Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici
Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici was the last of her family, and the reason the Uffizi is in Florence and not in Vienna or Madrid is a contract she signed in 1737. She was born in 1667, the only daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo III, and was married in 1691 to the Elector Palatine Johann Wilhelm, which took her to Düsseldorf for twenty-five years as Electress; the marriage was fond and childless, and the syphilis the elector is thought to have given her is one explanation of the miscarriages. She came home a widow in 1717 to a dynasty that was dying in front of her. Her brother Ferdinando was already dead. Her brother Gian Gastone, who succeeded in 1723, had no children and no interest in producing any, and the powers had settled in advance, without consulting Florence, that Tuscany would pass on his death to Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who had been made to give up his own duchy to France. Gian Gastone died in July 1737 and the Lorrainers came in. What she could do, she did: on 31 October 1737 she signed with the new grand duke's representative the Patto di Famiglia, the Family Pact, by which she made over to him the entire Medici collections - the galleries, the libraries, the statues, the jewels, the relics - on condition that nothing should ever be removed from Florence and that it should remain for the ornament of the state, the use of the public and the attraction of foreigners. It was a bequest with a clause, and it held: the Habsburg-Lorraine dukes, the French, the kingdom of Italy and the republic have all been bound by it, and the Uffizi and the Pitti are its consequence. She lived six more years in the Pitti as a private person, paid for the completion of the family chapel at San Lorenzo, and died in February 1743. Florence keeps her death day as a holiday at the museums, which are free that morning.
- Lived: 1667 CE – 1743 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: noblewoman, patron
