Tommaso Francini

Who was Tommaso Francini?

Tommaso Francini, Thomas Francine in France, and his younger brother Alessandro Francini were Florentine hydraulics engineers and garden designers who worked for Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, above all at the Villa Medicea di Pratolino, where Francesco de Vieri described the water features in 1586: "...and at Pratolino, where the statues there turn about, play music, jet streams of water, are so many and such stupendous artworks in hidden places, that one who saw them all together would be in ecstasies over them."

Francesco's heir, his brother Ferdinando, was persuaded to part with them in 1597 by his niece Maria, married to Henri IV. Their first project, begun in 1598, was to provide fountains, grottoes, waterworks and, above all, water-driven automata for the series of garden terraces at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The main feature there was a great fountain, from which water was channeled and conducted in siphon tubes to the reservoir in the vaulted area that supported the terrace. From there, through a series of secondary tubes, the water had sufficient head to operate grotto fountains and animate the elaborate automata that were a prized feature of Francini jeux d'eau. The upper grottoes on the third terrace opened from a Doric gallery and featured a dragon, a water organ and Neptune; on the next level, the Grotto of Hercules was flanked by two further grottoes; that on one side was devoted to Perseus and Andromeda, in which the delicately counterbalanced hero was made to descend from the ceiling by the hidden weight of water and slay a dragon that arose from the basin, and on the other a Grotto of Orpheus. The only trace of these features, whose high maintenance requirements cut their careers short when the court moved permanently to Fontainebleau, are in some engravings by Abraham Bosse, apparently derived from Francini drawings. The waterworks and automata at Saint-Germain-en-Laye were the most elaborate such things that had been seen in France up to that time, and Alexandre Francini's engravings of the brothers' works served to mark a distinct stage in the importation and transformation of Italian features in the creation of the French formal garden and far beyond: cast-iron versions of Francini's two-basin Fontaine rustique, dripping with stony icicles, were familiar features again in Victorian gardens.