The Galleria dell’Accademia was established in the XVIII century as a teaching facility for students of the adjacent Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1784 by Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine. The Accademia is housed in the antic spaces of the Hospital of Saint Matthew and the Convent of Saint Niccolo’ of Cafaggio, where the halls were used to display antic artworks as didactic models for the students of the Academy of Fine Arts. The Galleria dell’Accademia was progressively enriched by paintings gathered from convents or monasteries which were suppressed by Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine at the end of the XVIII century and later on also by Napoleon in 1810.Ten years after the Gallery of Accademia was opened to the public, the museum changed various arrangements to showcase tapestries, paintings and sculptures, mainly when Michelangelo’s Prisoners were moved into the Accademia in 1909. Around the 1950s the Hall of the Colossus was opened together with the so-called Bizantine style Rooms featuring 13hundred panel paintings. In the 1980s the collection of plaster casts models by Lorenzo Bartolini was added to the Museum, housed inside the Nineteenth Century Room originally used as the women’s ward in the ancient Hospital of Saint Matthew, patron of the bankers.