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.
Notes and Speculations on S. Lorenzo, Palazzo Medici, and an Urban Project by Brunelleschi
IN 441 a Medici-owned quarry in Trassinaia was opened to provide some of the stone (macigno) needed for a major architectural undertaking in nearby Florence-the completion of the basilica of S. Lorenzo, on which work had been suspended a little over a decade earlier.1 Responding to an appeal made in the winter of I440 by the Prior, Benedetto Schiattesi, to finish S. Lorenzo's apse and flanking chapels, prominent families in the parish pledged funds to erect the chapels.2 The most prominent citizen of all, Cosimo de' Medici, eventually agreed to finance not only the construction of the apse (Cappella Maggiore) which had already been started, but enough of the nave to bring the new basilica as far east as the high altar of the old Romanesque church it was superseding.3
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.