Salone Verde

The Salone Verde, whose decoration took place in two stages, undoubtedly represents the most interesting room within the Appartamenti Budini Gattai. The ceiling fresco was completed in 1894. The ceiling’s fictive wooden framing, with its geometric partitioning into individual pictorial fields, is quite in the style of Renaissance ceilings. Galileo Chini created the central ceiling paintings, which imitate tapestries not only in their brushwork but also in their muted palette. The frieze that runs round the whole room is attributable instead to Giulio Bargellini; it consists of a veritable conglomerate of objects from the worlds of art, science and technology. A few years later the painting of the terracotta tiled floor was commissioned from the otherwise unidentifiable G. Ferini, who signed his name in one of the panels and identified himself as a carpenter by profession (‘Eseguì G. Ferini / Falegname 1906’). Using delicate tempera pigments, Ferini conjured up a panelled marble floor that provided the framing for the large-format scenes of rural life incorporated in it. He used as a model for these scenes of ploughing, harvesting and so on a cycle of paintings created by the Florentine Raffaello Sorbi (1844-1931) for one of the villas of the Budini Gattai, which he reproduced almost to scale on the floor of the Salone Verde. Before the moving into the Photo Librabry, the painted floor has been covered with a slightly raised removable protective floor. This was done for conservational reasons.