The birth of the Gallery dates back to 1784, when the Grand Duke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo reorganized the Academy of Design Arts, founded in 1563 by Cosimo I de' Medici, into the modern Academy of Fine Arts. The new institution occupied the premises of the fourteenth-century hospital of San Matteo and those of the convent of San Niccolò di Cafaggio. The museum was enriched with the suppression of churches and convents ordered by Pietro Leopoldo in 1786 and by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810. The decisive event for the history of the museum was the transfer of Michelangelo's David from Piazza della Signoria in August 1873. The most famous sculpture in the world waited nine years, kept in a wooden case, for the completion of the construction of the Tribune designed by the architect Emilio De Fabris to house it.