“Et genus et nomen gens haec Panseatica sumpsit
E Pansa eximio Consule magnanimo;
Belligeri Tuscam Pistori venit ad urbem
Cum cecidit fato consul uterque pari,”
wrote Giovanni Navarra in the XVth century; and in public acts and ancient inscriptions the Panciatichi called themselves Pansea progenies. They were lords of many strong castles and townlets in the Apennines; amongst others of San Marcello, which from time immemorial paid them a yearly tribute of 100 lbs. of cheese, 50 loads of beech wood and 3 bushels of chestnuts. The oldest existing document about the family is dated 1057, and relates to Pansa, or Pancio, son of Bellino a knight of the Golden Spur who conceded to the Bishop of Pistoja the right of allowing the friars of S. Salvatore to collect certain tithes. Infrangilasta Panciatichi went to the crusades in 1190 and was taken prisoner by Saladin, but after some months he escaped and returned to Pistoja, where in fulfilment of a vow he gave lands to the church of S. Angelo in Gora.[52] The documents relating to his sons Inghiramo and Lanfranco are curious as showing the feudal rights enjoyed by a great Ghibelline family. Ridolfo Panciaticho, his sons and his brother Angelo, were created knights of the Golden Spur in 1329 by the Commune of Florence, and a few years afterwards the latter was made a citizen. His son Diliano was ambassador to the Emperor Charles IV., and a descendant of his, Bartolomeo, was a most successful merchant at Lyons. His son and namesake, a friend of the artists and men of letters of his day, was himself a poet. In France, where he was ambassador for some years, he became a Protestant, and on his return to Florence was imprisoned by the tribunal of the Inquisition. After suffering torture he publicly abjured in 1552 and was received again into the Roman Catholic Church after long and wonderful ceremonies. The portraits of himself and his wife Lucrezia by Bronzino, are in the Uffizi. His son Carlo, a man of violent temper, was condemned to death for murdering his servant, but was pardoned by Cosimo I. on the condition that he married his mistress Eleonora degl’Albizzi, of whom the Grand Duke was tired after she had borne him a son.
Niccolò Panciatichi, a member of the Academia della Crusca who won some fame as a writer, inherited the palace from his uncle the Cardinal, and married the rich heiress Caterina Guicciardini. He increased the fine library, collected many valuable pictures, and probably placed the Madonna and Child, of the school of Mino da Fiesole, on the corner of the palace. His grandson Niccolò was a great botanist (a taste inherited by the Marchioness Paulucci, his great-granddaughter) and his garden at the Villa La Loggia, where exotic and rare plants were cultivated with wonderful success, was celebrated. In 1762 he married Vittoria, the last of the great Portuguese family of Ximenes d’Aragona, who brought him a large fortune, besides the Marquisates of Esche in Bavaria, of Saturnia in Southern Italy, a palace in Florence, etc. The Panciatichi then added her name and her arms to their own (see p. 398).
PALAZZO PANDOLFINI
Via S. Gallo. No. 74.
This beautiful, but unfinished, palace was begun by a son of Pandolfo Pandolfini, who went to Naples in 1465 as ambassador of the Florentine Republic. He was so popular there, and became such a favourite with the King, that his son Gianozzo, described as a “jocund and liberal man, honoured by all who knew him,” was made Bishop of Troia. When the Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope he summoned Gianozzo Pandolfini to Rome, and created him Governor of Castel Sant’Angelo. But Florence was the place he loved, and he often came to stay in a house he had hired in the Via S. Gallo from the monks of Monte Senario. After improving the house, and turning part of the orchard into a garden, he wanted to buy it, but the monks refused to sell, alleging that in the orchard stood an oratory, or small church, which had once formed part of a convent of Benedictine nuns. Leo X. came to the aid of his friend the Bishop, and by a Papal Bull, dated 28th May, 1517, followed by a Brieve in Feb. 1520, conceded to him, and approved of the sale to him, of the house, land and church, allowing him to suppress and transfer the latter elsewhere if it so pleased him. The Pope at the same time sent some fine marbles from Rome to be used in the decoration of the house. Thereupon Bishop Pandolfini addressed himself to his “most dear friend Raffaello da Urbino,” who, as Vasari tells us, “made for him a design for the palace he wished to build in Via S. Gallo, and Giovanfrancesco da San Gallo was sent from Rome to begin the work, which he did with all possible diligence.”
Bishop Gianozzo died in 1525, so Vasari is in error when he states that the building, which had been interrupted by the death of the architect and the siege of Florence in 1530, was continued by him, with Bastiano da San Gallo, surnamed Aristotle, as his architect. It was most probably Ferrando Pandolfini, a man of considerable learning, to whom his uncle ceded his bishopric of Troia, and to whom he also left the palace, who went on with it, and who caused the inscription to be placed under the cornice, JANNOCTIUS. PANDOLFINIUS. EPS. TROIANUS. LEONIS. X. ET. CLEMENTIS. VII. PONT. MAX. BENEFICIIS. AUCTUS. A. FUNDAMENTIS. EREXIT. AN. SAL. M. D. XX. The original design by Raphael is said to have been curtailed, so that the part which now consists of ground-floor rooms, covered by a large terrace, ought to have formed an integral portion of the edifice. But the building is so beautiful as it stands that one can hardly regret what was left undone.
The entrance door, the windows, especially those of the first floor, which are Ionic, while the lower ones are Doric, and the capitals of the columns surrounding the loggia, are very fine. In 1616 the palace passed to a descendant of Bishop Gianozzo’s third brother, who finished it and laid out the garden, which had been neglected. He also dowered the oratory of S. Silvestro which had been incorporated with the house and not transferred. Roberto Pandolfini, his nephew, inherited the palace in 1655, and it is still in the possession of descendants of the family. Count Alessio Pandolfini restored it in excellent taste in 1875, when the outer door of the small church, or oratory, was made into a window. Florence owes to Battista, another brother of Bishop Gianozzo Pandolfini, the fine doorway of the Badia, which he commissioned Benedetto da Rovezzano to build, and he also erected the tomb to his grandfather, another Gianozzo Pandolfini, in the same church.