TRABALLESI, Giuliano

Of all the Medici villas in the environs of Florence, Poggio Imperiale has the most imposing site and is also closest to the Palazzo Pitti, which became the official residence of the grand dukes in 1561. The property came into the possession of Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1565. From 1618 Maria Magdalena of Austria, the wife of Cosimo II de’ Medici invested a great sum on improvements made under the direction of Giulio Parigi. In 1624 the property was officially named Poggio Imperiale with reference to the grand duchess’s imperial lineage. The lineage was also featured in the ambitious pictorial program of the public rooms and bedrooms which lay on the ground floor. However, the villa was stripped of its precious furnishings and art treasures from the seventeenth century under the Habsburg-Lorraine regency (1737-65).

The decoration of Poggio Imperiale started again under the reign of Peter Leopold (1747-1792) who succeeded his father as Grand Duke of Tuscany when his eldest brother became emperor as Joseph II in 1765. This decoration was intended to set a new artistic direction and propagate new standards of taste: Neoclassicism.

Three rooms in the south wing were frescoed in 1768-72 by Tommaso Gherardini and Giuliano Traballesi with the collaboration of Giuseppe del Moro, one of the best Tuscan perspective painters of the time. It was followed by the decoration of five rooms in the west wing in 1773-78. Here the frescoes were executed by Giuseppe Maria Terreni, Giuseppe Gricci, Giuseppe del Moro, Giuseppe Antonio Fabbrini, and Tommaso Gherardini.

The picture shows the ceiling painting in one of the rooms in the south suite of the Villa Poggio Imperiale. It depicts the Peace Offering of Emperor Augustus. It was painted by Giuliano Traballesi and the architecture painter Giuseppe del Moro.

Costumed as pontifex maximus, Augustus is placing an offering on an altar, surrounded by other priests and military officers with their standards. In the foreground lie a bound captive, a sacrificial lamb, and a sacrificial bull. Looming in the background is a temple whose columns are wound with garlands, probably the Temple of Janus, whose doors were closed once peace was declared.

Images showing the decorations of the various rooms in the Villa Poggio Imperiale can be viewd on the respective pages of Tommaso Gherardini, Giuliano Traballesi, Giuseppe del Moro, Giuseppe Maria Terreni, and Giuseppe Antonio Fabbrini.

The Kaffeehaus is one of the most interesting buildings inside the Boboli Gardens and is also one of the works carried out at the wishes of Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine, between 1774 and 1785. It is an airy pavilion, circular in shape and with an onion-shaped dome top. It is divided over three separate levels, beautifully inserted in a complex of small gardens and orchards. The interior is divided over four main levels and side mezzanine floors with triangular stairs.

Between 1775 and 1776, the interiors were decorated on the main floor by three artists who were well known in Florence at the time: Giuseppe del Moro, Giuliano Traballesi, and Pasquale Micheli. The decorations in the central room on the main floor blend harmoniously with the late rococo style of the building: green woods can be seen in perspective behind fountains with cupids, in homage to nature and to the garden sculptures, repeated in the berceau dome, where climbing flowers, birds and water springs, shown through the links in a mesh, simulating a pretty aviary.

The picture shows the vault of the nave with the Assumption of the Virgin in the Oratorio San Filippo Neri in Florence.

The most successful and most varied of Baroque apotheoses and glories in ceiling painting was the Assumption of the Virgin. Even as it became more and more difficult to give to such glorifications and ascents the directness and vividness required to make them seem believable, painters managed to invent original formulations for this scene with which, moderated by the influence of classicism, they once again evoked the Baroque tradition.