Villa del Poggio Imperiale
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Villa del Poggio Imperiale (English: Villa of the Imperial Hill) is a predominantly
Medici era
The Villa was once the property of the
In 1618 the villa was purchased from the Orsini by
The building work was very costly, as was the near simultaneous work at the
In 1659 the estate was acquired by
Habsburg-Lorraine era
The Villa was again redesigned and renovated in 1776 by
The Villa was always a secondary home for Tuscany's ruling families, favoured during spring and autumn. Conveniently close to the court, which resided at the Palazzo Pitti, and surrounded by an estate of 17 farms, it was a rural retreat from the city. However, it was always only one of several villas and palaces available to the Grand Ducal family, and its popularity and use waxed and waned. At the end of the 18th century, Grand Duke Ferdinand III leased the villa to King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia. Charles Emanuel lived here for just a month from 17 January 1799. It was at the Villa that on meeting Count Vittorio Alfieri (companion of Louise Stuart, wife of the "Young Pretender" Charles Edward Stuart, claimant to the British throne), Charles Emanuel uttered the much-quoted phrase "Voici votre tyran!" (Behold your tyrant).[9]
The present monumental principal facade was created in 1807 for the newly elevated Grand Duchess of Tuscany,
Neoclassicism was a style which evolved as a contrasting reaction to the more ornate
The facade is severe and plain, the only variation and ornament being the five-bayed projecting central block. This block has a
The severities of the exterior of the Villa were compensated for by the exuberance of the interior. A series of large salons were decorated with plaster work in the classical styles. The chapel, frescoed by Francesco Curradi, remained unaltered from the 17th century.
Post-Risorgimento
From 1849 the political history of Florence and Tuscany became troubled. Leopold II, the last ruling Grand Duke, was replaced by a republican constitution. The Grand Duke, although later appointed a constitutional head of the republic, was forced to abdicate. On 27 April 1859, the Grand Duchy ceased to exist and the last ruling Grand Duke of Tuscany and his family peacefully quit Florence. It had been a bloodless overthrow and the family left with "respectful farewell greetings of the people."[11] Tuscany now became part of the short lived United Provinces of Central Italy.
On 5 March 1860, Tuscany voted in a referendum to join the Kingdom of Sardinia. This was an important step in the unification of Italy (Risorgimento) which was to follow shortly. In 1865, Florence became for a brief period the capital of a united Italy. The Palazzo Pitti became the Italian royal palace. The new King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, with many palaces at his disposal and an obligation to travel across Italy in the interests of the unification, had little need for a second large palace, such as Villa del Poggio Imperiale, in such close proximity to the Palazzo Pitti.
The unwanted and, by now, fairly neglected villa, now in the ownership of the state, became an exclusive girls' boarding school, the Istituto Statale della Ss. Annunziata. The school had been founded under the patronage of Leopold II and his wife, Maria Anna of Saxony in 1823 to provide education for the daughters of the Florentine nobility. Its original home in the "Via della Scala" in the centre of the city was required for government offices, so in 1865 a simple exchange was made. The school has occupied the building ever since. In January 2004, the school's use of the villa was formalized in an official government announcement that granted the school free use of the state-owned property in perpetuity.[12] Only the state rooms, some of them with frescoes by Matteo Rosselli, are open by appointment to the public.
Interior furnishing
The only remaining part of the original 15th-century Villa di Poggio Baroncelli is the small courtyard. This, the smallest of the Villa's three courtyards, is sited immediately though the main entrance. Here, four cloister-like corridors illuminated by segmental windows provide abundant light. The corridors are adorned with antique busts placed on ledges and niches constructed in the eighteenth century.[13] This decoration and embellishment of a substantial collection of antique busts was made by Vittoria della Rovere, who brought the sculptures to Florence to embellish the Villa.[14]
On the first floor, one of the most prominent additions to the villa was the development of the Salone delle feste, built between 1776 and 1783, and decorated with embellished stucco reliefs which are predominantly white in color.
In one of the adjacent "Chinese" wings, are four rooms decorated with circa 1775 Chinese hand-crafted wallpaper, which came from Canton workshops, specialized for export, and represented the important influence of the chinoiserie style then being experienced throughout Europe.[15] The refined paintings of the China wing represent an idealized world of flowers, exotic birds and scenes of daily Chinese life, often borrowed from the period literature depicting Chinese life and culture. A fifth room contained, originally, 88 pictures (about 20 × 30 cm each) which were displayed with these various scenes from Chinese life. These probably came from a collection that was in the villa from about 1784. Today, only about twenty are displayed, with their repair and reconditioning being underway in an ongoing restoration project, which will eventually recreate their original layout.[16]
Many Chinese paintings, probably from the same source as those of the Villa, were given by
Interior design
The original 1487 plan of the Poggio Imperiale bears little resemblance to the present day neoclassical layout. Originally, the building was a country manor house belonging to the Baroncelli family; this passed to the Pandolfini family, and eventually in 1622 it was sold to the Grand Duchess Maria Maddelena of Austria. This change of ownership was to mark the beginning of a slow transformation from provincial country manor to grand, imperial villa. The Grand Duchess immediately commissioned the building's "restoration, enlargement, and embellishment."[17]
The commission was granted to the architect Giulio Parigi, who between 1622 and 1625, introduced a more ornate Baroque style, and the later version of Baroque, Rococo. This was achieved with an expanded floor plan, lengthening the facades and elevations. These longer facades were in the late 18th century deprived of their Baroque ornament to create the chaste austere neoclassical architecture seen at the villa today.
"The eminent architectural historian Carlo Cresti describes Parigi's 1624 design as yielding a corps de logis flanked by two lower, symmetrical wings with terraces and semicircular concave profiles. Inside the Villa, Parigi restructured the old central courtyard and the rooms of the grand-ducal apartment, which were frescoed by Matteo Rosselli and his pupils."[18]
A further period of enhancement took place when the villa passed to the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere who created the ground-floor rooms situated at the crest of the inner courtyard designed by Giacinto Maria Marmi. Between 1681 and 1683, the courtyard and its surrounding loggias were further re-designed by the architect Giovanni Battista Foggini.[19]
Between 1766-1783, the architect Gaspare Paoletti, during the third and final renovation of the villa, accomplished the definitive restructuring of the villa to twice its previous size. Paoletti added the two flanking inner courtyards to the central courtyard, and also designed the rear facade and the great ballroom on the piano nobile. This was embellished with the notable stuccowork by Giocondo and Grato Albertolli.
The principal facade, however, was not to be transformed until ownership of the villa passed to Maria Louisa of Bourbon, the Queen of Etruria, who in 1806 assigned the project to the architect
The chapel for the Annunciation
With the extensive redesign and renovation in the eighteenth century, many of the original chapels in the Villa were lost. Today, only the Chapel of the Annunciation remains which the architect Giuseppe Cacialli included as part of the 1820 neoclassical renovation.
The design of the chapel is divided into three naves with a semicircular tribune. The redesign preserved the pre-existing eighteenth century decorations and embellishments which included statues of the Virtues in separate niches, as well as stucco friezes depicting biblical scenes on the walls and ceiling dome in tempura depicting the Assumption of the Virgin by Francesco Ninci.
The remarkable wealth of the works of art and opulent reliquary of priestly use held in the chapel have been expertly cataloged and documented in the short volume by Brigida D'Avanzo in Italian titled: "Oggetti di arte sacra alla Villa del Poggio Imperiale Firenze" in 1990.[21] Two of the dozens of exceptional holdings in the chapel include the "Il Ritrovamento della Croce" of 1686 attributed to Luca Giordano, and the "Madonna col Bambino e S. Giovannino" of the sixteenth century attributed to the school of Puligo.[22]
A short essay in the D'Avanzo volume by Rosanna Caterina Proto Pisani documents several dozen of the objects of art held in the chapel. The extensive history of the relation of these exceptional holdings together with their cross-listing and shared use with the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, along with the art holdings identified with the Villa in general, has yet to be completely studied as a separate subject of the relation between the Villa and the Uffizi Gallery.[23]
Gallery
See also
Notes
- ^ Caroline P. Murphy, Murder of a Medici Princess 2008:143f.
- ^ Murphy 2008:143.
- ^ Cosimo's excuse was the participation in an anti-Medici rebellion by Pietro's son Alessandro Salviati, executed in 1555. (Murphy 2008:143).
- ^ Murphy 2008, passim.
- ^ Cesati, p 96: Isabella was strangled by her husband, who was anxious to marry his mistress. Orsini also had murdered his mistress' husband; Murphy 2003:323ff.
- Habsburg-Lorraine, that the Holy Roman throne (in the form of Francis I) and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany by a pact of 1735 became inextricably linked.
- ^ Cesati, p 114.
- ^ Cesati, p 116
- ^ Vaughan, P 237.
- ^ dal Lago, p. 144.
- ^ Chiarini, p 19.
- ^ La tutela della Villa, tra uso e conservazione Archived 28 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine (Italian) retrieved 18 August 2007
- ^ La Villa del Poggio Imperiale Villa del Poggio Imperiale (Florence, Italy) Roma : G. Bretschneider, 1979
- ^ La Villa del Poggio Imperiale Villa del Poggio Imperiale (Florence, Italy) Roma : G. Bretschneider, 1979
- ^ Viaggio nell'esotismo settecentesco alla Villa del Poggio Imperiale a Firenze : il riallestimento de Branca, Mirella [Livorno, Italy] : Sillabe, c2011
- ^ Viaggio nell'esotismo settecentesco alla Villa del Poggio Imperiale a Firenze : il riallestimento de Branca, Mirella [Livorno, Italy] : Sillabe, c2011
- ^ Villas of Tuscany, The Vendrome Press, pp366-369, by Carlo Cresti.
- ^ Cresti, p.369.
- ^ Cresti, p.369.
- ^ Cresti, p.378.
- ^ Oggetti di arte sacra alla Villa del Poggio Imperiale Firenze : Il Diaspro, Polistampa, [1990]
- ^ Oggetti di arte sacra alla Villa del Poggio Imperiale Firenze : Il Diaspro, Polistampa, [1990], p58-61.
- ^ Oggetti di arte sacra alla Villa del Poggio Imperiale Firenze : Il Diaspro, Polistampa, [1990]
Sources
- dal Lago, Adalbert (1969). Villas and Palaces of Europe. Paul Hamlyn. SBN 600012352.
- Vaughan, Herbert M. (1910). The Last Stuart Queen: Louise, Countess of Albany, Her Life & Letters. London: Duckworth.
- Cesati, Franco (1999). Medici. Firenze: La Mandragora. ISBN 88-85957-36-6.
- Chiarini, Marco, ed. (2001). Pitti Palace. Livorno: Sillabe s.r.l. ISBN 88-8347-047-8.