Illustrious men and women

The paintings depict nine historical figures who embodied virtues and ingenuity in the past, and are subdivided by type: Florentine strategists (Farinata degli Uberti, Filippo Scolari known as Pippo Spano, and Niccolò Acciaiuoli); famed women of antiquity (Cumaean Sybil, Esther, and Tomyris), and Tuscan men of letters Dante, Francis Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio.

The nine figures are depicted in a portico closed at the back by prized marble and topped by a sumptuous frieze adorned with figures of garland-bearing putti. Andrea del Castagno conceived an elaborate painted architecture, with the monumentally sized figures boldly foreshortened in heroic poses.

This recurrent theme in the decoration of public buildings and in sumptuous private residences between the 14th and 15th centuries celebrated the exemplary actions of famous men and women, whose example could be an admonishment for posterity.

The imposing painting cycle adorned the wall along the loggia on the ground floor of the villa in Legnaia, now in the periphery of Florence, that belonged to the Carducci family. The intricate history of the building’s ownership in the mid-15th century and a dearth of documents make the patron’s identity more uncertain to this day, the debated contenders being Filippo di Giovanni Carducci (1369-1449), Gonfaloniere of Justice of the Florentine Republic, and Andrea di Niccolò Carducci (?-1473). We do know that the Carduccis transferred the building to the Pandolfini family in 1475, and that the frescos were whitewashed – which is why they were concealed for more than three centuries.

Rediscovered in 1847, in 1850 the paintings were removed from the wall using the detachment technique by the restorer Giovanni Rizzoli, for the purpose of being sold. The Tuscan State, governed by the House of Lorraine at that time, purchased them in 1852. Some of the portions of the frieze that adorned the painted architecture were detached at a later time and added to the state collections.

Now state property, Villa Carducci Pandolfini retains other frieze fragments and the figures of Adam and Eve – the origins of humankind – discovered in the mid-20th century on one of the loggia’s short walls, transformed into a salon enclosed on an unspecified date.