Archaeology, Merriment, and Murder: The First Cortile of the Palazzo Vecchio and its Transformations in the Late Florentine Republic
The relationship between trecento and quattrocento architecture is usually seen as a simplistic paragone of stylistic antithesis generally derogatory to the former period. A reconstruction of the original cortile wing of the Palazzo Vecchio, which was remodeled in the Renaissance, permits the deconstruction of this view, at least with respect to key aspects of one major building. New archaeological evidence, together with historical data and the analysis of two picaresque literary texts, yields a detailed picture of the complex early project. The builders' remarkably precise and imaginative planning procedure is rediscovered, along with the exceptionally high functionalism of the original fabric. Life in the palace, real and symbolic, is reviewed, and the changing form of the cortile in the Renaissance is found to have been motivated principally not by aesthetics, but by Medicean politics.
What Brunelleschi Saw: Monument and Site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence
Urbanistic practice in trecento Florence, although it spawned no codified theory, was more conceptually developed than we usually imagine. Buildings were forcefully presented and tautly interwoven with their sites by means of inventive, empirical procedures. Intricate webs of geometry structured architectural scenes of Giottesque three-dimensionality. Order and meaning were bestowed on urbanistic scenes that might well have become disordered and unfocused through the slow evolution and redesign of architectural projects. A pre-eminent case in point was the Piazza della Signoria. Documentary, archaeological, and historical evidence suggests that as the Palazzo Vecchio rose in 1299-1315, it underwent fundamental design changes largely inspired by the growing piazza around it and that the piazza itself, as it grew to its final form through the trecento, was guided with surprising precision by the visual demands of the palace, the medieval obsession with geometric structure, and the urbanistic patterns of the city.
Santa Maria Del Fiore: 1294–1418
Florence cathedral (Figs, 1, 2, 5, 7), begun shortly after 1294,1 stands today almost unchanged since it was completed nearly five hundred years ago. The monument is whole. The documents survive in unparalleled quantity. The literature is growing.2 Yet essential questions touching on the history of its construction remain unresolved.