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History of Florentine Architecture in the 18th Century - The Roman Influence in the Works of Ignazio Pellegrini and Zanobi Del Rosso

Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the influence of Roman architecture was accentuated thanks to the works of Ignazio Pellegrini, the Veronese count who worked in Florence from 1753 to about 1776, and Zanobi Del Rosso even though the accents differ as to the complexity and richness of theoretical implications.

For the Uffizi in 1763, following the previous year's fire, Pellegrini designed the round, monumental staircase that was never built. It would have transformed the Loggia dei Lanzi into the entrance portico of the museum. In the Pitti Palace he created two new rooms, the "Gabinetto di Parata" (known as the Gabinetto Ovale, or oval room), and the "Gabinetto da Abbigliarsi" with elaborate rococo stucco work done by Milanese craftsmen under the direction of Francesco Visetti.

In 1763-64 Pellegrini designed the curving avenue (between the north side of the palace and Buontalenti's grotto), the theater and the Imperial Chapel. The chapel is shaped like the Pantheon with an elliptical room, evidence of an ability to modify Berninian themes along with the rediscovery of the architectural order, typical of mid-eighteenth century artistic culture, and in Pellegrini's case, favored by his direct knowledge of Palladian architecture. On 2 January 1775 Peter Leopold suspended work on the chapel that had been started before his advent, opting for a more modest chapel, designed by Giuseppe Ruggieri and Paoletti, on the ground floor of the palace.

The spectacular nature of Pellegrini's designs did not coincide with the artistic ideals of the Leopoldian era. Among the last manifestations of the idea of architecture as scenic composition is the pavilion known as the "Kaffeehaus". It was designed by Zanobi del Rosso in 1775 as a place for Leopold to spend his afternoons, and situated on the high part of the Boboli Gardens. This pavilion has many typical features, from the base designed by the continuous horizontal grooves of an arrangement transfigured in a graphic line, to the copper sheathed dome, to the color of the plaster (that was originally greenish, not red) are derived from solutions used in Viennese architecture (in particular the buildings for gardens created by Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach).

The unusual volumetric configuration is the result of the Kaffeehaus's dual nature, it is both a scenic Viennese pavilion with a convex front created to form the backdrop of the upward sloping garden and the "belvedere" facing the city, a reflection of the new taste for contemplating the urban panorama - expressed by the round, observatory shape, perforated by doors opening onto a large terrace. Between these geometrically counterposed sectors, Del Rosso placed a wall of optical transition in which convexity and roundness work together creating a curved outline. The continuous balconies and iron railings play an essential graphic role highlighting the passages between the various parts of the building. Above the base the covering is configured as a structure enclosed by "treillages" with the rhombus pattern in the plaster work. Inside, the frescoes present the same idea of an airy pavilion for climbing plants.

In the lemon-house (known as the "Stanzone degli agrumi" or "citrus room", 1785), which also stands in the Boboli Gardens, Del Rosso continued expressing his taste for colors foreign to the Florentine tradition (white framing and greenish background), for the order reduced to abstract frames and the superimposed ornaments and pendants, like Nigetti's.

In the early nineteenth century works by architects such as Louis De Cambray Digny or Giuseppe Martelli, in a cultural context heavily influenced by the French, the search for abstraction would be abandoned in favor of the rediscovery of a philological rigor in the use of orders. The arrangements would no longer, as in the Kaffeehaus, be an inspiring theme for graphic inventions, engraved into the plaster, but would only again faithfully represent the perfect shape of the isodomon.

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