| Development of Florentine Palace Architecture |
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The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had witnessed the
supremacy of the great building enterprises for religious
structures (cathedral, great churches and convents for the
religious orders) and civil architecture (palaces for the
magistrature, the guilds). In the fifteenth century, Florentine
monumental architecture was concerned with a few large-scale
reconstructions of religious complexes and the building of
unusually large palaces for the major families of the merchant
'bourgeoisie'. In the maps and panoramas of the period the great
private palaces are just as important as the more representative
religious and public buildings. The Medici, the Rucellai, the
Pitti, the Tornabuoni, the Pazzi, the Boni and later the Strozzi,
the Scala or the Gondi and others, thought of their residences as
monuments, which in their exceptional size and the quality of the
project, in which the return to classical elements played a part,
were declarations of the role and power of the family. The palace
was now something created for a single family rather than a
family clan (consorteria) and the city block, which in medieval
times was the result of a process of aggregation, tended to be
replaced by this single unit, the palazzo, often radically
lacerating the medieval urban fabric.
The Busini-Bardi palace (in Via de' Benci, built around 1415 and
attributed by Manetti to Brunelleschi) has a square courtyard
surrounded on four sides by a continuous portico with monolithic
columns in pietra serena (the first time in a private palace) and
round-headed arches, an innovation (apart from the precedent
example in the courtyard of the palace of Niccolò da
Uzzano in Via de' Bardi, dating to the early fifteenth century,
not yet quite as regular in its configuration) where it became a
regularizing element and played an essential role in the daily
life of the building and no longer acted simply as an accessory
area as it had in the fourteenth-century palaces. The first great
Florentine palaces date to around the middle of the century. Palazzo Medici seems to have been
begun in 1445, Palazzo Rucellai in 1446, Palazzo Pitti in 1458. The first
to be finished may have been Palazzo Rucellai (1451). In the
Medici palace, Michelozzo accepted the new perspective vision
only as a means of controlling the mass of the building, while
the general layout, based on the assumption that an oblique view
was fundamental, is still part of medieval tradition, which
became a thing of the past in Palazzo Pitti with its new concept
of size and a mass that was ideally visible from all sides.
Actually Palazzo Medici rationalizes the characteristics of the
medieval palace, stressing new elements that were however not as
revolutionary as they presumably were in Brunelleschi's model,
which Cosimo refused, and from wich it is highly likely that
Michelozzo derived various features. Before the late
seventeenth-century additions done for the Riccardi family, in
its width the facade on Via Larga was equivalent to three portals
(one corresponding to the corner loggia) and ten windows. The
progressive diminution in height of each story as well as
correspondingly less accentuated rustication is balanced by the
presence of the robust, strongly projecting, crowning cornice.
The rustication of the immense blocks on the ground floor is as
monumental as in ancient Roman architecture, while
fourteenth-century ashlar work gave the impression of having been
cut by sharp tools and used almost in the roughly trimmed state
in which the blocks came from the quarry. On the upper floors the
carefully worked out courses of stone masonry replace the
rubblework of the medieval palace, inspired if anything by the
terse surfaces of Orsanmichele.
The windows set in a 'modern' arched surround lend new elegance
to the traditional motive of the two-light opening. Classical
inspiration lies behind the decorative details, such as the
stringcourse between the stories which employs classical molding
profiles (cyma recta, dentils and cavetto) for the first time in
Florence. In the courtyard, elements of Brunelleschi's idiom turn
into a quest for decorative elegance and rather than
corresponding to the construction of a completely unified order
seem to be variations on a theme developed on three superimposed
sequences: portico, facade, loggia.
What distinguishes Palazzo Rucellai from Palazzo Medici, as well
as Palazzo Pitti, is the use of a system of superimposed classic
orders and the rustication seen as a continuous design that
results from a modular pattern of horizontal and vertical lines.
Apart from the distinct qualitative differences, the internal
structure that governs the design is comparable to Palazzo Pitti.
In both cases the facade is the result of a module which by
repetition can achieve the general design. In Palazzo Pitti solid
and void are equal and the entire pattern is produced by the
windows, eliminating all vertical linear elements. In Palazzo
Rucellai the basic module is more complex, contemplating the
presence of the divisory elements (pilasters) which determine the
size of the infilling (two vertically superposed squares), taken
up in their width by the window, divided in two by the
architrave. The facade thus is the material expression of the
lines of the regulating layout. An important precedent for the
design of a facade articulated by classical orders as in Palazzo
Rucellai is Palazzo Gerini, in Via Ginori, redecorated (circa
1450) with arches and sgraffito in a sham framework of classic
membering above the stringcourse between the ground floor and the
first floor. But in general the superposition of the orders was
not popular in Florence. Palazzo Pazzi, in Via del Proconsolo, of
Brunelleschian descent, presents an outspoken typological
innovation: a ground floor still in rusticated pietra forte and
the upper floors plastered with a delicate decoration in bands
around the windows. Palazzo Tornabuoni (circa 1450, thoroughly
restructured in the nineteenth century), is attributed by Vasari
to Michelozzo and defined "almost completely similar to the
palace he had made for Cosimo, except that the facade is not
rusticated nor does it have cornices above, but is
ordinary". The palace without rustication, simply plastered,
was to spread between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
century. Echoes of Brunelleschi's arches on columns are evident
in the courtyard of Palazzo Tornbabuoni. Connections with the
model of Palazzo Medici are evident in the Strozzino and Strozzi
palaces and hinted at in the Pazzi palace in Via del Proconsolo.
Of all the Florentine palaces, Palazzo Strozzi is the largest and
has the most regular and geometric plan.
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