History of Florentine Architecture in the 18th Century - Pietro Leopoldo's Cultural Policy
Late eighteenth century architecture was influenced by Peter Leopold's cultural and political decisions; he came to Florence in 1765. Even though the Grand Duchy's real estate holdings were decreased during the Lorraine rule, due to the sale of buildings, Leopold reorganized the Scrittoio delle Fabbriche, that is the office in charge of those affairs, headed by Francesco Piobati, and gave orders for prompt work to be done to preserve the royal villas and palaces.
After the attempt at developing the most revolutionary components of Buontalenti's poetics to the anti-graceful, in the architecture of Leopold's era, the volute and scrolled cornice were definitely separated from the walls, leaving the bare structure, and the order was amended by monsters and textile paraments. The removal of Ruggieri from his post (he had been accused of fraud and imprisoned) favored decisive developments of the cultural uncertainties that developed in the first half of the eighteenth century. References to Palladio's architecture and theory, presented by Lorenzo de'Vegni, Giuseppe Del Rosso or Giuseppe Manetti imposed themselves on the continuity of the values of the fifteenth-sixteenth century architectural order.
Even though Zaboni Del Rosso played an important role, sanctioned by his appointment to the post of first engineer of the Regie Fabbriche, replacing Ruggieri in 1769, the leading architect of Leopold's era was, however, Niccolò Gaspero Maria Paoletti. He travelled and studied in Rome, Naples and Parma where a decisive architectural renewal had been launched by the Frenchman EnnemondAlexandre Petitot. The masters in stucco work from Ticino, Grato and Giocondo Albertolli, who came from Parma where Giocondo had studied at the Accademia played a decisive part in changing in the design of wall coverings in the grand ducal rooms designed by Paoletti.
Paoletti's cultural orientations aimed at a classic vision in which various and heterogeneous cultural components were also determining factors in addition to Palladian purism. They were based mainly on an increasingly profound knowledge of antiquity which was no longer identified solely with Roman or Athenian ruins and Vasari's famous works, but now extended to other cultures, from the Egyptian to the Etruscan. We have already seen how the order, reduced to abstract cornices became symbolic of utilitarian purposes in buildings such as the Ospedale di San Giovanni Battista designed by Giuseppe Salvetti.
The Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Villa del Poggio Imperiale and the Cascine dell'Isola park became the key places for experimenting with the new taste influenced by the new concept of the classic. Modifications on the Uffizi Gallery, to meet the new criteria of classifying artworks by genre and school, were begun in 1769. Work on plastering the "stanzone" (big room) was begun in 1771 in view of the forthcoming transfer of fifteen statues of the Niobids, from the Villa Medici in Rome, to Florence, wit Niobe in the middle. In a report to the grand duke, Zanobi Del Rosso noted the room's inadequate size. Between 1772 and 1773 designs by Fallani and Oreste Boni proposed central-plan temples, probably for the Boboli Gardens, that match the Roman arrangement of the sculptures, but they were criticized by Del Rosso and Paoletti. In 1774-5 the "stanzone" in the Uffizi was proposed again, and the changes, probably designed by Paoletti, were completed in 1780.
The statues were placed on pedestals and aligned along the walls decorated with Corinthian pilaster strips and paintings. This arrangement, which favors viewing individual pieces and not an overview of the entire group was criticized by the architect and archeologist, Charles Robert Cockerell in 1818. The Boboli Gardens and the Pitti Palace took on their almost final configurations. The transformation of the orchestra section of the Boboli amphitheater, that dated from 1740 was eliminated, cypresses and box trees were planted, flower beds created and statues positioned, according to plans by Jadot, inspired by French rococo gardens.
From 1766 the Boboli Gardens were opened to the public on certain days of the week. During the 'seventies, the major projects were assigned to Del Rosso, while Paoletti directed the works inside the palace, even though the two architects were often involved in the same projects in 1777-78. In 1776 Del Rosso designed the Kaffeehaus, and in 1785 the "Stanzone degi agrumi". In 1789 the erection of the Egyptian obelisk, in the middle of the amphitheater, on the pedestal designed by Paoletti marked the end of a phase in Boboli's history. The guide to the Gardens by Francesco Maria Soldini (1789) and Aniello Lamberti's views (1790) were published. One of the final eighteenth century projects in the Boboli Gardens was the double staircase leading to the Giardino del Cavaliere, designed by Giuseppe Del Rosso (1790-93). Paoletti built an extension of the Pitti Palace overlooking the Boboli Gardens: the Palazzina della Meridiana, begun in 1776, continued by Giuseppe Cacialli and completed by Pasquale Poccianti, an expression of poetics influenced by Palladian tastes.
In 1771 Paoletti began the work on transforming the Palazzo Torrigiani (situated in Via Romana near the Pitti Palace) into the Imperiale e Regio Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale (Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History) ordered by Leopold. The museum, opened in 1775, now housed the Medici's geological and paleontological collections. Behind the museum, facing the Boboli Gardens, Paoletti created the botanical gardens with the grotto (1777) and around 1780, the octagonal astronomical observatory -his personal interpretation of the Tower of the Winds in Athens - that was completed in 1789 with modifications by Giovanni Bernoulli.
Some of the works in the grand duke's quarters in the Pitti Palace, done between 1774-76, under Paoletti's direction, such as the stucco decorations in the Gabinetto Rotondo, by Domenico Ruschi; the transformation of the Medicean Salone dei Forestieri into the Salone degli Stucchi (1776-83, which is now the Sala Bianca, or white room) to designs by Paoletti, executed by Grato and Giocondo Albertolli, mark the transition from the rococo arabesque frame to the rediscovery of classic ornamentation, albeit with the typically rococo airy, delicate reliefs.
In the Salone degli Stucchi the classic decorations transcend - as in Robert Adam's contemporary works - a simple philological return, and multiply in an unusual manner, to the breakup of the order's tectonic strength expressed in forms that reveal the plasticity of the stucco, as in certain interiors at Pompeii, knowledge of which began to spread and influence decorating tastes in the second half of the eighteenth century.
In 1766 Peter Leopold and Maria Luisa of Spain undertook major expansion work on the Villa del Poggio Imperiale, that was assigned to Paoletti and completed in 1782. Paoletti began the transformation of the villa that was still influenced by fifteenth-sixteenth century canons, into templar architecture that was definitively completed by Poccianti and Cacialli in the early nineteenth century. In the left (1768-71) and right (1776, circa) courtyards, Paoletti used the architectural order with theoretical rigor, with one order for each story, using the pilaster strip for the order against the wall and the column as the free support. Semi-columns were used only near the ground floor columns. It is no accident that Paoletti's architecture was admired by his contemporaries such as Algarotti and Milizia.
In the stucco wall decorations of the rooms, as in the Pitti Palace, there is a marked shift of taste from rococo style ornamental motifs created to French designs by Grato and Giocondo Albertolli in 1770, towards those made after 1775 and inspired by the new themes of international taste such as the room with the Pompeian decorations by Tommaso Gherardini (1776) and the courtly, white Salone delle Feste by Grato Albertolli (1780-81).
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