or collectors used to be under the Medici, who were indulgent to their subjects, and spent their revenues amongst them. This will not be the case for some time, though a young prince is coming, for the emperor will still have the principal share.”[57] Botta had been busy for some time arranging the Palazzo Pitti, which had been untenanted since the death, in January, 1743, of the Princess Palatine, last of the Medici. Like all her family she had artistic tastes, and the Dutch pictures now in the Uffizi were collected by her and left to Tuscany. Huge pier glasses and Rococo furniture were bought to furnish the empty rooms on the first floor (where now the picture gallery is), “but,” writes Mann, “everything is calculated for the Meridian of Germany--nay, of Muscovy. Stoves and chimneys in every room. For the furniture the _gout_ is not less Gothick.” A few days after the marriage of Leopoldo of Austria with Maria Louisa of Spain, his father died suddenly at Innsbruck, and the fate of Tuscany was changed. The Emperor Joseph II. ordered his brother Leopoldo to be proclaimed Grand Duke, instead of Regent, and Mann writes, “The Florentines seem very sensible of their good fortune in having a prince again to live among them, after thirty years’ bondage under unexperienced Lorrain ministers and others, so little fit and desirous to contribute to their welfare.”... Though Marshal Botta made “sad work” inside the palace, he employed a good architect, G. Ruggeri, for the outside, who in 1764 began the great loggiata, or projecting colonnade, at the north end of the façade, where now is the entrance to the picture gallery. To him is also due the credit of taking advantage of the steep slope to create the bastion or terrace, but of a different shape from what we now see. The corresponding bastion on the opposite side was added by the Grand Duke Leopoldo I. in 1783 under G. Paoletti, who also designed and half finished the Palazzina della Meridiana, an adjunct to the Palazzo Pitti on the garden side, where he cleverly took advantage of the lie of the land to make the entrance on a level with the second floor of the great palace.