The received history of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa begins with Careggi, Trebbio, and Cafaggiolo, the brooding strongholds built for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, then proceeds to the serene, cubic Villa Medici at Fiesole, and concludes with the all’antica forms of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. In Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, Amanda Lillie suggests this standard sequence is both generalizing and reductive, and notes that an assumed familiarity with this architectural type is in fact based upon the evidence drawn from the five principal Medici villas. In her book—a self-described “quest for a more representative view of rural life and rural buildings”— Lillie seeks to direct attention beyond the Medici canon by addressing a range of Florentine rural houses, from agricultural complexes to palatial suburban estates. Using new archival evidence, she encourages a more flexible, wide-ranging approach to the study of Florentine villas, demonstrating that the histories, functions, and forms of many of these houses were less ideal than incidental and idiosyncratic.

The volume is divided into two sections, the first focused upon the villas of the Strozzi family, and the second on the villas of the Sassetti. These two families provide useful comparative examples as fifteenth-century villa patrons; not only did they both own and build prominent villas, but they also stood at opposite ends of the contemporary, Medici-dominated political arena. The Strozzi, as venerable Medici rivals, had long-established and extensive holdings in the contado of Florence, while the Sassetti, as relative newcomers to the elite landholding class, owed their upward mobility to their faithful support for the Medici regime. Lillie indicates that despite the gradual attrition of Strozzi power and wealth over the course of the century, and conversely the accumulation of power and wealth by the Sassetti, both families made important investments in their rural estates. This observation supports one of the underlying themes of the book, whereby Lillie seeks to redress a traditional scholarly bias that favors Florentine urban developments over its rural environment. Instead, she presents Florentine villas, and rural Tuscan life in general, as crucial and integral elements of the broader fifteenth-century cultural and social context.

One of the most notable aspects of this book is Lillie’s determination to avoid judging Italian villa architecture by the traditional standards of aesthetic criteria. Here she steers a very different course from most architectural historians, whose interest in the emergence of formal classicizing elements during the Renaissance dovetails with the chronology of the five Medici villas. In contrast, Lillie widens her scope to address less well-known and less classically distinguished houses, seeking to provide a more representative understanding of fifteenth-century villa architecture and social culture. The first half of the book surveys the numerous Strozzi properties, many now engulfed by post-war sprawl and deprived of their original pastoral appeal. However, Lillie’s painstaking archival work not only resuscitates their forms and functions in the fifteenth century, but reveals how they still functioned as a vital rural support network for the declining but still powerful Strozzi dynasty.

Ultimately, Lillie’s investigation claims the hardworking agricultural farm on the flat Arno plain was as significant a component of the Florentine contado as the more seductive hillside pleasure house offering views onto Brunelleschi’s cupola. Many Strozzi villas were furnished not only with brick kilns and mills, but even wayside inns and village shops, testament to the pervasive Florentine frugality governing the design of these rural investments. Lillie concludes her discussion with a case study of the Strozzi villa at Santuccio, the rambling “casa da signore” enlarged and regularized with an adjoining wing by Filippo Strozzi in the 1480s. With its crenellated, feudal tower dominating the approach to Florence from the west, it must have made an impressive sight to visitors to the city. Lillie suggests this dominating appearance had a vital political function, signaling Strozzi authority was firmly entrenched in the surrounding territory, as well as emanating from the city itself. Moreover, she indicates that Santuccio’s design, cobbled together piecemeal in a series of building campaigns, was more typical of Florentine villas than such unified, compact designs as the Medici villa at Fiesole or the exactly contemporary Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano.

The second half of the book explores an alternative model for the fifteenth-century Florentine villa, as revealed in the rural estates of the Sassetti family. Although Lillie addresses all three branches of the family, her principal interest is Francesco Sassetti, the famous branch manager of the Medici bank, who once declared in a letter to Pierfrancesco Lorenzo de’ Medici, “I am entirely yours and your creation.” Francesco began work in 1462 upon the villa at La Pietra, which took its name from its location at the first milestone on the road north toward Bologna. In contrast to the Strozzi villas, the siting of La Pietra is comparable to that of the Medici villa at Fiesole, with its splendid placement just outside Florence on the low foothills overlooking the center of the city. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the villa would be extensively altered, suffering certain indignities in the process, such as Sir Arthur Acton’s decision to remodel the dome-vaulted oratory into a toilet. Lillie’s sleuthing unravels many of these alterations, returning the villa closer to its layout, appearance, and function while it was still occupied by the Sassetti.

Lillie’s investigation hinges upon an important document regarding the division of this house in 1499 among Francesco’s heirs, here for the first time transcribed and published in full (in Appendix C). This document provides the departure point for a functional analysis of the villa’s internal spaces. As in the preceding analysis of the Strozzi villa at Santuccio, the examination explores how ongoing transformations bestowed greater order upon the plan of an existing structure. However, this process is especially pronounced in Lillie’s reading of the La Pietra plan, where she reveals how a sophisticated series of interventions neatly appropriated and reformed a haphazard, asymmetrical, essentially random plan to create an improved, coherent, unified design. She demonstrates how the designer skillfully resolved numerous architectural discrepancies, producing a balanced, four-part plan that not only fulfilled logistical requirements, but which also convincingly managed to imply that the design had been governed by symmetrical order from its inception.

This reconstruction suggests the villa at La Pietra represented a bold innovation in fifteenth-century domestic structures. Lillie indicates the characteristic four-part division and distinctive sequence of internal spaces at La Pietra—with larger public rooms placed at the center of the façades and the private chambers at the corners—marked a transition between two major contemporary Tuscan monuments, the Palazzo Piccolomini in Pienza and the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. She further suggests the architect must have been familiar with the latest developments in Renaissance architectural design. Yet even more impressive is her assertion that the designer of the Sassetti villa should be credited for making the imaginative leap of transposing the formal, symmetrical plan of a Florentine palace to a rural, pastoral setting. The idea of summoning civilized urban elegance for an informal, natural setting was an idea sanctioned by Vitruvius and a hallmark of the Renaissance villa, and lends credence to Lillie’s suggestion that Sassetti’s commission was shaped by a major (but still unidentified) Renaissance architect.

This is an elegant, thoughtful book. Much of the urban and rural environment of fifteenth-century Florence has been lost, and Lillie’s analysis suggests that most of these lesser Florentine villas, isolated and unrecognized, have been especially susceptible to the powerful forces of change. Her careful documentary reconstruction not only rescues many of these villas from oblivion, but makes an important contribution to an understanding of how many Florentine villas assumed their forms through a gradual and complex evolutionary process.

My principal complaint is that the quality of the illustrations is in no way worthy of Lillie’s meticulous text. Cost concerns must have determined the decision to use black-and-white reproductions, which is of course justifiable, but there is no obvious reason for the photographs to be awkwardly cropped and grainy. The landscape views are often disappointing, and the technical photographs of architectural details are sometimes illegible. Certainly the decision to publish such images weakens and marginalizes the value of the visual evidence. Nonetheless, as a close reading of critical new documentary sources, Lillie’s book represents a fundamental advance in the study of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa.