Accademia Gallery

Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo founded the Accademia di Belle Arti in 1784 as a teaching academy for Florentine artists, and the gallery grew out of its study collection of paintings and plaster casts — works gathered over the following century for students to draw and copy from, not for public display.

The museum's turning point came in 1873, when Michelangelo's David was moved here from Piazza della Signoria, where it had stood in the open air for almost 370 years since its unveiling in 1504. Decades of wind, rain and increasingly polluted city air had begun to damage the marble, so the statue was brought indoors and given a purpose-built tribune, lit from above, while a copy took its place in the piazza outside Palazzo Vecchio.

The approach to the David runs past four of Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures known as the Prisoners, or Slaves — figures that seem to still be struggling free of the raw marble block around them. Michelangelo believed a sculpture already existed inside its block of stone, waiting to be released by the chisel; left deliberately incomplete, the Prisoners are among the clearest surviving records of how he actually worked.

The David itself was carved from a single, imperfect block of Carrara marble that two other sculptors had already rejected as flawed and unworkable. Michelangelo took on the challenge anyway at the age of 26, working on it for roughly two years.