It is their lunettes that, above all, evoke the three Medici villas of Trebbio, Cafaggiolo and Pratolino. Painted at the behest of Grand Duke Ferdinando I by the Flemish Giusto Utens between 1599 and 1602, they were originally part of a series of 17 pieces, but only 14 remain, that were meant for the villa of Artimino to iconographically celebrate the sumptuous rural residences that dotted the Medici dominion.

In the first two painted images are the roots of a family to be extolled: the dwellings of Trebbio and Cafaggiolo are portrayed there, with their sober architectonic volumes, the boundary walls, the guard towers, the kitchen and the formal gardens, the pergolas set in the rolling green of the landscape.

IUSTUS VAN UTENS noto come GIUSTO UTENS<br />(Bruxelles?- Carrara 1609)<br />Cafagiolo<br />1599-1602 <br />tempera su tela<br />Firenze, Museo Storico Topografico “Firenze Com'Era”<br />Inv. 1890 n. 6315

Michelozzo, the architect also hired for Bosco ai Frati, worked on both buildings, transforming the severe fortified residences into harmonious, humanistic dwellings. The artist had been called by Cosimo the Elder’s father, Giovanni di Bicci, to renovate Trebbio Castle after 1426 and the work was then continued by his son, a great “lover of building”; instead, the patron at Cafaggiolo between 1431 and 1433 was with all probability Giuliano, the son of a cousin of Cosimo’s.

Once this branch of the family died out in 1443, the Cafaggiolo villa passed into Cosimo’s hands who, in 1451, assigned the ancient property of Trebbio to his nephew Pierfrancesco (his brother Lorenzo’s son) when he came of age, keeping instead Cafaggiolo for himself. Here his son Piero and grandsons Giuliano and Lorenzo grew up, the latter of whom composed there the poem Nencia da Barberino. And it was Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, to cede in 1485 the villa of Cafaggiolo to the secondary branch of the family, already the owners of Trebbio, where the famous ceramics factory then flourished, beginning in 1498.

IUSTUS VAN UTENS noto come GIUSTO UTENS<br />(Bruxelles?- Carrara 1609)<br />Il Trebbio<br />1599-1602 <br />tempera su tela<br />Firenze, Museo Storico Topografico “Firenze Com'Era”<br />Inv. 1890 n. 6326

Another Cosimo (the son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere) would instead leave Trebbio in 1537, upon receiving the news about the killing of Alessandro. Barely eighteen years old, he was destined to become duke and then grand duke of Tuscany. He brought Florence into the power game of European absolutism, between France and the Empire, transforming the artistic passion of his 15th-century predecessors into a sumptuous celebration of the state’s magnificence. The ancient dwellings of Trebbio and Cafaggiolo thus still remained dear but, with their excessive rusticity, were suitable at most for the seasonal rite of the hunt.

IUSTUS VAN UTENS noto come GIUSTO UTENS<br />(Bruxelles?- Carrara 1609)<br />Pratolino<br />1599-1602 <br />tempera su tela<br />Firenze, Museo Storico Topografico “Firenze Com'Era”<br />Inv. 1890 n. 6324

One of his sons, Francesco, was to transfer the magnificence of the court into the frame of a rural residence ‘facing” the ancestral Mugello, acquiring ‘mountain’ lands in 1568 in the inaccessible area of Pratolino where he had Bernardo Buontalenti erect a new, splendid and very modern villa. Demolished at the beginning of the 19th century because it was by then abandoned, it concealed in its relatively simple disposition of volumes, hidden in the basement, a series of fantastic grottoes, where water ran setting in motion mechanisms that produced music and made automatons move, descending from the fountain of Jove and especially from that of the Apennine (the mountain territory from which the Medici had descended centuries before), to then fill other grottoes and fountains set further downhill in a complex interrelation between nature and artifice, so dear to the melancholic grand duke and his beloved Bianca Cappello.