Uffizi Gallery

Duke Cosimo I de' Medici ordered the building in 1560 to gather the thirteen chief Florentine magistracies into one seat under his direct eye beside the old Palazzo della Signoria, a government block matching the power Florence had gained after taking Siena. The uffizi, the offices, gave the place its name. Giorgio Vasari, already at work on the adjoining Palazzo Vecchio, drew a U-shaped plan taking in the Romanesque church of San Pier Scheraggio at one end and the old Mint at the other.

Cosimo let the work to the lowest bidder and commanded carters, stonecutters and pickmen from the surrounding districts to the site. In 1565, for the marriage of his son Francesco to Joanna of Austria, the duke ordered a raised and secret way from Palazzo Vecchio to the dynasty's new residence at Palazzo Pitti; Vasari built it in six months, carrying it over the Ponte Vecchio. The magistracies on the San Pier Scheraggio side had moved in by August 1572, and Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi the elder took over in 1574 and finished the fabric in October 1580.

In 1581 Francesco I closed the open loggia of the top floor and turned it into a private gallery for his paintings, medals, hardstones, antique statues, armour and scientific instruments, then allowed it to be seen on request, making the Uffizi one of the oldest museums in Europe. In the same year Buontalenti began the Tribuna in the east wing, modelled on the Tower of the Winds in Athens as Vitruvius describes it; the octagonal room was finished in 1584 and became an influential attraction of the Grand Tour. Buontalenti completed the Medici theatre in the east wing in 1586.

Under Ferdinando I the grand-ducal workshops moved into the west wing, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure among them in 1588, and a decree of 1591 opened the gallery to the public on request.

The Medici line ended with Gian Gastone in 1737, and his sister Anna Maria Luisa ceded the family collections to the incoming House of Lorraine by a convention of that year, on condition that they stay in Florence and remain inalienable; the Lorraine kept to it, and the collections were never broken up or dispersed abroad. A fire on 12 August 1762 destroyed part of the east corridor and many of the works kept there.

Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine opened the gallery to the public in 1769. He made Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni director and gave the rearrangement to Luigi Lanzi, who completed it in 1780-1782 on Enlightenment lines, roughly one kind of thing to a room. From 1793 exchanges with the imperial gallery in Vienna brought in works by Titian, Bellini, Giorgione and Dürer in return for Florentine paintings.

In the Italian campaign of 1796 the gallery was stripped of works chosen for Paris by Dominique Vivant Denon, director of the Musée Napoléon, among them the Medici Venus from the Tribuna and the Madonna of the Long Neck; they came back at the Restoration, after Antonio Canova's work at the Congress of Vienna.

While Florence was capital of Italy, from 1865 to 1871, the Medici theatre was altered to serve as the chamber of the Italian Senate; it was divided into two floors and dismantled in 1889, the space now holding the Primitives rooms and the cabinet of drawings and prints. In the Second World War the rooms were emptied and the works put into refuges thought safe, returning in July 1945; part of them had been requisitioned by the Germans and taken to the province of Bolzano, and was recovered.

The Florence flood of 1966 damaged the Uffizi's collections; the superintendent, Ugo Procacci, and his staff reached the museum early that morning to save what they could. On 27 May 1993 the Sicilian Mafia detonated a car bomb in Via dei Georgofili, killing five people and damaging parts of the palace and the Vasari Corridor. Five works of art were destroyed and about thirty damaged, the worst harm in the Niobe room, since restored, though its frescoes were beyond repair.

The Nuovi Uffizi programme begun in 1989 moved the state archive off the first floor to more than double the display space; an enlargement completed in 2006 took the exhibition area to nearly 13,000 square metres. The museum reopened in May 2021 after a renovation that added fourteen rooms and 129 further works. A state museum under the Ministry of Culture, it belongs to the Gallerie degli Uffizi, which also takes in the Vasari Corridor, Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Garden; in 2024 the gallery recorded 5,294,968 visitors, more than any other art museum in Italy.