Palazzo dei Cartelloni, also known as Palazzo Viviani, is a Baroque-style palace in

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

, region of

Tuscany it, Toscano (man) it, Toscana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Citizenship , demographics1_footnotes = , demographics1_title1 = Italian , demogra ...

, Italy.

History

This building displays many unusual architectural elements, the most evident being the unusually big epigraphs written in

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

. The owner of the building, the mathematician

Vincenzo Viviani Vincenzo Viviani (April 5, 1622 – September 22, 1703) was an Italian mathematician and scientist. He was a pupil of Torricelli and a disciple of Galileo.Galileo Galilei Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He wa ...

. It is after these inscriptions that the building takes its name. The main architecture of the building was created by Giovanni Battista Nelli, while the bust of Galileo that still stands over the main entrance was sculpted by Giovanni Battista Foggini, and is actually a copy of the original made by

Giovanni Caccini Giovanni Battista Caccini or Giovan Battista Caccini (24 October 1556 – 13 March 1613) was an Italian sculptor from Florence, who worked in a classicising style in the later phase of Mannerism. Life Giovanni Battista Caccini was born at Mo ...

in 1610. After Viviani died in 1703, the building was inherited by his nephew, the Abbot Paolo Panzanini. The palace was then acquired by Giovan Battista Nelli's son, who had the same name as his father. The new owner took good care of the many books and manuscripts which belonged to Viviani, and also published the façade's inscriptions in his work ''Galileo’s Life and Literary Commerce''. The palace was later owned by the Sermolli family (who then became the Picchi Sermolli family) and successively by the Loria family. Today Palazzo dei Cartelloni is owned by SACI Studio Arts College International, a U.S. institution. A small classical garden, which was recently restored, is located within the premises and includes a double staircase leading to an upper terrace. The rooms inside the palace have been renovated several times throughout the centuries. Some of them have wonderful coffered ceilings, probably dating to the 19th century, as well as beautiful frescoes. These frescoes display typical themes of the time, such as romantic landscapes,

grotesque Since at least the 18th century (in French and German as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus ...

s and rustic scenes. On the first floor, a

Trompe-l'œil ''Trompe-l'œil'' ( , ; ) is an artistic term for the highly realistic optical illusion of three-dimensional space and objects on a two-dimensional surface. ''Trompe l'oeil'', which is most often associated with painting, tricks the viewer into ...

fresco covers the entire room, giving the optical illusion of a pergola, with an olive tree in the distance.

Sources

*Sandra Carlini, Lara Mercanti, Giovanni Straffi, ''I Palazzi parte seconda. Arte e storia degli edifici civili di Firenze'', Alinea, Florence, 2004.

External links

Sito della Regione Toscana
from which is taken the original Italian version with

GFDL The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the ...

licensing (''see the Italian version for license authorization''). * http://www.saci-florence.edu {{Authority control Cartelloni Baroque architecture in Florence