Bartolomeo Ammanati’s letter to Marco Mantova Benavides (May 2, 1555) is a valuable verbal description of a villa by an architect and sculptor addressed to an intellectual patron, antiquarian and collector. Ammanati, an educated artist,...
moreBartolomeo Ammanati’s letter to Marco Mantova Benavides (May 2, 1555) is a valuable verbal description of a villa by an architect and sculptor addressed to an intellectual patron, antiquarian and collector. Ammanati, an educated artist, reports in Italian on the Villa Giulia, in which he was involved in Rome, to Benavides, a jurist in Padua. Sculpture and stone materials are given more emphasis than architectural details and pictorial decorations, but no less attention is paid to plantings, verdant furnishings, agricultural features, and views. The letter is noteworthy above all for its mention of the monumental pergola connecting the Tiber landing point to the Fontana pubblica. A carpentry structure covered with vegetation documented in the papal accounts and recorded in contemporary maps, the pergola was used not only as a covered walkway but also as a ceremonial approach and a prelude to the villa experience. Constructed of light, diaphanous, and translucent materials, it provided a vista towards the villa building anticipating the painted pergola in the semicircular portico. The pergola motif was continued in the roof of the loggia flanked by aviaries on the east side of the nymphaeum, recorded in a print by Hieronymus Cock, which resonated with the two previous pergolas. Maximizing the sensation of nature, the pergola as a leitmotiv played a key role in enhancing a sensuous villa experience. The combination of real and fictive pergolas, observed also at the Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the Villa Medici in Rome, may have been a familiar concept among designers. Ammanati’s letter would have served as a means of transmission of design ideas from Rome to other cultural centers through social networks. It reveals the relationship between patrons and designers in the sixteenth-century, who both shared the same intellectual culture and contributed to the shaping of the design.
