lazzo 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

Florentine painting in the fourteenth century may be seen to best
advantage in the churches of Florence and in the Accademia delle Belle
Arti, for here in the Uffizi there is nothing from Giotto's or Orcagna's
hand, though the work of their schools is plentiful. In the first long
gallery, among certain Sienese pictures of which I speak elsewhere, you
may find these works; and there, too, like antique jewels slumbering in
the accustomed sunlight, you come upon the tabernacles and altar-pieces
of Don Lorenzo Monaco, monk of the Angeli of Flor