Entry to the Museum is through the old hall which previously led to the offices and workshops of the Opera del Duomo. From the fifteenth century on, the areas that now house the museum were used for planning and preparing the work on the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. It was here that Filippo Brunelleschi had his headquarters and here that Michelangelo carved the David, originally intended for one of the buttresses on the exterior of the Cupola. From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth these areas were used by the Opera as warehouses and then from 1891 to the present as a museum.