, is as various as it is splendid.  It is true that it possesses no work by Velasquez, and if we compare it with such collections as those of the National Gallery or the Louvre, we shall find it a little lacking in proportion as a gallery of universal art.  It is really as the chief storehouses of Italian painting that we must consider both it and the Pitti Palace.  And both for this reason, and because under its director, Signor Corrado Ricci, a new and clearer arrangement of its contents is being carried out, I have thought it better to speak of the pictures in no haphazard fashion, but, as is now becoming easy, under their respective schools, as the Florentine, the Sienese, the Umbrian, the Venetian, thus suggesting an unity which till now has been lacking in the gallery itself.

I. THE FLORENTINE SCHOOL