I might write much in praise of masters now living,[240] but I propose not to enter on their merits, and shall leave them wholly to the judgment of posterity. In other arts I indulge a greater latitude, but not frequently. I may add with truth, that during the course of six centuries, the artists of Florence have been fortunate in a government most auspicious to the fine arts. The last princes however of the Medicean family had shewn more inclination than activity in patronizing them; and the reign of the Emperor Francis I., though generally distinguished for enterprize,[241] was nevertheless that of an absent sovereign. The accession of the Grand Duke Peter Leopold to supreme power in Tuscany, in 1765, marked a new era in the history of the arts. The palace and royal villas were repaired and embellished; and amid the succession of undertakings that attracted the best artists, painting was continually promoted. The improvement of the ducal gallery was most opportune for it; and afforded new commissions to painters, and new specimens of the art: for the Prince ordered all the inferior pieces to be removed from the collection, and their place to be supplied by vast numbers of choice pictures. Fine specimens of antique marbles were likewise added: to him Florence owes the Niobe of Praxiteles,[242] the Apollo, and other statues; the basso-relievos, and busts of the Cæsars, which complete the grand series in the corridore: the cabinets of the gallery were then only twelve in number, and they contained a confused assemblage of paintings, statues, bronzes, and drawings, antiquities and modern productions. He reduced this chaos to order; he separated the different kinds, assigned separate apartments to each, made new purchases of what was before wanting, and increased the number of cabinets to twenty-one. This great work, one branch of which he was pleased to commit to my charge,[243] was worthy of record. I laid it before the public, in 1782, in a memoir, which was inserted also in the forty-seventh volume of the Journal of Pisa. Whoever compares this book with the Description of the Gallery, published in 1759, by Bianchi, will clearly perceive that Leopold was rather a second founder than a restorer of that emporium of the fine arts: so different is the arrangement, so remarkable are the additions to the building, to its ornaments, and to the articles it contains.[244] I have been diffuse in my description of the antiquities which appeared to me deserving of more particular elucidation; of the pictures I merely indicated the artist and the subject. Since that period, other descriptions of the gallery, by very able writers, have been given to the public, in which my nomenclature and expositions of the antiquities have been adopted; but a fuller and better catalogue of the paintings is given on the plan of that of the imperial cabinet of Vienna, and similar works.