Ferdinando, the Grand Prince
Ferdinando, eldest son of Cosimo III and Margherita Luisa d’Orleans, was heir to the grand duchy of Tuscany with the title of Gran Principe (1663-1713). Along with his great-uncle Leopoldo, he was a gujndamental figure in the growth of the collections and decoration of Palazzo Pitti. While he died before his father, his role as heir to the throne provided him a position of privilege that allowed him to concentrate completely on his great passions: art and music. While he did not travel extensively – his greatest travels were two trips to Venice, with stops along the way. One was in 1688 the year after he married Violante of Bavaria, and the second was in 1696. These trips fed his passion for Venetian pictures. His great knowledge of the influences on and biographies of artists helped him to understand the various artistic schools, above all those about which he was most passionate: the Venetian and Emilian. Even in Tuscan art he could trace the work of the great artists of the Renaissance, many represented in the collection of his great-uncle Leopoldo, who had first introduced him to Venetian pictures.
Following the example of the cardinal, Ferdinando in 1690 began his systematic research on the pictures which were to fill his apartment. There he accumulated an enormous collection of about a thousand pictures, extraordinarily rich furniture, his famous collection of musical instruments, now in the Accademia -- he played the cello -- sculpture, and large mirrors. All this he kept in a suite of rooms on the piano nobile on the opposite side of the palace from the grand ducal apartments and in his Mezzanini. His rooms were separated from his father’s by the large Room of Niches (dominated by the enormous lunette with The Oath of the Florentine Senate to Ferdinando II, painted by Justus Sustermans in 1624-1626). The Gran Principe’s apartments were transformed during the reigns of the Lorraines and the Savoy into the Royal Apartments.
The prince’s suite began with the “Guards’ Room”, today the Green Room, which has in the center of its ceiling Luca Giordano’s large canvas celebrating the peace between Florence and Fiesole. The walls of this room were completely covered with pictures by various artists, like the rooms that follow, and they were decorated with the most luxurious furnishings. The next room, Ferdinando’s Reception Room (today the Throne Room), held four large altar pieces with ecclesiastical provenances: two by Riminaldi, one by Francesco Bassano, and, of major importance, The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine, by Fra Bartolomeo. It is called the Pala Pitti and is today exhibited in the Palatine Gallery. Ferdinando’s passion for works by clerical artists, a passion he shared with his uncle Cardinal Giovan Carlo who had lived in Ferdinando’s apartment previously and who had managed to acquire the famous Pietà that is in the Palatine Gallery today, spurred the prince on to acquire two additional altarpieces, the unfinished Pala della Signornia, today in the museum at San Marco, and the great San Marco, from the church of the same name, that is still at the Pitti.
Following the example of the cardinal, Ferdinando in 1690 began his systematic research on the pictures which were to fill his apartment. There he accumulated an enormous collection of about a thousand pictures, extraordinarily rich furniture, his famous collection of musical instruments, now in the Accademia -- he played the cello -- sculpture, and large mirrors. All this he kept in a suite of rooms on the piano nobile on the opposite side of the palace from the grand ducal apartments and in his Mezzanini. His rooms were separated from his father’s by the large Room of Niches (dominated by the enormous lunette with The Oath of the Florentine Senate to Ferdinando II, painted by Justus Sustermans in 1624-1626). The Gran Principe’s apartments were transformed during the reigns of the Lorraines and the Savoy into the Royal Apartments.
The prince’s suite began with the “Guards’ Room”, today the Green Room, which has in the center of its ceiling Luca Giordano’s large canvas celebrating the peace between Florence and Fiesole. The walls of this room were completely covered with pictures by various artists, like the rooms that follow, and they were decorated with the most luxurious furnishings. The next room, Ferdinando’s Reception Room (today the Throne Room), held four large altar pieces with ecclesiastical provenances: two by Riminaldi, one by Francesco Bassano, and, of major importance, The Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine, by Fra Bartolomeo. It is called the Pala Pitti and is today exhibited in the Palatine Gallery. Ferdinando’s passion for works by clerical artists, a passion he shared with his uncle Cardinal Giovan Carlo who had lived in Ferdinando’s apartment previously and who had managed to acquire the famous Pietà that is in the Palatine Gallery today, spurred the prince on to acquire two additional altarpieces, the unfinished Pala della Signornia, today in the museum at San Marco, and the great San Marco, from the church of the same name, that is still at the Pitti.
The attention that Ferdinando showed to works of ecclesiastical origin provided some of the most important pictures in the Palatine Gallery today. In the “sala dei Cimbali”, or Music Room, today the Blue Room, there is the Madonna della Baldacchino by Raphael, which, though unfinished, served as a pendant for another Fra Bartolomeo, the Salvator Mundi, which was enlarged during Ferdinando’s time by the Genovese painter Niccolò Cassana. There was also the Madonna delle Arpie by Andrea del Sarto, which was exchanged in the 18th century for another painting by the same artist at the Uffizi, and the celebrated Madonna dal collo lungo by Parmigiannino, which the prince managed to acquire from the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna. His great-uncle Leopoldo had tried to acquire the painting from the church for many years without success. Finally, the room contained Rosso Fiorentino’s masterpiece made at the turn of the century, the Pala Dei, from the altar of the Dei family chapel in Santo Spirito, very nearby.
Fortunately, the Gran Principe’s culture and natural courtesy prevented him from behaving arrogantly, which would certainly have annoyed his contemporaries. Each time he bought a painting from a Tuscan church, he replaced it with a copy by a good artist, thus not depriving the faithful of an object of worship. In another case, with the Estasi di Santa Margherita by the Parma painter Lanfranco, now at the Pitti, that he obtained from a family in Cortona with strong ties to the Medici, Ferdinando ordered a canvas to replace it to be painted by one of the painters under his patronage, the Bolognese painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi. In his apartment he also had numerous non-religious canvases, especially Venetian examples. Inheriting parts of his families' collections, Ferdinando owned some of the most prestigious examples of portraits by Titian, among which were Pietro Aretino and l’Uomo dagli occhi glauchi). He owned, by Tintoretto the Cornaro and Giovane dai cappelli rossi), and by Rembrandt, the so-called Rabbino (today in the Uffizi). There were all on the walls of his gorgeous “alcova” (probably built for the Gran Principe by the Giovan Battista Foggini). This room was transformed into a chapel by the Lorraines, but it retains the unaltered decoration of a white stucco and gold ceiling and the intaglio screen which hid the secret “studiolo”. It was dominated by a space for a bed, but today is occupied by a late 18th century altar. Among some of the religious paintings in the room are various works by Bonifacio Veronese, a painter also much loved by Cardinal Leopoldo.
The Gran Principe’s interest in the great artists of history was stimulated by his father, Cosimo III, who had acquired two enormous canvases made for Henry IV of France, a residual part of a series that Maria de’ Medici had ordered from Rubens, but that remained unfinished (today in the Uffizi). These were gifts from the Elector Palatine Giovanni Guglielmo, Ferdinando’s brother-in-law, who married Ferdinando’s sister, Anna Maria Luisa. Among Ferdinando’s Dutch and Flemish paintings were Cristo Risorto by Rubens and the already mentioned Rabbino. Ferdinando was also responsible for the arrival at Pitti of of the great, late masterpiece by Rubens, Conseguenze della Guerra, which the Flemish artist had sent to his colleague Justus Sustermans in 1638 and from whose heirs the prince managed to obtain it. How remarkable to imagine all these masterpieces mixed together with works by contemporary artists from whom the prince ordered paintings – among them works by Venetian painters like Johann Carl Loth and G. B. Langetti, or Genovese, like Valerio Castello and il Grechetto, or Emilian, like Cagnacci and il Contarini – arranged in a room that also contained beautiful cabinets, the inlaid table (“of the lions”, today in the Room of Mars), Venetian lamps, mirrors, vases (like the four in stone and decorated with gilded bronze that are today in the Iliad Room of the gallery). The symmetry of this arrangement is recorded in some drawings by Diacinto Maria Marmi, the court architect, but also in the 18th and 19th century arrangement of the Palatine Gallery, which follows the same example.
Ferdinando’s artistic fancy was realized in other ways. In the “mezzanini” adjacent to his apartment, he kept a collection of sketches and small pictures, together with precious objects. We can imagine how, in these rooms designed for him by Foggini, he displayed his collection of paintings of more modest dimensions by his favorite painters, like Crepi from Bologna, Magnasco from Genova, with his collaborator for landscapes Antonio Francesco Peruzzini, the Roman Crescenzio Onofri, the sketches by Sebastiano Ricci beside the little landscape fragments of his nephew Marco Ricci and the others by Livio Mehus and the Pole Pandolfo Reschi.
Works by these same artists are in the two country residences preferred by the prince, Pratolino , where the music of Handel and Scarlatti was performed in the theater, and at Poggio a Caiano, where Ferdinando had created a “gabinetto di opera in piccolo”, a supremely refined example of the 18th century taste for the French “cabinet de l’amateur”.
The frescoes on the ceiling of the two rooms at Poggio a Caiano painted by Sebastiano Ricci and by Antonio Domenico Gabbiani (with the collaboration of Chiavistelli for the framing) were lost in the 19th century reconstruction. and that The frescoes in the “mezzanini” at the Pitti (including the Caduta dei giganti, frescoed by Gabbiani), largely disappeared during the construction of the palazzina Meridiana, but there still remains a vivid testimony to the “presence” of the Gran Principe in the palace and in the country villas: the decoration of the room in the Meridiana and the annexed corridor, the joint accomplishment of G. B. Foggini, A. D. Gabbiani, and of Jacopo Chiavistelli, and above all the “saletta d’ingresso” to Ferdinando’s “summer” apartment, a work of extraordinarily inventive refinement by Sebastiano Ricci, assisted by Giuseppe Tonelli, “virtuoso del Gran Principe”, that precociously anticipates the European development of the style of the late baroque, often rebranded as the rococò .
In comparison, the apartment of Ferdinando’s wife, Violante of Bavaria, carved out of the “quartiere dei forestieri”, presents only a few decorative innovations in the small dressing room, the ceiling of which is rich in friezes in white and gold designed by Foggini, and in the chapel, where Gherardini executed a series of frescoes in celebration of Violante’s marriage to Ferdinando in 1689.
Works by these same artists are in the two country residences preferred by the prince, Pratolino , where the music of Handel and Scarlatti was performed in the theater, and at Poggio a Caiano, where Ferdinando had created a “gabinetto di opera in piccolo”, a supremely refined example of the 18th century taste for the French “cabinet de l’amateur”.
The frescoes on the ceiling of the two rooms at Poggio a Caiano painted by Sebastiano Ricci and by Antonio Domenico Gabbiani (with the collaboration of Chiavistelli for the framing) were lost in the 19th century reconstruction. and that The frescoes in the “mezzanini” at the Pitti (including the Caduta dei giganti, frescoed by Gabbiani), largely disappeared during the construction of the palazzina Meridiana, but there still remains a vivid testimony to the “presence” of the Gran Principe in the palace and in the country villas: the decoration of the room in the Meridiana and the annexed corridor, the joint accomplishment of G. B. Foggini, A. D. Gabbiani, and of Jacopo Chiavistelli, and above all the “saletta d’ingresso” to Ferdinando’s “summer” apartment, a work of extraordinarily inventive refinement by Sebastiano Ricci, assisted by Giuseppe Tonelli, “virtuoso del Gran Principe”, that precociously anticipates the European development of the style of the late baroque, often rebranded as the rococò .
In comparison, the apartment of Ferdinando’s wife, Violante of Bavaria, carved out of the “quartiere dei forestieri”, presents only a few decorative innovations in the small dressing room, the ceiling of which is rich in friezes in white and gold designed by Foggini, and in the chapel, where Gherardini executed a series of frescoes in celebration of Violante’s marriage to Ferdinando in 1689.
Marco Chiarini, “Il Gran Principe Ferdinando”, Palazzo Pitti: l’arte e la storia, Nardini Editore, 2000-2003, Firenze, pp. 132-142.
See also:
Laura Baldini, Marco Chiarini; "L'"Alcova" di Ferdinando de'Medici Gran Principe di Toscana in Palazzo Pitti: vicene costruttive e decorative"; Antichità viva; 1986, pp. 33-46.
Marco Chiarini, Il "mezzanino delle meraviglie" e la collezione di bozzetti del Gran Principe Ferdinando a Palazzo Pitti, 2013.
Marco Chiarini, I quadri della collezione del Principe Ferdinando di Toscana: III, 1975.
See also:
Laura Baldini, Marco Chiarini; "L'"Alcova" di Ferdinando de'Medici Gran Principe di Toscana in Palazzo Pitti: vicene costruttive e decorative"; Antichità viva; 1986, pp. 33-46.
Marco Chiarini, Il "mezzanino delle meraviglie" e la collezione di bozzetti del Gran Principe Ferdinando a Palazzo Pitti, 2013.
Marco Chiarini, I quadri della collezione del Principe Ferdinando di Toscana: III, 1975.