2_ENG_Architettura_144-203_beg_Layout 1 12/03/13 15:58 Pagina 176
bolizing virtues. The room is situated on the same side of the courtyard as another room that still contains a fifteenthcentury ceiling with heliotropes. Also worth mentioning is the presence, in another room giving onto the courtyard, of a Medici coat-of-arms with papal insignia, evidence of Alessandro’s interest in his palace even during the very short period of his papacy, which lasted less than a month, not enough time for him to make any further interventions. Of the original fifteenth- and sixteenth-century construction – apart from some decorations on the vault of a staircase not subsequently transformed, where there also appears an interesting scene of a construction site, nothing else remains visible. Following the passing of the property to the Della Gherardesca family, decorations in the palace were adapted to the glorious events and times of that dynasty. The upper floor has a more complex layout which is a result of the subsequent extensions that were made above all in the 18th century. Surviving from the 17th century are decorations in the corridor on the first floor along the courtyard, with coats-of-arms relating to the Della Gherardesca properties at Donoratico and in the Maremma, and the most noteworthy fresco, the Blindness of the human mind being enlightened
v Medici coat-of-arms with papal insignia, dating from the period of Alessandro de’ Medici (pope Leo XI), ceiling of a room on the ground floor of Palazzo Scala-
by Truth, by Baldassarre Franceschini known as Volterrano. Mentioned by Baldinucci and exe-
Della Gherardesca, Florence.
cuted in the 1660s, the painting is visible on the vault of a small room with perspective architec-
v
ture and Chinese wallpapers applied in the 19th century. With Volterrano the palace was embellished with that profane and allegorical decoration that the painter had already executed in Palazzo Guadagni and Palazzo Niccolini and «the interpretation of the baroque as a languor of the senses, a dynamic conflict between two figures personifying different impulses and concepts».16 His art must have been very much admired by the family if, as emerges from seventeenth-century inventories, there were other paintings by him in the building along with «a large book of about four hundred drawings».17 In the course of the eighteenth century the gallery and staircase were built (1713-15) on the orders of Count Ugo di Guido, on designs by Antonio Maria Ferri and the intervention of the stuccoworker Alessandro Geri, and later, after the death of Ferri, other interventions were made by the stuccoworker Giovanni Martino Portogalli. Other works were executed during the periods 1744-45 and 1758-61; the most important were commissioned by Cardinal Giuseppe Maria.18 In the side along the courtyard, on the upper floor, in addition to the painted gallery bearing an inscription with the date 1717, we may also mention the great hall with stuccos, six oval-shaped above-the-door decorations in monochrome and frescoed scenes with inscriptions celebrating the fourteenth-century glories of the family, where in the first
176