Image: Museo delle Porcellane, Florence
At Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the ‘Sala di Bona’ preserves an expansive political and cultural statement commissioned by Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici. Decorated between 1607 and 1609 by the Florentine painter Bernardino Poccetti, the room was designed to project the authority of the Medici dynasty and the ambitions of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
The room was among the first spaces in the Pitti Palace to receive fresco decoration in the early 17th century. It formed the principal hall of the so-called Apartment of Foreign Princes, one of the most lavish areas of the Galleria Palatina. Ferdinando I entrusted the project to Poccetti with the intention of creating a political and cultural manifesto for his rule, taking as a model the monumental Salone dei Cinquecento in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, commissioned by his father, Cosimo I de’ Medici.
The cycle’s central image is on the ceiling. Six female allegories—Magnificence, Glory, Wisdom, Vigilance, Mercy and Good Fame—surround an oval depicting Cosimo I between Minerva and the Glory of Princes. Cosimo appears nude, in the manner of an ancient Jupiter, holding a compass and a square. The instruments present him as the architect and builder of the Tuscan state, expressing the idea of the ruler as a prince who gives form and order to his territory.
The long walls turn from civic virtues to military achievement. Their frescoes commemorate Ferdinando I’s campaigns and the role of the Knights of Saint Stephen as a Christian bulwark. The order had been founded by Cosimo I in 1562. Poccetti represented its campaigns in the capture of the fortress of Prevesa in Albania—now a city in the Ionian region of Greece—and Bona in Algeria. The painter drew on published accounts of the two expeditions, issued in 1605 and 1607.
The shorter walls complete the room’s territorial and dynastic programme. One depicts Ferdinando I receiving prisoners and the spoils of war. Opposite it is an elevated view of Livorno’s port, a key base of the maritime fleet developed under Cosimo I to reinforce Medici control of the Tyrrhenian coast. The port is introduced by allegorical figures representing the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Arno River.
Around these major scenes, Poccetti and his collaborators filled the room with an elaborate ornamental framework of allegories and grotesques, panoplies on the pilasters, flowers, landscape views and monochrome paintings that imitate ancient statues set into niches. The decoration combines military imagery, geography, classical references and dynastic symbolism within a single architectural setting.
The fresco cycle underwent a four-year restoration from 2018 to 2022, carried out by Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure. The work was supported by the Amici degli Uffizi and Friends of the Uffizi Galleries, with funding from the American philanthropist Veronica Atkins. The ‘Sala di Bona’ is part of the Royal Apartments at Palazzo Pitti, one of the historic sites administered by the Uffizi Galleries.
