Giovan Battista Foggini e i Viviani: una nuova stagione umanistica per Firenze

Abstract

The essay aims to highlight aspects related to thoughts and works of Florentine neo-humanistic culture of the late seventeenth century. We analyze two episodes of Giovan Battista Foggini’s early activity, which was strongly conditioned and determined by the mathematician Vincenzo Viviani. The first case is the facade of Viviani’s private palace, where the scagliola reliefs give shape to the message of the epigraphs on the cartouches. Stoic ethical principles, combined with the adherence to the Jesuit thought, are used to enhance Galileo Galilei and his discoveries, generating a modern mythology aimed at exalting the figure of the great scientist. The second commission that Foggini receives from the Viviani family by the end of the seventeenth century is the palace of the grand-ducal auditor Donato Viviani della Robbia. The architectural solutions adopted by Foggini stem from the legacy of Raphael’s thought concerning geometry and harmonic proportions. At the same time, the internal plastic and pic- torial decoration provides a behavioral model based on the canons of measure and aims at the search for truth: following this vocation, man will be in a position to gain awareness of the universal harmony and to spread it through beauty and pleasure. These concepts, taken from the thought of the Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino, come to Florence through Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with whom Viviani entertained a lively intellectual exchange.