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.
Founding the Palazzo Vecchio in 1299: The Corso Donati Parado
The usual origin-story of the Palazzo Vecchio as a security measure for the city's executives taken in response to civic unrest does not hold up under a close analysis of the historical record and the architectural evidence. The original project of 1299, as distinguished from the building as modified 1306-1310, was not heavily fortified; and by contemporary standards the late 1290s was a comparatively peaceful interval. It is proposed that rather than fear, the immediate motivation for the decision to build was a crisis in civic honor. If so, the palace would have been initially an expression less of the core values of the mercantile class, officially at the helm of the republic, than of the excluded nobility, as represented by the arch-enemy of the regime, Corso Donati.
The Politics of Liberty in England and Revolutionary America: Acknowledgments
Introduction: re-examining the roots of Anglo-American political thought Part I. The Divine Right Challenge to Natural Liberty: 1. The attack on the Catholic natural law 2. Calvinism and parliamentary resistance theory 3. The problem of Grotius and Hobbes Part II. The Whig Politics of Liberty in England: 4. James Tyrrell: the voice of moderate Whiggism 5. The Pufendorfian movement: moderate Whig sovereignty theory 6. Algernon Sidney and the old Republicanisms 7. A new Republican England 8. Natural rights in Locke's two treatises 9. Lockean liberal constitutionalism 10. The glorious revolution and the catonic response Part III. The Whig Legacy in America: 12. British constitutionalism and the challenge of empire 13. Thomas Jefferson and the radical theory of empire 14. Tom Paine and popular sovereignty 15. Revolutionary constitutionalism: laboratories of radical Whiggism Conclusions Notes Bibliography.