Life in the home was turned inwards towards the courtyards,or
the garden. Basically furnishing were still medieval in type but
tastes had changes and there were occasional innovations. In the
larger palaces the basaments and sometimes the ground floor
housed the cellars for wine and oil. As in the Middle Ages, the
loggiated courtyard with its entrance hall, on the ground floor,
was surrounded by service premises, rooms for the servants,
woodsheds. When the palace had a garden, then some of these rooms
were used by members of the family. The first floor, or piano
nobile, with its halls, sitting rooms, study or writing room, was
dedicated to public life. Service rooms were on the upper floors,
the room for the maidservants, linen rooms, bread room, cupboards
(grain, fruit), loggia on the courtyard. Normally the wells were
at the level of the cellars, but sometimes they had an opening in
the courtyard set either in the center or in a niche in the wall
(Pal. Antinori, Spinelli); water was drawn up by a pail with a
rope or chain attached to a pulley. In the kitchen, the
traditional wooden troughs were gradually replaced by stone sinks
(which generally emptied out, uncovered, in the courtyard) and
water was taken from a bucket with a faucet, hung on the wall.
One room entered into another, without corridors. By the early
fifteenth century the main staircase, as steep as ever, which had
been external in the Middle Ages, was inside-outside, beginning
in the portico of the courtyard and then entering the main part
of the building; the interior staircase with vaulting was an
innovation introduced around 1420.
In the Middle Ages houses as well as palaces had their walls
decorated with painting, generally imitation hangings. The
tradition continued in the early fifteenth century, in particular
with decorations depicting figures, stories or portraits of
famous men. A series of illustrious men was painted by Bicci in
Palazzo Medici. And the scenes of family life in the Villa Lemmi
(Botticelli) or the bacchanalia scenes in the 'La Gallina' Villa
(A. Pollaiuolo) are also well known.
The Florentine house was not equipped with what might be called a
dining room; the table was set up wherever was deemed best, for
example, before the fireplace in winter. The diners sat on one
side of the table only, and food was passed to them from the
other side. The sink in pietra serena or marble was set in a
niche in the wall and framed by a cornice, simple or more
elaborate, which ran down to the floor or was connected to a base
below (Pal. Strozzi, second floor); in the upper part, on one or
more shelves, was the equipment for serving drink, pitchers and
cups.
"When a new architectural ideal came into vogue in the
fifteenth century, architraved fireplaces frequently replaced
pavilion fireplaces in the Florentine rooms. It may have seemed
to Brunelleschi and his followers that with its projection the
hood broke the harmony of line that was part of that classic
style they were attempting to bring back into style" (A.
Schiaparelli; examples: fireplace with Medici coat of arms, Badia
Fiesolana; fireplaces in Pal. Strozzi; fireplace attributed to
Desiderio da Settignano, Victoria & Albert Museum, London;
fireplace attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo, Pal. Gondi).
The large bedroom was used throughout the day; it contained the
fireplace and the basic pieces of furniture: the bed with a more
or less rich head for the bed or a canopied bed with curtains
that served to isolate the bed in the single room that
constituted the living quarters in the more modest dwelling; the
chest or cassone (when there were not enough chests, clothing and
linen could be kept in open drawers on the platform on which the
bed stood), which could, during trips in particular, but
otherwise as well, serve as bed, table, bench; the chamber pot;
the basin on a wooden stand. "In modest dwellings, with a
simple bench bed and a straw mattress covered with a quilt,
clothes were hung on poles set diagonally across the corners of
the room. More modest chests, which the people called arca (ark),
contained clothing and linens in hemp or wild linen. But whether
in the nuptial chamber of the rich family, or in the simple room
of a poor married couple of the common folk, artisans, or
peasants, the place of honor was reserved for the cradle"
(U. Middeldorf).
The courtyard was paved in "dressed pietra serena which
turns moss green in untrodden places and raises dust where it
lies in the beaten path, which dampens the sound of the metal
rims of the wagons /.../, which darkens when it rains and
glitters with crystal flecks in the sun" (P. Sanpaolesi).
The floor of the rooms was generally brick, known as mezzane, of
which Alberti describes the placement in parallel lines or in a
circle or a herringbone pattern. "Red terra cotta, not the
kind one sees today, of a dull tone, machine polished even in the
most noble halls of Palazzo Vecchio, but a finely made compact
terra cotta, which had been fired long and had taken on a deep
hue, not cut with machines but molded by hand" (P.
Sanpaolesi).
The ceilings on the ground-floor were mostly vaulted, at least in
the palaces. The groin vault set on corbles was now preferred to
the medieval depressed rib vault. On the upper floors the palchi
or wooden ceilings were 'real', that is with the structure and
secondary framework in sight, or 'apparent' (or 'dead'), that is
boards hung on to the real ceiling. The frame was enriched with
moldings and dentils, the center of each coffer with a large knob
or a classic rosette.
Furniture too acquired more ornamentation. In the palaces it was
made of walnut, carved and sculptured, in the common houses of
beach, ash, cherry. Not until the sixteenth century would
straw-bottomed chairs appear. The doors were in polished walnut
mostly with only one framed side.
"If you will put panelling of fir or timber all around the
walls" , writes Alberti, "you will make the room
healthier and in winter much warmer, and the summer will not be
very hot". The wall panelling, three braccia or more in
height, was called spalliera, or back, because beds and other
pieces of furniture were set against it. In the fifteenth century
these were decorated with moldings and marquetry. Often paintings
were set into the frames (for instance, episodes from Nastagio
degli Onesti's novella, painted by Botticelli for a spalliera in
Casa Pucci, now in the Museum of the Prado in Madrid). In the
richer interiors the decorated spalliere were accompanied by
sopraspalliere, that is tapestries or frescoes or additional
framed paintings (which Vasari calls 'cornici' or frames). In the
fifteenth century, paintings were almost always an integral part
of the decoration and only rarely did they appear as isolated
elements hung on the wall (perhaps as a panel frieze, set over
the doorway) as seen today in museums. Paintings were part of
chests, of the spalliere and the sopraspalliere. While in the
fourteenth-century dwellings the only paintings were of a
religious nature, in the rooms of Palazzo Medici the many
paintings of sacred subjects were in the company of others, as
well as statues and has reliefs, of a secular and mythological
nature in line with the aesthetic taste of the day. Collecting
made its first appearance and other important families followed
the example of the Medici. Views of Florence are listed among the
paintings in Palazzo Medici in Lorenzo the Magnificent's
inventory: they were probably Brunelleschi's famous perspective
panels of views of the Piazza della Signoria and of the Cathedral
and the Baptistery. As the vogue for collecting developed, so did
the typically Florentine artistic craft of carved frames; a
novelty at the end of the century were the round frames with
decorations of fruit and flowers in gilded stucco.
"...the custom started of doing inexpensive casts of the
heads of those who died; and so one can see in every house in
Florence, over the chimney-pieces, doors, windows, and cornices,
endless examples of such portraits, so well made and natural they
seem alive", wrote Vasari in his life of Verrocchio. Thanks
to this practice we now have Brunelleschi's death mask (Museo
dell'Opera del Duomo).
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries movable fabrics were
used to cover variuos kind of furniture. The custom of hanging
tapestries to rows of hooks in the wall by means of curtain rings
was still used in the fifteenth century but perhaps less than
before. The door hangings called usciali and portiere were widely
used.
Tapestry workshops were set up as early as the beginning of the
Renaissance when Flemish workers brought in by the Florentine
merchants and bankers taught local workers the technique of
weaving hangings after cartoons by Florentine painters such as
Botticelli.
Florentine crafts flourished in all fields: from objects of daily
use to purely decorative elements. The coffer-makers were famous
for their caskets, strong boxes, coffers, boxes for money,
jewels, documents. Potters produced a great variety of vases,
plates, jugs, basins, pitchers. Of particular renown was the dark
blue and yellow-orange ware of the Medici kilns of Cafaggiolo.
Objects of colored glass and crystal were also of particular
note. In modest houses goblets in the dark green glass of Empoli
were already in use, and they are still being made today. The
straw-covered flasks came from Poggibonsi. Everyday tableware was
in glazed terra cotta (see frescoes in the Oratorio dei Buonomini
di San Martino).
Carpentry and cabinet work evolved considerably with furniture
that was carved, sculptured and inlaid, and types already in use
in the fourteenth century were further developed. Even so,
important functional innovations, such as for example drawers,
did not appear until the sixteenth century. The Renaissance piece
of furniture was marked by an elegance of line and by its size
and harmonious geometric composition, in which the elements
already present in the Gothic period, such as for example the
pierced rosettes in the panels, were reabsorbed and transfigured.
In the field of furniture there was also an intense exchange of
ideas between architecture and the minor arts. Classic cornices
and membering found in architecture reappeared in furniture. For
example, the cornice of the altar of S. Giovanni (attributed to
Giuliano da Maiano and Francesco di Giovanni known as Francione,
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo) directly echoes the model of the
crowning cornice of Palazzo Medici. And on the back (spalliera)
of the cupboard of the Old Sacristy in S. Lorenzo, the carved
brackets in the upper part are similar to those in pietra serena
in the architecture of the room.
Development of the classic style in the field of furniture led to
a prevailing use of marquetry, which spread over the panels and
along the frames, while carving had been preferred in the Gothic
period. Apparently the inlaid surfaces corresponded to the taste
for a clear linear design, as was found in architecture.
Marquetry falls under four types: 1. geometric design; 2. free
hand decoration; 3. perspective drawing; 4. figures of people and
stories. While the first type already appeared in rare examples
of Gothic marquetry (almost exclusively church furniture) the
other three types were introduced in the early Renaissance.
In the field of painted furniture, artists such as Paolo Uccello
and Domenico Veneziano lent their services. Of the former Vasari
says "In many Florentine houses can be found a number of
pictures by Uccello, all of them small, painted in perspective to
decorate the sides of couches, beds, and so forth..." The
latter painted chests for the wedding of Caterina Sforza. The
well-known painting by Granacci, which shows Via Larga with
Palazzo Medici on the occasion of the visit of Charles VIII
(Uffizi) was also originally made for a piece of furniture.
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