Cultivating the Renaissance

A Social History of the Medici Tuscan Villas

Katie Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000521009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia italiana

By exploring the evolution of the Medici family's villas, Cultivating the Renaissance charts the shifting politics, philosophy and aesthetics of the age and chronicles the rise of an extraordinary family from obscure farmers to European royalty.

From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, the Medici family dominated European life. While promoting both arts and sciences, the Medici helped create a new style of architecture, present a new idea of villa life and promote the novel idea of living in harmony with nature. Used variously for pleasure and sports, scholarly and amorous liaisons, commercial enterprise and botanical experimentation, their villas both expressed and influenced contemporary ideas on politics, philosophy, art and design. Each patron's public interests and private passions, as well as the architects, artists and philosophers they employed, are examined. Through a chronological approach, this book reveals how the villas were used, their reception by contemporary commentators, their legacy and their current state five centuries after they were first built.

Lavishly illustrated, Cultivating the Renaissance is of great interest to students and scholars of architecture, horticulture, landscape history, philosophy, art and the history of the Renaissance in Italy.

PART 1 The early Renaissance villa as humanist retreat

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201212-2

In the fourteenth century, Europe emerged from the protracted turmoil caused by the fall of the Roman Empire. Increasing peace and prosperity stimulated confidence and curiosity while trade introduced new products, plants and philosophies. Having filled the power vacuum after the fall of the Roman Empire, Christianity began to lose its supremacy; its thousand-year reign, through what became known as the Middle Ages, was challenged by the rediscovery of classical culture. This was stimulated by archaeological excavations, recently begun in Rome, which revealed the richness of the pre-Christian world. It was kindled by the arrival of ancient manuscripts imported from the east by merchants and scholars, and was furthered by the Greek and Arab learning introduced by crusaders returning from the Holy Lands. After centuries of pedantic medieval theological scholarship, the classical world seemed a place of reason and beauty. Writers like Homer and Ovid, mathematicians like Euclid and Archimedes and scientists like Hippocrates and Pliny, who had been largely ignored by medieval scholars because of their paganism, were rediscovered. Greek myths became a source for literature and art; Roman architecture became a template for citizens keen to imitate the nobility of the past.

This movement, which was later dubbed the Renaissance, because it marked the rebirth of the classical world, promoted the belief in human potential and intellectual freedom. It is perhaps surprising that it should have emerged in Florence, a relatively small city-state which only two centuries earlier had risen up against its rulers and established itself as a republic. But Florence was proud, brash and affluent; it was also fiercely independent, free of the oppressive presence of the papacy in Rome and the orthodoxy of the university in Padua.

In an approach which became known as humanism, Florentine scholars began to shift their focus from God to man, from the spiritual to the secular. Ignoring long-held dogma, they moved from faith to reason and from superstition to science. Without actually abandoning Christianity, they turned their attention elsewhere, looking to experimentation and empirical evidence rather than received wisdom.¹ Eventually, even the church embraced this new way of thinking, and ultimately it produced some of the foremost humanists of the day, including the fifteenth-century Pope Pius II and the sixteenth-century Medici popes, Leo and Clement.

One of the key ideas to emerge from the rediscovery of the classical world was a love of nature and the sense that otium – the solitary, contemplative, spiritual peace of the countryside is superior to negotium – the frenzied, competitive, corruption of the city. Originally a Greek idea, otium had been adopted by the Romans of the republican era. In 160 BC, Cato the Elder, when not fighting for the Roman republic, retreated to his farm in Sabine hills to write his seminal agricultural treatise De agri cultura. In 29 BC, Virgil’s Georgics depicted rural life as an idyllic state, and about the same time, Horace’s Odes endowed the countryside with an almost mythic quality. The popularity of villa life reached its zenith at the end of the republican period when Augustus overthrew the republic and established himself as the first Roman emperor. Anxious not to challenge his ruthless authority, the wealthy oligarchs, who had previously ruled, retreated to their country villas; there, they created gardens, wrote manuals on farm management and studied philosophy in their new-found otium.

Similarly, in fifteenth-century Florence, as the Medici gradually took over the government, the ruling oligarchs withdrew to their rural villas. Ironically, perhaps, the Medici were also great villa dwellers. Inspired by the ancients, they too began to build rural estates based on descriptions by Cato, Virgil, Horace and Pliny. Used variously for pleasure and sports, for scholarship and liaisons, for commercial enterprise, botanical experimentation and international diplomacy, their villas created a new architectural model, while influencing and expressing the evolving philosophy and aesthetics of the era.

Though the fashion for rural otium was cleverly exploited by the Medici, its origins lie in three Tuscan writers of the previous century. In 1302, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was expelled from the city having been caught up in the battles between the Guelphs, who supported the pope, and their rival Ghibellines, who supported the emperor. From his banishment, Dante nostalgically described his homeland as ‘the daughter and heir of Ancient Rome’, promoting the idea that Florence was successor to the glories of the classical past.²

In the next generation, the diplomat Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) retired to the country near Avignon which was, at the time, the home of the pope. Here, he built a small house amid the olive groves and wrote his influential Vita Solitaria, promoting the spiritual and physical benefits of country life, pitting the contemplation of rural otium against the business, and busy-ness, of the city.

A third Florentine writer, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), also pushed a humanist agenda in his famous Decameron. Based on the Arabic literary form of stories within stories, his novel recounts the exploits of ten Florentine youths who flee the 1348 plague and find refuge in the countryside. There, they amuse themselves by telling stories over the next ten days – decameron being Greek for ‘ten days’. As they cavort through elegant chambers and pretty gardens, in a state of pre-lapsarian innocence, gathering flowers, swimming naked, drinking wine and eating sweetmeats, Boccaccio’s protagonists assert that their rural idyll is ‘Paradise on earth’.³

This idealised image of villa life is perfectly expressed in Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of The Magi, a fresco cycle commissioned in the mid-fifteenth century to embellish the chapel in the Medici’s newly built palace in Florence. Though nominally a depiction of the three wise men as they wind their way to Jerusalem to pay homage to the Christ child, the fresco is, in fact, a celebration of the Medici dynasty. As the royal cavalcade winds through a distinctly Tuscan landscape, the scarred rock faces represent the quarries which provided stone for the grand palaces which were, at that moment, transforming the city. The lush meadows, rich hunting grounds, elegant villas and prosperous farms demonstrate the effect of good government under the Medici’s benevolent rule. With its celebration of the joys of nature and the splendours of the man-made world, the fresco expresses the humanist spirit of the time.

The early Medici frequently associated themselves with the Magi, who provided one of the few examples in the bible where wealth is presented in a positive light. By linking their luxurious goods with the story of Christ’s birth, the Medici conferred upon themselves a quasi-royal status while promoting the idea that their prosperity was God-given. And, like the Magi who brought gifts to the son of God, the Medici contributed generously, and conspicuously, to religious institutions, using their fortune to pay homage to a higher authority.

Beyond its philosophical and biblical associations, Gozzoli’s fresco is a declaration of dynastic intent. Traditionally, the Magi represent the three ages of man – youth, maturity and old age, often depicted as an African, a European and an Asian. In the centre of Gozzoli’s image, the youngest Magus is, in fact, a portrait of Lorenzo, grandson of the much-loved Cosimo the Elder. Framed by the halo-like laurel bush from which he takes his name, lavishly dressed in a silvery tunic and mounted on a splendid horse, the young heir apparent marches the Medici clan into the future.

FIGURE I.1 Despite Gozzoli’s flattering depiction as the central figure in his Procession of the Magi, Lorenzo de Medici was notoriously ugly. A more realistic portrait of the boy, with his distinctive long nose and squashed face, rises from the line of young men behind Cosimo on his donkey. Mirroring Cosmo’s expression, this Lorenzo faces determinedly forward, with one eye staring at the viewer. The practice of depicting a particular figure several times within one work was not unusual; Gozzoli painted himself at least three times in the fresco, most prominently just behind and to the right of the boy Lorenzo where he rises from the crowd, staring from beneath his tall, red hat, on which he has helpfully inscribed the words ‘opus Benotti’ – the work of Benozzo.

© Album/Alamy Stock Photo RCWEAJ.

Notes

1. Humanist scholars found, in classical philosophy, ideas which appear to anticipate some of the tenets of Christianity. In keeping with Christian ideology, for example, they believed man’s attempt to perfect himself was a striving towards the divine. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Harper and Row, New York, 1958, Vol. 1, pp. 147–151.
2. Dante, Convivio I, iii, 4; A Literary Invention: The Etruscan myth in early Renaissance Italy, Erik Schoonhoven, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 24, no. 4, Sept 2010, p. 470, accessed 03.0.21, JSTOR https/org/stable/24419582.
3. Boccaccio, The Decameron, tr. G.H. McWilliam, Penguin, London, 1972, p. 191.

1 CAFAGGIOLO Averardo’s villa farm

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201212-3

The oldest and most dramatic of the Medici villas, this austere republican fortress sits in the shadow of a dark oak forest twenty miles north-east of Florence. With two watch towers, tall ramparts, castellated inner wall, deep outer wall, moat and drawbridge it offered refuge in tumultuous times. Though it is uncertain when the property was originally purchased, by the early fourteenth century it formed the centre of the Medici’s expanding agricultural enterprise. The family’s ownership of the isolated outpost marks their emergence as a significant force in Florentine politics and social life.

Cafaggiolo is the first Medici property to come to public notice: despite its forbidding appearance, it overlooks the gentle, fertile plain of the Mugello, a region with great historic significance. The Magelli, from whom the region derives its name, are thought to have settled the area as early as 2,000 BC. The earliest public document linking the Medici to the region appears to be a deed of 1319, though a private memoir written in 1373 suggests the family had been there since at least the mid-thirteenth century.¹ Whether the Medici actually originated in the Mugello or simply purchased land there as they acquired wealth and status, they always claimed to have hailed from the region, not least because it was known as the Paradise of Tuscany. A late fourteenth-century chronicle claimed the Mugello possessed the country’s most beautiful and fruitful fields, produced up to three harvests a year and supplied a third of the cattle needed by Florence.²

Notwithstanding its notorious fertility, the Mugello was particularly revered because it had been the homeland of the Etruscans – the most ancient and civilised of Italy’s indigenous tribes. At the height of their empire, around the sixth century BC, the Etruscans ruled an area stretching from their native Tuscany across central Italy, north to the Alps and south to the Roman Campania. The Medici made much of this noble heritage when they became rulers of the region, evoking Etruscan gods, acquiring Etruscan lands and restoring Etruscan aqueducts in an effort to link their name to the glories of ancient Etruria.³

In the fourth century BC, when the Romans conquered the region, the Mugello was central in the northward thrust to Gaul. In the seventh century AD, the Lombards, ‘long beards’, a group of Germanic tribes, descended from the north, overthrew the ruling Romans then littered the hilltops with their fortresses and lookout-towers. Cafaggiolo itself is a Lombard word for a large, enclosed plantation of trees, which may have given rise to the rumour, promoted by their enemies, that the Medici were originally nothing more than itinerant coal burners – a lowly and despised profession often associated with evil practices. By the eighth century when Charlemagne incorporated the Italian peninsula into his Holy Roman Empire, the Mugello’s fertile fields provided food for the burgeoning city of Florence. The Medici professed descent from a knight of Charlemagne’s campaign, one Averardo, who, while travelling home through Tuscany, challenged a giant who was terrorizing the local folk. The shield with which he staved off the giant’s blows acquired such dents that Charlemagne gifted him the region and allowed him to use the image of his battered shield as a personal emblem: hence the Medici coat of arms with its gold shield bearing six red dents or balls.

While this explanation reflects well on the family, many belie...