Giambologna's Apennine between nature, artifice and Renaissance wonder

Giambologna's Apennine between nature, artifice and Renaissance wonder

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It is said that the architect Dinocrates planned to transform the entire Mount Athos, in Greece, into a gigantic statue of Alexander the Great. A grand idea; perhaps excessive. It would in fact be the Americans who put it into practice in the twentieth century, carving Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota, with the colossal portraits of four presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.
L’Appennino di Giambologna tra natura, artificio e meraviglia rinascimentale

Before then, at the twilight of the Renaissance, a great artist born in French Flanders and later becoming Italian (so much so that he translated his name from Jean Boulogne into Giambologna) did the opposite: he created the statue of a mountain, making it (appear) as great as a mountain itself.

That is how it still appears today, towering with its ten metres in height above the trees of the wonderful park of Pratolino, just outside Florence. We are in what must have been one of the most beautiful gardens in Europe: the favourite of the capricious, cultured and melancholic Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco I.

It was Bernardo Buontalenti who conceived and built Pratolino for Francesco; and he filled it with water features, automata, sculptures, antiquities and exotic animals. Everything seemed perfectly natural, yet everything was skilfully artificial. And when the time came to build a great fountain, Buontalenti and Giambologna imagined it as a natural lake; and they imagined that the water feeding it would come from the very mountain on whose slopes the park stands, that Apennine crossed by the ancient road linking Florence to Bologna.

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