1600 Florence Villa Gardens - Villa di Pratolino
Villa di Pratolino by Giusto Utens (Flemish artist, 1558-1609) who painted a series of 14 lunette glasses of villas & their gardens near Florence, for the 3rd grand duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando I, in 1599–1602. The Villa di Pratolino was a Renaissance patrician villa in Vaglia, Tuscany, Italy. It was mostly demolished in 1820: its remains are now part of Villa Demidoff, 12 km north of Florence, reached from the main road to Bologna. The villa was built by the solitary Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany in part to please his Venetian mistress, the celebrated Bianca Capello. The designer of villa and gardens was his court architect Bernardo Buontalenti, who completed it in a single project that lasted from 1569 to 1581; it was finished enough to provide the setting for Francesco's public wedding to Bianca Cappello in 1579. In its time it was a splendid example of the Mannerist garden. Francesco had assembled most of the property, which was not a hereditary Medici possession, by September 1568, and the construction was begun the following spring. The garden was laid out along a perfectly straight down-slope axis passing through the center of the villa, which stood midway. Down the central descent, the visitor still walks under a cooling arch of fountain jets, without getting wet. Michel de Montaigne, one of the earliest visitors to leave a description of Pratolino, saw it in 1581, and considered it to have been built, he thought when visiting Villa d'Este, "precisely in rivalry with this place". A long description was published by a Florentine, Francesco de' Vieri, in 1586. Giusto Utens included a view of the southern half of the villa complex among his series of lunettes containing bird's-eye views of the Medicean villas, painted in 1599. Though the villa and its fountains were kept in repair, after Francesco's death it was deserted.
By the Renaissance, artists began to paint secular scenes including landscapes, breaking away from the dominant religious art of medieval painters. Partly out of interest in the natural world & partly out of nostalgia for classical Greece & Rome, paintings became valued as symbolic & allegorical objects & as depictions of earthly success & status. The period in Europe was the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages & modern history. The relationship between man & nature was evolving as Francis Bacon (1561-1626) promoted man as "the minister & interpreter of nature." Images began to depict natural landscapes & more formal garden settings, where man was obviously using his intelligence, wealth, & power to shape & control the nature around him for sustenance & for pleasure. Thus, the Renaissance garden became as much as symbol of the owner's wealth & culture as his house or art collection.
