Francesco Camilliani (1530

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

– 1586) was a Tuscan

sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

of the

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

period. He studied in Florence under

Baccio Bandinelli Baccio Bandinelli (also called Bartolommeo Brandini; 12 November 1493 – shortly before 7 February 1560), was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, draughtsman, and painter. Biography Bandinelli was the son of a prominent Florentine goldsmith, ...

. His son

Camillo Camilliani Camillo Camilliani ( fl. 1574–1603) was an Italian architect, military engineer and sculptor. He is mostly known for the design of watchtowers and other fortifications around the coasts of Sicily. Life Camillani was born in Florence sometime ...

(died 1603) was later a sculptor too, working in

Palermo Palermo ( , ; scn, Palermu , locally also or ) is a city in southern Italy, the capital (political), capital of both the autonomous area, autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan ...

, where he also worked as an architect and held the post as well of ''ingegniere del Regno'', "engineer to the Kingdom of Sicily". Camilliani was praised in one of

Cosimo Bartoli Cosimo Bartoli (December 20, 1503 in Florence – October 25, 1572) was an Italian diplomat, mathematician, Philology, philologist, and Humanism, humanist. He worked and lived in Rome and Florence and took minor orders. He was a friend of architect ...

's ''Ragionamenti Accademici''; in the course of a stroll through Florence the interlocutors in Bartoli's dialogue say of one of Camilliani's statues, that, had it been buried and rediscovered, it would have been praised heartily. Francesco Camilliani's most notable work by far is the Renaissance fountain in the Piazza Pretoria in Palermo, the ''Fontana Pretoria''. This piece was originally commissioned for the garden of the villa outside Florence of Luigi Alvarez de Toledo, son of the viceroy Don

Pedro Álvarez de Toledo Pedro is a masculine given name. Pedro is the Spanish, Portuguese, and Galician name for ''Peter''. Its French equivalent is Pierre while its English and Germanic form is Peter. The counterpart patronymic surname of the name Pedro, meaning " ...

and brother-in-law of

Cosimo I de' Medici Cosimo I de' Medici (12 June 1519 – 21 April 1574) was the second Duke of Florence from 1537 until 1569, when he became the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, a title he held until his death. Life Rise to power Cosimo was born in Florence on 12 ...

; it was completed in 1555. Camilliani was aided in the grand project by the ''garzoni'' of his studio, including the Florentine Michelangelo Naccherino (1550–1622), or Vagherino Fiorentino. In its original site,

Giorgio Vasari Giorgio Vasari (, also , ; 30 July 1511 – 27 June 1574) was an Italian Renaissance Master, who worked as a painter, architect, engineer, writer, and historian, who is best known for his work ''The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculpt ...

called it a "most stupendous fountain that has not its peer in Florence or perhaps in Italy." Under pressure to make economies in his style of living, and perhaps with reservations about the completed fountain's crowd of ''ignudi'', in January 1573 Don Luigi permitted it to be bought by the Senate of Palermo, through the intervention of his brother Don Garçia, the former viceroy and Governor of Palermo. It was dismantled into six hundred and forty-four pieces and transported to Palermo, and set up there by Camillo Camilliani, who had to concentrate its elements in the more constricted urban space, and to oversee some additions to render it more suitable for Sicily, which included a ''Venus'' by Antonio Gagini. Re-erection at Palermo was complete in 1584."La Fontana Pretoria"
/ref> The sculpture of the fountain depicts

fable Fable is a literary genre: a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular mo ...

s, monsters, and

nymph A nymph ( grc, νύμφη, nýmphē, el, script=Latn, nímfi, label=Modern Greek; , ) in ancient Greek folklore is a minor female nature deity. Different from Greek goddesses, nymphs are generally regarded as personifications of nature, are ty ...

s all spraying jets of water, which also falls and cascades between them. Once locally known as the ''Fontana della Vergogna'', the "fountain of shame”, because of the nude statues that stand around the base of each tier, it is one of the few true pieces of High Renaissance art in Palermo.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Camilliani, Francesco 1530 births 1586 deaths 16th-century Italian sculptors Italian male sculptors Renaissance sculptors Architects from Palermo