Galleria dell'Accademia

The Galleria dell'Accademia is a museum in Florence, Italy, located on Via Ricasoli near the convent of San Marco. It is best known for Michelangelo's David, which makes it one of the most visited museums in the world and the second in Italy by tickets sold. Yet its holdings also include a significant body of painting. The institution grew out of the Academy of Design, founded in 1563 by Cosimo I de' Medici; in 1784 it was reorganised as an Academy of Fine Arts under Leopold of Habsburg-Lorraine. In 1873 its seat moved to the site where the David is now displayed, and part of the Academy gradually became the museum.

The painting collection spans several centuries. The rooms devoted to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries feature the Tree of Life by Pacino di Bonaguida, while the first room holds works from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among the most represented painters on the website are Lorenzo Monaco, Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, with three works each, followed by Pontormo, Pietro Perugino, Fra Bartolomeo and Spinello Aretino. Notable paintings include Venus and Cupid by Pontormo, Madonna del Mare by Botticelli, The Visitation by Perugino, Job by Fra Bartolomeo, and the Cassone Adimari by Scheggia. Visitors should also note the Gipsoteca, with more than four hundred busts, bas-reliefs and plaster sculptures, and the Musical Instruments Department, set up in 2001, which houses instruments from the Tuscan grand dukes, the Medici and the Lorraine family, including a viola and a cello by Antonio Stradivari.