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Chronology

• The Story of Galileo's Instruments

Biographies

• Galileo Galilei

Founded in 1560, the Uffizi was built at the initiative of Cosimo I de' Medici, to the project of Giorgio Vasari, as the seat of the most important municipal offices. In 1565 the construction of the "Corridor" joining the Uffizi to Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti was begun. After the death of both the Grand Duke and his architect in 1574, the work was continued by Bernardo Buontalenti and completed in 1580.

Already in 1581 it is documented that Grand Duke Francesco I was setting up on the top floor a gallery in which to conserve and display his own collections. This is the birth certificate of one of the world's most important museums, a great collection of  art and science. The heart of the Gallery is the Tribune of Buontalenti: with a hexagonal  ground plan inspired by the Tower of the Winds in Athens, it is imbued with symbolic allusions to cosmic order.

Next to the Tribune, in a small room known as the Stanzino delle Matematiche, scientific instruments and papers were kept. This was a little "room dedicated to the study of military architecture", in which to display machines for lifting weights, mathematical instruments (some of then now in the Museum of the History of Science) and "books and papers on geography and plans and models of fortresses." The first decorations in the Stanzino delle Matematiche were completed in 1599-1600 by Giulio Parigi, who created there, alongside the celebration of Medicean exploits and Florentine professional traditions, a visual history of mathematics. The portraits of Pithagoras, Ptolemy and Euclid are associated with the mathematical basis of the military art. But the unrivaled hero of this visual history is Archimedes, whose apotheosis in the Stanzino bears witness to the revival of interest in the scientist from Syracuse occurring during those years, as exemplified by the arrival in Florence of the codex of his works in Greek, now in the Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana. Sixty years later Grand Duke Ferdinand II and Prince Leopold de' Medici dedicated new attention to mathematics in the West Corridor of the Gallery. Here Galileo Galilei was honored as the "New Archimedes". In 1780 Filippo Lucci added to the iconography of the Stanzino a series of images depicting electrostatic devices, an obvious sign of the interest that such apparatus was attracting near the end of the 18th century. In the Uffizi Gallery today, the Stanzino delle Matematiche is "Room 17, of the Hermaphrodite". At the center, in fact, is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, the Roman copy of an original bronze by Polycletus.

Between 1587 and 1591 the corridors of the Uffizi were adorned with the series of paintings portraying illustrious men, the series called "Jovian" because it was inspired by the model of the museum belonging to the erudite Paolo Giovio. This was the first and most important nucleus of the rich iconographic collection destined to encounter even greater splendor over the centuries. Among the personages portrayed are many scientists: Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Robert Boyle, Tycho Brahe, Cartesio, Antonio Cocchi, Galileo Galilei, Guido Grandi, Giovanni Kepler, Alessandro Marchetti, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Girolamo Mercuriale, Isaac Newton, John Ray, Francesco Redi, Niccolò Stenone, Evangelista Torricelli, and Vincenzo Viviani.

If today the core of the collections consists basically of the paintings and the sculpture gallery, in the first conception of the museum the art collections coexisted with the naturalist ones, with the scientific instruments and the armory. A substantial renewal of the Gallery was undertaken by Pietro Leopoldo, who transferred the scientific collections to the Museum of Physics and Natural History. Today the minerals, stuffed animals, fossils, measurement instruments and objects of scientific interest in general are kept mainly in the various sections of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence and the Institute and Museum of the History of Science.