a valuable collection of Venetian pictures which he
had bought, together with those that his wife Vittoria della Rovere
had brought him from Urbino, while his brothers, Cardinal Giovanni
Carlo de' Medici and Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici (the extremely
ugly man with the curling chin, at the head of the Uffizi stairs),
added theirs. Giovanni Carlo's pictures, which mostly went to the
Pitti were varied; but Leopold's were chiefly portraits of artists,
wherever possible painted by themselves, a collection which is steadily
being added to at the present time and is to be seen in several rooms
of the Uffizi, and those miniature portraits of men of eminence which
we shall see in the corridor between the Poccetti Gallery and Salon of
Justice at the Pitti. Cosimo III (1670-1723) added the Dutch pictures
and the famous Venus de' Medici and other Tribuna statuary.

The galleries remained the private property of the Medici family until
the Electress Palatine, Anna Maria Ludovica de' Medici, daughter of
Cosimo III and great niece of the Cardinal Leopold, bequeathed all
these treasures, to which she had greatly added, together with bronzes
now in the Bargello, Etruscan antiquities now in the Archaeological
Museum, tapestries also there, and books in the Laurentian library,
to Florence for ever, on condition that they should never be removed
from Florence and should exist for the benefit of the public. Her
death was in 1743, and with her passed away the last descendant of
that Giovanni de' Medici (1360-1429) whom we saw giving commissions
to Donatello, building the children's hospital, and helping Florence
to the best of his power: so that the first Medici and the last were
akin in love of art and in generosity to their beautiful city.

The new Austrian Grand Dukes continued to add to the Uffizi,
particularly Pietro-Leopoldo (1765-1790), who also founded the
Accademia. To him was due the assembling, under the Uffizi roof,
of all the outlying pictures then belonging to the State, including
those in the gallery of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which owned,
among others, the famous Hugo van der Goes. It was he also who
brought together from Rome the Niobe statues and constructed a room
for them. Leopold II added the Iscrizioni.

It was as recently as 1842 to 1856 that the statues of the great
Florentines were placed in the portico. These, beginning at the Palazzo
Vecchio, are, first, against the inner wall, Cosimo Pater (1389-1464)