Premium Featured Accommodation

History of Florentine Architecture in the 17th Century - Giulio Parigi's Work

Starting from the beginning of the seventeenth century the Pitti Palace became the object of continuous work that would extend into the nineteenth century, so that the building became both a monument to and seat of the grand duke's power. In 1616, Cosimo II launched a competition to enlarge the palace and design the piazza in front of it. It was won by Giulio Parigi, whose plans called for extending the façade by three windows on either side; he accepted the logic of the growth of the city and the Brunelleschian works suggested by Sangallo who doubled the loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and which wasalso interpreted by Caccini with the construction of the loggia in front of the church of Santissima Annunziata. The work on the north side of the Pitti Palace began in 1618, and on the south side in 1631.
The palace was further enlarged between 1640 and 1650 to designs by Alfonso Parigi the Younger, Giulio's son, who adopted the same face of the fifteenth century building and perhaps continued with one of Giulio's plans.

With his designs for the Pitti Palace, Giulio Parigi introduced important changes in the concept of the Florentine palazzo. On the one hand he developed the scenic sense of the relationship between architecture and the city that had taken hold between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This can be seen in the fixed and courtly spatial perspective of Brunelleschian architecture in Piazza Santissima Annunziata, arranged like temples in a luminous Roman forum and in Vasari's version, as seen in the Uffizi, where the perspective is tight and recalls a basilica, with the backdrop in shadow, reaching towards the Arno River from a loggia that filters both light and the urban landscape. On the other hand, he created the façade following the principles that had led Ammannati, on the example of the Farnese palace in Rome, to open the courtyard towards the Boboli gardens that stretch behind the palace, maintaining an optical closure only up to the height of the first story.

Parigi mitigated volumetric severity of the fifteenth century palace, that probably derived from its origins as an old tower- house, in the structure of the central building and wings. He interpreted a taste for scenery that would become predominant in seventeenth-eighteenth century architecture of imperial courts and grand, stately European homes. These transformations and changes to the Pitti Palace also coincided with the construction of' residences that were volumetrically articulated and complex, even in relation to the landscape and the gardens, such as the French chateaux at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles. Subsequent work on the Pitti Palace façade and piazza confirmed the transition outlined in Parigi's plans from stately home to royal palace. In 1765 Giuseppe Ruggieri built the Rondò on the Porta Romana side, and between 1783-99 Niccolò Gaspero Maria Paolettti, who had been working with Ruggieri since 1764, designing modifications to the palace that continued through to the end of the eighteenth century, built the Rondò di Bacco.

At the end of the century, the Pitti Palace asserted itself as a deliberately articulated structure, designed in perspective with an empty space in front, for which it served as the backdrop. Giulio Parigi's architectural ideas were also applied to the developments in the Boboli Gardens. Control of landscape design, a highly theatrical taste, and a profusion of fauna of Buontalenti's monsters combined with antiquities, influenced both his and Alfonso Parigi the Younger's works. Between the second and fourth decades of the seventeenth century the amphitheater, open towards the palace courtyard was built to complete the system of perspective relationships of Ammannati's courtyard that served as a monumental backdrop, as were the monumental, straight Viottolone avenue and the elliptical Piazzale dell'Isolotto, completed around 1637. This was a sort of Hadrian's marine theater, isolated by a pool, with the Fountain of Oceanus in the center that could be reached by bridges indicated by coupled columns. The Artichoke Fountain by the sculptor Giovan Francesco Susini (1641) was situated on the palace terrace at the perspective boundary between the courtyard and the amphitheater. The octagonal pool with two round basins is decorated with putti and shells, and four staircases that run diagonally like semicircular waves in Ammannati's style.

Giulio Parigi tried a variation of the Pitti Palace's volumetric arrangement in the Villa del Poggio Imperiale on the Arcetri hill. In 1620 several architects including Gherardo Silvani were called in to remodel and expand the Villa di Poggio Baroncelli where Maria Magdalena of Austria, widow of the Grand Duke Cosimo II wanted to establish her summer residence. In addition to the volumetric arrangement in the villa, which by 1622 was considered one of Parigi's major projects, wings were built perpendicular to the façade, as in the eighteenth century modifications to the Pitti Palace. Giulio Parigi also designed the straight avenue from Porta Romana to the villa replicating the one in the Boboli Gardens, creating both a road and perspective link between the Pitti Palace and the Poggio Imperiale residence.

This "scenic" view of architecture reached its resolution in the original façade of the palazzo that Giulio Parigi built in Piazza Santa Croce for Niccolò dell'Antella, Luogotenente of the Accademia del Disegno. The arrangement of the windows follows a rhythm that becomes progressively tighter as it reaches the church, in order to control the perspective deformations of the main view of the façade which is not frontal, but angular. The rhythmic sequence, in fact is calculated so that the view of the façade, from the central door of the church as the observation point, offers a series of wall sectors of identical length. Allegorical figures in various poses were painted between the windows, proportionate with the irregularity of the wall sections; they were completed in twenty days, between 1619 and 1620 by a group of artists working under the direction of Giovanni da San Giovanni. Even in the country house for the Guadagni family, situated in a garden on the outskirts of the city, and attributed to Gherardo Silvani, the building, structured with wings, was designed to created a perspective view towards the domes of the church of Santissima Annunziata and of the Cathedral.

Articles