The Medici Villas and Gardens Project

Among the countless landscape, monuments and art treasures of Tuscany, the Medici villas form a particularly remarkable group. Perhaps no other family in European history prior to the revolutions of the last two centuries succeeded as well as the Medici in organizing such a large, widespread and varied network of sites for splendid villeggiatura (country retreat) and magnificent self-representation, but also of shrewd economic management and political control of the territory. In Italy and elsewhere, of course, there was no shortage of similar phenomena, such as the castles and villas of the Gonzaga family in their Po Valley state or those of the Farnese in Tuscia, the Savoy residences in Piedmont and the neighbouring areas under their rule, those of the popes in and around Rome, or the Bourbon royal palaces in Naples and Campania. Yet such comparisons only shed further light on how exceptional the Medici villas were, especially as regards their geographical extension, early establishment, duration over three centuries, and number of family members actively involved.

Early establishment was accompanied by boldness and foresight. When in the fifteenth century projects such as Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, Fiesole, Castello, Poggio a Caiano or Spedaletto saw the Medici launching into the challenge that would ultimately generate a true system of discreet but firm domination over the countryside of the Florentine state, they were still private citizens, at least in a formal sense. Planning such a program of material (and above all symbolic) conquest of the suburbs of Florence, and of the Republic’s countryside, had a dual implication: huge financial exposure and – by way of legally irrefutable property enterprises – unequivocal ambitions of government. It was this strategy, alongside the multiple private and public structures built in Florence (palazzi and chapels, churches, convents and monasteries for the secular clergy and a wide range of religious orders), that earned the Medici, parallel to their political intrigues, a gradual elevation to the status of princes, finally obtained in 1532 and lasting more than two centuries. As with other aspects of their patronage, the Medici, recognized across fifteenth-century Europe through the many branches of their bank, skilfully put to use the patterns of life and behaviour that in Northern European countries were the sole preserve of ruling houses: in the 1410s, the opening pages of the celebrated Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (Chantilly, Musée Condé), or the lavishly illuminated book of hours for John, Duke of Berry, son of John II the Good, King of France, had portrayed the passage of time and human existence through the succession of the twelve months of the year; and in the background of almost every outdoor scene stood a castle that belonged to the crown, thus expressing with the other scenes a cycle of possessions whose value was powerfully ideological. Almost two hundred years later, for a reception room in the villa at Artimino, Grand Duke Ferdinand I was to commission the Flemish painter Giusto Utens to paint no less than seventeen lunettes, each with a view of a Medici site.

It goes without saying that over the course of three centuries, until 1737, not all the Medici villas were in full or simultaneous operation. While some gradually increased the series of sites through new foundation or purchase, others, albeit significantly few, passed out of their ownership. In any case, the network remained so substantial that the Lorraine dynasty, who succeeded the Medici for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were forced to divest themselves of more than a few villas. Of the nearly thirty old Medici country houses that have survived to our own day, more than half are privately owned, and only fourteen were chosen in 2013 to form the “serial site” recognized by UNESCO as part of “world heritage” or “heritage of humanity.” These are the places, mostly publicly owned, and all of prime importance for the history of architecture, gardens and landscape, that are represented, documented and described in this portal of the Regione Toscana. The Boboli Garden can also be counted as a “serial site” whose unique appearance cannot really be appreciated if it is dissociated from the immense Palazzo Pitti, of which it is the open-air extension. However, the urban structures of the Medici, not only in Florence but in Pisa, Siena, Livorno and Rome, form the subject of a separate chapter of this unrivalled story, to be narrated in due course.

Francesco Caglioti