ANIMALS, PEASANTS AND GODS: THE MYSTERIES OF THE STATUARY AT VILLA BELLOSGUARDO

摘要

Villa Bellosguardo is situated in the Tuscan hills to the west of Florence. Created by Alessandro di Pandolfo Pucci in the late sixteenth century, it remained in the ownership of the Pucci family until the nineteenth century. There are several early twentieth-century accounts of the villa: Edith Wharton in Italian Villas and Their Gardens (London, 1904) wrote that 'statues are everywhere'. Recent Italian scholarship has provided the evidence necessary both to identify most of these statues and to establish the sequence in which the majority of them were acquired, but there are aspects of the statuary that still need to be resolved. This paper discusses these questions, which include not only how the choice of statuary might be related to contemporary influences, but also the extent to which it may have had an iconographical role.