Villa del Poggio Imperiale
[2] In 1565 at Pietro's death the Salviati property was confiscated by Cosimo I,[3] who gave the villa to his daughter Isabella de' Medici who was married to Paolo Giordano Orsini, duke of Bracciano, who made an occasional appearance.
[5] In 1618 the villa was purchased from the Orsini by Archduchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, wife of the future Grand Duke Cosimo II, and was completely rebuilt between 1622 and 1625 to the design of the architect Giulio Parigi.
[7] Following the death of Cosimo II and the joint regency of Maria Magdalena and her mother-in-law Christine of Lorraine, the extravagances and unprecedented luxury of the court at the Villa del Poggio Imperiale and the Palazzo Pitti severely depleted the Medici finances.
[8] In 1659 the estate was acquired by Ferdinand II and his wife Vittoria della Rovere, who had the villa further enlarged and embellished with marbles and intarsia.
At the end of the 18th century, Grand Duke Ferdinand III leased the villa to King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia.
[10] The works of Leopoldo Pollack, in particular his Villa Belgiojoso, and Giuseppe Piermarini, was similar to the neoclassicism found from London to Munich.
The unwanted and, by now, fairly neglected villa, now in the ownership of the state, became an exclusive girls' boarding school, the Istituto Statale della Ss.
The school had been founded under the patronage of Leopold II and his wife, Maria Anna of Saxony in 1823 to provide education for the daughters of the Florentine nobility.
[14] On the first floor, one of the most prominent additions to the villa was the development of the Salone delle feste, built between 1776 and 1783, and decorated with embellished stucco reliefs which are predominantly white in color.
Today, only about twenty are displayed, with their repair and reconditioning being underway in an ongoing restoration project, which will eventually recreate their original layout.
[16] Many Chinese paintings, probably from the same source as those of the villa, were given by Leopold I to his sister Maria Caroline, who became Queen consort, and de facto ruler, of Naples and Sicily.
This change of ownership was to mark the beginning of a slow transformation from provincial country manor to grand, imperial villa.
These longer façades were in the late 18th century deprived of their Baroque ornament to create the chaste austere neoclassical architecture seen at the villa today.
The eminent architectural historian Carlo Cresti describes Parigi's 1624 design as "yielding a corps de logis flanked by two lower, symmetrical wings with terraces and semicircular concave profiles.
Inside the villa, Parigi restructured the old central courtyard and the rooms of the grand-ducal apartment, which were frescoed by Matteo Rosselli and his pupils.
"[18] A further period of enhancement took place when the villa passed to the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere who created the ground-floor rooms situated at the crest of the inner courtyard designed by Giacinto Maria Marmi.
The principal façade, however, was not to be transformed until ownership of the villa passed to Maria Louisa of Bourbon, the Queen of Etruria, who in 1806 assigned the project to the architect Pasquale Poccianti.
Poccianti extended this effort of complete neoclassical transformation (of the façade) to include a rusticated five-bay portico flanked by a theater and a chapel.
The free adaptation by Cacialli allowed him to supplement the original piano nobile with luminous peristyle including stuccowork and wall paintings.
[22] A short essay in the D'Avanzo volume by Rosanna Caterina Proto Pisani documents several dozen of the objects of art held in the chapel.
