The National Bargello Museum is housed in the former Palace of the Capitain of the People. According to Vasari, the original core, dating to 1255, was built following a design by a certain Lapo, father of Arnolfo di Cambio, and corresponds to the site overlooking Via del Proconsolo: this was the city's oldest seat of government. From the late 13th century to 1502 the Palace was the official residence of the Podestà, the magistrate who governed the city and who, by tradition, had to come from another town.
Around 1287 the balcony was built, a beautiful loggia overlooking the courtyard where the Podestà often held meetings with the representatives of the guilds and corporations.

The Bargello offers in sculpture and its courtyard and interiors contain some of the masterpieces of the Tuscan Renaissance. In the large fourteenth century hall on the first floor are found some of the finest works of Donatello (1386-1466) such as the marble Youthful David, the St. George from its niche in Orsanmichele and the later, and more ambiguous, David in bronze. All are works in which the linear and decorative tendencies of late Gothic sculpture can be seen giving way to more solid and human ideals, full of civic and moral dignity.

On display in the Michelangelo Room are works by that great Renaissance artist: the so-called Drunken Bacchus, sculpted in Rome between 1497 and 1499; the marble tondo with the Madonna and Child and the Child St John, carried out in 1504 for Bartolomeo Pitti; the David-Apollo, marble statue, begun in 1531; the Brutus, marble bust carried out around 1540; as well as the Bacchus, marble statue, sculpted by Jacopo Sansovino around 1520, the bronze bust of Cosimo I by Benvenuto Cellini; also on display another outstanding example of 16th-century sculpture, Giambologna's splendid Mercury, a bronze from 1564.