A glance at Piero di Cosimo’s portrait of Ferrucci in our National Gallery will show that an ordinary Florentine street preceded the erection of the Uffizi.  At that time the top storey of the building, as it now exists, was an open terrace affording a pleasant promenade from the Palazzo Vecchio down to the river and back to the Loggia de’ Lanzi.  Beneath this were studios and workrooms where Cosimo’s army of artists and craftsmen (with Bronzino and Cellini as the most famous) were kept busy; while the public offices were on the ground floor.  Then, as his family increased, Cosimo decided to move, and the incomplete and abandoned Pitti Palace was bought and finished.  In 1565, as we have seen, Francis, Cosimo’s son, married and was installed in the Palazzo Vecchio, and it was then that Vasari was called upon to construct the Passaggio which unites the Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti, crossing the river by the Ponte Vecchio—­Cosimo’s idea (borrowed it is said from Homer’s description of the passage uniting the palaces of Priam and Hector) being not only that he and his son might have access to each other, but that in the event of danger on the other side of the river a body of soldiers could be swiftly and secretly mobilized there.

Cosimo I died in 1574, and Francis I (1574-1587) succeeded him not only in rule but in that patronage of the arts which was one of the finest Medicean traditions; and it was he who first thought of making the Uffizi a picture gallery.  To do this was simple:  it merely meant the loss of part of the terrace by walling and roofing it in.  Ferdinand I (1587-1609) added the pretty Tribuna and other rooms, and brought hither a number of the treasures from the Villa Medici at Rome.  Cosimo II (1609-1621) did little, but Ferdinand II (1621-1670) completed the roofing in of the terraces, placed there his own collection of drawings and 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.