Pitti Palace – Treasury of the Grand Dukes

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

We spent the first part of the day relaxing, doing laundry, and planning our adventures for the remaining five weeks of our stay in Florence. In the afternoon, we headed out to the famous Pitti Palace, part of the Uffizi network of museums, and ended the day with dinner with our classmate Georgia.

Church bells rang out all across Florence at noon on Saturday. (Turn your sound on.) On Sunday mornings, there seem to be bells from one church or another about every 15 minutes, but they ALL peal promptly at 9 am!

Were were in need of a snack on our way to the Pitti Palace, and darned if our route on foot didn’t take us past Edorado, our favorite gelateria (at least so far). The mounded, vibrantly colored and elaborately decorated gelati that you see in many windows in Italy are designed to attract tourists, but the locals know that the best gelato is made in small artisanal batches without artificial colors and kept in covered pots behind the counter.

The imposting front of the Pitti Palace. The Palace bears the name of its first owner, Florentine banker Luca Pitti, who built it in the mid-1400s at the foot of the Boboli Hill south of the Arno River. Cosimo I de’ Medici and his wife Eleanor of Toledo purchased the palace 1550 to serve as the new Grand Ducal residence, and it soon became the new symbol of the Medicis’ power over Tuscany. It also housed the Court of other two dynasties: the House of Habsburg-Lorraine (which succeeded the Medici from 1737) and the Kings of Italy from the House of Savoy, who inhabited it from 1865.

You enter the Pitti Palace through the enormous and stately Ammannati Courtyard.

One of the fountains that adorn the Pitti Palace.

On this day, we visited the Treasury of the Grand Dukes, which is just one of the five museums at the Pitti Palace. With our “Friends of the Uffizi” annual membership, we get unlimited free priority entry to all of them, so we can take the time to savor each one on different days.

We entered the Treasury of the Grand Dukes through the Salon of Giovanni da San Giovanni, and our breaths were immediately taken away! This great state room was part of the summer apartments of the Medicis. The artist Giovanni da San Giovanni, for whom the salon is named, designed the room’s decorative scheme and began the fresco decoration of the walls and ceiling in 1635 to celebrate the marriage of young Grand Duke Ferdinando II dei Medici and Vittoria Della Rovere, the last heir to the Duchy of Urbino. After Giovanni died in 1636, three other artists continued the fresco decoration and completed it 1642.

This majestic room served as the antechamber to the ducal audience chamber and, on special occasions, was used for banquets and receptions. Because of its public function, the pictorial decoration was given a historical and dynastic significance, designed to exalt the young Grand Duke Ferdinando II, the Medici family, and Florence as the successor to classical Greek and Roman culture.

Framed by the arches surrounding the room are scenes celebrating Florence at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent as the new Athens of the Arts and Letters. In this panel, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the great patron of the arts in the later 15th century and ancestor of the Medici Grand Dukes of the 16th century, welcomes artists and men of letters, symbolized by the nine Muses, who sought refuge in Tuscany after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks.

Giovanni da San Giovanni was able, through his extraordinarily creative genius, to transform this dimly lit room into a spacious imaginary loggia in a splendid illusionistic setting of architecture, sculpture and gilded floral ornaments. He and the artists who followed him used quadratura, perspective and trompe l’oeil techniques, to create illusions of three-dimensional space and objects on two-dimensional surfaces. Most of what you see here is a flat wall. Only the decorative moldings (on which spotlights are mounted today) are three-dimensional. The ceiling of the room is a flat barrel vault. From the ground, it was almost impossible for us to tell where the architectural elements ended and the painting began.

The fresco on the wall directly opposite the entrance to the Salon depicts the era of peace that followed, in which the arts could flourish. Lorenzo is shown surrounded by the artists he patronized, among them the young Michelangelo Buonnaroti presenting him with a statue in the antique style.

At the center of the salon ceiling, Giovanni da San Giovanni painted an allegory of the grand-ducal marriage. From the dessicated stump of an oak tree, the emblem of the Della Rovere family, springs a last green shoot (an allusion to the bride Vittoria), which is taken and grafted onto the Medici arms. Once again, this is a flat, barrel-vaulted surface; all of the architectural details are visual illusions created by the artist.

Another completely flat wall in the salon, painted to look like relief sculptures.

In a close-up view of where the ceiling meets the wall, some of the detail that seems convincingly 3D from ground level begins to reveal its technical genius. Again, this is a completely flat surface, even though it looks from the floor like three-dimensional marble sculptures and architectural elements. The artist Giovanni da San Giovanni depicted himself in the man holding the crab (top right), the symbol of Cancer and representing the month of June.

Oil portrait of Lorenzo the Magnificent (painted in 1550).

The next room we visited was the public audience chamber. This room, painted by Bolognese artists Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli from 1637 to 1639, was where public audiences took place. After waiting in the antechamber, visitors were ushered into this room to be received by the Grand Duke, who was seated on his throne and surrounded by the court.

On the ceiling, flying putti surround an allegorical figure of Time, personified by an old man with an hour-glass, crowned with com and flowers alluding to the changing seasons. At his feet is the symbol of eternity: a snake forming a circle by biting its own tail. Time banishes deceptive Good Fortune and welcomes Justice, holding her scales, who is presented and supported by Fortitude. The motto reads: “All Fortune is illusory, it passes and does not last. Merit and Virtue last and do not pass away”.

This is the front wall of the public audience chamber. Although it doesn’t look like it, this is a flat wall (except for the molding at top center on which the lights are mounted). The artists Mitelli and Colonna invented entirely new ways of expanding the surrounding space, introducing features, such as the grand circular staircase, that were only taken up in real architecture more than a generation later.

In the public audience chamber, only the sovereign remained seated, while everyone else was obliged to stand in his presence. Since many people were received at a time, the room had practically no furniture apart from the throne. The motto above the niche at the center of the painted staircase, presumably addressed to those about to speak to the Grand Duke, reads: “Talk little, and be brief and witty”.

Third room–the private audience chamber. Artists Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna completed the decoration of this room in 1640. Smaller than the public audience room, it was here that the Grand Duke had his private audiences, without the court in attendance. The frescoes, which again give the impression of immense space leading to other rooms beyond the walls, represent an elegant loggia supported on columns, decorated with spirals of oak branches. The frescoes in this room celebrate Alexander the Great, a great conqueror but one who knew how to bring under the same culture the different nations of his vast empire. Grand Duke Ferdinando II identified himself with Alexander since they were both young when they came to power. Once again, the wall is flat, with the paintings providing a convincing illusion of depth and weight.

Left wall of the private audience chamber. Created entirely with frescoes, an upper loggia with pairs of green columns supports a balustrade opening towards the sky. The artists probably used the already existing barrel-vaulted ceiling to create the strange optical effect of the columns which seem to slant at a different angle as you change your position from one side of the room to the other.

In the “open sky” at the center of the ceiling in the private audience chamber–painted on a flat barrel-vault–is the Triumph of Alexander the Great, seated on a chariot drawn by two white horses. He receives a crown of laurel from Apollo, the protector of the arts and letters, while Fame flies ahead blowing a trumpet and carrying a scroll with words that invite the onlooker to imitate his virtues. The Medici coat of arms appears to the right of the ceiling in this photo.

Tabletop in the private audience chamber, created in the 1570s (meaning it was already an antique when Ferdinando II acquired it), designed in an intricate geometric pattern with inlaid stones.

This spectacular room, the Third State Room, was the last to be decorated with frescoes by Mitelli and Colonna in 1641. It was the first room in which visitors would arrive, serving as the antechamber to the Grand Duke’s summer apartments.

The frescoes decorating this grand hall celebrate the Medici dynasty. The Medici arms, surmounted by the granducal crown, dominate the four corners. At the center of each wall are fictive portrait busts of the four Grand Dukes (Cosimo I, Francesco I, Ferdinando I, Cosimo II) who were the ancestors of Ferdinando II, beneath which are monochrome scenes illustrating the virtues and accomplishments of each ruler and an inscription in Latin.

A succession of different spaces and levels lead the eye up from the ground level of the third state room to the octangular opening framing the sky. The Medici arms can be seen in the corners. All of the decoration and virtually all the architectural elements are painted onto flat surfaces.

At the center of the fresco on the ceiling of the Third State Room is Grand Duke Ferdinando II seated on a cloud, surrounded by allegorical figures and flying putti, receiving the crown and sceptre of power from Jove as he descends from Olympus carried on the wings of an eagle. A putto carries a scroll with words exalting the happiness of the Tuscan people under the rule of the Grand Duke.

This piece of furniture, commissioned by Cosimo III de’ Medici in 1707 and known as the Elector’s Cabinet, is a centerpiece of the Third State Room. It is one of the most significant pieces produced by the Galleria dei Lavori, an artistic factory specializing in the processing of semi-precious stones, founded in 1588 by Ferdinando de’ Medici.

Detail at the bottom of the Elector’s Cabinet. The enormous cabinet is made of ebony and adorned with intricate mother-of-pearl and semiprecious stone intarsia with gilded bronze decorations.

Meryl, a friend of ours from Plano, Texas, had recommended a restaurant near the Palazzo Pitti called Osteria Santo Spirito, in the piazza of the same name. We met our classmate Georgia there at the time their website said they opened, only to discover that the opening time was actually an hour later. (We’d been warned that Italian business websites are often out of date.) But it worked out for the best, because a long line of hopeful patrons formed behind us as we waited for the 7:30 opening. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who knew about this gem of a place.

Meryl’s daughters had said that the truffle gnocchi at Osteria Santo Spirito was “life changing”, so that’s what we and Georgia all got. It was indeed fabulous and we were stuffed!