Villa Litta Modignani, Milan

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The Villa Litta Modignani is a 17th-century rural palace and park located on Via Taccioli in the north suburbs of Milan, in the Province of Milan, Lombardy, Italy.

Milan Italian city

Milan is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city in Italy after Rome, with the city proper having a population of 1,372,810 while its metropolitan city has a population of 3,245,308. Its continuously built-up urban area has a population estimated to be about 5,270,000 over 1,891 square kilometres. The wider Milan metropolitan area, known as Greater Milan, is a polycentric metropolitan region that extends over central Lombardy and eastern Piedmont and which counts an estimated total population of 7.5 million, making it by far the largest metropolitan area in Italy and the 54th largest in the world. Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire from 286 to 402 and the Duchy of Milan during the medieval period and early modern age.

Province of Milan Province in Lombardy, Italy

The Province of Milan was a province in the Lombardy region, Italy. Its capital was the city of Milan. The provincial territory was highly urbanized, resulting in the third highest population density among the Italian provinces with more than 2,000 inhabitants/km2, just behind the provinces of Naples and the bordering Monza e Brianza, created in 2004 splitting the north-eastern part from the province of Milan itself. On January 1, 2015 it was replaced by the Metropolitan City of Milan.

Lombardy Region of Italy

Lombardy is one of the twenty administrative regions of Italy, in the northwest of the country, with an area of 23,844 square kilometres (9,206 sq mi). About 10 million people, forming one-sixth of Italy's population, live in Lombardy and about a fifth of Italy's GDP is produced in the region, making it the most populous and richest region in the country and one of the richest regions in Europe. Milan, Lombardy's capital, is the second-largest city and the largest metropolitan area in Italy.

History

Built as a rural villa in 1687 by Pietro Paolo Corbella, secretary of the Chancellor Segreta. Corbell had been named that year Marquis of Affori. It was in this villa that Pietro married Barbara Melzi. The building's exterior is simple; but the interiors were luxuriously decorated in a rococo-style. Marianna, the granddaughter of Pietro, only daughter of Carlo Corbello, died at the age of twenty-two and the property passed to her young husband, Francesco d'Adda. He remarried Teresa, the daughter of Marquis Pompeo Litta. She in turn widowed and married the Marquis Maurizio Gherardini. After some iterations, the family died out in 1836, and the villa was acquired by the Taccioli family, merchants of Milan. [1]

Affori Former commune annexed by Milan in 1923 in Lombardy, Italy

Affori is a ward of Milan, Italy, part of the Zone 9 administrative division of the city, located north of the city centre. It borders with the wards of Bruzzano, Comasina, Bovisasca, Dergano and Niguarda. Before being annexed to Milan in 1923, it was an autonomous comune.

Rococo 18th-century artistic movement and style

Rococo, less commonly roccoco, or "Late Baroque", is a highly ornamental and theatrical style of decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colors, sculpted molding, and trompe l'oeil frescoes to create the illusions of surprise, motion and drama. It first appeared in France and Italy in the 1730s and spread to Central Europe in the 1750s and 1760s. It is often described as the final expression of the Baroque movement.

After the mid-1850s under the patronage of the Count Girolamo Trivulzio and his daughter of the Princess Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso, the villa became a locus for writers and artists including Alessandro Manzoni and Francesco Hayez. [2]

Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso patriot from Italy

Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso was an Italian noblewoman, princess of Belgiojioso, who played a prominent part in Italy's struggle for independence. She is also notable as a writer and journalist.

Alessandro Manzoni Italian poet and novelist

Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Antonio Manzoni was an Italian poet and novelist. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (1827), generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language. Manzoni also sat the basis for the modern Italian language and helped creating linguistic unity throughout Italy. He was an influential proponent of Liberal Catholicism in Italy.

Francesco Hayez Italian painter

Francesco Hayez was an Italian painter, the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories, and exceptionally fine portraits.

In 1905, the villa became property of a Litta-Modignani, who had married a grandson of Luigi Taccioli. The property was acquired by the province and in 1927, by the comune of Milan. [3]

The stairwell opens to the right of the access atrium, and had a fresco depicting the Life of Diana painted by Giuseppe Nuvolone. [4] The Salons also have landscapes by Rosa da Tivoli and a large ball-room with high wooden ceilings and quadrature. [5]

Giuseppe Nuvolone Italian painter of the Baroque period

Giuseppe Nuvolone (1619–1703) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Milan, Brescia, and Cremona. Born in San Gimignano. He was the brother of the painter Carlo Francesco Nuvolone and son and pupil of Panfilo. He painted St Dominic resurrecting the dead for the church of San Domenico in Cremona.

Illusionistic ceiling painting art

Illusionistic ceiling painting, which includes the techniques of perspective di sotto in sù and quadratura, is the tradition in Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art in which trompe l'oeil, perspective tools such as foreshortening, and other spatial effects are used to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on an otherwise two-dimensional or mostly flat ceiling surface above the viewer. It is frequently used to create the illusion an open sky, such as with the oculus in Andrea Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi, or the illusion of an architectural space such as the cupola, one of Andrea Pozzo's frescoes in Sant'Ignazio, Rome. Illusionistic ceiling painting belongs to the general class of illusionism in art—art designed to create accurate representations of reality.

In the 1850s, the formal gardens were recast as the looser "English Garden" by the Count Ercole Silva. The gardens were restored after 1958 by Egizio Nichelli. They are presently a public park. The villa is closed to visitors. While it retains some of the frescoes, it has lost nearly all the movable artworks, which once included a Madonna and Child by Bernardino Luini. [6]

Bernardino Luini Italian painter

Bernardino Luini was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle during the High Renaissance. Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly; he was described as having taken "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend". Consequently, many of his works were attributed to Leonardo. He was known especially for his graceful female figures with elongated eyes, called Luinesque by Vladimir Nabokov.

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References

  1. ↑ Ville e castelli d'Italia: Lombardia e laghi, second edition, by Luca Beltrami; Editors of Tecnografica, Milan, (1907), page 601-605.
  2. ↑ Comune of Milan Archived March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine ., Villa Litta park.
  3. ↑ Comune of Milan Archived March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine ., Villa Litta park.
  4. ↑ Luca Beltrami, page 602.
  5. ↑ Luca Beltrami, page 603.
  6. ↑ Lombardia Beni Culturali.

Coordinates: 45°31′00″N9°10′04″E / 45.5167°N 9.1677°E / 45.5167; 9.1677

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