The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense (Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics)

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PALACE FACADE STRUCTURES OF AUTHORITY, SURFACES OF SENSE The architectural facade – a crucial a...

Author: Charles Burroughs

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THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PALACE FACADE STRUCTURES OF AUTHORITY, SURFACES OF SENSE The architectural facade – a crucial and ubiquitous element of traditional cityscapes – addresses and enhances the space of the city, while displaying, or dissembling, interior arrangements. In this book, Charles Burroughs tracks the emergence of the facade in late-medieval Florence and then follows the sharply diverging reactions of Renaissance architects to new demands and possibilities for representation in both residential and governmental contexts. Understanding the facade as an assemblage of elements of diverse character and origin, Burroughs explores the wide range of formal solutions available to architects and patrons. In the absence of explicit reflection on the facade in Renaissance architectural discourse, Burroughs notes the theoretical implications of certain celebrated designs, implying meditation on the nature of architecture itself and the society it serves and represents, as well as on the relationship between nature and culture. He also explores the resonance between shifts in architectural form and social space, and the ideas articulated in the literary production of the period. Charles Burroughs is Professor of Art History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University, SUNY. A scholar of Italian Renaissance architecture, he is the author of From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome and has published extensively on early modern Italian visual culture and urbanism, emblems and architecture, and architectural theory.

RES MONOGRAPHS IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND AESTHETICS

series editor Francesco Pellizzi assocate editor Joseph Rykwert, University of Pennsylvania

This series provides a point of encounter for contributions from diverse sources to the study of what is often described as “material culture.” Many disciplines have studied different aspects of utilitarian, decorative, and cult objects, from classical to modern times, in Western and other literate cultures. The series, with its breadth of scope and eclecticism, addresses this rich diversity. Like the journal from which it takes its name, it provides a forum for authors from many disciplines, including anthropology, art history, music, dance, and architectural studies.

THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PALACE FACADE STRUCTURES OF AUTHORITY, SURFACES OF SENSE

CHARLES BURROUGHS Binghamton University, SUNY

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521109734 © Charles Burroughs 2002 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2002 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Burroughs, Charles. The Italian Renaissance palace facade : structures of authority, surfaces of sense / Charles Burroughs. p. cm. –(RES monographs in anthropology and aesthetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 62438 X (hc) 1. Facades – Italy. 2. Palaces – Italy. 3. Architecture, Renaissance – Italy. 4. Symbolism in architecture – Italy. I. Title. II. Series. NA2840 .B87 2002 720´.945´09024 – dc21 2001037484 ISBN 978-0-521-62438-1 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-10973-4 paperback

For Christine and Inna

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xiii Preface xvii Introduction • 1 1. The Forked Road to Modernity: Ambiguities of the Renaissance Facade • 12 Prelude, 12 • The Facade as Composition, 13 • Representation and Identity: The Place(s) of Heraldry, 14 • The Facade as Screen: Between Tectonics and Rhetoric, 16 • The Roman House: Itinerary and Representation, 16 • The Agonistic Facade: Facing Off in the Court Enclave, 17 • Triumphal Architecture: Syntax and Schema, 18 • Frames and Meaning, 20 • Serlio and the Limits of Architecture, 21 • Architectural Assemblage and the Emblematic Turn, 26 • Between Architecture and Physiognomy, 29 • Vitruvius, De architecto: Transparency and Professionalism, 30 • The Building as Body and the Subject of Architecture, 31 • Virtues of Transparency; Advantages of Opacity, 32 • Face and Pre-Face in Renaissance Culture, 33 • Telling Stories: Antiquarianism, Ideology, and Nostalgia, 35 • Memory and Monsters: The Facade as Terminus, 38 2. Domestic Architecture and Boccaccian Drama: Court and City in Florentine Culture • 43 Between Opacity and Expression, 43 • Toward the Renaissance City: Shifts in Social Space and Architectural Framing, 47 • The Facade: Metaphoric Intersections, 48 • Body/House, 49 ix

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CONTENTS

3. Between Opacity and Rhetoric: The Facade in Trecento Florence • 51 Cultural Overlay and the Face of the City, 51 • The City as Symbol: The Florentine Oligarchy and the Sea of Stone, 54 • Facade Architecture and the Ideal of Consensus, 58 • Reading the Binary Facade, 64 • The Campaign against Jetties and the Emergence of the Planar Facade, 65 • Discriminations: Looking Beyond Uniformity in the Florentine Streetscape, 69 • Composing Urbanity: Design and Representation in Siena and Florence, 73 4. The Facade in Question: Brunelleschi • 77 Toward a New Architecture: The Disputed Founder, 77 • “Vernacular” Brunelleschi?, 79 • Faces/Facets: Abstraction at the Cathedral, 80 • Brunelleschi and the Place of Housing, 81 • An Ant’s View of Architecture: Palace Design and the Domestic Uncanny, 84 • Frame and Screen: The Palazzo Busini, 86 • Prudential Architecture, 88 • Threshold and Itinerary: Beyond the Facade, 90 • Brunelleschian Principles of Design: Corporeal Grammar, 91 5. The Bones of Grammar and the Rhetoric of Flesh • 94 Legibility in the Environment: Learning from Alberti, 94 • The Face of the Water and the Face in the Water, 96 • Albertian Antinomies, 98 • The Parade of Artifice and the Paradox of Authenticity: Alberti and the Palazzo Rucellai, 102 • In Between: The Palazzo Medici, 104 • The Rhetoric of the Corner, 105 6. Setting and Subject: The City of Presences and the Street as Stage • 108 Perspectives in the Palace: Image and Self-Image in Urbino, 108 • The Window Model and the Doors of Perspective: Design and Rule, 114 • Apollo and Minerva: From Frame to Stage, 117 • Jutting Images, 119 • The Subject of/in Perspective: Brunelleschi’s Panels, 121 • Brunelleschi and the Palazzo della Signoria: Questions of Viewpoint, 124 • On an Implicit Paragone: Architecture as Statue and Surrogate Subject, 127 7. Bramante and the Emblematic Facade • 133 Avoiding Antithesis: Late Fifteenth-Century Florence, 133 • Compound and Palace: Exceptional Rome, 134 • Bramante’s Exordium in Rome: The Orders Displayed, 136 • An Architecture of Dissimulation: Built Structure and Ideological Structures, 139 • Architectural Allegory: The Building and the State, 143 • Architecture and its Others: The Emblematic Graft, 144 • Art and Nature, 146 • Origins in Architecture, 148

CONTENTS

8. Facades on Parade: Architecture between Court and City • 151 The Via Alessandrina: The Street as Stage, 151 • Facing Off: A Battle of Style and Its Implications., 155 • Raphael’s Critique of Bramante: Medium and Message, 160 • The Scene of the Court and the Space of the City, 165 • Architectural Culture and Social Structure: Fluidity and Rigidity in the Roman Cityscape, 166 • Patrician Architecture: Cross-Town Consistency and the Interests of Rome’s Citizen Elite, 167 • A House for Hercules: Architectural and Genealogical Lineage, 171 • The Walking Bull and the Madonna in the Tree, 173 9. From Street to Territory: Projections of the Urban Facade • 176 Transcended Contrasts, 176 • Roman Itineraries: The Campidoglio as Laboratory and Exemplum, 178 • Garden Iconography and Projections of Architectural Meaning, 181 • “And Nature Is the Architect”—Artifice and Landscape at the Rotonda and Other Palladian Villas, 183 • Giants Beneath: “Thus Are the Monsters Tamed”, 188 • Ideology and Landscape, 190 • Coda: Architectures of Power, and the Powers of Architecture 192 Notes 195 Select Bibliography 271 Index 283

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1. Strada Nuova, Genoa. Nineteenth-century photograph. 2. Villa Lante, Bagnaia, view. From Giacomo Lauro, Antiquae urbis splendor, Rome, 1612–18. 3. Palazzo Medici, Florence. Exterior showing facade on Via Larga (Cavour) on right. 4. Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, facade. 5. Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini, facade. 6. Sebastiano Serlio, palace elevation of Venetian type and in the Corinthian style. 7. Sebastiano Serlio, design for portal. 8. Sebastiano Serlio, design for portal (the “bestial order”). 9. Palazzo dei Conservatori, facade, Campidoglio, Rome. 10. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, facade. 11. Matteo de’ Pasti, medallion, reverse. Leon Battista Alberti’s impresa of the winged eye (a portrait of Alberti appears on the obverse). 12. Antonio (Antoine) Lafréry, engraving, 1549. Palazzo Caprini, elevation. 13. Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome, facade. 14. Palazzo Pandolfini, Florence. 15. Palazzo Baldassini, Rome, facade. 16. Palazzo Farnese, Rome, facade. 17. Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila. 18. Hell’s mouth, Villa Orsini (Sacred Wood), Bomarzo. 19. Palazzo Davizzi (Davanzati), Florence, facade. 20. Palazzo della Signoria, Florence: view from northwest corner of piazza. 21. Bargello, Florence. 22. Palazzo Alessandri. xiii

5 8 14 15 19 21 23 24 25 26 27 29 37 38 39 40 41 42 52 55 59 60

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23. Via de’ Bardi, Florence, showing the Palazzo Capponi (da Uzzano) in the distance, and the Palazzo Canigiani in the foreground. 24. Jettied houses, Florence (tower and palaces of the Corbizzi family, Piazza San Pier Maggiore), Florence. 25. Casa Davanzati, Florence. Rendering of 1886. 26. Palazzo Capponi (da Uzzano), Florence. Facade detail. 27. Alberti tower and loggia, Via de’ Benci, Florence. 28. Agostino di Giovanni, elevation of Palazzo Sansedoni, Siena. 29. Florence cathedral (S. Maria del Fiore), dome. 30. Anon, Expulsion of Walter of Brienne, the “Duke of Athens,” from Florence. Fresco. 31. Palazzo Busini, courtyard. 32. Palazzo Busini (Bardi-Serzelli), exterior. 33. Palazzo Pazzi, Florence. 34. Rucellai Loggia, Florence. 35. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. View from Via Romana (i.e., from outside the city). 36. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Street facade. 37. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Porta della Guerra. 38. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Studiolo. 39. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Studiolo. Marquetry landscape. 40. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Sala degli Angeli, Doors of Apollo and Minerva. 41. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Throne Room, with fireplace wall. 42. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Marquetry doors in Sala degli Angeli. 43. Serlio, Tragic Scene (Book 2 “On Perspective,” 1540, fol. 68r). 44. Anonymous late-fifteenth-century artist, View of Piazza della Signoria with the execution of Savonarola. 45. Michelangelo, David, on original site in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, Florence. 46. Maarten van Heemskerck, View of Piazza Capitolina and the Palazzo dei Conservatori before the remodeling of 1563f. 47. Palazzo Gondi, Florence. 48. S. Maria della Pace, Rome: courtyard. 49. Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia (Castellesi), Rome: facade. 50. Anonymous follower of Bramante, View of corner of Palazzo Caprini (from a position on the Via Alessandrina in front of the Palazzo Castellesi). 51. Etienne Dupérac, View of Rome 1577, detail. 52. Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere/dei Penitenzieri, Borgo Vecchio (Via della Conciliazione). 53. Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia, facade. 54. Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Rome: facade on Via del Papa. 55. Palazzo Alberini Cicciaporcia, Rome: facade. 56. Palazzo Stati-Maccarani, Rome: facade. 57. Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli, Rome: facade. 58. Palazzo Ossoli Missini, Rome: facade.

62 66 68 70 72 74 81 83 85 87 89 103 109 110 113 114 115 117 119 120 123 125 129 131 134 138 140

141 152 156 161 167 170 171 172 175


59. Etienne Dupérac, engraving, 1569. The Campidoglio according to Michelangelo’s design. 60. Michelangelo, bust of Brutus. 61. Anonymous drawing of Campidoglio. 62. Etienne Dupérac, engaving, 1573. View of Villa d’Este at Tivoli. 63. Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, distant view with surrounding landscape. 64. Villa Badoer, Fratta Polesine. 65. Sebastiano Serlio, Satyric Scene. 66. Andrea Palladio, ideal reconstruction of (or capriccio based on) the Temple of Fortune, Palestrina. 67. Villa Rotonda, Vicenza. Hall with satyr’s mask drain cover in center of floor. 68. Giuseppe Vasi, view of garden facade of Casino di Pio IV, Vatican.

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177 178 179 181 183 184 185 186 187 189

MAPS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Florence. Major palaces. 53 Florence. Via de’ Benci and surrounding district. 71 Urbino. Palazzo Ducale. Itinerary from palace entrance to duke’s apartment. 111 Rome. Borgo Leonino. 157 Rome. Major palaces. 168–169

PREFACE

In any academic book, a preface is expected, requiring an author to announce and even defend the ensuing text with a certain degree of self-consciousness. This is especially so in the present case, for this book is dedicated to the historical moment in which such an expectation arose, and the genealogy of the literary preface is intimately related to that of the architectural facade. In a sense, indeed, this book is itself preface, or at least prolegomenon. Others are better qualified than I to analyze the facade as a design project or task; I have sought to address puzzles that pressed into my consciousness whenever I turned my attention to Renaissance architecture, a built world in which the facade was a conspicuous element, yet in some ways also a highly obscure one. The book is less a forensic performance, therefore, than a many-tracked exploration. Nevertheless, certain convictions are crucial in my approach. First, departing from the familiar preoccupation with Renaissance architecture as fundamentally mimetic, i.e., defined by its emulation of “antiquity,” I return the focus to the social milieu and to practices of assigning and locating meaning evident within it. Second, I adopt a skeptical attitude to unilinear and downward (i.e., “trickle-down”) paradigms of the transmission of culture, preferring to privilege evidence for relatively dialogic and dynamic processes. Third, I am interested in a wider standard of evidentiality than is often accepted in scholarly work on the built environment (though architectural historians have been known to venture opinions on the social and cultural meanings of their objects of study on the basis of relatively exclusive consideration of those objects themselves). Issues of historiography and method apart, I have written this book while on the faculty of a major public university with a highly diverse student body and rapidly evolving pedagogical agenda. As director of interdisciplinary programs in medieval and Renaissance studies and in global studies, I have been closely associated with the struggle to maintain the humanities as a central elexvii

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PREFACE

ment of the curriculum, indeed of the institutional culture, while recognizing the need for creative and self-critical responses to the challenges faced by the humanities. Many of the graduate students with whom I have worked, moreover, come from “non-Western” backgrounds, and bring remarkably fresh perspectives to the consideration of European art and architecture. Such a milieu, which is common enough in higher education in the US and Europe, seems far removed from the world out of and for which most Renaissance architectural historians tend to write. I have also been struck by a deepening gulf between academic architectural history and architectural education, and hope that this book may reach today’s more “theory-conscious” practitioners and students. Many friends and colleagues have often unwittingly given support to or otherwise conspired in the production of this book. I began work on this project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, for which I thank the NEH, as well as the Institute itself, for financial support. By fortunate chance, or perhaps with cunning deliberation, Irving Lavin assembled a remarkable group of scholars with interest that overlapped with mine, and then and subsequently I have benefited much from my interactions with Anthony Cutler, George Gorse, Pierre Du Prey, and John Pinto. I have much therefore for which to thank Irving Lavin and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, whose interest in and encouragement of my project were crucial. I owe a particular debt to two long-standing friends, Leon Satkowski and Lynette Bosch, who invited – or rather incited – me to give presentations that turned out to be central to the progress of my ideas, and otherwise acted as gadflies. In a project such as this I have drawn on the work of many excellent scholars; only David Friedman and Brenda Preyer, for instance, can measure the debt I owe to their work. I often found myself working in James Ackerman’s wake, and looking back to long-ago conversations at the Warburg Institute with Michael Baxandall and, occasionally, the late Ernst Gombrich. For important intellectual stimulus and moral support over the years I thank especially Robert Adam, Liana Cheney, David Chambers, Thomas Cohen, Sam Kinser, Leatrice Mendelsohn, John Paoletti, Alina Payne, Linda Pellecchia, Sheryl Reiss, Robert Tavernor, and Barbara Wisch. At Binghamton I benefited from a lively atmosphere of debate and innovation, even when economic times were tough; I have learned much from my colleagues Barbara Abou el Haj, Karen Barzman, John Chaffee, Rosmarie and Parviz Morewedge, Sandro Sticca, John Tagg, Dale Tomich, Richard Trexler, Jean Wilson, and especially Anthony King. Many students pushed me to rethink positions, notably Cosimo Calabrò, Deborah Cibelli, Kim Evans, Preminda Jacob, Laura Foster, and Abidin Kusno (now happily a colleague). I am also grateful to the SUNY Faculty Development Grant Program for financial help, especially for the illustrations, and to the Dean of Harpur College, Binghamton University, for a much-needed sabbatical leave. Also at Binghamton, I am grateful to Christopher Focht for photographic work; to Lucius Willis of the Binghamton University Geography Department, as well as

PREFACE

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to Terry McDonald, for cartography; and to my secretary Ann Di Stefano for keeping the office going when my thoughts were elsewhere. Claudia Goldstein of Art Resource Inc. provided much assistance in locating photographs, and the cover image was provided by Ralph Lieberman, through the good offices of Claudia Lazzaro. Finally, I acknowledge the generosity of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, and Angela Giral, its director, for allowing me to use images in the Library’s possession without a fee. This book takes its place in a series whose editor, Francesco Pellizzi, and associate editor, Joseph Rykwert, have been enormously important not only in the preparation of this book, but also for my own intellectual trajectory. I am especially grateful to Joseph Rykwert for finding time to review manuscripts, and for offering both encouragement and criticism – to my great benefit, at least when I didn’t stubbornly stick to my guns. A preface usually includes the author’s expression of gratitude to others for assistance and a declaration of his/her own responsibility for mistakes; this is more than usually the case here. As editor of Res, moreover, Francesco Pellizzi has published some of my more adventurous work, as has Jósef Grabski, editor of Artibus et Historiae. I owe a particular debt to these extraordinary editors, whose journals have consistently welcomed innovative and unconventional work, and have opened up a space for those operating, as I seem fated to do, on the fringes of current academic formations and fashions. At Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl showed great patience as I struggled to complete the book, and admirable insistence on the contracted length; there is no doubt that the pruning that I carried out at her behest greatly improved the text. I also thank Larry Meyer and the staff of Hermitage Publishing Services for their careful oversight of the production process, including the final editing. This book, finally, has been long in the making. It was begun in a white temple-as-house, a Greek Revival aedes with box columns in the front porch that overlooks the banks of the Susquehannah River. It was completed in a more prosaic ranch house, high on a hill, a transition that gave me plenty of opportunity to meditate on the psycho-social effects of architecture and domestic space. In my journey in housing styles from the 1840s to the also very distant 1960s and, in my research, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries I was accompanied and patiently supported by my wife and daughter. Every good preface requires a dedication: this one is dedicated to them.

INTRODUCTION

This book is deliberately and literally superficial, “stopping at the surface, the fold, the skin.”1 Typically, of course, architectural history penetrates and explores, whether the object of study is a building, a treatise, or a roll of drawings. In some contexts, however, the front of a building demands attention, if not decoding, as part of the surrounding street or even city, rather than as part of a particular architectural configuration. Such a facade is logically quite distinct from the mere front wall of a building, and indeed may result from a separate construction project, perhaps involving the exterior transformation of an unremarkable and/or unfashionable structure. A facade, then, is an elaborated surface, implying the reduction of architecture to “mere” image.2 This is at best a partial definition. In most cultures with a monumental building tradition, buildings were designed to impress from outside, often through their bulk; indeed, Renaissance theorists disparaged the emphasis on sheer size (e.g., in the pyramids of Egypt) as a sign of primitivity.3 The idea of facade presupposes, not just a single privileged view of a building, but rather, specifically, a privileged front, usually at the main entrance. As such, a facade frames and enhances the point of intersection of interior and exterior space, dividing but also allowing passage between contrasted functional and symbolic realms. With their soaring and lavishly decorated facades and deep portals lined by saints and heavenly beings, the great Gothic churches of medieval Europe famously exemplify such a model. Though this book begins with medieval Europe, there is little mention of cathedral architecture or the embellishment of sacred space. While certainly concerned with the place of architecture in a symbolic order, I focus on secular, mostly residential buildings, and on conceptions of the exterior capable of extension to the city as a whole, or at least more affluent urban districts. In the densely settled environment of medieval Italian cities, the front wall of a house was often all that was visible in the street. Urban congestion alone, however, 1

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THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE PALACE FACADE

cannot explain the preference for regular and rectilinear house fronts evident, notably, in late-medieval Florence. The emergence of such facades is bound up with crucial transformations both within and outside the enveloping walls of houses, that is, in the wider built environment as well as in domestic space. It is closely connected to the evolution and standardization of conventions of planning and design applicable at different levels, from a city or urban district as a whole to a house or room. In the long view, these are part of a history of modernization that leads, needless to say, to the effective abolition of the distinction of sacred and profane, and to the emergence of cultural and spatial boundaries, like that between public and private, that have remained crucial to this day.4 In contrast to the analysis of sacred architecture, the study of housing and urban space – of the human “habitat” – is generally marked by expansiveness of focus. Certain major recent studies of Italian medieval urban environments have focused on processes of development within the city as a whole, including “vernacular” or ordinary building beyond the major palaces and architectural set pieces. The archives of Florence, in particular, have yielded important information about patterns of real estate development and the evolution of the economic and statutory environment.5 Though this painstaking work is crucial for any attempt to understand the evolution of Italian cities, my own discussions will concentrate on qualitative rather than quantitative issues, applying broadly semiotic strategies of analysis to often quite familiar, indeed canonic buildings and designs. The typical residential facade of an Italian urban mansion or townhouse possesses a particular semiotic character that contrasts, in significant respects, with that of the facade of a Gothic cathedral. The contrast turns on the relationship of exterior and interior. While a cathedral facade, on the one hand, generally registers the position of the nave and aisles, the body of the cathedral itself is extended horizontally toward the sacred, but spatially peripheral, center at the far end from the facade. The hierarchical succession of spaces traversed, (e.g., by solemn processions) is not manifested in the arrangement, though certainly hierarchical, of the facade. Like its analogues and models in secular public architecture, on the other hand, the town-house type that emerged in Italian commercial cities is organized vertically, that is, through stories stacked one above the other on the inner side of the “facade.” In principle, but not necessarily in practice, the interior is legible from outside. Two logically distinct, though in practice not incompatible, principles are operative in early modern facade design. Categories of analysis first proposed by the great philosopher and semiotician C. S. Peirce, notably the tripartite classification of signs as symbols, icons, and indexes, are useful in the distinction of crucial features.6 A facade may qualify primarily as an outer surface, aesthetically and compositionally part of the street or square in which it stands, and carrying various kinds of information and cues for decoding by different interpretive communities. In Peircean terms, then, a facade is a “sym-

INTRODUCTION

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bol,” its meaning assigned by convention, though certainly the interest of certain important facade designs lies in their marked “iconic” or mimetic character, as noted later. On the other hand, any facade accommodates intensive interaction between interior and exterior space, allowing the passage of people and their possessions, as well as light, air, sound, glances from windows, and so on. It can and to a degree must manifest interior spatial arrangements, and its design may call attention to functional elements, like windows and other apertures, that mediate between public and domestic space. Such a facade “indexes” the interior, though the elaboration of details may well disturb a facade’s basic indexical and, as such, denotative character, introducing not only formal but also connotative complexity and abundance. Of course, restraint may also carry connotative value, but that is an issue for a later chapter. This is clearly an ideal classificatory schema, since most Renaissance facades are semiotically composite and multiple. Indeed, the analysis of individual cases must grapple with the logical and aesthetic ambiguities of the facade as a space and site intermediate between surface and structure, exterior and interior, public and private. If the concept of facade requires and reinforces such dichotomies, it troubles them in the variety of its manifestations, some the result of sophisticated and self-conscious design work, others simply arising, as if “naturally,” within a specific milieu. A particular problem, needless to say, is the term “facade” itself, both in historical and contemporary usage. Currently, indeed, “facade” may operate as a key term in architectural polemic, as we will see, but it is more likely to serve in an entirely unproblematic, even banal, way to register an apparently everyday aspect of a built environment. The modern city is an array of functionally and typologically differentiated buildings that city dwellers mostly enter and exit casually, with no special effort of reorientation, though intermediate spaces and devices often ease such transitions. Usually these are at least potentially architectural, like an atrium, lobby, or front porch. Modern technology, however, has contrived new kinds of threshold: we need only consider the role of the automobile as a means of psychological transition as well as physical transportation between the contrasted environments of work and home.7 Unchecked by a recent nostalgic backlash, the age of the automobile has seen the elimination of the front porch as a culturally and architecturally pervasive element of North American residential areas.8 The facade too emerged at a time when, in many cities, intermediate spaces and structures – porticoes and loggias – were disappearing as integral elements both of the urban environment and of a respectable urban house.9 In contrast, the facade precisely marks the threshold between distinct domains, often dramatizing this with architectural and other elements functionally and symbolically related to the act of entry, but reduced to elements of an essentially planar configuration. There is an obvious tension between such an essentially two-dimensional conception of the facade and the venerable tradition of relating building and

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body. The inscription of the human body in architectural configurations, especially as a legitimating basis for both formal and proportional characteristics, has of course a central and much-discussed place in the architecture of Western classicism.10 There are even rare but famous cases of buildings literally in human form, illustrating, in extreme form, the idea that, whatever the differences of scale, a classical building confronts a beholder as another body in space, often with features (e.g., symmetry) that augment the resonance between them.11 The facade, on the other hand, may well disguise the volume of the building that it fronts. Nevertheless, facades contain elements – notably apertures – designed to accommodate and frame actual or imagined human bodies, while at least in classical architecture, the idealized human body, through a process of abstraction, supplies a source for the proportions and/or shape of columns and other details, or even for the overall composition. At least for male beholders, this makes possible a degree of self-recognition and self-celebration in the engagement with architecture. Beyond the threshold, on the other hand, the relationship of body and building is very different. A building shapes space around the body of a visitor, supplying an envelope and setting rather than analogue. It is true that corporeal metaphors are central to a familiar Western tradition of monumental architecture, involving the representation of the crucified body of Christ in the plan of many medieval and even some postmedieval churches.12 Even where it occurs, however, such literal iconism hardly contributes now, if it ever did, to the sensually available experience of entering and moving through a building. Instead, as in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on architecture, the body – not even necessarily a human body – serves as paradigm of the orderly articulation of elements within a coherent structure or indeed, in its premodern sense, a “machine.”13 It is of course in Alberti’s treatise that we encounter an early and typically brilliant articulation of the fateful distinction of structure and surface. I will return in Chapter 5 to Alberti’s engagement with the concepts of beauty and ornament, bones and flesh.14 In Renaissance practice, certainly, the facade tends eventually to loosen itself from the built fabric that it fronts, becoming a mere supplement or, in the astute phrase of Pietro Aretino, clothing or dress for the building’s body.15 This association of architectural surface with clothing connects it to the dynamics of fashion and taste, in a world characterized by an unprecedented flood of available commodities, at least for the elite, and encompassing the sectors of housing and of domestic furnishing and decoration.16 The facade, then, is a place where, in the service of rhetorical effect, the corporeality of architecture is compromised. Nevertheless, as we will see, it may well rely on the emphatic inclusion of material substance, even if faked, as an especially powerful expressive device. The study of the facade has become especially urgent in the light of postmodern developments in the built environment and architectural thinking. A

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1. Strada Nuova, Genoa. Nineteenth-century photograph.

key point of reference has been the famous Strada Nuova in Genoa (Fig. 1), an elegant and exclusive street lined by aristocratic palaces.17 The Strada Nuova, dead straight and very wide by the standards of the day, was a new foundation of the mid-sixteenth century, designed as an appropriate setting for grand palaces, all of which meet the street with an imposing, fashionable, and in most cases ornate facade.18 Through design or accident, these facades balance the requirements of overall consistency for the street as a whole and the interest in self-representation of the individual proprietors.19 This was possible, needless to say, through the exploitation of a peripheral, almost suburban site, high on a hill overlooking the distant harbor and crowded old city studded with the traditional compact enclaves of the leading families. Though of outstanding architectural quality and coherence, the resulting urban space was typical of the noble quarters or enclaves emerging in the era. It was an aristocratic utopia repressing all visible evidence of ancillary or subordinate populations and

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functions, and asserting the solidarity and mutual allegiance of the patrons’ families and lineages. It helped maintain the fiction that Genoa itself remained a free city-state, controlled by an aristocracy of birth and taste, rather than subject to a dominant foreign regime. Such fictions were common enough in Renaissance Italy. None of this was of relevance in the postmodern reception of the Strada Nuova. It was grist to the mill of polemics against the purist vision, central to architectural modernism, of functional and technological conditions as determining form. In modernist principle, at least, a design was generated from within, so that, in Le Corbusier’s memorable formulation, the perfect building assumed the quality of a bubble, its exterior profile entirely and transparently a product of interior spatial manipulation, of which it was also a sign.20 In postmodernism, on the other hand, architecture was reduced to imagery, or even pastiche.21 The leading theorist of the movement, Robert Venturi, proposed the absolute divorce of the semiotic and containing or sheltering functions of buildings, allowing the flexible adjustment of the exterior to changes of a building’s function, not to speak of wider cultural changes.22 Such a radical disjunction of architecture and building – or between the semiotic/decorative and tectonic aspects of architecture – was hardly new, with its distant echoes of Alberti’s distinction of ornament and beauty. Venturi’s ideas, of course, drew sustenance from studies of the largely classical church and palace facades of Renaissance and baroque Rome. The result was a conception of classicism, or at least of classicizing decor, as admitting formally and semantically flexible procedures of design and redesign not only responsive to, but also even defined by, social and commercial exigencies. There is no need to emphasize the absolute contrast of principle between such a conception and the Neoplatonist doctrine of metaphysical absolutes once dominant in the historiography of Renaissance architecture. If only out of a positivistic suspicion of theory, more recent scholarship has largely turned away from metaphysics, to offer reassessments of one major figure after another as attentive to strategic logic and rhetorical effect, even while maintaining, perhaps also with strategic cunning, the semblance of absolute perfection.23 Indeed, the tension between essence and expression lies, we might say, at the heart of the great tradition of Western architecture, and it lives on in more recent polemics. Not by accident, a key text in the history both of modernism and of the late twentieth-century antimodernist reaction emphasizes the Platonist–Pythagorean conception of an architecture grounded in transcendent formal values, an integral and orderly classicism resonating with an imagined integral and orderly wider world.24 In his enormously influential Architecture in the age of humanism, first published in 1948, Rudolf Wittkower associated such a conception with leading architects of the Renaissance, with fateful consequences for historiography. Indeed, Wittkower thereby detached the study of the Renaissance built environment from the social and broadly cultural forces that attended and conditioned its production, leaving no possibility for the serious engagement with

INTRODUCTION

7

the issue of the facade, which is inherently subversive of Wittkower’s entire approach.25 Nevertheless, it was also Wittkower who drew attention to the ambivalence of crucial classical architectural forms in the most ostensibly Platonist theoretical and constructive contexts, opening the way for interventions, especially those of Colin Rowe, that were ultimately fatal for modernist orthodoxy.26 Wittkower notoriously developed his argument in relation to a highly select group of buildings set apart from the city, most notably Palladio’s villas. He proceeded, further, to abstract these from any topographical context or even architectural framing that they might have had, in a discursive move reminiscent of the modernist project of the dissolution of the traditional city and the emergence of the villa as a paradigm for architectural design.27 The ideal modernist villa, of course, was set within and formally responsive to a rural idyll, allowing an interpenetration of interior and exterior space, or even suggesting the elision of any such distinction. In practice, needless to say, the most exemplary modernist “villas,” notably those of Le Corbusier, turned out to be about representation and image-projection as much as transparency, and some were even equipped with undeniably facade-like elements.28 Similar issues and equal sophistication in the solutions occur, however, already in the architecture of the sixteenth century. To refer to a prophetic observation of Alberti, villas allow a maximum degree of freedom in the elaboration of a design, even when accommodated to the topographical context.29 Long before modernism, though certainly with different means and expressive objectives, Renaissance architects contrived the opening of the architectural interior into “natural” landscape, or the irruption of the exterior into the interior (Fig. 2).30 In general, villa architecture offered opportunities to evade the particular disjunction of architecture and clothing, structure and surface, which was by then prevalent in the architecture of urban residences. In an increasingly restrictive and rule-bound urban world, the villa provided for architects as well as patrons a sphere of liberty, or even, on occasion, libertinism. This study takes as its primary material a range of facades produced in the “long Renaissance,” mostly in Florence and Rome, sites of the most precocious and influential facade solutions. The major objective of the book is to present a broadly anthropological understanding of the facade as cultural phenomenon, in all its complexity. I seek in the opening chapter to map the relevant conceptual field, an undertaking that necessarily involves forays into material usually excluded from the disciplinary confines of architectural history. This is not just a matter of contriving a methodological or historiographical strategy appropriate to the topic as defined in more expansive terms, but also of engaging with the almost complete absence of discursive treatment of the architectural facade in Renaissance treatises on architecture. In a society preoccupied with self-representation, it is indeed remarkable that so conspicuous a vehicle of self-representation as the facade remained for

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2. Villa Lante, Bagnaia, seventeenth-century view. The “main house” of the villa comprises two identical structures separated by a sloping section of garden with diagonal ramps.

the most part implicit, as it were below the surface of discourse about architecture, as crystallized in treatise literature. On the other hand, the built work of certain architects embodies a self-conscious resistance to the separation of interior and exterior central in the idea of facade. Immanent in some design projects, indeed, is a conception of architecture that presupposes, as a central axiom, the transparency of a building, making the interior legible on the outer skin. The house front as index becomes a matter of principle, then, while the paradox emerges that the facade and its critique belong to the same historical moment. From a late twentieth-century perspective, such a paradox raises the issue of the ambiguous place of Renaissance architecture in the genealogy of modernism, in which it may equally register as a pioneer phase or a model to be overcome. Throughout the book, further, I appeal to discourse beyond the specific domain of architecture, and to a rich array of conceptions and formulations relevant to the issues about which architectural writers proved so laconic. In scholarship on the Renaissance environment, indeed, there has previously

INTRODUCTION

9

been remarkably little intersection between architectural and cultural history, even when the terms of the discourse seemed to require it.31 In Chapter 2, I explore the spatial as well as interpersonal relations and conditions indicated in one of the most celebrated tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Boccaccio does not refer to “the facade” as such, but his text provides evidence of styles of conceptualization available in fourteenth-century Florentine literate culture, that is, among lay circles who both prized the Decameron and were interested in the ordering and enhancement of their domestic environment. The link between the latter and a highly wrought literary work is obviously indirect, but the very slippage between these two domains of cultural production compels a confrontation with the issue of the larger epistemological regime in which both occur. The history of facade architecture is part of a larger architectural history that is too well known to require retelling here. Nevertheless, while developing issues raised in the opening chapters, Chapters 3 to 10 engage these issues in relation to specific cases and historical processes. Proceeding roughly in chronological sequence, these chapters address the genealogy, inflections, and diffusion of the secular facade as a catalyst and condition for a radically new kind of urban environment and new conceptions of urban design. Thanks to the pioneering research of David Friedman, we know that the facade, in this sense, had a beginning, emerging in Florence in the fourteenth century.32 At least implicitly, the basic issues in facade design were framed long before various major architects of the fifteenth and especially sixteenth centuries expended remarkable inventiveness and skill in the elaboration of diverse models. What changed, needless to say, was the self-consciousness with which such architects approached their task. This resulted especially from the engagement with the doctrine of Vitruvius, which not only did not provide models for facade design, but also, as we will see, suggested an approach to design that rejected the very idea of the facade. In Chapters 3 to 5 I discuss the emergence and diffusion of facade architecture in late-medieval and early Renaissance Florence, noting the incidence of remarkably disparate approaches to facade design. The possible ideological resonance of diverse architectural idioms is an important theme of these discussions, along with the general intellectual or rather epistemological context. In particular, I devote a chapter to each of the two great pioneers of the new architecture, Brunelleschi and Alberti, one the upholder of an architectural grammar, the other of a rhetorical architecture. Much of the succeeding history of Western architecture can indeed be found, in nuce, in the opposition of the design approaches of these two innovators. From Florence the discussion moves to Urbino, site of especially audacious experiments in the design and furnishing of a palatial residence. In Chapter 6 I consider the explorations of perspective drawing associated with the court of Urbino and manifested in the decorations and even architecture of the ducal palace itself. I explore the tension between new forms of projective representa-

10


tion using the technique of one-point perspective, implying or showing the recession of space beyond a given base plane (typically, the picture surface), and an interest in the evocation, emphasized by ancient writers, of material objects thrust forward from a base plane. The latter is inherent especially in various kinds of portraiture, linking the literal representation of an individual human subject and his or her metaphorical representation through emblematic and even architectural means. This leads to the idea of buildings as endowed with subjectivity, as quasi-agents rather than mere backdrop in the social drama, in contrast to standard conceptions of the place of scenography in Renaissance culture. Finally, the metaphoric association of architecture and human subjectivity leads to a conspicuous case of their metonymic deployment, that is, in contiguity: by way of a discussion of the issues arising or implicit in debates about the installation of Michelangelo’s David in Florence, I consider the relevance for facade design of the emergence of colossal statuary in the Renaissance. Two chapters examine developments in Rome, site of especially important associations of colossal statuary and architectural objects. In Chapter 7 I consider a single facade in the newly founded court enclave. Bramante’s design for the Palazzo Caprini is of exceptional paradigmatic importance in later palace design, not least for its semiotic charge. In particular, it constitutes a remarkably self-conscious and self-reflexive projection of an architecture of binary contrast, conjuring dichotomies, notably that between nature and culture, central in the epistemological regime of the Renaissance, though often subjected, in the course of the sixteenth century, to witty and playful elision. In Chapter 8 I turn to the setting of the Palazzo Caprini, detailing the unplanned and unforeseen evolution of the court enclave around a pioneer parade street. In c. 1500 to 1527 this district became an incubator for an especially diverse and elaborate set of facades, creating the conditions for an enlarged conception of the architectural facade. This leads to the issue of the social and ideological implications of facade types chosen by different kinds of patrons for different kinds of site and setting. The emphasis is on tissues of alliance and rivalry rather than, as is all too common, on the determination of taste by a dominant court or other center of authority. The concluding chapter presents a drastic change of topographic and, at first sight, conceptual focus. A major thesis of the book is the significance of facade architecture in the elaboration of formal and logical schemata of profound importance in the self-representation and self-comprehension of the elites of Renaissance Florence and especially Rome. In the course of the sixteenth century, facade architecture lost the logical and semiotic complexity apparent in the Rome of Bramante and Raphael. Crucial themes of the facade architecture of that remarkable epoch reemerged, however, in the work of Andrea Palladio, less significantly in Palladio’s polite adaptations of facade types than in expansive, indeed rural, architectural projects. To a great extent this was a matter of the logic of architectural archetypes (or of architecture and

INTRODUCTION

11

its “natural” setting or substrate), rather than of formal echoes; a crucial intermediary role was played by garden design and by studies of complex, tiered structures of antiquity. In this way Palladio achieved the three dimensional material realization of ideas earlier expressed mainly at the level of metaphor and/or through the resources of myth and ancient legend. Expression gave way to embodiment, launching a seemingly most rational and inevitable form of architectural classicism on its remarkable career as a marker of status and authority throughout much of the Western world, often as the “acceptable face” of colonial power and exploitation. Palladianism indeed is not so much an architecture of facades, but architecture as facade. This more expansive sense of the term leads the discussion far beyond the limits that architecture – as defined in the early modern period – seeks to set on its own expressive means and capacities. It returns attention, however, to crucial tensions within architecture, notably between the claim to inherent signifying codes and protocols, and the accommodation of heterogeneous elements and discourse arising within, and referring to, a world of social and cultural contestation far removed from the hierarchical certainties so often and so eagerly associated with the Renaissance.

CHAPTER ONE

THE FORKED ROAD TO MODERNITY AMBIGUITIES OF THE RENAISSANCE FACADE

PRELUDE The architectural facade was a crucial feature of the early modern transformation of social space and of the emergence, concomitantly, of new media and vehicles of communication and prescription. The architectural treatise, in particular, developed as a genre of printed book.1 We look in vain in this literature, however, for explicit reflection on the concept of “facade,” for all its resonances with themes and concerns in other cultural domains and genres of literary production.2 How can we explain this discrepancy between what we read and what we see?3 To a degree, the transition to a world of facades was so complete that the facade’s very ubiquity made it conceptually unremarkable, while contention developed, or at least found articulation, around other design elements, notably the vocabulary of classicism. But explanations in terms, say, of the collective unconscious of the period must account for the emergence in the Renaissance of fashions in architecture, implying conscious decisions on the part of both patrons and architects. In particular, the design work of certain leading architects betrays resistance, if not opposition, to facade architecture, as a threat not only to the integrality of a specific building, but also to the legitimizing basis of the nascent discipline of “Architecture” itself. Crucial shifts in practice outstripped, further, not only the theoretical resources of the period, but even, to a degree, linguistic usage. Indeed, the semantic field and connotations of the familiar term “facade” (facciata, faccia) have undergone a notable evolution since the Renaissance.4 The purpose of this chapter, accordingly, is to map the complex conceptual terrain in which the notion of facade is located, to explore its genealogy, and to dispel the usual nonchalance in the use of the term. 12

THE FORKED ROAD TO MODERNITY

13

THE FACADE AS COMPOSITION In contrast to the relatively fluid space of a typical medieval house, Renaissance house facades presented a relatively even, bounded, and rectilinear surface amenable to the rational, proportional design then coming into fashion.5 Deceptively simple, the conception of the facade as architectural composition was hard-won, emerging in an urban environment in which selfrepresentation was secured through signage, notably the display of heraldic insignia that strictly have no place in the humanist conception of architecture. Visibility and legibility were crucial: from the fourteenth century, especially in Florence, the emphasis on the view from the outside implicitly reconceptualized residential facades as belonging to public space and to the public cognitive domain, rather than simply forming part of the physical envelope of a house.6 The demand for facade architecture in residential projects stimulated wider use of elevation drawings, which further fostered the autonomy of facades, though not yet from one another, so strong was the concern with solidarity in the late-medieval Florentine elite.7 In contrast, section drawings, developed much later, demonstrate the relationship of exterior and interior, as do models.8 Indeed, Leon Battista Alberti’s advice to architects to use a model, in addition to drawings, indicates a commitment to methods of representation ensuring an integrated, three-dimensional design.9 The genie, however, was out of the bottle. As a tool of architectural representation for architects to work with, the elevation drawing also provided a demarcated surface to work on. On this ground, different kinds of articulation and enrichment were possible: some were optional, like variation in surface treatment or the introduction of stringcourses, and some inevitable, like doors and windows.10 As Sebastiano Serlio noted, however, the distribution of apertures often had less to do with the provision of light and air to the interior, than with exterior effects of patterning and proportion, or the projection of symbolic values.11 As necessary elements of a facade, nevertheless, doors and windows seem to constitute “natural” signifiers, establishing the ambiguous logic not only of apertures, but also of the facade in general. If an elevation drawing is a representation of a particular facade, a facade may itself constitute a ground of representation, or at least elaboration, through the inscription of graphic elements. Indeed, the sgraffito ornament fashionable in Florence and elsewhere from the mid-fourteenth century involved a kind of drawing on the facade itself, however simple at first. The association of facade drawing and drawing on a facade was perhaps a factor in the proliferation of decoration that would inevitably conflict with strictly architectural criteria, and even unsettle newly established protocols of architectural design.12

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3. Palazzo Medici, Florence. Exterior showing facade on Via Larga (Cavour) on right.

REPRESENTATION AND IDENTITY: THE PLACE(S) OF HERALDRY The earliest known elevation drawing of a private residence includes the owner’s coat of arms. Throughout medieval Europe heraldic insignia appeared on buildings, as on other possessions, to identify ownership and assert social status and allegiance. Heraldry was a conspicuous feature of grander houses, especially castles and other buildings associated, like heraldry itself, with warfare or its ludic analogue, chivalry.13 Such practices found new sites and styles of display in the rapidly evolving visual culture of the Renaissance. With the emergence of the new-style facade, the aesthetically or “architecturally” appropriate placing of coats of arms inevitably became an issue, especially with the introduction of classical schemata. Heraldic insignia appear on


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4. Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, facade. The three orders of pilasters are clearly visible against the drafted masonry. The Rucellai arms appear as if affixed to the wall above the windows in the bays of the piano nobile above the two doors.

facades in two ways, exemplified by the Palazzi Medici and Rucellai (Figs. 3,4): a prominent unique coat of arms and crest, cut in stone but represented as if affixed to the wall surface, contrasts with the integration of heraldic or emblematic motifs into the architectural ornament. In the latter case, the redundant treatment of insignia as multiples is common, often extending into a palace, for example, on column and console capitals or in the frieze zones of interior courtyards.14 The result is a fusion of signage and architecture, involving at best a delicately balanced reconciliation of distinct traditions of self-representation and sources of prestige, one medieval and nonarchitectural, the other dependent on the study of ancient architecture and architectural ornament.

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THE FACADE AS SCREEN: BETWEEN TECTONICS AND RHETORIC The Rucellai facade is a masonry skin, an architectural supplement cladding an older, heterogeneous built fabric (Fig. 4). Giovanni Rucellai’s lavish remodeling of his family compound, to Alberti’s highly innovative design, remained without followers in Florence itself, where older patterns of consensualism in elite residential architecture proved persistent. In important respects it was typical of new trends, however, notably in creating the effect of a unified and up-to-date palace and dramatizing a separation, on a horizontal axis, between domestic space and the wider environment. It also exhibits the vertical structuring of interior space, not only by means of lines of windows, but also through a sophisticated architectural articulation that suggests a hierarchical ranking, especially of the middle floor over the ground floor.15 Though the formal means differ, the effect of hierarchical stucturing is quite typical of Renaissance facades, though rarely as a transparent representation of social structure within the household. The rise of the facade accompanied the decline of facade porticoes and loggias, structures intermediate between house and street that served prominent families as prestigious and conspicuous sites of gathering and celebration (ironically, the famous Rucellai Loggia was one of the last to be built), not least on the occasion of bethrothals or weddings. By setting a more precise boundary between house and street, the new-style facade screened a space defined, to a degree, as the domain of women.16 Not coincidentally, this was a period of the growing seclusion and restriction of women within a domestic, “private” sphere.17 As an opaque screen, a facade carries or even embodies mimetic and/or symbolic representation (C. S. Peirce’s “icon” and “symbol”); at its most transparent, it is a guileless index of interior space.18 As we saw, most facades exist somewhere on the spectrum between these extremes, but the disjunction of index and screen informs rival conceptions not only of a well-designed building but also of the art of architecture itself, as either the socially motivated projection of rhetorical and representational concerns, or the embodiment of universal, transcendently grounded values.19 The unresolved oscillation between these positions is a leitmotif of Renaissance architecture and even architectural theory. Most notably, in his great architectural treatise, the De re aedificatoria (written in the 1440s and 1450s), Leon Battista Alberti formulated the famous distinction between beauty and ornament, marking the entrance into architectural discourse of the wider issue, pondered by Plato and Aristotle, of the relationship of philosophy and rhetoric.20

THE ROMAN HOUSE: ITINERARY AND REPRESENTATION Alberti’s place in the history of the facade is no less ambiguous than the topic itself. The elaboration of thresholds, not least through assertive facades, informs his work as architect, even when not required by the circumstances. In


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his treatise, however, written before his emergence as architect, he neglects the facade as a crucial task in residential design; even if he stresses the role of architecture as a vehicle of representation and rhetoric. He scrupulously avoids using the Latin word facies in the architectural sense of the Italian faccia, let alone facciata; instead by stressing the etymological derivation of facies from facere (“to make”), he associates it with the Latin term factura, the overall aspect or shape of something. In contrast, as in Alberti’s own Italian usage, faccia and facciata refer to a part of a larger whole. In crucial respects, Alberti’s treatise betrays an especially close reliance on the ancient inheritance, in particular Vitruvius’s De architectura, the sole architectural treatise to survive from antiquity. Vitruvius bequeathed an inconsistent model of architectural self-representation to Renaissance readers. Certainly he dwells on the visual effectiveness appropriate to temples, though this is largely effected through conspicuous siting.21 He “leaves no clue,” however, “to the design of a [residential] facade.”22 His account of private houses, for all the focus on the residences of public men, is essentially limited to the distribution of interior space and the articulation of an elaborately coded movement to increasingly private space, through the subordinate domus to the dominus.23 Vitruvius’s relative neglect, then, of the entrance front of a house is entirely consistent with his emphasis on the entrance’s spatial and social distance from the principal reception areas and the presence of the master. In the Renaissance, however, the recognizable extant Roman remains did not include residences of the spreading, single-story domus type. However keen to emulate antiquity in their designs for residential facades, architects were constrained to seek inspiration in buildings that, though certainly ancient, were not residences or, if they were residences, were not ancient.24 We should not exaggerate the importance of the study and emulation of antiquity in Renaissance architecture, especially as regards the facade. As we will see, crucial aspects of the early modern facade preceded and even informed humanist efforts to revive the architecture, rhetoric, or other dimensions of ancient Roman civilization. The excessive emphasis on Vitruvius as guide and model, or even antimodel, has distorted the study of Renaissance architecture in another way. In general, the sources and cultural associations of facade architecture, some of which I noted previously, were highly heterogeneous and diverse in character, and created the preconditions for the variety distinguishing Renaissance facade design. Renaissance architectural literature of the period, no less than modern scholarship, largely ignores this phenomenon.

THE AGONISTIC FACADE: FACING OFF IN THE COURT ENCLAVE The phenomenon of the architectural facade, though established long before mannerism, nevertheless enters a new phase in the early sixteenth century, when mannerist conceptions assert themselves at the expense of humanist

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ideals of harmonious integration. In spite of certain well-known utopic imaginings, the early modern city was a place of spatial fragmentation.25 By demarcating domestic space and dramatizing its edge, the facade was symptomatic of – and helped produce – an emerging tendency to segregation in social space, typified most notably by “noble quarters,” single class enclaves of often frankly representative architecture, like the Genoese Strada Nuova. Shifts in settlement patterns and the marking of topographical boundaries, further, resonated with shifts in interpersonal communication, not least a growing formalization of conduct.26 In the long view, the give-and-take of republican polities gave way to an authoritarian stillness in monarchic or at least relatively centralized regimes. The architectural facade had emerged in a late-medieval city-state in which the concern with civic and class solidarity was especially powerful. The cockpit of a new phase of development was the highly competitive and often ostentatious court culture of sixteenth-century Rome, in which certain thoroughfares provided an appropriately magnificent stage for the choreography of power. On such streets, the remarkable corps of architects present in early sixteenth-century Rome created facade architecture that in its formal abundance and contrasts produced an image in stone and stucco of the competitiveness and self-promotion of court culture.27 At the same time, other patrons chose architectural solutions evocative of self-restraint or shared values and aspirations. A debate was under way, but the facades “spoke,” not the architects.

TRIUMPHAL ARCHITECTURE: SYNTAX AND SCHEMA As a montage of heterogeneous elements, including heraldic and other motifs of diverse derivation, the typical facade nevertheless drew on a conspicuously classical model of incorporation, the Roman triumphal arch. This was readily accessible: many arches survived in good condition in Rome and elsewhere, and their planimetric simplicity made them easier to study than many ancient building types.28 At the Tempio Malatestiano (Fig. 5), Alberti inaugurated the long career of the triumphal arch theme as a ubiquitous organizing schema of church facades. Though such formal citation is rare in classicizing palace facades, many echo the combinative aspect of the most famous triumphal arches (notably the Arch of Constantine, with its assemblage of new and reused sculptural material).29 In an era of political spectacle and the conscious manipulation of the settings of public ceremony, the exclusively rhetorical function of the Roman triumphal arch was directly pertinent. Elaborate temporary triumphal arches were conspicuous in the decor contrived to glorify the protagonists of processions through or into cities, often recalling the rituals for which ancient arches had been built. Sometimes printed leaflets or, more rarely, the ornament on


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5. Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini, facade. Specific decorative elements are closely modeled on the nearby Arch of Augustus, though this has only a single bay.

actual palace facades created a more lasting record.30 Finally, the rhetorical character and formal richness of the triumphal arch often enlivened the scenery devised for the productions of classical or classicizing drama popular at many Renaissance courts.31 In the Renaissance, in general, the theatralization of conduct, especially at court, accompanied diverse visual and/or spatial manifestations of a prevalent “triumphalism.”32 Recent scholarship has identified bricolage, stimulated especially by the imitation of triumphal arches, as a crucial aspect of Renaissance architectural culture, sometimes on the basis of perceived precedent in ancient art.33 While the use of spolia is generally connected with medieval appropriations of ancient Roman sculptural or architectural material, Serlio, for one, clearly insists on its character as a specifically ancient practice.34 Closely related ideas are already articulated by Alberti, though in a text not primarily concerned with architecture. He cites mosaic (or inlay) – specifically the creation of a new work out of the shards of past constructions – as a metaphor for the predicament of the humanist artist or writer confronted with the splendid, if fragmented, accomplishments of the ancients; there is no question of invention ex novo, but only of the assemblage of elements mined from what already exists.35 In the De re aedificatoria, on the other hand, Alberti articulates an influential organic conceptualization of built structure, as skeletal bones clothed with flesh and skin, that leaves little space for assemblage.36

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FRAMES AND MEANING Devoid of medieval-style porticoes, Renaissance palace fronts deploy columns or pilasters, not for structural reasons, but as framing and/or articulating devices, in association with other kinds of “ornament.” This raises the issue of the role of the classical orders in the production of meaning, for if they form a code valid across various contexts and settings, it follows that a facade embellished with the orders accepts meaning from them. Architectural meaning in general is often relational, however: “buildings alone do not normally provide a basis for interpretation of their possible meanings.”37 Instead, meaning is often a matter of diverse, overlapping kinds of framing, both literal and metaphorical, that do not halt at the edge of a building.38 In sixteenth-century visual culture, indeed, framing motifs were often occasions for “various kinds of ironicization and trespass.”39 For all its prestigious connotations, moreover, architectural classicism required supplements, like heraldry or inscriptions, to anchor and communicate specific meaning within the space of a Renaissance facade.40 The “architectural purity” of the early Renaissance, to quote Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, was achieved at the cost of a semiotic dimension, for which the vocabulary of the orders provided inadequate compensation; this in part explains the lure of the rich Roman visual culture displayed by the ruins, though missing from Vitruvius’s “austere” pages.41 Architectural classicism, indeed, was less equipped to support signification than to overwhelm it through the sheer excess of elements required by the code, but irrelevant to specific rhetorical or expressive purposes, which could be better fulfilled by nonclassical and/or nonarchitectural elements. Probably, however, when heraldic or emblematic material was present in an all’antica architectural facade, the one did not escape contamination by the other, especially given the symbolic resonances of such architectural elements as the column.42 The facade, then, is a site of the confluence of disparate material, involving the addition of extraneous material to an architectural language distinguished by a high degree of abstractness (Weil-Garris Brandt’s term), and defined by the very exclusion of elements that the dusty world of social expectations and demands forced it to incorporate. The ultimately Vitruvian idea of an invisible, rational system of coordinates beneath the visible, material building was too powerful to allow conscious, still less theoretical, registration of this crisis of meaning. In Sebastiano Serlio’s remarkable formulation: “Nor is there any difference between a transparent body and a solid body, any more than there would be in seeing the skeleton of a dead body without the flesh upon it and seeing the same body alive with its flesh.”43 Serlio himself published facade designs that effectively illustrate this principle; they have little relation to actual buildings (Fig. 6).


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6. Sebastiano Serlio, palace elevation of Venetian type and in the Corinthian style, 1537. The deep porticoes inserted in to the body of the house make the latter’s geometrical structure clearly visible.

SERLIO AND THE LIMITS OF ARCHITECTURE Nevertheless, no Renaissance architectural writer was more attentive to the issue of the facade than Serlio, who planned to publish a series of model facades for different building types, though his manuscript languished in obscurity for four centuries.44 In Serlio’s published material, however, we occasionally encounter unusually frank recognition of the tensions confronted by architects working in a classical idiom, especially in relation to the

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design of facades. In diverse contexts Serlio represents the codes of classical architecture as strangely vulnerable, indeed threatened by contemporary fashions. He notes with dismay the current fashion for facades decorated with frescoed imagery, and warns against certain kinds of illusionism that efface the solidity of the wall, making it seem “transparent.” In the urban environment – Serlio is evidently thinking of the diffusion of painted facades, often decorated with martial scenes, in the elegant quarters of Rome – painting and architecture do battle, and the facade serves both as the field and prize of battle.45 In the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) appears a description of a literally transparent, therefore windowless temple entirely fabricated of crystal except for its golden door.46 However eccentric in this case, such emphasis on the portal was quite characteristic of Cinquecento practice.47 Serlio’s Libro extraordinario (1551), illustrating a number of largely visionary designs for portals (Figs. 7,8), was later included in “complete” editions of the treatise as the sixth book, usurping the place of Serlio’s most complete account of facade architecture.48 Apparently designed for rural or at least suburban locations, these portals could also serve as models for the entrance of a palace. In any case, the architectural enrichment of a portal accords less with Vitruvius’s treatment of thresholds (ianuae) in a house, lacking special prescriptions for the architectural elaboration of the main entrance, than with his emphasis on the central portal of a fictive palace in a theater set.49 It is symptomatic of Renaissance attitudes that Alberti specifically recommends the use of a temple pediment motif to ennoble a house entrance.50 This explicit transfer of a prominent design element from the religious to the domestic domain miniaturizes it and drains it of even residual functional character, turning architecture into sign. Serlio’s portals, however, are far from the letter or spirit of orthodox Vitruvianism, as is clear from his own apology for taking liberties with the principles of architectural classicism. In a less than flattering allusion to the forested landscape of Fontainebleau and to the French royal court that frequently resided there, Serlio excuses his lapse from orthodoxy by reference to the rough territory in which he found himself, inhabited by savage beasts rather than by men.51 He claims that his departures from Vitruvian precept are applied to an underlying Vitruvian configuration that remains inviolate, capable of restoration by the simple removal of offensive motifs. Serlio’s telling characterization of the latter as a “mask” implies a dual conception of architecture: as an ideal, inherent system, or formed of the combination or intermingling of architecture and supplemental, nonarchitectural elements.52 The latter’s validity, if any, could only possibly depend on social acceptance, that is, on the part of a “public” willing to countenance heretical departures from Vitruvian standards of taste in order to satisfy more pressing concerns. In an earlier text, Serlio had recognized the necessary interplay of natural material and human artifice in architecture, but his portals conjure with vehemence the disruptive, even destructive impact of the wilderness through the inclusion into architecture of rough rocks and other material left in its “natural


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7. Sebastiano Serlio, design for portal from the Extraordinario libro, 1551. This portal contains no less than five framed fields for the display of verbal or iconic signs. The brackets that support the pediment emphasize its character as an architectural sign.

state.” The most extreme of the portals, entitled “the bestial order” (Fig. 8), transforms masses of uncut rock, inserted violently into a conventional architectural configuration, into grimacing monstrous heads.53 The most prevalent motif that disturbs the Vitruvian tectonics of these portals, however, is not redolent of the dark powers of the northern forest, but rather of a concern for emphatic self-representation typical of the most refined and sophisticated urban milieus. On almost every portal the integrity and/or primacy of the major classical elements is compromised by the insertion of cartouches for the display of different kinds of signage identifying and celebrating the prospective owner and his lineage.54

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8. Sebastiano Serlio, design for portal from the Extraordinario libro, 1551. In the “bestial order,” as Serlio calls it, the opposition of rough stone and elegant craft is carried to an extreme, and the striations of the rock in the spandrels suggest monstrous faces.

In Serlio’s examples, the cartouches are left blank, prompting the viewer to imagine, first of all, traditional forms of self-identification and representation, like coats of arms and other heraldic signs. By reason of their proliferation in diverse shape and position, however, the cartouches seem designed to accommodate the growing fashion for nonheraldic, broadly emblematic figurative material, notably imprese or “devices” associated with the exploits and ambitions of a specific individual, thereby indeed tacitly distinguishing such an individual from his or her lineage. A further challenge to architectural classicism came from “within.” A key development of the sixteenth century was the emergence of the giant order,


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9. Palazzo dei Conservatori, facade, Campidoglio, Rome. The building’s double program is expressed through the contrast of the colossal pilaster order – in an orthodox Corinthian manner – and the highly unorthodox Ionic columns of the ground floor. The former relate to the zone of governmental reason, centered on the rooms on the upper floor; the latter front the offices of Roman trade guilds (e.g., the butchers occupied the third from the right).

the deployment of columns or pilasters rising through multiple stories, often contrasting with an order at a different scale. For Serlio, the giant order is a natural result of the reuse of ancient material in new contexts, that is, the literal incorporation of architecture’s own mighty past into its present.55 Such insertion into new buildings of relics (spoglie) of a superseded civilization dissolves their original tectonic or ornamental function(s) and frees them for new expressive purposes straining the resources of a more orthodox, Vitruvian classicism. Indeed, Lionello Puppi argues that the giant order is an affront to the harmonious system of architectural classicism, in which the orders are combined by superimposition.56 Instead, the giant order involves a violent clash of humanist proportion and posthumanist disproportion that lent itself to the representation of an evolving absolutism, even if the architecture of the Campidoglio (Fig. 9), a crucial paradigm in this development, was designed with very different concerns in view.57

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ARCHITECTURAL ASSEMBLAGE AND THE EMBLEMATIC TURN In his “extraordinary” portals Serlio contrived an extreme, possibly ironic, version of architectural assemblage. Assemblage was a key procedure in other cultural domains (Fig. 10); thus by the end of the fifteenth century, the craft of marquetry (intarsia) had become an important branch of the representational arts.58 Renaissance antiquarians knew that the ancient term for inlay work was emblema, a term that soon came to denote, as it still does, a specific combination or inlay of text and image, either a binary combination of a “picture” and motto, or a more expansive type including a stanza of verse.59 Alberti himself had contributed to the growing fashion for emblems, most obviously through his personal device of the winged eye, accompanied by a

10. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, facade. The effect of regularity and homogeneity distinguishes this from the Palazzo Medici. However, the designer of the third story, Il Cronaca, was known for his “chronicle style,” involving the montage, rather than integration, of prestigous classical elements.


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11. Matteo de’ Pasti, medallion, reverse. Leon Battista Alberti’s impresa or device of the winged eye (a portrait of Alberti appears on the obverse).

cryptic motto (Fig. 11).60 We do not know what term Alberti might have used to characterize his device; in his writings concerned with symbolic images, like those on signet rings, he does not use the term “emblem.”61 Already by the second half of the fifteenth century, the term that became standard for such composite signs was impresa, though for some time the terminology remained fluid in response to a markedly dynamic and varied cultural phenomenon. It was only in the mid sixteenth century that theorists legislated strict distinctions between imprese and emblems, contrasting the individual reference of the impresa with the more general, often moralizing emblem. The pioneering author of reflections on imprese was Paolo Giovio, who identified the origin of the fashion for this mode of self-advertisement in the impact on Italian onlookers of the chivalrous devices borne by knights in the invading French army of 1494.62 The fashion was of course much older, but the chivalric connotations of imprese were indeed a significant part of their appeal in the increasingly stratified society of sixteenth-century Italy, dominated by foreign nations, France and Spain, in which traditional aristocracies retained enormous importance, not least as cultural models. This was the world Serlio encountered in northern France. Imprese were of course related to the much older visual system of heraldry, a fixed and multigenerational code or set of codes that supplied the context within and against which the impresa emerged as an identifying sign of limited and often temporary reference.63 Sometimes a chivalric device was contrived specifically for a single joust or some other courtly occasion and did not outlive

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it. Indeed, literary explications of imprese, as of triumphal processions, were typically intended to give a more enduring cast to ephemeral display and to anchor and restrain otherwise fluid and provisional, even promiscuous, signifiers. At the same time, they overlapped and even occasionally merged with the equally normative conduct literature that was so prominent a feature of sixteenth-century culture. As Renaissance theorists recognized, inscriptions and figurative emblems could have a prominent place in architecture; this was consistent with orthodox design procedures, though in the sixteenth century unorthodox means of combination and contamination came into use.64 Several of the most admired examples both of ancient and Renaissance architectural classicism carried inscriptions and devices (only later, notably in French classicism, would the control of inscriptions and similar signage become a conscious concern).65 But Serlio’s conflicted presentation of his portal designs may already betray a recognition of the challenge exerted by social rivalries to the supposedly transcendent values imbuing classicism, and emphasized by Vitruvius himself.66 As such it expressed ambiguities present in facade design from the beginning, though intensified with the application of the architectural orders. Long before the mid-sixteenth-century codification of symbolic systems, emblematic devices appear on facades alongside heraldry.67 The development of the architectural facade belongs, then, within a context of the evolution of devices and fashions of self-representation in general, including the impresa. Whether or not it carries specific imprese or emblematic material, moreover, the palace facade, characteristically an assemblage, structurally resembles the impresa and sometimes shares its inherent appeal to obscure learning and “inside” knowledge.68 The fundamental principle of the impresa, however, is highly accessible: the meaning of its elements is explicitly relational, joining elements in different media and often derived from heterogeneous sources. Meaning arises in a process of interpretation that is open-ended and even ludic, responsive to allusions and cues that invite further reflection, rather than enforcing a single, universally binding construal. In principle, further, any item in the phenomenal world is potentially eligible for inclusion in the interpretive game through the literal or implicit addition of a motto. On the model of the “linguistic turn” of the later twentieth century, I propose to employ the notion of an “emblematic turn” to characterize the cultural prism, only partly conscious, through which contemporaries apprehended not only literal, badge-like devices within cartouches and other framing elements, as illustrated in Serlio’s portal designs.69 In an especially influential case, the elements placed into formal contrast conjure the fundamental components of architecture itself (Fig. 12).70 Alberti and other theorists define architecture as created out of the skilled transformation of natural material in obedience to a process of conceptualization and design posited as prior to, and determining, the construction phase. The


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12. Palazzo Caprini, engraved by Antonio (Antoine) Lafréry, 1549. The contrast of form and character of the (visible) floors is clearly apparent. Lafréry attributes the palace to Raphael and notes that it is constructed of brick.

relationship of material and building is temporal, therefore, since the latter arises out of the processing, that is, “de-naturing,” of the former. Already in the mid fifteenth century, however, we encounter architecture composed out of spatially contiguous architectural and nonarchitectural elements or, indeed, out of architecture and its “Others” – notably more or less “wild” natural substance, or indeed “Nature” as such.71 The elaboration in theory and practice, therefore, of a coherent code and system of architectural classicism, marked and even defined by the exclusivist aspect of any classical system, coincided with the phenomenon of the incorporation into architecture of material defined by its position outside architecture, which it nevertheless itself defines.

BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND PHYSIOGNOMY In the Renaissance, then, the limits of architectural classicism as a signifying system were crucial in the development of facade architecture. So far I have focused on the apparatus, architectural and nonarchitectural, enabling a facade to convey more or less specific messages within a more or less receptive urban environment. As itself a signifier, however, a facade can be seen as a representative or even surrogate of the individual or family whose arms or devices it bears.72

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The Renaissance was notoriously a period of intense concern with the presentation and evocation of the individual subject through various kinds of portraiture.73 These extended from the visual counterfeiting of physical features – the literal portrait – to the separate or associated evocation of personal qualities through other means, not least through devices. The emblematic “moral portrait,” in Daniel Russell’s phrase, was indebted to the Roman and humanist enthusiasm for medals, which typically display distinct forms of visual representation, along with textual elements, on each side.74 While satisfying an interest in at least apparent self-revelation, the emblematic portrait relied on a medium calculated to effect concealment and dissimulation. In Renaissance culture, after all, dissimulation was not only a social strategy, but also valued and even fashionable in itself; as Erasmus put it, whatever was most worth having, whether precious stones or information, had to be mined from hidden depths.75 Yet the facade of a building endowed with subjectivity of a kind, might, like a human visage or face, inspire powerful desire. Architectural patronage has never been entirely a rational matter.76

VITRUVIUS, DE ARCHITECTO: TRANSPARENCY AND PROFESSIONALISM Self-revelation is an important theme in Vitruvius’s De architectura, as well as – perhaps especially – a motive for writing. It arises in the context of extensive prescriptions concerning the conduct and self-presentation of an architect in his professional activity, notably in his dealings with actual or potential clients.77 By his own admission an unprepossessing, uncharismatic man, Vitruvius laments the success of forms of self-promotion that are beyond his reach. He sums them up in the extraordinary story of the bold and handsome Dinocrates, who displayed his own naked body – paradoxically, an apparent lack of “facade,” though evoking the persona of Hercules – in his cunningly seductive approach to Alexander the Great.78 Recoiling from this, Vitruvius dreams of a world of transparency: the ideal man is is like a building through whose windows interior qualities and erudition can be perceived and appreciated without possibility of error.79 Vitruvius insists, then, on the need for an architect to win assent through the sober communication of professional qualifications, and without duplicitous rhetorical devices in attracting the attention and sponsorship of a society’s decision makers. Such emphasis on conduct toward patrons by no means implies that architectural judgment is contingent on social assent; indeed Vitruvius expressly grounds his treatise in the transcendent context of the physical universe. At the same time, he situates the discipline of architecture within the universe of human knowledge, connecting the nature of the discipline to the profile of the architect, for whom, he claims, an encyclopedic culture is a prerequisite.80 Ethical and cognitive dimensions coincide in Vitruvius’s image of the architect.


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The Renaissance reception of Vitruvius’s concern with conduct has been little studied, though it surely contributed to the formation of a cultural milieu marked by the explicit regulation and ordering of domains of human activity and knowledge, and by the appearance of new and extremely successful genres of prescriptive literature. There is an obvious affinity between the Renaissance conduct manual, with its focus on the regulation of the passions and the movements of the body, and the discourse of architecture, especially in view of Vitruvius’s own association of strategies of bodily and architectural self-representation.81

THE BUILDING AS BODY AND THE SUBJECT OF ARCHITECTURE Widely diffused in Renaissance architectural theory and practice, the idea of the human body as the legitimating basis for architectural precept and principle was grounded in Vitruvian prescription. The applications of the body metaphor in the Renaissance, however, wavered between alternate conceptualizations. On the one hand, Vitruvius clearly lays out an anthropometric model of architectural design, grounded in highly abstract, proportional relationships derived from an ideal human figure, and capable of expression in mathematical terms.82 On the other hand, Vitruvius’s references to the literal inclusion of the human body into architecture, as in the famous cases of the caryatids or the Persian portico, spurred and justified the formulation by Renaissance architects and theorists of anthropomorphic metaphor.83 In his Vitruvius edition of 1556, for example, Daniele Barbaro compares the architect to a doctor, laying open the body of a building, as if by dissection, when using techniques of graphic representation proper to architecture.84 Marcantonio Raimondi imagined superimposed orders of caryatids, with male beneath and female above, in the usual places of the Doric and Ionic orders.85 Such anthropomorphic conceptions went far beyond the Roman author’s sober doctrines, but they echoed the growing “empire” of classical rhetoric, in which the “recourse to metaphors of the human body to define qualities of style [was] a cliché.”86 Vitruvius’s body metaphor runs in one direction only; there is no trace in the De architectura of the characterization of human bodies – or “the human body” – in terms of architecture. The Christian scriptures provide, however, a rich and very diverse store of metaphoric transpositions between architecture and the physical and social body, and these were certainly operative in some Renaissance contexts.87 A notable case is the punishment meted out in Dante’s Inferno to thieves: those who failed to respect the property of others lose property rights over their own bodies and suffer dematerialization and transformation, as well as physical invasion by serpents.88 On the other hand, the very prestige in the Renaissance of all’antica architecture and its ordering criteria

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made these available in the efforts of Renaissance artists to characterize human individuals or types, as in the portraits (also representations of character types) studied by Luba Freedman.89 The reversibility of the metaphor inherent in the term “facade” is crucial in its modern sense. By the middle of the sixteenth century there is evidence that the term “facade,” borrowed by architecture from the discourse of the human body, was returning to its original context.90 In the language of and about civil intercourse and interaction, the modern term “facade” describes strategies of dissimulation and self-concealment that require the artificial display or suppression in an individual’s face of telltale marks of interior feeling. Such a correlation between the lack of transparency in the human individual and in the built environment resonates with well-known early modern concerns about the appropriate and/or effective playing of roles and style of conduct. In short, the cultural moment of the facade was also that, more widely, of a range of strategies dedicated to the artful but seemingly natural presentation or projection of the self, indeed the widespread and often systematic exercise of dissimulation.91 Arguably, indeed, identity in the period was constituted in the fluid adaptation to limiting circumstances, not in some underlying essence.92 In its very ambiguity and oscillation between display and dissimulation, then, the facade constituted a token and symptom of incipient modernity. It echoed the Renaissance interest in the reading of human interiority by means of signs and marks on the exterior.93 This culminated in the “science” of physiognomy, and indeed an important early physiognomic text relates the principle of knowing the soul from the body to the knowledge of a man’s status gained from observation of his residence.94 There was perhaps, moreover, a shift in the Renaissance theory of the expressions from the gestures and movement of the whole body to an emphasis specifically on the face.95 Even in the apparently self-revelatory genre of portraiture, however, there were celebrated cases of self-concealment and opacity.96 And if on occasion a building could be a portrait of its occupant, at least by the mid sixteenth century portraits of buildings were beginning to find a market in publications of various kinds, from treatises to single sheets.97 Thus detached from its material context (if one had existed), a facade was eminently susceptible of transfer into new topographic contexts or imagined scenographies, in defiance of the conventional association of portraiture with individualism.

VIRTUES OF TRANSPARENCY; ADVANTAGES OF OPACITY According to Peter Burke, Italy was a “theater culture,” a “land of facades.”98 He draws a contrast with a northern “sincerity culture,” with its often religiously motivated commitment to plain speaking, a communication stripped of rhetorical devices.99 Nevertheless, critical references to social and institutional insincerity are not uncommon in Renaissance Italian culture. By the


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mid fifteenth century, the leading Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini had mounted various lines of attack on “merely” external ritual and self-representation.100 Burke himself notes Giovanni Della Casa’s denunciation of insincere ceremonial in his treatise on manners, the Galateo, written in the early 1550s.101 The princely court was the arena par excellence of the artful presentation or even fashioning of the self, not least through architecture.102 The fashionable theme of metamorphosis – the shifting of external appearance as the interior remains the same – was embodied in ubiquitous imagery derived from Ovid’s poem, while the Homeric tale of the witch Circe enjoyed evidential status.103 In the 1540s the imposition of the Roman Inquisition and other ways of disciplining opinion encouraged the incidence among courtiers of Nicodemism, the strategic concealment of religious heterodoxy, intensifying the gap between private behavior and public morality.104 Literal role-playing was anyway fashionable in a time of intense interest in the staging of ancient drama enhanced by architectural scenery.105 Like an actor on stage, but without remission, a courtier performed on the brightly lit and closely observed stage of the court, his self-consciousness only enhanced by the appearance of conduct manuals.106 In court society, various forms of dissimulation and subterfuge were necessary; this is perhaps the background of Serlio’s idea of an architecture in maschera. Serlio suggests, of course, that the mask in question can be removed at will, revealing an essential architecture. In relation both to architecture and human subjectivity, however, the question arises of an essential identity beyond the masks, for even sincerity may be no more than a mode of self-presentation.

FACE AND PRE-FACE IN RENAISSANCE CULTURE An important trend in recent Renaissance studies has been the rehabilitation of the notion “Renaissance” itself, not simply as part of, but rather, in significant respects, in distinction to, an “early modern” historical era. The old idea of individualism as a defining feature of the Renaissance has also received new currency, though in terms of the definition of an individual subject in terms of diverse roles and masks, appropriate to a given situation, rather than in traditional humanist terms. Pointing out the importance of material surroundings and possessions in the constitution of Renaissance subjects, indeed, Margreta de Grazia notes the contrast with the seventeenth-century or “early modern” ideal of an individual constituted, as it were, from within, in terms of a constant and coherent subjectivity, abstracted from exterior possessions and interests.107 Among the material posessions conferring identity, none is of more importance than a house, often identified with a family or even understood as a surrogate self. While “objective” indicators, like a palace’s size and location,

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unmistakably betray the economic and social status of the owner, a facade may well dissemble, not least in the case of especially non-demonstrative, “plain” exteriors.108 In sixteenth-century residential architecture it is not uncommon to encounter a marked contrast between a stern urban facade and a garden front providing secure opportunities for self-expression.109 A middle term between person and building is supplied by the printed book. In manuscript culture and in early printed books, a colophon, placed at the end of a text, provides information about a book and its author. Such an inconspicuous advertisement rapidly yielded to the title page and/or frontispiece, placed at the beginning of a book and drawing attention to its subject matter and the identity of its author. Through a dedication to a lofty patron, a title page often associates a book with a high-placed guarantor of its quality and social acceptability.110 Typically, it combines a wide range of informational media, from text (often in various typographic forms) to pictorial, architectural, and sculptural imagery; it often includes emblematic devices, among them the mark of the printer concerned, which frequently took the form of a classic impresa, as in the famous dolphin and anchor of Aldus Manutius. An obvious framework for the unified graphic presentation of such disparate material was to hand in the ancient triumphal arch.111 As a place of passage or even entrance, the arch motif – sometimes reduced to an aedicula112 – dramatized the reader’s movement into the space of the text. This was especially the case in works about architecture itself or in the booklets, previously noted, that illustrate the progress of a princely procession through a battery of triumphal arches spaced within a city. Such a correlation of textual and physical space perhaps depended in part on the suggestion in Vitruvius’s De architectura of an analogy between the book and a building, supplementing the better known analogy between the building and the body.113 As we have seen, moreover, the fictive architecture of a frontispiece could both support emblematic material and itself embody emblematic meaning. Indeed, the ambiguity of classical architecture was perhaps nowhere more evident than in the opening of a book. In the Renaissance, further, the preface begins its career as a standard element of a book, whether as a separate entity or in combination with the dedication; it was subsequently taken for granted until subjected to particular critical attention by poststructuralist thinkers.114 The Renaissance preface had no true equivalent in antiquity, for reasons that illustrate the divergence of Renaissance modes of self-presentation from ancient aristocratic practice, or at least ethos, for all the explicit emulation of antiquity. The ideal of the individual male aristocrat in archaic society involves a “total congruence between the external (appearance, strength, reputation, or social status) and the internal (moral virtue, wisdom, ‘innate nobility’).” At least ideally, there is a “smooth, unbroken continuum between a hero’s exterior and his interior.”115 This phenomenon can be traced throughout classical antiquity, and indeed may well characterize medieval chivalric practices, at least before their appro-


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priation in the Renaissance.116 The Renaissance literary preface, however, marks a clear break with antiquity.117 The “assumption of a perfectly intelligible public world,” in which “the most effective speaker is the most transparent speaker … through whom the audience can see directly to the facts,” cannot withstand the tension experienced by Renaissance intellectuals between the requirements of monarchic interests, often framed in transcendent terms, and their own place in a “market culture,” a phrase certainly appropriate to the competitive character of courtly milieus.118 Finally, the early modern preface often presents a literal face to prospective readers, in the form of a portrait of the author, often supported by biographical material, a textual portrait.119

TELLING STORIES: ANTIQUARIANISM, IDEOLOGY, AND NOSTALGIA Literary expressions of an ancient aristocratic culture of transparency resonate, needless to say, with Vitruvius’s architectural and social prescriptions. The profound cultural shifts separating antiquity and the Renaissance, not least in domestic arrangements and practices, notoriously made the study and reconstruction of ancient living patterns very challenging for Renaissance antiquarians and architects. Nevertheless, the approximation of such patterns continued, often as a passionate concern, throughout the Renaissance. Even if the Renaissance did not produce a positive theory of the “facade,” the concept maintained a ghostly, negative existence as the antithesis to a properly rational and integral architecture, crucially located on a trajectory toward a modernity of Cartesian stamp. Crucial in the genealogy of such a modernity is Brunelleschi’s radically abstract approach to architectural design, which on occasion was as close as Renaissance architecture ever came to the Corbusian ideal of the building as bubble.120 In the De re aedificatoria, Alberti famously insists on a design process that yields a unitary project, of a Brunelleschian stamp, fully conceptualized in advance of the construction phase (in sections written later, Alberti’s rhetorical concerns become more marked, in line with his own architectural designs).121 Palace construction boomed under Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent (1468–1492); the palaces built by patrician families, with Lorenzo’s encouragement, combine a consistently unified and rational threedimensional design and homage to Lorenzo’s own main residence, the Palazzo Medici (Fig. 3).122 These palaces drew on “Brunelleschian” models, at a time of high regard for Filippo’s achievement; indeed, a number of major mid-fifteenth-century palaces – including, in a way, the Palazzo Medici – were (incorrectly) attributed to him.123 The obvious references to Roman/antique formal models reflected the ideologically motivated antiquarian enthusiasm of an era in which Lorenzo appropriated and elaborated the myth of the Roman foundation

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of Florence, and its assumed imprint on the city’s subsequent character.124 Among other markedly all’antica architectural projects he perhaps envisaged an ambitious, spreading domus-type residence in Florence itself.125 Whatever the commitment to Brunelleschian consistency, Brunelleschian geometry was generally tempered in palace architecture by an emphasis on the materiality of the stone of which facades were made, as at the Palazzo Strozzi (Fig. 10).126 Further, many prominent fifteenth-century Florentine palace facades (e.g., at the Palazzi Medici and Strozzi) embody a noteworthy disparity between the interior organization of space and the horizontal articulations of the exterior.127 On each floor, the windows are aligned along a stringcourse or horizontal division that suggests the level of the floor itself; in fact, however, the window bases as well as the stringcourse are higher than the floor. This anomaly marks a profound departure from the traditions of Gothic building, which persisted in the domestic architecture of many major Italian centers, where the correspondence of interior and exterior, (i.e., architectural transparency,) was maintained.128 Moreover, Gothic drawing methods, combining elevations and sections, perhaps had some influence on key architects of the “high Renaissance.”129 If so, both Vitruvian and Gothic impulses were operative in later Renaissance design practice, and even, on the level of reflection, in Serlio’s notion of “hidden lines” (linee occulte) informing every part of the design of a building, including its facade (Fig. 6).130 Following the expulsion of the Medici (1494) and the ascendancy of Savonarola, Florentine palace architecture was marked by a dramatic shift to simplicity or even austerity, though construction continued on the Strozzi palace, suggesting it was not found discordant with its changed context.131 Behind the uniformly sober facades of the outgoing fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, however, a wide variety of interiors lay concealed.132 Through its adoption as a marker of pietism and/or republican values (and, later, in the Counter-Reformation), architectural restraint became a kind of rhetoric of the facade. The trend to austerity left the complex Rucellai facade something of an anomaly in Florence. In Rome, however, the treatment of the palace facade as a tightly composed surface of successive horizontal layers, with vertical counteraccents, became a feature of palace architecture. In this respect the Cancelleria facade (Fig. 13) in Rome marks a clear advance, from the point of view of architectural logic, over its presumed Albertian model, for the stringcourses on each floor are doubled, with one “carrying” the windows, and another marking the internal succession of stories.133 In his Palazzo Pandolfini of c.1516 (Fig. 14), bringing Roman ideas to Florence, Raphael uses a pedestal zone to link window balustrades and provide a formal transition between the contrasted planes of the upper and lower wall surfaces.134 In two slightly later Roman palaces, the Florentine Antonio da Sangallo, who came to prominence as Raphael’s student and associate, successively adopted contrasting approaches.135 The Palazzo Baldassini (c.1516) owes its strongly Florentine character to its mas-


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13. Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome. The palace thrusts forth between the Via de’ Pellegrini, on the left, and the oblong piazza opened up in front of the main facade, on the right. The papal arms of the corner are clearly visible, as are the shops on the secondary facade.

sively lofty basement story, topped, high above the street, by the windows of the piano nobile (Fig. 15).136 The roughly contemporary Palazzo Farnese exhibits the latticelike effect of the doubling of horizontal articulating elements, combined with insistent verticals (Fig. 16). This was not a matter of mere aesthetic, still less mannerist, preference; rather the concern was to rescue classical principle.137 Antonio doubtless learned to handle the ambiguity inherent in facade design from Raphael, whose major palace design, the Palazzo Branconio (Fig. 17), draws on a wide range of ancient architectural and decorative models and displays a painter’s sensibility in the elaboration of architectural surfaces.138 Raphael was undoubtedly interested in connecting exterior and interior, but in sophisticated and subtle ways that often exceed, or even disturb, mere spatial correspondence. Antonio, on the other hand, shared Raphael’s passion for antiquity, but hardly his delight in complex surface ornamentation. He was a keen student of Vitruvius, and his independent palace designs bear the mark of his interest in the interior components and layout of the Roman house as indicated, none too clearly, by Vitruvius, but which Antonio himself perhaps understood through the prism of the stern and disciplined private architecture of his native city. Indeed, his solutions would soon influence antiquarian reconstructions of the Roman house.139

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14. Palazzo Pandolfini, Florence. The rusticated portal was intended to be the centerpiece of a coherent facade, half of which was not built above the ground floor.

In accord with his Vitruvian convictions and Florentine background, Antonio da Sangallo subordinated his palace facades to a three-dimensional, consistently proportioned architectural volume.140 The characteristic facadetype is formed of a neutral expanse ordered by the repetition of elements. Ornamentation is restricted to framing elements, such as quoining, emphatic window and portal surrounds, and unusually inventive stringcourses, which perhaps served as a kind of trademark; the portal receives particular emphasis, though without unbalancing the overall effect.141 It is not suprising, then, that in the era of modernism an eminent scholar found in Sangallo’s architecture an anticipation of the integration and transparency envisioned in modernist practice.142

MEMORY AND MONSTERS: THE FACADE AS TERMINUS In the end, however, Sangallo’s facades conform, in their own way, to the contemporary demand for impressive architectural rhetoric in the public realm, in contrast to the Roman domus that Sangallo studied with zeal. We have considered the itinerary through the progessively private spaces of a domus, which


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15. Palazzo Baldassini, Rome. The raking view is necessitated by the narrow street, at least in relation to such an imposing building. The projection of the quoined corner of the palace from the street line is visible, as is the assertive Doric portal in the center of the high ground floor.

was apparent only in the plan. In principle, a similar itinerary existed also within a Renaissance townhouse, in which the growing complexity of interior design, giving dramatic emphasis to movement upward and between levels, marked the transfer of the horizontal processional way of the domus to the vertical order of the typical palace. To a degree, indeed, such an itinerary was located behind the facade, inviting an observer in the street at least to imagine movement from story to story, and from one experiential domain to another. As the sixteenth century progressed, the idea of the designed itinerary gathered ground, fostered not only by the Vitruvian editions and commentaries, but also by ancient descriptions of expansive houses and their grounds

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16. Palazzo Farnese, Rome, facade. The doubled moldings on the upper floors are a significant element of the design of the whole. The floors are distinguished by three different types of aedicula.

by other ancient authors; notably Pliny’s descriptions of his country villas.143 By 1540, the idea of a coherent itinerary, encoded through statuary and other features, had spread from the interior into the garden. Here in an atmosphere often of profound strangeness and exoticism, there were echoes not only of the imaginary world of myth and story, but also of distant territories and peoples, from which unsettling artifacts, plants, and other items were finding their way to Europe.144 As the world expanded and human knowledge pressed against the constricting conventions of learning and authority, the garden and the wunderkammer converged, combining mental and physical itineraries. Like the door of a gentleman’s cabinet, so too the facade of a building or a portal in a garden wall might open to reveal wonders within. The sixteenth-century maintenance of an ordered and ordering classicism, especially in facades and reception rooms, was surely in part a response to such challenges to epistemic order. In villa and garden architecture, on the other hand, a public show of Olympian serenity sometimes concealed proliferating and disorienting signs of excess and disturbance, hidden by high walls and thick woods from the mundane world of cultural and religious orthodoxy. Such is the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo, contrived at the height of the CounterReformation for a libertine, necessarily dissimulating patron.145 Among the


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17. Palazzo Branconio dell’ Aquila, from Ferrerio and Falda, Palazzi di Roma, 1655. The caption makes clear that the palace had become confused with the long-disappeared Palazzo Caprini.

marvels at Bomarzo, nothing is stranger or more uncanny than the architectural exhibits, notably a slanting house, carved from rock, and a hell’s mouth (Fig. 18) of explicitly Dantesque inspiration. The hillside park itself is structured around complex itineraries that wind along shaded paths and, for all the surreal and ambiguous character of the territory through which they guide the visitor, depend in principle on ancient conceptions of sequential space and incident. Ancient, perhaps specifically Etruscan echoes resonate in the odd figures carved from rocky outcrops among the trees. The visitor’s wandering – and musing on antiquity – come to an abrupt halt, however, at the grotesquely medieval image of finality of the hell’s mouth. At 6 meters high, this is as large as many a house front, conveying the effect of the facade, not just the face, of hell. Its fearful aspect, needless to say, entirely belies its true purpose as a place not of death (such a place is elsewhere in the park, at the monument for the patron’s wife), but of recreation and pleasure. This is a typical Renaissance conceit, as indicated by the carnivalesque emphasis on a bodily orifice designed for the intake of food that, as a place for

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18. Hell’s mouth, Villa Orsini (Sacred Wood), Bomarzo. The motif would soon be used for the garden entrance of a Roman palace, the Palazzo Zuccari.

light dining, both eats and feeds those who enter.146 Part of the conceit, of course, is the play on the phonic and etymological relationship of “face” and “facade.” Along this uncanny path of reverie, however, the contemporary viewer’s response was perhaps less to the strange objects in the park than to associations that they evoke, as in a memory theater.147 If so, this is an ironic, mannerist version of a memory theater, in which connections between ideas in the mind and objects in the theater are far from clear and direct, as in ancient rhetorical theory. Instead they suggest an infinite abyss of possible emblematic meanings and paradoxes that, in the case of the hell’s mouth, turn on the central yet ambivalent and often occluded place of the architectural facade in Renaissance culture.

CHAPTER TWO

DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE AND BOCCACCIAN DRAMA COURT AND CITY IN FLORENTINE CULTURE

BETWEEN OPACITY AND EXPRESSION I have argued that language adequate to the architectural, not to speak of cultural, phenomenon of the Renaissance facade is largely absent from contemporary texts explicitly concerned with the architectural framing of elite lifestyles. Certain aspects and implications of the phenomenon reverberate, however, in imaginative literature, especially when a plot or narrative turns on an illicit or at least unexpected passage across the boundaries of social space and/or the spaces of gender. From the fourteenth century, at latest, no such boundary was more important than the facade. In his great work, the Decameron, written between 1348 and 1353, the Florentine author Giovanni Boccaccio draws on the experience of social and affective structures, already under strain, that had recently come under extreme challenge during the Black Death.1 Of the numerous transgressions described or alluded to in the tales of the Decameron, many involve or require a spatial dimension. As a highly wrought literary representation, of course, Boccaccio’s text is no window onto the social world of an earlier time. In relation to long-term cultural patterns, however, it is worth considering the extent to which so enduringly popular a work affected and even shaped attitudes in and beyond Florence.2 In terms of its own era, moreover, it suggests modes of spatial conceptualization and response available in late Trecento culture, providing an author primarily interested in narration and character with largely familiar frameworks for a wide range of actions and interactions. The Decameron famously consists of tales supposedly told by a group of elegant young men and women, affluent enough to escape the plague raging in their native Florence. The escapist tone is occasionally strong, as is the dependence on – or self-conscious manipulation of – existing narrative conventions and forms. Nevertheless, Boccaccio clearly strives for an effect of 43

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realism in the delineation of human types and environments (as a notary he was in a good position to do so). The plausibility of the physical setting often seems essential to the effect, as Boccaccio maneuvers adeptly between diverse cultural tendencies and possibilities, and sites and milieus of social interaction.3 Many of the stories turn on a contrast of mercantile and chivalric/aristocratic cultural ideals and standards familiar to elite Florentines, not least to Boccaccio, who had himself spent some time in Naples, site of one of the great princely courts of Italy.4 Naples was the final destination of the villains of a story whose architectural implications are especially rich. The setting is a large house, the residence of a prosperous merchant in the Sicilian trading city of Messina. In a window stands an unremarkable earthenware pot, in which, with luxuriant foliage, grows a basil plant cared for by a young woman, the merchant’s daughter Lisabetta. In this everyday scene, the pot, of course, is not what it seems. Its terrible secret is revealed when the girl’s brothers grow suspicious over Lisabetta’s distress as she tends the plant. They soon discover that the pot contains the head of their sister’s lover, Lorenzo, whom they had murdered and whose body they had disposed of in the countryside. But after Lorenzo appeared to Lisabetta in a dream and revealed the location of his body, she had dug up her lover’s remains and removed his head, which she had hidden in the pot, sheltered by the basil which she watered with her tears. The pitiless brothers remove and discard the pot with its grisly contents; Lisabetta dies of grief, a martyr for love and, apparently, more affected by the loss of her lover’s head than of his living person. At the end of the story, Boccaccio presents his tale as an aetiology of a popular song diffused throughout Southern Italy, from Sicily to Naples, a vernacular and secular, yet quasi-hagiographic, commemoration of Lisabetta’s devotion and its tragic outcome.5 As recently demonstrated by Julia Lupton, Lisabetta’s pot is a secularized reliquary invested with exemplary significance in a work of literature marked by the citation and incorporation of a variety of religious texts and practices.6 Lupton notes in particular that Lisabetta exemplifies a familiar hagiographic type, that of a female saint confined by a harsh father or other relative within an enclosed space against the contagion of Christianity. (The closest parallel is Saint Barbara, locked in a tower). Lisabetta is one of a number of young women who suffer a similar fate in the narratives of the fourth day of the Decameron, the only day given over to tragic stories. In his preface, Boccaccio observes of his female contemporaries: “forced to follow the whim of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and husbands … they spend most of the time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms.”7 The stories of the fourth day compellingly illustrate this restriction of women’s will and appetities, not least sexual, which received biblical sanction from the story of Dina, who traveled abroad and was raped.8 The confinement of women

DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE AND BOCCACCIAN DRAMA

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was a marked feature of late-medieval and Renaissance Italian elite society, but the evidence indicates that a shift to more restrictive attitudes was occurring in the period of the Black Death.9 This trend, perhaps together with tensions occasioned by it, was part of the social world that Boccaccio drew on, and in which new models of domestic space emerged. The tragic outcomes of the tales of the fourth day dramatize, further, the mechanisms of control available to males in elite families, whether princely or bourgeois,10 and to which the heroines or at least protagonists of these tales undertake doomed resistance. Their stories, moreover, illustrate and problematize the exchange of women as a crucial factor in the maintenance of the social order and its microcosm in the family. Crucial in Lisabetta’s story, however, is its explicit setting in an urban and mercantile, as opposed to courtly or princely, milieu, perhaps especially as conjured up in great detail in the story of Ghismunda (Day Five, 1), in some ways a negative mirror of that of Lisabetta.11 Though Lisabetta’s brothers’ motives are explained only through reference to the low birth of Lorenzo, who worked for them in their shop, the staging of the story suggests that commercial advantage as much as family honor is at stake. The Tuscan origin of the family is an important motif in the story. Following their father’s death, the brothers are confronted with the need to reestablish the family fortunes in a foreign city. Lisabetta is a potential pawn in her brothers’ dealings with the local elite, against the background of the familiar social and economic aspects of medieval marriage. Until their scandalous discovery, the brothers are in a position to trade their young, lovely, and (as they certainly expect) unsullied sister for an advantageous alliance with a wellconnected Messinese family. The sudden and unexpected loss of this prospect explains the savage murder of Lorenzo and, more to the point, Lisabetta’s brothers’ attempted cancellation of all trace of his physical presence. The implicit scandal of the story, therefore, may be the association or even assimilation of the exchange of women to mercantile exchange in general and to the social and dynastic maneuvers needed to further it. The pot of basil figures the utopian abrogation of such a system, and points to powerful though inappropriate and highly risky social, sexual, and even architectural desires. At first sight, her father’s house is Lisabetta’s prison. In contrast, her brothers use it as a base for action in the wider urban world, including, as we know, murder (for Lorenzo, on the other hand, it is a base for amatory adventures, at least until his affair with Lisabetta). The presence of several brothers, however, suggests an expansive and loosely organized household. Lisabetta takes advantage of the relative porosity of her familial and architectural environment to conduct her surreptitious affair and, later, to slip into the countryside to seek her lover’s body. The pot of basil evokes this porosity, for Lisabetta sets it in a window of the house, at the intersection of interior and exterior space.12 The denouement, however, emphatically restores the enclosure that makes her a secular anchorite, and leaves death as the only mode of escape.13

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The emphasis on Lorenzo’s head draws attention to the absence of the “head” of Lisabetta’s own family: her father had recently died, after transferring his household from San Gimignano to Sicily. Indeed, the absence of the paterfamilias seems to be a necessary precondition for the string of unfortunate events that dooms his daughter, in contrast, say, to the only too intrusive presence of the father in the story of Ghismunda (Day Five, 1). The specifically Tuscan protagonists and bourgeois milieu of the story – even Lorenzo is from Pisa – contrast, as we saw, with the stories of the other tragic heroines of Day Four. As Lupton notes, moreover, the motif of a head in a pot alludes to the urn that, in the familiar hagiographic account, contains the head of John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence. It carries a covert allusion to the sickened city from which the women of Boccaccio’s merry band of storytellers have fled and whose traditional strictures and rules of conduct are temporarily in suspension. The head is concealed in Lisabetta’s pot; what is visible is a compound entity, the pot crowned by the lusty green foliage of the basil plant. It suggests, therefore, a symbolic or rather proto-emblematic image of the kind invented and discussed by Alberti in the following century.14 Further, the evocation of growth out of death and decay suggests the regeneration of the city itself, giving the sacrifice of the young lovers of Day Four a teleological and even providential character as a martyrdom – and so truly worthy of hagiography – in the service of a larger historical process.15 In this respect the Lisabetta story stands out against the dark background of the many stories in Day Four that involve arbitrary suffering and death through sickness and bodily afflictions. The symptoms and events that characterize these afflictions return the reader to the initial, both literary and extraliterary framing of the Decameron, the plague itself. As a medicinal plant, basil contrasts with the poisonous sage that kills the unfortunate Pasquino in the seventh story of Day Four.16 In the context of the work as a whole, moreover, the theme of providential, even redemptive regeneration points forward to the last of the hundred stories, that of Griselda. This transcends all devices of secularization and irony to propound an overall Christian moral, as no less a reader than Petrarch claimed in a well-known commentary.17 The call for the regeneration or at least reform of society was nothing new in Florence. In a famous passage of the Paradiso, for example, Dante harshly reprimands a moral decline within the city. The passage was certainly familiar to Boccaccio and perhaps served as a germ for his narratives about the transgression of social norms.18 The Griselda episode makes clear that Boccaccio’s object was not to support any relaxation of standards of conduct or surveillance within the individual family or society at large. These are cautionary stories, informed by authorial rather than behavioral or ethical originality. In this way they prefigure the authoritarian government – and society – of late fourteenth-century Florence.


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TOWARD THE RENAISSANCE CITY: SHIFTS IN SOCIAL SPACE AND ARCHITECTURAL FRAMING Dante’s jeremiad on the state of Florence is directed at shifts not only in conduct, but also in the physical city, the arena of social action and interaction. The physical city has changed no less than the men and women who inhabit it, and Dante’s words suggest the reciprocal effect of attitudinal and architectural transformations. In the aftermath of the Black Death, Boccaccio and his contemporaries were confronted with no less striking a set of cultural shifts, with important implications for the urban environment. Considerable rebuilding was occurring in the city even before the plague.19 A major effect of the population collapse caused by the plague was an immediate increase in the availability and affordability of housing, while newly affluent mercantile families took the opportunity to establish themselves in the older quarters of the city.20 The old system of feudal enclaves declined, while improved standards of residential construction and fashions of interior embellishment became widespread: “The families who built the big new palaces that began to appear in Florence in the late thirteenth century created a new building type. Large in size, permanent in construction, and oriented to the streets with elegant masonry facades, the palaces of the … most prominent citizens soon took their place alongside churches and town halls as the great monuments of the new urbanism.”21 It is not clear whether these grand houses sheltered traditional, extended families, or accompanied a trend toward the “modern” nuclear family; in any case, the new residential architecture seems shaped more by representative concerns than by living arrangements.22 A few generations later, a perspicacious observer registered the transformation of the urban environment, focusing on the adoption of permanent and prestigious construction materials. In his treatise on architecture, Alberti saw a shift from timber to stone building as a salient aspect of the recent history of the Italian urban environment. Perhaps influenced by Dante’s strictures, however, he found the dynamism of change in the built environment a matter for regret, and a spur to reflection on ways to discipline it.23 Boccaccio’s merchant epic, with its acute evocations of diverse household types and spaces, enjoyed considerable success into the quattrocento, though its possible impact is obviously difficult to assess. The great Leonardo Bruni, for example, historian and chancellor of Florence, translated the story of Ghismunda and Tancredi into Latin, in a remarkable fusion of the two great cultural models of the Florentine quattrocento, chivalry and humanism.24 Both chivalric and humanist models – in varying degrees – infiltrated and eventually transformed the major processional festivals of the city’s ritual year, like the celebrations around the day of the patron saint of Florence, St. John the Baptist.25 Both these models, of course, were already naturalized in Florence, not least through the Decameron and other writings of Boccaccio.

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Indeed, the Decameron evokes a society – both as subject and audience of the tales – marked by the interpenetration of mercantile, chivalric, and all’antica motifs, even if there were certainly occasions when chivalric and courtly devices of self-representation served as a kind of mask or facade for an essential mercantile core.26 There can be no doubt that the continuing enthusiasm for Boccaccio in Florence, especially on the part of such pillars of the regime as Leonardo Bruni, was limited in scope and moralistic, in line with the repressive climate in the city, at least as evidenced by legislation. Recent studies have drawn attention to increasing state scrutiny and regulation of private sexual and sumptuary mores in the period in question.27 The patrician palace exterior displayed images of familial discipline authorized by appeals to classical learning and/or chivalric ideals and evoking an idealized Florentine tradition. But such a facade also, like Lisabetta’s pot of basil, could perhaps serve to divert the eye of the guardians of morality. In such a context, the association of facade architecture and dissimulation was inevitable.

THE FACADE: METAPHORIC INTERSECTIONS Lorenzo’s head, in Lupton’s phrase, is “lovingly nestled (within its) terracotta walls,” a testa within a testo. The pot figures the house itself, as well as the emerging conception of the exterior as a facade, simultaneously a site of signification and dissimulation. It conceals or rather, in the literary framework of the story, transfigures its contents. It is rooted in the sacred economy of relics, as Lupton points out, but also in a famous phrase of St. Paul that echoes in medieval stylistics: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Cor. 4:7). St. Paul and his many followers championed a Christian plain style against the proponents of elevated classical rhetoric, and by doing so asserted an unequivocally unclassical division between the plain “exterior” and the often complex “interior” of speech or, potentially, any other form of communication.28 Early Christian writers did not unanimously accept such a division, however, for Augustine and others maintained an integral vision of the plain style, often evoked by the metaphor of a human body stripped bare for physical action.29 Nevertheless, all were concerned to develop a specifically Christian mode of self-presentation, generally involving transparency to an authentic self. In Boccaccio’s tale the humble pot of basil ironizes such a demand for transparency. It misleads the actors in the narrative – though it is rich in connotations for readers – about what lies within. The pot’s terracotta wall, like the house facades of late-medieval Florence, institutes an opaque screen between interior and exterior, though it is available for the projection of meaning through the addition of key elements (i.e., the leafy basil) and through the


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emblematic resonance of the combination of jar and leaf, framed in a house window. More important, needless to say, is the unseen presence of a human head, exerting a power that exceeds mere symbolization. I will return in Chapter 6 to attempts to associate the “natural” power of human presence with the conventional signifying apparatus of architecture.

BODY/HOUSE In his account of the plague, Boccaccio stresses its morally deleterious effects on those who survived, especially women. Thanks to the dispersal of many households and the effective destruction of some, even beautiful and highborn women infected with the pestilence had found themselves without relatives or servants to care for them. In the hope of finding relief for their suffering, therefore, they had abandoned their customary modesty and shame and had allowed even male strangers access to their bodies.30 The spatial dimension of Boccaccio’s language is striking: he speaks of women’s willingness to “open” their bodies to male outsiders, in ways they would previously have contemplated only when attended by female insiders.31 This marks a remarkably brutal shift, the annulment of a traditional hierarchy of spaces consolidated by gender associations. The violations of domestic and personal space occasioned by the plague were significant factors, in Boccaccio’s view, in a shift to more permissive sexual behavior following the cessation of the plague. This emphasis on postplague promiscuity associates an – in late-medieval terms – unnatural melting of social and familial restrictions with the disappearance not just of family structure and discipline but also of families as such. Boccaccio expressly and pathetically describes this in terms of the emptying out of buildings, to which he refers no fewer than three distinct though effectively synonymous terms, as if to specify that he has in mind not the house qua household or lineage, but the physical house.32 The permeability of formerly inviolate women’s bodies and the desolation of fine houses, formerly thronged with life, are associated together in a melancholy account of social decay. The impressive houses of Florence have become mere empty containers, facades masking the space of death and emptiness behind. There can be little doubt that, pace Boccaccio, older patterns of social life and moral attitudes reasserted themselves soon after the cessation of plague. As is well known, the chivalric fashions of the aristocratic centers of northern Italy and beyond continued to make inroads among the progeny of the hardheaded Florentine business class, at least until the shock of the Savonarolan coup. The chivalric games and customs of this period may, however, in some cases have local rather than imported origins. A case in point is a custom that at least momentarily identified a house with the young woman resident within it. To demonstrate his prowess and dramatize his choice of a certain lady as the

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object of his affections, a young man would ride hard at the front of her house and, swerving at the last minute, break his lance against the facade.33 The sexual symbolism here – the metaphoric construal of the house as equivalent to the body of the woman within – is no less obvious than in the well-known medieval literary embellishments of the castle of love.34 The inclusion of a Florentine house in the performance of an action redolent of a distant and idealized courtly and chivalric world temporarily transformed that house, along with the adjoining street or neighborhood. From a place of mercantile commerce and exchange (including the exchange of women between families), the setting became one both of loftier and earthier chivalric desire and imagination. In this sense, the developing elite culture of Renaissance Florence not only set, as is well known, a facade of republicanism and traditional civic politics in front of its progressive manipulation and concentration of power. It also softened the traditional austerities and harsh rivalries of Florentine political life through a veneer of courtly refinement consistent with the consensual politics and the Platonizing ideology associated with the era of Lorenzo il Magnifico.35

CHAPTER THREE

BETWEEN OPACITY AND RHETORIC THE FACADE IN TRECENTO FLORENCE

CULTURAL OVERLAY AND THE FACE OF THE CITY The tragic stories of Boccaccio’s Day Four implicitly contrast the calculating culture of mercantile Tuscany, as in the tale of Lisabetta, and the passionate but no less harsh world, evoked in the other tales, of chivalry and the aristocratic court. Though in Florence the values of the mercantile elite sometimes collided with the aristocratic concern with honor, this did not inhibit the association of the “bourgeois” city and its government with chivalric forms of self-representation, especially on ritual occasions.1 Wishing to maintain some hold on power, on the other hand, certain feudal (“magnate”) clans passed themselves off as popolani, some even giving up traditional coats of arms for less provocative heraldic and other forms of self-identification.2 This complex history is variously inscribed in the city. Stern palaces lined the streets of late-medieval Florence, though the display of precious and colorful cloths on festivals, especially St. John’s Day, temporarily transformed the face of the city.3 The culture of public architectural austerity recalls Dante’s famous lament for an idealized lost world, submerged by courtly fashion and self indulgence: “Florence within its ancient circle … remained in peace, modest and restrained. There were no necklaces, no crowns, no fancy dresses, no girdle that caught the gaze more than the person” (italics mine).4 Dante’s concern with transparency, that appearance should match essence, resonates with the long history of sumptuary legislation in Florence and the generally conservative practices of architectural self-representation.5 Nor was Dante the only early Trecento moralist to lament the passage from a more austere age to one, allegedly, of soft living and the danger of effeminacy.6 In late fourteenth-century Florence, the continuing popularity of Boccaccio’s Decameron and related literature was one aspect of an enthusiasm for luxurious and French-style (i.e., courtly) fashions widely diffused among citizens, though 51

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typically as a phenomenon of palace interiors.7 Following late nineteenth-century “urban renewal” in central Florence, the Palazzo Davizzi (now Davanzati; Fig. 19; Map 1) is the only extant late-medieval palace with substantial remnants of furnishings and decoration.8 In several rooms lavish wall paintings evoke an aristocratic lifestyle through fictive wall hangings, marble revetment, and architectural details, as well as through pictorial references to dalliance in gardens and life in the country. Such embellishment of interior space was representative of the taste of the urban elite, whose patronage enabled certain artists to develop a specialization as interior painters (dipintori di camere).9

19. Palazzo Davizzi (Davanzati), Florence, facade. The doubled piano nobile creates a marked effect of verticality.

BETWEEN OPACITY AND RHETORIC

Map 1. Map of central Florence. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Alberti Tower and Loggia Palazzo Alessandri Palazzo Antinori (Boni) Palazzo Busini Palazzo Canigiani Palazzo Capponi (Da Uzzano) Palazzo Gerini Palazzo Gondi Palazzo Horne (Alberti)

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Palazzo Medici Palazzo Pandolfini Palazzo Pazzi Peruzzi Complex Palazzo Pitti Palazzo Rucellai Palazzo Scala Palazzo Strozzi Palazzo Tornabuoni

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The extant painted decoration, executed in the last decade of the fourteenth century, consists of fictive tapestry wall hangings, though iron hooks apparently supported actual tapestries over the fictive ones, no doubt during festivities and/or in cold weather. The most elaborate frescoes in the house illustrate a French chivalric romance, a love story that, despite its tragic conclusion, was selected in celebration of the wedding in 1395 of Francesco Davizzi. As paired coats of arms indicate, Francesco’s bride was a member of the Alberti family, sealing an alliance with a politically marginalized clan that was perhaps ill advised. In 1400, in any case, Francesco died on the scaffold for his role in a conspiracy against the ruling oligarchy.10 Whatever its connotations, such decoration enhanced the striking contrast at the Palazzo Davizzi between severe exterior and luxurious and refined interior, a contrast apparently typical of late-medieval patrician Florence. The domestic realm of elite families, with its aristocratic pretensions, was emphatically screened by walls that gave little hint, to the wider world of artisans and small traders, of what lay behind. Palace facades, in short, were means of concealment and dissimulation as much as display.

THE CITY AS SYMBOL: THE FLORENTINE OLIGARCHY AND THE SEA OF STONE The development of residential architecture in fourteenth-century Florence occurred in the context, if not in the shadow, of a striking transformation of the public face of the city.11 In the final decade of the thirteenth century, the definitive victory of the revolutionary guild regime was marked immediately by major interventions in the physical fabric of the city. Construction started on the Palazzo della Signoria, on the vastly expanded “third” circle of walls, and on the new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, entirely a civic project (Map 1). The towers of new public buildings inscribed changed political relations in a skyline previously dominated by prominent and numerous signs of aristocratic power. As in many Italian cities, clusters of high and heavily fortified towers once rose above the palace compounds of Florentine magnate families and alliances.12 In 1250, the political conflict between magnate (Ghibelline) and mercantile (Guelph) factions issued in a short-lived victory of the mercantile faction, which lost no time in regulating the height of private towers.13 After a brief period of renewed magnate ascendancy, the famous Ordinances of Justice of 1293 marked the establishment of a guild-dominated republic that would last for two centuries. Once again, the merchant elite’s concern to limit the height of magnate towers was given legislative expression, though within a larger institutional context, by the establishment of a special magistracy with responsibility for the urban environment. The purview of this magistracy, later known as the Tower Officials, included the demolition of offending architecture, though doubtless practical rather than political criteria were often


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20. Palazzo Vecchio (della Signoria) and Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence: view from west.

applied.14 An injunction of 1325 setting a precise maximum height for all private towers indicates that towers were still being built.15 The mid thirteenth-century Guelph victory set the stage for politically motivated demolitions that would have a determining effect on the physical and political topography of central Florence. The destruction in 1258 of houses of the Ghibelline Uberti clan created a space available to the city, decades later, for the construction of a great public square.16 In 1299 work started on the Palazzo della Signoria, the new city hall, which was always envisaged as set off by a relatively expansive open space, the core of which was the area of the Uberti houses. The Palazzo della Signoria itself incorporates part of the residential compound of another magnate family, the Foraboschi, whose tower, the torre della vacca, became a key reinforcing element in the substructures of its mighty belltower (Fig. 20). The western front of the Palazzo della Signoria, with its

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conspicuous irregularities, remains a palimpsest of architectural as well as political transformation.17 Officially, the Foraboschi properties were acquired by purchase rather than coercion; still, the incorporation within the palace of a typical magnate tower was a potent symbol of passage from one regime to another, reinforcing the collective memory of the new political class.18 In its stern magnificence the Palazzo della Signoria constituted an appropriate seat of government, a stage for the rituals of state, and a symbol of the new political order. At times, however, it served as a focus for disaffection and bitter contests for power that threatened the survival of the republic.19 Most famous was the revolt of the cloth-workers, the Ciompi, who in 1378 stormed the palace and held it for a while. The ensuing repression set the stage for the installation of a tight-knit oligarchy that took decisive action against potential alternative centers of power, such as the prominent clan of the Alberti. Though scattered in exile, the international commercial activities and connections of the Alberti guaranteed the family’s continued economic well-being, as well as the capacity to strike against the Florentine government.20 Successive plots had the effect only of exacerbating the hostility between the regime and the Alberti and their allies; this was the context of Francesco Davizzi’s execution. In 1412 the discovery of an especially serious conspiracy prompted even harsher measures against the Alberti, including sentences of death against leading male members of the family and the expulsion of the Alberti women from the family’s ancestral houses and towers, which they had been permitted to occupy until then.21 This was a step of considerable symbolic and practical importance, for the continued residence of the women in the Alberti houses had signaled not only the regime’s tolerance of a continued Alberti presence in the city, but also the expectation of the family’s eventual return. The measures taken in 1412, however drastic they may have seemed, did not include the demolition of Alberti houses, which were still standing to welcome the members of the family who took advantage of the revocation of exile in 1428.22 Such restraint marked a civic culture very different from that of the thirteenth century, when victorious factions had repeatedly used the confiscation and demolition of property as a weapon against hostile families, including the Alberti. The preservation of the houses of political enemies was perhaps symptomatic of a conception of the city, emerging in the Trecento, as a physical and affective unity that transcended signs of difference and rivalry.23 Such a commitment to maintain the general decus urbis, the physical attractiveness and integrity of the city, was especially notable in the bitter, crisis-laden climate of 1412. State-sponsored interventions in the fabric of late-medieval Florence manifested a remarkable drive to shape and order urban space, though in the face of obstructions and even resistance inevitable in a densely settled and complex environment. The guiding principles and formal preferences of Florentine latemedieval urbanism were fully realized in rebuilt villages outside Florence itself, in areas forcibly incorporated into the emerging Florentine territorial state.24 Nevertheless, the city was also the site of large-scale interventions, notably the


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repetition of uniform architectural elements along major thoroughfares and open spaces in the central districts, providing an orderly and honorific setting for the great buildings of the republic and for the rituals of state.25 Such concern, on the part of the state, with the manifestation of political power and principle raises the issue of the private expression of social hierarchy, not least in residential architecture. Recent scholarship has stressed the cohesion of the families of a ruling class, the so-called reggimento, united by common interests and ideology and by various familial and other alliances.26 Certain scholars have discerned the crystallization of this cohesiveness, if not indeed its self-conscious expression, no less in private than in public architecture, and even specifically in heraldic signage.27 Certainly, restraint in the use of ornament, including devices of self-advertisement, on the houses of the latemedieval elite was to a degree a special characteristic of Florence, contrasting with practices in other Tuscan cities.28 For all the exterior homogeneity and plainness of the palaces of its elite, however, Florence was a primary site of the emergence of the facade as a defining feature of the urban scene of Renaissance Italy, not to speak of early modern Europe.29 At first sight this is a paradox, for the best known early modern facades catch the eye for their richness and rhetorical force, rather than for their formal restraint. Self-restraint in personal conduct and interpersonal relations, however, recurs as a central theme in the wider historiography of modernity, including the embryonic form manifested, not without contradictions, in late medieval and Renaissance Florence.30 The dialectic between restraint and display (magnificentia in the Aristotelian terminology favored at the time) was a key characteristic of the Renaissance, though it grew out of and in many ways continued the older tension of bourgeois and courtly cultures that Boccaccio had exploited. The show of architectural plainness and homogeneity in the streets of the city expressed the consensus, or at least the preoccupation with consensus, of the elite. It also emerged within a statutory environment that imposed (but by no means always guaranteed) restrained and compliant behavior, especially on the part of social groups excluded from real power. Indeed, the climate of repression and discipline did not stop at the threshold of a house, even one sheltering a family of the ruling elite. Through highly intrusive legislation the state sought to regulate the social and even sexual practices of its citizens; the well-known sumptuary legislation, previously noted, cannot be disassociated from a long-running campaign against sodomy and other forms of sexual “deviancy.”31 The disciplinary force of such legislation, no doubt, was directed primarily at social groups beyond the narrow circle of the reggimento. But if members of the ruling elite were less likely to suffer the sanction of the law, they were hardly immune to the chilling effects of the state’s regulation of conduct, especially if they belonged to groups deprived by their youth or gender of the right to participate in government.32 Consensus and repression were closely linked, needless to say, not least as the solidarity expected of adult men of leading families involved both self-

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control and the control of less privileged members of their own households, notably women – for life – and adolescent males, until they achieved maturity. Apprehensions about the untoward effects of political and other forms of immaturity were deeply rooted in Florentine society and indeed were reflected in the consitution of the city. Sumptuary regulations and related legislation were only an official and especially obvious instrument of the progressively tighter control of women.33 Behind the “masculine” rusticated walls, Florentine palaces were a place of women’s enclosure – perhaps also of women’s laments, as so often in the stories of Boccaccio.34 The fourteenth-century Florentine palace facade institutes a screen, then, not only between a domestic and a public domain, but also between domains defined, to a degree, in terms of gender associations. Moreover, wives and children constituted “ornaments” of mature and politically active men, no less than their houses and material possessions.35 The state-sponsored surveillance of conduct clearly implied scrutiny of male patricians’ ability to maintain order within their own households and alliances, and to project that order in ways consonant with their position and dignity. In other words, the state mandated and monitored the parameters of strategies of self-representation that linked the house and the body, and the discourses and attitudes associated with each. The pressing concern of the Florentine reggimento with the control of bodies and their sexual and social interaction, therefore, was crucially implicated in the production of an architectural uniformity that gave Florence, in Brenda Preyer’s apt phrase, the aspect of a “sea of stone.”36

FACADE ARCHITECTURE AND THE IDEAL OF CONSENSUS According to Dante (Inferno XV. 61–63), stoniness invests not only the Florentine environment but also the character of the people, still bearing the mark of their origin on the harsh mountainsides of Fiesole.37 Dante puts this complaint about Florence, however, in the mouth of Brunetto Latini, who appears in the poem as a sodomite, a representative of a lifestyle of “unnatural” worldliness.38 Indeed, in late-medieval Florentine architecture the treatment of stone veers between the assertion of a rough-hewn “natural” materiality and the display of artifice. The former procedure, rustication, was no less a matter of artifice, whether the mason wished to give the impression of a cliff face or quarry wall, or perhaps of certain famous structures of ancient Rome whose massive blocks had resisted the corrosion of time, but bore its marks. Indeed a wide range of types of rustication existed, and the term is generally used to relatively smooth drafted masonry (or ashlar). Depending on location and context, the rhetorical effect also varied greatly. The use of rustication in general, however, was limited to districts of the city, mainly in the center, inhabited by powerful families and close to the great public buildings; it was an obvious signifier of class status and solidarity.39 It


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21. Bargello, Florence. The apertures for anchoring projecting sporti are clearly apparent on both fronts of the building.

echoed the great rusticated walls of the civic buildings, the Palazzo del Capitano (Bargello; Fig. 21) and the Palazzo della Signoria, just as in cities ruled by a prince, the prince’s arms – or those of high-placed allies – regularly appeared on private family palaces, along with the insignia of the family concerned.40 The assertive rustication on patrician houses, then, probably conveyed a republican message, though doubtless for some observers the message was one of appropriation of the republic, rather than commitment to it. In any case, rustication almost never invested the entire surface of a palace facade, but only the ground floor (as in the Palazzo Alessandri; Fig. 22), suggesting a powerful taboo against overly close identification with the Palazzo della Signoria, with its all-over rustication.41 The binary facade perhaps served, therefore, to distinguish private from public power, even as it asserted the public role of private families that belonged or hoped to belong to the reggimento.

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22. Palazzo Alessandri, view from the Borgo degli Albizzi, which terminates in the Piazza San Pier Maggiore, illustrated in Fig. 24. The high viewpoint emphasizes the relative height of the ground floor, which apparently terminates at the base of the second floor windows.

Extensive use was also made of rustication by the Florentine state as a unifying element in its projects of urban improvement, notably the late fourteenth-century remodeling of the area around the cathedral and of the Via dei Calzaiuoli, between the Piazza della Signoria and Baptistery (Map 1), linking the political and religious centers of the city.42 In these cases, embracing an entire street or open space, rustication served to frame and emphasize uniform ground floor openings. Perhaps because the building concerned did not include the residences of politically important families, it was the street wall that mattered, not the individual units. Indeed, a literal wall, rusticated but lacking apertures, closed off and regularized the western edge of the Piazza della Signoria, continuing the line of the Via de’ Calzaiuoli and concealing a


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jumble of buildings from the austere geometry of the public square. Built solely to enclose and shape public space, this so-called Muro dei Pisani formed an interior facade of the piazza, thereby reinforcing the effect of the adjacent Loggia della Signoria, with its emphatic formal echoes of the interior nave elevation of the cathedral. The project made explicit a key principle of emergent facade architecture: a facade is as much the internal front of a public space as the external front of a specific building.43 Rustication extended, then, across both the private residences of the reggimento families and certain streets and spaces crucial to the ritual economy and political topography of the city. In this way, the central city became a spectacle of the cohesiveness of the governing class, now projected onto streets and spaces of political, but not specifically patrician, importance. The audience for these speaking stones was by no means only the patrician elite, but also different elements in the social fabric of the city. Nor were the associations of rustication in medieval Florence exclusively republican; indeed, the main source of the technique was – and perhaps was known to be – imperial (Hohenstaufen) architecture, notably the castle at nearby Prato.44 Further, the unifying display of rustication in the Via de’ Calzaiuoli improvement and similar civic projects echoed aristocratic practice within Florence itself. Here, as in many cities, conspicuous enclaves comprised the clustered residences of branches of a major clan and its allies, sometimes marked by a certain uniformity of architectural treatment.45 In the political circumstances of the early fifteenth century, no concentration of patrician residences was more important that of the Albizzi family in the Borgo San Pier Maggiore (now degli Albizzi), whose dominant political role was ended by the Medici coup of 1434. Among the massive Albizzi houses looms the Palazzo Alessandri (Fig. 22), rebuilt c. 1380 after suffering extensive damage during the Ciompi revolt (Map 1).46 The Alessandri had recently broken away from the Albizzi clan and marked their independent status by taking a distinct coat of arms, which is still conspicuously mounted on the palace. The device on the Alessandri coat of arms is a sheep, the symbol of the Arte della Lana, the powerful wool guild that presided over the most important industry of the fourteenth-century city. Such conspicuous display of the wool guild’s heraldic beast was perhaps enough to make the palace a particular target of the Ciompi, the proletariat of the wool industry. In any case, it is remarkable that a kinship group asserted its identity by selecting a device denoting a major institution associated with the Florentine elite as a whole. Perhaps the Alessandri, operating within a specific context of fissuring kinship relations, deliberately sought an emblem of wider social and institutional solidarity. On the palace as rebuilt after the Ciompi revolt, however, the sign of the sheep may, instead, have symbolized the sharpening distinctions of class and rank under the rule of an increasingly narrow oligarchy. In this period, both the regime and certain private patrons appear to have embraced a visual language of order and rationality. With its emphasis on

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rectilinear patterning, a widespread fashion for drafted masonry (flat rustication) in palace facades of the late fourteenth century suggests the geometrical symbolization of a political order (Fig. 23).47 The famous gridded pavement of the Piazza della Signoria was laid out and a geometricization of the piazza itself implemented, in part, as we saw, through the construction of the Muro dei Pisani.48 The project may have alluded to the original Florence, the colony of Rome, whose gridded street layout still largely determined the topography of central Florence. By now, indeed, Florence was in the position of republican Rome, establishing her own colonial foundations in a program of pacification of subject territories, in which the imposition of geometry enacted and visualized the extension of Florentine authority.49 The grid was not, however, a universal fashion or symbol in late trecento Florence; many rusticated facades of the last decades of the fourteenth century are treated in a “neonaturalistic” style, marked by irregular courses of stones, apparently quoted from the Palazzo della Signoria. Its ideological dimension, Sinding-Larsen suggests, lies in the assertion of the natural basis or character of the increasingly polarized society of late medieval Florence.50 Certainly, the coincidence of starkly disparate styles of facade treatment suggests a high degree of self-consciousness within the social elite about appropriate vehicles of self-representation.51 It occurred in a moment when a humanist intellectual elite, led by Coluccio Salutati, was articulating new models and styles of justification for the republic and, less overtly, for the minority that held power within it. At the same time, of course, traditionalists like Giovanni Dominici denounced humanism as injurious to the cultural if not social order of the city.52 Looking back from a changed world, fifteenth-century writers emphasize the impact on the urban environment of qualitative and quantitative shifts in residential architecture, which of course they acclaim as cultural progress. Alberti offers especially telling observations in his treatise on architecture (written in the 1440s and 1450s), in which references to the contemporary scene are relatively few. Two major developments had transformed the cities of his time: the shift from wood to stone construction, and the shift away from towers to more civil residential architecture.53 In his biography of Brunelleschi, written in the late 1470s, Antonio Manetti occupies a different vantage point, as a highly biased witness of the way that “Renaissance” design protocols and cultural ideals were already shaping the city. Manetti celebrates a shift to a more refined domestic architecture, associated, not entirely plausibly, with Brunelleschi’s activity as an architect of private houses.54 For Manetti, writing several decades after Alberti, the face of the city was marked less by employment of a certain building material than by more stylish design. As Trachtenberg has noted, the fifteenth century tends to be the standard against which the fourteenth is measured.55 In a view back from the “Renaissance” the trecento environment flattens out, presenting a homogeneous, masklike screen occluding the domestic world of patrician families. Within this stony world, however, discriminations can still be made, for example, in terms of


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23. Palazzo Capponi (da Uzzano), Florence. Facade detail. The “neonaturalistic” rustication of the Palazzo Da Uzzano (in foreground) contrasts with the drafted masonry of the adjacent house. Typical of Renaissance shifts, the portal in the latter is clearly inserted within a formerly much wider opening.

the distinct types of rustication classified by Sinding-Larsen, whose findings suggest that quite subtle distinctions of facade treatment were apparent and even meaningful to contemporaries.56 His discussion of rusticated facades suffers, however, from an exclusive focus on the nature and, on occasion, meaning of specific types of rustication.57 In fact, rustication typically occurred as a component, however important and expressive, of a larger entity, usually a palace facade forming, or composed into, a semantic as well as compositional entity. The familiar image of a cohesive late-medieval Florentine urban environment begs numerous questions. In general, cohesiveness in any group of objects privileges subtle formal distinctions and semantic cues that would have been ineffective in a richer perceptual field or matrix. We can, with SindingLarsen, seek to elucidate differences between types of rustication, as is certainly sometimes appropriate, or see rustication as a relatively unchanging

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background for the inscription or insertion of elements of more active semantic quality. Moreover, the presence of rustication only on the lower part of a facade, as was characteristic of trecento palace architecture, produced an especially emphatic binary articulation, which constituted a frame for further elaboration. Indeed, Friedman has argued that by regulating the appearance only of the ground floor of buildings in areas subject to homogeneous remodeling, the state implicitly sanctioned the binary division of house fronts.58

READING THE BINARY FACADE In the fourteenth century, the division of facades into superimposed zones of distinct surface treatment became one of more or less conscious fashion, rather than simply the result of traditional building practices.59 This raises fundamental questions about the generation of architectural meaning not only in trecento architecture, but also architecture in general. As noted in Chapter 1, meaning may arise from semantic or expressive properties inherent in an architectural language or composition; on the other hand, architecture often serves as a site and/or frame for the generation of meaning through other media, especially more specific meaning, in view of the relatively general semantic potential of architecture as such. As a standard treatment of the lower portion of a facade, indeed, rustication functions both as a framing and/or articulating element and as a signifier in itself. In the semiological analysis of a facade, therefore, the upper boundary of an expanse of rustication may be more crucial than its surface. Clearly, surface and edge have distinct semiotic properties: most obviously, a rusticated surface marks and defends the boundary between house and street, while its edge divides a facade, inscribing a diagram of the vertical distribution of space within the house. In both cases, rustication evokes an image of spatial as well as social relationships, though generally not as the architectural crystallization of a social world, but rather as a dissimulative and tendentious representation. On many palace facades, most obviously, the ground-floor rustication extends to the stringcourse or sill on which the windows of the upper floor sit. It clearly does not correspond to the height of the ground-floor rooms themselves, since a window aperture is generally higher than the floor behind it. Instead, in a compelling visual metaphor (i.e., connotation rather than denotation), the rustication serves as visual support for the zone above (Fig. 22). The quarrying and shaping of massive stones was expensive, precluding the use of rustication by all but the most affluent building patrons and giving it, at first sight, “inherent” value as a symbol of wealth and power. In binary facades, however, the upper zone – at first view, more prestigious – was generally of plaster over brick – that is, a mode of construction considerably cheaper and more widely diffused than rustication, which fronted the ground floor. Within the cramped and narrow streets of the inner city, moreover, passersby


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necessarily walked in close proximity to the assertive stonework of rusticated walls, experiencing the latter as much in tactile as visual terms. The upper floor, which could only be experienced visually, elicited a contrasting sensuous and aesthetic experience, for at this level, the materiality of actual stone gave way to plaster surfaces available for decoration, often illusionistic, in sgraffito or paint. The artificiality of the upper facade surmounted the sturdily natural ground floor, in a reversal of the status ascribed to rustication, in a city full of plastered houses, as an identifying characteristic of patrician houses. The issue immediately arises of the date of the emergence of the piano nobile, as an area dedicated to reception and representation, surmounting a service floor.60 In a fourteenth-century house, the vaulted spaces off the street were often used or even rented out for commercial purposes or for storage, but they also could provide a setting for domestic rituals, from mundane notarial transactions to important ceremonies. In late-medieval society, needless to say, business dealings and domestic ceremony were orchestrated and often exclusively enacted by men: accordingly, the upper story may have been simply characterized as the setting of the domestic realm, the place of women and small children. This space soon received new importance through the migration of rituals of reception and social interaction into interior space, with interesting repercussions on attitudes to gender in patrician households. Indeed, elite women became signifiers less of privacy than of politeness. If this was a promotion in terms of status, however, it certainly did not alleviate the subordination of women in most areas of life; if anything, women lost ground.

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST JETTIES AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE PLANAR FACADE The typical binary palace facade type had its origins in certain prominent medieval practices of building and dwelling. Projecting structures (sporti; English “jetties”; see Fig. 24) proliferated in medieval Florence, cantilevered out from the fronts of private and some public buildings (e.g., the Bargello).61 These have been the subject of penetrating discussions, notably by David Friedman, which make extended discussion here unnecessary. Few still exist on the primary facades of buildings (an impressive set of jettied structures on a large palace in the Piazza S. Croce perhaps owes its survival as a site from which to view the spectacles that occurred in the square), but many side facades, even of major palaces, carry jetties mounted on powerful stone brackets.62 Jetties were built of lightweight and impermanent materials, perhaps lathe and small timber, and surfaced with a plaster coating.63 The resulting surface was doubtless whitewashed in most cases, producing a striking contrast in tone and color with the front of the ground floor, where the benches and tables of merchants and traders were not only set against darker stone walls but also often shaded by the projecting structures above.

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24. Jettied houses, Florence (tower and palaces of the Corbizzi family, Piazza San Pier Maggiore, Florence). At one time sporti were also attached to the tower.

As experienced from the interior, jetties expanded the space of a house beyond its footprint, a matter of importance in the congested central districts of Florence. Often they seem to have enabled or improved communication, especially between floors, and many of the surviving jetties contain stairs.64 Seen from the street, jetties formed a projecting plane that concealed the bearing wall behind, making it an interior wall. The evidence from Florence indicates that the antithetic articulation of superimposed horizontal zones, a ubiquitous feature of early modern facade architecture in general, began as a practical response to the exigencies of urban living at close quarters, within an accommodating legislative environment.


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If so, the legislative environment soon changed. A long-drawn-out statutory campaign against jetties and similar projecting elements was a central preoccupation of the late-medieval Florentine governing elite.65 Legislative and broadly cultural changes went hand in hand, at least in the world of the elite. Palace facades built or remodeled after the mid fourteenth century generally show no sign of jetties, indicating a change of fashion of crucial significance, as Friedman has argued, for the emergence of a distinctively early modern urban environment.66 The liberation of the actual front wall of a palace from projecting jetties produced the possibility of a facade. At the scale of the street, moreover, the disappearance of jetties gave palaces a far more generous spatial context, allowing their facades to qualify as objects of aesthetic attention, within an evolving reconceptualization of public space as a kind of stage. The emergence of the facade, in other words, was intimately connected to an epochal shift in the relationship of house and street, and private and public space. Obviously, far more than aesthetic interests were at stake here. Friedman’s account of the disciplining of the urban environment through a campaign against jetties dovetails neatly with Trachtenberg’s Foucauldian reading of Trecento urbanism, especially with regard to the ordering of public space in the central city. On the other hand, jetties were sufficiently widespread in the Trecento not to be associated with the dwellings or district of a particular class or social group. A campaign of urban improvement directed at jetties in general, therefore, implies an abstract and idealizing approach to the urban environment as a whole, rather than an attack on a specific social group. The campaign against jetties, however, began in the period of the Ordinances of Justice of 1293–95, the legislation that sealed the establishment of a revolutionary power structure and political culture in the city, symbolized, as we saw, by the imposition of a height limit on magnate towers. There was after all, perhaps, a link between the state’s campaign against private towers and that against the doubtless far more prevalent jetties. A number of early tower houses survive with abundant physical traces of longdisappeared jetties, which surely provided ample opportunities for aggressive behavior and display, projecting an image of aristocratic violence and arrogance.67 The possible association of jetties with magnate power, at least in the late Dugento, raises the issue of the appearance and connotations of jetties as characteristic elements within the late-medieval visual environment. Though few jetties survive, some evidence exists for their appearance in painted representations of urban scenes or of the city as a whole. These suggest that a simple facing of plaster without surface decoration was applied to most jetties (with the latter’s removal, the exposed front bearing wall of the houses concerned received similar treatment). In his discussion of the visual evidence, Friedman emphasizes the transfer from one context to the other of what he calls an “aesthetically neutral surface.” This claim seems inconsistent, however, with the early interest in facade ornament, especially the fashion for incised ornament

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25. Casa Davanzati, Florence. Rendering of 1886 showing the fourteenth-century use of sgraffito to create the effect of drafted masonry (or brick), and to accentuate the Gothic windows.

(sgraffito), which has left traces throughout the city. A good example is the sgraffito facade of the Casa Davanzati (not the famous Palazzo Davanzati, built by the Davizzi family), of the third quarter of the fourteenth century (Fig. 25). Here the fictive ashlar stonework is enlivened by cheerful ornamental bands framing the apertures and articulating the major sections of the facade.68


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The passage of time and changes in fashion have canceled much of the sgraffito decoration that once ornamented urban houses. Sgraffito, however, was a more permanent form of surface decoration than painting, which would have been a cheaper, faster, and more flexible substitute. It seems reasonable to assume that painting was also extensively used on Florentine facades, if only to produce images of religious character (painted images of the Madonna are still visible in Italian cities), or identifying a shop or trade or, in the case of qualified families, heraldic insignia.69 In trecento and early quattrocento representations of the city, however, such decoration is absent, as Friedman has emphasized, though perhaps without sufficent attention to the representational conventions and conditions of patronage associated with the imagery in question and evocative of the ideology of consensus among the patrician class.70

DISCRIMINATIONS: LOOKING BEYOND UNIFORMITY IN THE FLORENTINE STREETSCAPE We can be sure, in any case, that ephemeral decorations on and around the palaces echoed the controlled pomp of civic rituals or, at the other extreme, the more spontaneous amusements of the young, including jousts and other events that temporarily brought to the streets and squares the chivalric themes and ideals more permanently enshrined in the recesses of the grander palaces. By the late trecento, sgraffito or painted decoration was perhaps becoming common. In general, however, the stern facades of private palaces spoke a language of permanence, not least through their assertive rustication, with its particular allusion to the mighty Palazzo della Signoria, seat of the republic, and to feudal and even ancient models. The situation was perhaps more complex, however, for the late fourteenth-century closing of social ranks did not inhibit the economic and social mobility of an early center of recognizably capitalist forms of enterprise.71 As we saw, one of the major rusticated palaces of the later trecento, the Palazzo Alessandri, was built by a newly constituted family, even if its members came from an old and eminent lineage. The emphasis on stone in its “natural” form perhaps asserted and, at the same time, naturalized the social power of newcomers to the elite, as much as it signaled the persistence of hierarchy. When a design seems to abjure rhetoric, its rhetorical effect is all the stronger. Important questions of interpretation are raised by the massive palace constructed in the second decade of the fifteenth century for the powerful statesman Niccolò da Uzzano, a leading figure in the oligarchic reggimento, as a residence for his own and his brother’s families (Figs. 23, 26; Map 2). Usually named for the Capponi family, to whom it soon passed, this palace (referred to here as the Palazzo da Uzzano) has received some scholarly attention, but generally in the context of discussion of the background of the Medici palace.72 Indeed, through its squat and stocky proportions, later mitigated by raising the height of the upper stories, the Palazzo da Uzzano stands out as a negative

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26. Via de’ Bardi, Florence, showing the Palazzo Capponi (Da Uzzano) in the distance, and the Palazzo Canigiani in the foreground. The Palazzo Canigiani and, less obviously, the house next to it exemplify the use of drafted rustication.

model for the far more elegant residence of Cosimo de’ Medici (Fig. 3), who came to power in 1434 at the expense of Niccolò da Uzzano’s regime (Niccolò himself died in 1432). The strikingly squat horizontality of da Uzzano’s house cannot be discounted, however, as evidence merely of architectural mediocrity. The emphatic horizontality of the palace’s extremely wide street facade stands in an obvious contrast to the verticality of traditional tower houses, or even the relatively


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Map 2. Map of the Via de’ Benci and surrounding district.

recent and sophisticated Palazzo Davanzati. The expanse of unbroken rusticated wall on the ground floor, uninterrupted by shops or large openings, emphasizes the width of the da Uzzano house, thus drawing attention to the size of the lot. The generous, hence prestigious, lot size was doubtless connected with the palace’s somewhat peripheral location in Oltr’arno, between the Via de’ Bardi and the river. The Via de’ Bardi, however, marked the line of the so-called second wall of the early thirteenth century, which lost its raison d’etre with the construction, beginning in the 1290s, of the city’s final wall system. The disappearance of this wall opened up generous spaces and settings for palace building (Map 2). The Alberti were among families who took advantage of this, by expanding their residences on either side of the Via de’ Benci, dominated by the surviving archaic tower and loggia on the corner of the Borgo

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27. Alberti tower and loggia, Via de’ Benci, Florence. The view is taken from the western side of the Via de’ Benci looking northward toward the Alberti tower at the intersection of the Via de’ Benci and the Borgo Santa Croce. The contrast in width between the Via de’ Benci and Borgo S. Croce (not an unimportant thoroughfare) is clearly apparent.

Santa Croce (Fig. 27).73 The Alberti presence was also marked by a domed mausoleum at the entrance of the Ponte alle Grazie, a remarkable example of the symbolic appropriation of public space by a leading family.74 Across the bridge lay the Via de’ Bardi, leading to the da Uzzano palace.75 The topographical correspondence of the da Uzzano and Alberti compounds is no less suggestive than their proximity. With the banishment from the city of the men of the


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Alberti lineage, for which da Uzzano and his faction were responsible, the Alberti tower became a sign of the power of the government, a prominent warning to other disaffected ancient families. The insistent horizontality of the da Uzzano house, then, perhaps provided a conspicuous symbolic contrast with magnate towers in general, and with the Alberti tower in particular.

COMPOSING URBANITY: DESIGN AND REPRESENTATION IN SIENA AND FLORENCE The emergence of the facade presupposed a degree of intentionality in the working out of designs, in advance of the process of construction. No architectural drawings for palaces survive from medieval Florence, but a fourteenthcentury drawing in Siena provides incontrovertible proof that facade designs were on occasion carefully worked out, at least for houses in conspicuous locations and occupied by leading families (Fig. 28). Any visitor to Siena recalls the prevalence of brick as a building material; there was little use of rusticated stone. Nevertheless, the drawing shows a facade that is not constructed exclusively of brick, but rather articulated in a binary arrangement of horizontal zones of contrasted form and, as the inscription indicates, material. As in contemporary Florentine practice, this binary structuring betrays utilitarian considerations, with a lower section built of harder and more resistant stone, appropriately for its exposed position on a major street. An important difference from Florentine practice, however, is the emphasis on formal contrast and applied ornament in articulating the facade; there is no apparent expression of connotative values through “natural” qualities of the materials concerned. The drawing documents, then, the pervasiveness of antithetic facade design far beyond Florence, and without dependence on Florentine models; it also illustrates the potential for differing inflections, with differing connotative value, of a basic denotative framework, though the framework itself might have ideological connotations.76 The Sienese drawing, dated 1340, shows the front of a town house identified as the extant Palazzo Sansedoni located close to the Campo, in the commercial and social heart of the city.77 Toker demonstrates that the drawing represents a project, not the registration of an already extant building: its function was to make clear in graphic form a preexisting design and to guide construction work. The drawing gives limited information. Mainly, it locates apertures in a tall, apparently flat house front, on which the windows and portals constitute the major architectural detailing, at least below the evidently projecting machicolations carried on consoles at the top of the building. A contrast of material is instituted between stone beneath and brick above, though the contrast seems to be of color rather than texture.78 Doubtless, no such house would have been left unmarked by insignia of some kind, and the drawing carries a rather inconspicuous notation of the family’s coat of arms. These

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28. Agostino di Giovanni, elevation of Palazzo Sansedoni, Siena. The lowest floor is below grade. The ground floor, with its mezzanine, is equipped with rounded arches; all the upper floors have Gothic arches. The draftsman notes the use of brick to create a herringbone pattern on the front of the crenellations surmounting the building.


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are clearly not understood as part of the “architecture” represented in the drawing. In a modest anticipation of the contrast famously drawn by Alberti, the drawing suggests a disjunction between “architecture” and “ornament.”79 Alberti was concerned with the divergent roles of the classicizing column in architecture, as support and as key element of an essentially ornamental system of articulation. In the Siena drawing there is no trace of the classical orders, but it represents a facade articulation whose logic anticipates later ornamental and symbolic applications of the columnar orders. If we exclude the lowest section of the facade, which represents the vaulted section of the house below grade, there are four rows of apertures, with a row of small mezzanine windows above the ground-floor openings. The major openings fall into two groups: the lowest row (i.e., above the cellar) is round-topped and of squatter proportions; the upper rows are taller and characterized by pointed arches. A distinction is clearly made here between the zone of the building used for commercial and public functions and the less accessible residential zone above. The drawing asserts – or perhaps rather takes for granted – the hierarchical organization of the facade and the superiority of the upper floors, with their Gothic windows, over the vaulted premises beneath. The Sansedoni facade, therefore, belongs in a wider discourse about the contrast of Gothic and round-arched (“Romanesque”) architectural idioms in fourteenth-century visual culture, especially in well-known cases where their deployment lacks structural implications, and is clearly done for purely semiotic effect.80 In Siena, moreover, construction itself – obviously according to accepted standards of architectural urbanity – had civic or even moral value, and was represented as such in city hall, not far from the Palazzo Sansedoni itself.81 The statutes of Siena required, further, that private palaces facing the Palazzo Pubblico across the Campo should have windows modeled on those of the latter. Apparently the concern here was not (just) for regularity of appearance, but specifically for the diffusion of Gothic forms.82 The formal language of the Sienese drawing, then, however basic, links it to the ascendancy of cultural models whose social and political resonances are frankly spelled out in the imagery of the main audience halls of the Palazzo Pubblico. Yet though there is evidently a hierarchical relationship between the Romanesque and Gothic of the Sansedoni facade drawing, the “Romanesque” of the basement floor does not characterize the activity of a superseded magnate class, but rather the necessary economic activity of a merchant family, presided over by the men of the family. The Gothic detailing on the upper floors, on the other hand, may indicate an emphasis in the strongly Ghibelline city of Siena on magnate values even within a mercantile context, just as typical pursuits of young aristocrats – falconry and other courtly amusements – are featured in the imagery in city hall of an ideal ordered polity identified with Siena. In Florence, on the other hand, there is at first sight little trace of markedly Gothic detailing on fourteenth-century facades. Nevertheless, window and

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portal surrounds of distinctly pointed, “Gothic” profile become common and conspicuous features of fifteenth-century palace architecture, usually within a unified facade composition of unmistakable Renaissance character.83 Rather later than in Siena, perhaps, this marks an overt mingling of courtly and civic ideologies and cultural values. It also draws attention to a new relationship, discussed in the following chapters, between the house and the city.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FACADE IN QUESTION BRUNELLESCHI

TOWARD A NEW ARCHITECTURE: THE DISPUTED FOUNDER The emergence of the architectural facade is not a story of architects or even patrons, but of a largely anonymous process of urban transformation. In the early fifteenth century, however, the pace of qualitative advance quickened, and the scattered works of (or attributed to) a single innovator stand out in the urban sea of stone, now redimensioned by his greatest achievement, the looming cathedral dome. Shortly after his death, Filippo Brunelleschi’s status as a cultural protagonist was officially recognized through the installation, in the cathedral itself, of a monument carrying a grandiloquent epitaph and a likeness of the architect, affirming the unity of the man and his body of work.1 To say the least, Brunelleschi was no facade architect, as his radical counterfacade for Santo Spirito, already mentioned, makes clear. In recent scholarship, however, the earlier assurance about the nature and significance of Brunelleschi’s achievement has given way to general aporia: his approach to design was radical, or traditional; he produced architecture profoundly classical in principle, or profoundly unclassical or even, on occasion, anticlassical; he broke free from traditional civic and institutional entanglements and presuppositions, or he remained firmly embedded within them.2 Such aporias – the list could go on – focus attention on real contradictions or at least tensions in Brunelleschi’s own life and work. Most obviously, his ability to operate successfully within traditional administrative structures and social networks of the Florentine republic, from the cathedral building office to the guild of stone masons, did not preclude intransigence with respect to institutional practices and processes of decision making. His much-cited record of governmental office holding and an early commission for remodeling in the Palazzo della Signoria itself indicate that Brunelleschi enjoyed the confidence of the early fifteenth-century governing elite, and suggest that he shared the 77

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values of “civic humanism,” a quasi-official ideology of the republic in the difficult years of threats to Florentine independence from Milan and elsewhere. In fact, the evidence suggests a certain coolness in the relations between Brunelleschi and leading humanists, for whom he qualified as a culture hero only posthumously.3 At the very least, the prevalent image of the early Florentine Renaissance as a cohesive cultural epoch, with Brunelleschi as a leading protagonist, is seriously open to question. Nevertheless, it is possible that the coolness between Brunelleschi and certain humanists followed the ascent to power of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1434. Certainly, Brunelleschi never again held government office, perhaps, as often claimed, as a result of a shift in his political fortunes.4 Nor did he receive Medicean patronage after 1434, that is, in a period when Cosimo and his sons implemented a coherent policy of cultural patronage that forged a remarkably durable association between the Medicean regime and literary and philosophical humanism as well as innovative work in the visual arts. Was this a matter of ideology? The new learning, lavishly fostered by Cosimo, was now deeply entangled with Medicean interests, and in some individuals, the study of antiquities and the appreciation of all’antica forms coincided with the renunciation of or at least disinterest in the ideals of civic humanism. A conspicuous example is the arch-connoisseur Niccolò Niccoli, whose barbed exchange with Brunelleschi is a key piece of evidence for antipathy between Brunelleschi and the humanists.5 If this took place after 1434, it may have had specific political resonance. The issue is far from clear, however, since Brunelleschi’s documented political career ended not in 1434, but in 1432, by when he was of an age and career position to resist extensive demands on his time and energy from a demanding patron with an existing close relationship with a more pliant architect, Michelozzo.6 It is even possible that Brunelleschi had a hand in the design of the major building attributed to Michelozzo, the Palazzo Medici itself.7 If Brunelleschi scholars have achieved consensus about any aspect of his activity, it is the general skepticism about the claim, already found in Renaissance sources, that he developed the principles of his architecture through the direct study of antiquity.8 In recent accounts of his career, Brunelleschi has shed his toga and steps forward as a hardheaded practitioner of a rationalizing architecture crucially indebted to an engagement with medieval Italian models and precedents, most of them Florentine. In his massive recent study of Brunelleschi’s buildings, indeed, the late Howard Saalman represents Brunelleschi unequivocally as a bound by tradition; Alberti, for Saalman, is the crucial figure in the development as well as the theoretical elaboration of a new and in many respects revolutionary architecture.9 It is important to distinguish, however, between diverse approaches to antiquity. Grounded in humanist literary and archeological studies, Alberti’s model of architectural expression was obviously congenial to humanist observers and patrons. Alberti also drew on a current of architectural design

THE FACADE IN QUESTION

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that sought effects of richness and “color,” in the rhetorical sense, entirely foreign to Brunelleschi.10 Such “sculptor’s architecture,” in Arnaldo Bruschi’s phrase, is especially associated with Brunelleschi’s great rival and counterpart, Lorenzo Ghiberti, who relied on humanist advisers in a process of professional and artistic self-fashioning, and in the celebration of his own work as a milestone in the recovery of the lost art of antiquity. The label of unclassical or anticlassical sometimes applied, implicitly or explicitly, to Brunelleschi depends, then, on an overly homogenizing conception of “the classical.”

“VERNACULAR” BRUNELLESCHI? Brunelleschi was intensely a man of Florence. As a notary’s son he had familiarity with basic educational and legal processes, and as a participant in government he gained experience of the complex and contentious world of the councils and committees of the Florentine republic and the guilds. He took part in the sometimes scurrilous exchanges of verses and tales of a loosely defined group that met in the shop of the barber poet Burchiello, celebrated for his advocacy of the Tuscan dialect – the local vernacular – as a medium for literary expression. The barber and his friends drew lively motifs and linguistic models from the streets and markets of Florence, but also shared a passion for Dante.11 Predictably, they also shared a general aversion for Petrarch, Petrarchism, and humanism, though Burchiello at least appears to have been a political supporter of the oligarchic reggimento, with its crucial ideological commitment to civic humanism and to the all’antica style in art.12 Some of the Burchiello group had, like Brunelleschi, an interest in technology, notably Giovanni da Prato, lecturer on Dante at the Florentine university, but best known for his attacks on Brunelleschi’s designs for the cupola and for a spirited exchange of polemical verses with the architect.13 Brunelleschi was at home, then, among the sharp blades and wits in Burchiello’s shop, a lively and learned, but emphatically vernacular, milieu. The significance of this for his approach to architectural design is far from straightforward; indeed, Brunelleschi’s distillation of rigorous architectural language through abstraction and rationalization seems related only by contrast to Burchiello’s often macaronic, carnivalesque, and open-ended versification. Both Brunelleschi and Burchiello, however, were committed in their own ways to the self-conscious reassertion of local tradition: Brunelleschi, of course, drew particular inspiration mainly from buildings located in Florence and, in the case of the Baptistery, symbolically identified with the city. The selection of sources, however, is less important than the use made of them in the design process. Brunelleschi shaped his architectural system through reference to a restricted and coherent group of models, not only actual buildings, like the Baptistery itself, but also virtual buildings such as the canopied aediculae prominently represented in the Baptistery’s mosaic decorations.14 Such light-

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weight, open-sided pavilions of manifest tectonic structure recall the metaphor of a skeletal, jointed architecture – an architecture of “limbs and bones” – attributed to Brunelleschi himself.15 In terms of the perceptions of his day, such structures echoed, even if distantly, a specifically Tuscan antiquity, for the Baptistery in particular was believed to be a relic of the Roman city, a matter of considerable cultural and even political importance.16 At the same time, Brunelleschi’s elaboration of an architectural system from Florentine sources drew sustenance from an understanding of classical architecture as he had experienced and studied it in Rome itself. Brunelleschi’s formal explorations, however, were secondary to and contained within the conception of a perspectivally constituted space, made amenable to reason through technologies of measurement and the application of optical theory. Whatever his models, Brunelleschi’s buildings convey a remarkable degree of abstraction from the contemporary city, or indeed that of antiquity. Nevertheless, the dependence on certain early medieval buildings, notably the Baptistery, is and surely always was unmistakable. Paradoxically, then, an architect committed to and active in the Florentine republic consistently looked to models predating the latter’s establishment, rather than the great architectural projects of the Trecento state.

FACES/FACETS: ABSTRACTION AT THE CATHEDRAL The great group of public buildings erected or at least initiated around 1300 by the newly triumphant republic, and still dominating the silhouette of the city, transformed the city into a physical symbol as well as setting of its power. They include two – the cathedral and the Palazzo della Signoria – where Brunelleschi served as project supervisor, in the succession from the founding architect, Arnolfo di Cambio, practicioner of a Gothic moderated by native masonry traditions and early Christian and even ancient references.17 Completing the cathedral with the famous cupola (Fig. 29), Brunelleschi was bound by contractual obligation to follow an existing design. Nevertheless, the bold profiling of the great marble ribs and the vertical accentuation of the swelling dome display a marked degree of originality, manifesting, not least, Brunelleschi’s passionate interest in geometry. The author, almost certainly Antonio Manetti, of the famous late-fifteenth-century biography of Brunelleschi quotes a crucial document of 1420, in which the term face (faccia) is used of the “faces” defined by the ribs (sproni).18 In this usage, the term is entirely devoid of anthropomorphic connotations; instead, it draws on technical terminology in the geometry of regular solid bodies (cf. the English “facet”).19 As we will see, in his pioneer exercises in perspective drawing, Brunelleschi imaged buildings (one octagonal, like the cupola) as faceted three-dimensional solids, not as facades. Indeed, the conceptual opposition central to quattrocento architecture may be grounded in the semantic range of the term faccia itself.


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29. Florence cathedral (S. Maria del Fiore). Four of the eight “faces” of Brunelleschi’s dome.

In any case, the design of the cupola exemplifies a process of transfiguration characteristic of Brunelleschi’s general approach. Whether continuing an existing fabric, as at the cathedral, or manipulating a familiar typological model in a new project, as at the Spedale degli Innocenti (Foundling Hospital), Brunelleschi consistently designed buildings that engaged their physical and/or institutional context. Through a rigorous and focused process of abstraction, they reveal essential properties that were already there.

BRUNELLESCHI AND THE PLACE OF HOUSING The vernacular writing of Burchiello and his circle not only drew on Dante, but also championed the poet’s continuing primacy in a changing literary environment. In the physical environment, Arnolfo’s public architecture, notably the Palazzo della Signoria, set a crucial paradigm for the development

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of an architectural vernacular in patrician houses in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Little is known of Brunelleschi’s involvement with residential building; looking back from the 1480s, Manetti claims in his biography of the architect that he played an important role in the transition from a rough (rozzo) style of domestic building.20 He gives particular emphasis to remodeling work in the still extant house of a certain Apollonio Lapi. The physical evidence indicates that a new entrance passage was inserted, but there is no trace of a major architectural intervention. The house’s prominence in Manetti’s text may depend in part on its conspicuous location on a major street, the Corso, a short distance from the intersection with the Via dei Calzaiuoli. More important, perhaps, was a desire to signal Brunelleschi’s claimed kinship with the aristocratic Apollonio, a scion of the eminent Aldobrandini lineage.21 With the obvious exception of fascinating allegations about a project for Cosimo de’ Medici, we hear little about other verifiable or even possible private residential projects by Brunelleschi.22 Any such projects were surely not different in kind from work undertaken by Brunelleschi in certain major public or institutional buildings: at the Palazzo della Signoria and the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, most notably, he intervened in an existing built fabric, even if in his new hall for the Parte Guelfa, though never completed, he created a remarkably influential building.23 The dearth of evidence about Brunelleschi’s residential architecture echoes, indeed, the better known lacuna regarding the architect’s sojourn in Rome and study of the remains of the ancient city, as Manetti claims he did. A visit to Rome on Brunelleschi’s part, which seems highly likely, was in any case only part of a longer and more diverse period of preparation. Born in 1379, Brunelleschi trained and practiced as a goldsmith, which probably contributed little to his well-known technical, mathematical, and generally intellectual interests and expertise, or his ability to undertake the complex task of designing a building and seeing it to completion. As an architect, he achieved conspicuous success relatively late; in his breakthrough years of 1418 to 1420 he was already in his forties, and in a position to benefit from his long-term association with the oligarchic reggimento. His first known engagement with architecture had perhaps been the preparation of the two famous perspective panels showing the most important public secular and religious buildings in the city. These panels, now unfortunately lost, ended up in the Palazzo Medici as ornaments of the palace. Perhaps in consequence they are usually discussed as if they were laboratory experiments, rather than charged with ideology. There was a tradition at Florence of the ornamental display of illusionistic images of architecture. In the frescoes in the reception rooms of the Palazzo Davanzati, fictive arcades and corbeling occur, though they are clearly secondary to the images of courtly romance and garden greenery. Such decorations, done for a wealthy but politically marginalized family, are nostalgic, even escapist in character, while also conveying moral messages appropriate in a


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30. Anonymous fresco, an allegory of the expulsion of Walter of Brienne, the “Duke of Athens,” from Florence. The northern entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria is clearly visible beside the platform on which the Virgin is seated. As in the Sienese Palazzo Sansedoni, though not in that city’s Palazzo Pubblico, the major floors are distinguished by Gothic windows, with roundtopped windows beneath.

Florentine patrician milieu.24 In the houses of reggimento families, however, such dreamy nostalgia would hardly have been in place. There is no detailed documentation of the interior furnishings of such houses, but it would certainly not be surprising if images of important civic buildings were displayed, notably those associated with the political leadership of the families and individuals concerned. A single medieval image of the Palazzo della Signoria exists in Florence, preserved by chance in a copy on a wall of the city prison (Fig. 30). Its ideological character is absolutely explicit, for it shows the expulsion from the city

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of a would-be tyrant, the Duke of Athens, in 1342.25 In the political conditions of the post-Ciompi reggimento, we might expect hortatory or even talismanic imagery of this kind to migrate from a public into a private setting, conveying a positive message about the good order and peaceful state of the city in palaces whose exteriors did the same.26

AN ANT’S VIEW OF ARCHITECTURE: PALACE DESIGN AND THE DOMESTIC UNCANNY Whatever Brunelleschi’s actual role, there is clear evidence of changing expectations in housing among the Florentine elite in the early fifteenth century, though the intermittent alarms and military threats to the city obviously inhibited prospective builders (though perhaps not collectors of architectural representations!). The Palazzo da Uzzano, reviewed in the previous chapter, indicates the scale and magnificence of building for major patrons, though little is left to give any impression of the original interiors. Such shifts in domestic space perhaps find powerful expression in a poem by Burchiello in which an ant discovers a horse’s skull that seems to him to make a fine, bright, and even conspicuous (chiaro) dwelling.27 The ant soon realizes, however, that there is no food for him there, presumably because it is outside the customary haunts of the ant community. In the end, by returning to his customary hole (buco), the ant withdraws from the temptation of a lifestyle marked by architectural elaboration and symbols of status (the horse’s skull seems to allude to chivalric values and trappings), but also by the interruption of long-standing social and economic patterns. In his buco he finds again the inconspicuous and unpretentious but familiar and nourishing gemeinschaft of the ants’ nest, so different from the uncanny milieu of the skull.28 The evocation in Burchiello’s poem of a grand but cold and uncanny domestic space echoes a well-known but highly controversial thesis about the interior character of Florentine palaces of the Renaissance. Richard Goldthwaite has insisted that the evolution in house form in the Renaissance accompanied and accommodated significant shifts in household composition, in particular a shift away from the extended household to a recognizably “modern” nuclear family occupying large but sparsely furnished spaces. Others have argued for the persistence of traditional affective and social networks such as the lineage, the confraternity, and the neighborhood.29 Nevertheless, Florentine palaces were less likely to be built to contain apartments for distinct family units, as was the case at Venice. When a Florentine palace had this character, it was pointed out as if worthy of remark, as in the references to the Palazzo Busini, discussed in a later section. The debate has focused on the domestic environment primarily to raise questions about its evidentiary value in reconstructing social practice.


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31. Palazzo Busini, courtyard.

Implicitly, however, Goldthwaite challenges us to consider the issue of the visual aspect and legibility of the urban fabric. Without doubt a major shift in palace form took place in the Renaissance, with its onset roughly in the third quarter of the trecento and a period of especially significant activity in the so-called “building boom” of the later fifteenth century.30 According to the Goldthwaite thesis, the exteriors of palaces built in this period are deceptive, in that they seem built to accommodate far larger households than those that would have occupied them. The opposing thesis holds that formal experimentation in palace architecture, however suggestive of social innovation within, masked relatively unchanging social practices and structures. In different respects, therefore, both views represent elite palaces as concealing some inner reality; in other words, the face of the patrician city was truly a “facade.” In the emergence of new standards of elite residential architecture, no building was more important than the Medici palace (Fig. 3). Key elements, however, had already made an appearance in Florentine domestic architecture. As early as the 1420s a square courtyard enclosed by four uniform arcaded porticoes was constructed in the Palazzo Busini, across town in the gonfalone of Leon Nero (Black Lion district) in the Santa Croce quarter (Fig. 31; Map 2).31 It caught the attention not only of modern scholars, but also of late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century observers of the Florentine built environment. There is a general consensus that the courtyard is unprecedented; with its rational and regular geometry of plan and elevation, its monolithic columns, and its fine but restrained and uniform detailing of capitals and other architectural

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ornament, it is, in modern terminology, the first palace courtyard of the Renaissance.32 In the sixteenth century, the formal character and early date of the courtyard of the Palazzo Busini secured its attribution to Brunelleschi, now firmly established in the pantheon of the heroes of Florentine culture. Unfortunately, there is no mention of the palace in the Life of Brunelleschi of Antonio Manetti, despite Manetti’s claim, largely unsupported by examples, that building patrons frequently sought Brunelleschi’s advice specifically for private residential projects.33 Recent monographic works on Brunelleschi’s architecture mostly either exclude Brunelleschi from consideration as architect of the palace or ignore it altogether.34 I shall return to the question of authorship later.

FRAME AND SCREEN: THE PALAZZO BUSINI The exterior of the Palazzo Busini does not prepare the visitor for the courtyard, which indeed is often illustrated without the rest of the building. As seen from the street, the Palazzo Busini, though certainly not eye-catching, is imposing enough, largely through its sheer bulk (Fig. 32). With eight window axes in the upper floors, it is extremely wide by the standards of the time, occupying an entire block. The effect of its bulk is enhanced by its position on a relatively wide street, the Via de’Benci leading down to the Ponte alle Grazie (Map 2). The early fourteenth-century construction of the much more capacious “third” and final wall had rendered the “second circle” redundant. Demolition of the latter provided generous space for the layout of streets following the line of the wall and for the construction of palaces, which came effectively into view along the new streets.35 The Via de’ Benci was such a street. If the facade of the Palazzo Busini is from the 1420s (i.e., not substantially the result of reconstruction following the transfer of the house to the Bardi family in 1483),36 it marks as radical a departure as the courtyard from traditional usage. There is no trace of the usual binary articulation of the facade, though this would have been appropriate to the functions accommodated by the building, as indicated by the existing contrast of shop openings on the ground floor and regularly spaced and large windows on the floor above. Rustication, of a conspicuously flat and tame type, is confined to the surround of the main portal and to quoining on the edges of the facade, while fictive rusticated blocks in stucco frame the windows. Otherwise all three floors of the palace are covered with flat plaster in which fictive ashlar masonry is incised. The floors are marked off from each other by stringcourses, but from top to bottom there is no trace of variation in the sgraffito ornament, which turns the corner at both ends and covers one bay of the wall surface on the side alleys. The treatment of openings intensifies the


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32. Palazzo Busini (Bardi-Serzelli), exterior. The Via de’ Benci slopes from right to left; hence in part the discrepancy in the treatment of the ground floor on either side of the portal.

impression of homogeneity: the single portal in the rather high ground floor is framed with flat ashlar blocks projecting only slightly from the smooth wall; and the window surrounds on the upper floors echo the slightly pointed, low relief profile of the portal. Such uniformity of facade treatment was rare in early fifteenth-century palace architecture, though simulated ashlar masonry as an overall surface had existed for a while as an option in facade design.37 In the case of the Palazzo Busini, two factors were perhaps in play. On the one hand, the relatively flat rustication that became fashionable in some circles in the later trecento and early quattrocento was easily replicated in sgraffito and extended over a complete facade. On the other hand, the construction of palaces did not occur in a vacuum, and there was extensive construction throughout the city of housing, much of it carried out by major religious and other institutions, for less afflu-

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ent strata of the population than the palace-owning elite.38 By the beginning of the fifteenth century, standardization of house form and homogeneity of appearance were frequent in such developments, apparently as a result of conscious planning.39 At least on more important thoroughfares, it is unlikely that such housing was ever equipped with projecting jetties, which, as we saw, provided a functional justification for the contrast of surface treatment on a house front. The interest in homogeneity in facade design grew through the century, and became prevalent toward 1500. In prominent but rather unusual cases – for example, the Palazzi Rucellai, Pitti, Strozzi, or Gondi – the material used was stone, while fictive masonry in stucco clothed less lavish palaces, like the Palazzo Busini itself or the Palazzo Portinari-Salviati of the 1470s.40 Huge, smooth, and relatively plain, the facade of the Palazzo Busini is, in Burchiello’s terms, an architectural horse’s skull. Its effect among the rocky outcrops fronting the palaces in its vicinity must have been striking in an era when, as Brenda Preyer has noted, rusticated arcading on the ground floor of palaces constituted a sign of patrician solidarity.41 It embodies the major defining characteristics of the early modern facade, achieving a high degree of formal coherence and sameness within a clearly demarcated perimeter, and satisfying David Friedman’s condition of “orientation … toward the street.”42 Finally, its rhetorical or expressive aspect is undeniable, even if this largely depends on understatement or even dissimulation, distracting attention from the remarkable environment within. The signifying potential of the early modern facade emerges, in other words, from the apparent – or suggested – nonsignification of a mute, bony carapace.

PRUDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE If the Busini brothers chose to focus their investment on the interior of the palace, rather than the front, what can we surmise about their motivation? In uncertain times, prudence sometimes counseled exterior blandness. In his treatise on architecture, Alberti recommends inconspicuous siting and exterior treatment for the house of a private citizen, and the same is implied in the well-known passages in praise of withdrawal from an active political life in the Della Famiglia.43 In a departure from the idiom of recent or roughly contemporary palaces of oligarchic grandees, like the Alessandri or da Uzzano, the Busini palace instituted a modest, indeed prudential architecture, unlikely to attract envy or suspicion. As such it anticipates a significant group of family palaces whose size and array of windows and coats of arms were sufficient to assert social rank, but that eschew external architectural representation. In the case of the Palazzo Tornabuoni, Giorgio Vasari noted, apparently with raised eyebrows, the absence of signs of magnificence on the exterior, while emphasizing that the interior was modeled on the Palazzo Medici.44


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33. Palazzo Pazzi, Florence. The contrast of rusticated basement and elegant upper floors is here carried to an extreme. The basement story is also notable for the absence of mezzanine windows, for all its considerable height.

The Tornabuoni built their palace in the years of the Medici ascendancy, when a family of such ancient lineage might well have wanted to avoid any suspicion of ambition. To judge from the exterior treatment of their palaces, such concerns were less pressing for the less than faithful Medici ally Luca Pitti or for the – eventually – outright treacherous Pazzi family.45 Nevertheless, the scale and magnificence of Jacopo de’ Pazzi’s palace (Fig. 33), which prompted later authors to attribute it (anachronistically) to Brunelleschi, perhaps prompted a macabre incident after his execution for complicity in the conspiracy of 1478. A crowd dragged his corpse from the piazza to the Palazzo Pazzi and, banging on the door, demanded it be opened to provide entrance for the master of the house.46 Organized vandalism against the houses of the losers in factional conflict had been standard practice; among the palaces of Guelf leaders attacked by a furious crowd in June 1378, for example, was one in the

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immediate vicinity of the Busini.47 And if this was not a sufficient cautionary example, the Alberti were also near neighbors of the Busini. Whatever the relationship between the Busini and Tornabuoni palaces, however, they both exemplify a type of fifteenth-century palace of very restrained design, in emphatic contrast with the rather few highly conspicuous palaces that are often taken as emblematic of the Florentine Quattrocento.

THRESHOLD AND ITINERARY: BEYOND THE FACADE The general blankness of the surface of the Busini facade throws into relief, as if drawn on a page, the profiles and outlines of the facade itself and the apertures opening in it. Low ashlar or fictive ashlar work frames both doors and windows and emphasizes, in the form of quoining, the lateral edges of the facade as a whole. The conspicuous portal combines a rounded inner profile with an exterior profile rising toward a slightly, but noticeably pointed apex, an arrangement repeated in the windows of the upper floors.48 This generically Gothic motif would become, as Lingohr notes, a standard element of Florentine palace design, later in the fifteenth century, perhaps serving as a subtle indicator of adherence to republican traditions.49 The Busini portal appears as an isolated motif on the ground floor, not as part of a larger rusticated surface. The obvious formal echoes with the windows above make it the starting point of an itinerary that both joins and separates the street and the domain of the family. The character and distance, both in physical and symbolic terms, of this itinerary receives definition from the interposition of an all’antica vestibule and courtyard. The combination of architectural grandeur and geometrical discipline in the courtyard seems especially designed to induce in the visitor a suitably grave and reverent state of mind before the ascent, by one of two staircases, into the brothers’ private apartments. In nuce, therefore, the Busini palace anticipates a crucial dimension of the ducal palace at Urbino, with its far more complex and magnificent path into the interior, as discussed in Chapter 6. No trace remains at the Palazzo Busini of a loggia recorded in documents of the 1480s; these specify no site, but refer to a roof supported on two stone pillars (further support must have been given by an adjacent wall).50 This loggia must be reconstructed on the facade; if so, it resembled the extant loggia of the Alberti palace, just across the street, which is also supported on two columns and connected at the back to the front of the house (Fig. 27). The date of the loggia of the Palazzo Busini is unknown, but it was surely not a product of the reconstructions of 1488 to 1498, when such loggias were out of fashion. Most probably, the loggia was built to echo, if not quote, the Alberti loggia, itself an archaic symbol of revival rebuilt after the return of the family from exile in the late 1420s. This is also the most likely date of the Busini loggia; perhaps it was constructed as a gesture of solidarity with the most important family of the district.51


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The history of the Busini family supports this hypothesis, since the brothers who built the palace were the sons of a prominent citizen whose name disappears from the records of office holding after 1413, the year following the final attack on the Alberti by the reggimento.52 For all their wealth, moreover, neither of his sons is documented as holding civic office, suggesting that a prudential focus on the family itself and its domicile took the place of involvement in government, a reordering of priorities explored by Leon Battista Alberti in the Della Famiglia, through the fictionalized persona of his relative Giannozzo Alberti.53 The authorship of the palace is of course disputed. Certain compromises and inconsistencies apparent at the Busini palace suggest the hand of the versatile and flexible Michelozzo, not least in the courtyard that, as noted, anticipated that of the Palazzo Medici.54 Recent research by Maria Bartoli on the proportional systems employed both at the Busini and Medici palaces indicates that, though slightly different systems were used, the same rigor and homogeneity of application is evident, once the constraining local conditions are taken into account.55 The proportional system is carried through three dimensions, and is a feature as much of the elevation (i.e., the facade) as of the ground plan. The proportioning is of course most in evidence in the courtyard, which therefore forms the point zero of the overall design, as well as the symbolic heart of the palace itself. In good Brunelleschian fashion, the interior determines the exterior.

BRUNELLESCHIAN PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN: CORPOREAL GRAMMAR Whoever designed the Palazzo Busini, it realizes architectural principles axiomatic in Brunelleschi’s work. He insisted on absolute consistency from building to building, inscribing into the complex and motley urban fabric moments of a potentially universal paradigm of architectural form. This consistency also operated at the level of the individual project through the correspondence of interior and exterior.56 Symbolism is secondary to, if not inherent in, the rational play of architectural members and volumes. Brunelleschi left no explicit reflection on his approach, except, perhaps, for a remarkable pronouncement attributed to him in Manetti’s biography. Composed about 1480, this unprecedented document for the career of an individual architect emerged in an intellectual and professional milieu sharply distinct from that of Brunelleschi himself.57 In particular, the famous description of Brunelleschi’s visit to Rome and study of ancient architecture seems colored by the intervening consolidation of expectations about the preparation of an architect. It is in this passage that Manetti introduces the idea of a fundamental ordine di membri e d’ossa (arrangement of limbs and bones), supposedly discerned by Brunelleschi in the remains of ancient architecture. The metaphor serves to accentuate a technical distinction

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between supporting and reinforcing elements (regimenti e fortezze) and ornamenti. It also recalls Alberti’s recourse to a similar organic metaphor, though with a crucial expansion to encompass flesh and skin that is completely missing in the biography and evokes an architecture very different from Brunelleschi’s.58 It is reasonable, then, to trace back to Brunelleschi himself a specific inflection, in the notion of membri e ossa, of a familiar body metaphor.59 In their abstraction and intellectualism, Brunelleschi’s buildings hardly invite elucidation in terms of organic metaphor, except of a particularly abstract kind. Instead, the frequent recourse in Brunelleschi studies to the metaphor of grammar responds to his typical articulation of space through the integration of uniform elements into consistent patterns of syntactic ordering. As Walter Ong has demonstrated, spatial metaphor proliferates in latemedieval learned discourse, notably in reference to articulated bodies of doctrine.60 In the case of Brunelleschi’s architecture, the relationship of text and building seems to move in the opposite direction. Brunelleschi’s “architectural grammar” may depend, indeed, on a conception of philosophical grammar of crucial importance in late-medieval European culture. In short, this was a familiar late-medieval doctrine, developed and articulated by scholars at Bologna University, among others, according to which Latin grammar was a mirror (speculum) of reality, giving rise to the term “speculative grammar.” Brunelleschi never attended university, and was surely quite young when placed as an apprentice goldsmith. As the son of a notary, however, he certainly experienced the basic linguistic training available to the sons of professional men in his society. His professional and political roles indicate that Brunelleschi was thoroughly immersed in a latinate culture in which, as Paul Grendler has shown, the ideas of the speculative grammarians had wide currency, affecting the status and character of grammar training. The latter included the study specifically of syntax, which medieval Europeans, using an architectural metaphor, called constructio.61 Inevitably, the principles of speculative grammar were not congenial to the humanists, with their emphasis on interactive discourse and the revival of ancient rhetoric and rhetorical categories, contrasting profoundly with scholastic terminology. Nevertheless, the earliest humanist grammars largely continue the prescriptive apparatus of scholastic grammars, though they leave out the explicit metaphysical dimension. In some respects, the late-medieval latinate culture of notaries and grammar teachers merged with and prepared the ground for the developing ideals and practices of humanism, though this eventually marginalized and destroyed it.62 Insofar as a visual grammar informs Brunelleschi’s architecture, it belongs in the same cognitive world as the speculative grammar diffused, or rather naturalized, in professional as well as academic circles in Florence. Brunelleschi moved in a cultural milieu in which the key assumption of speculative grammar, the claim of transcendental grounding, retained currency and remained


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available for the elaboration of an architecture devoid of everything arbitrary or contingent, and deeply rooted in latinate, though not classical, learning. In a short-lived cultural moment, finally, this latinate tradition could sustain, and be enriched by, the emerging culture of humanism; against this background, Brunelleschi drew on and reconciled traditional and classical models and norms in the production of novel architectural designs memorable no less for their rigor than for their consistency.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE BONES OF GRAMMAR AND THE RHETORIC OF FLESH

LEGIBILITY IN THE ENVIRONMENT: LEARNING FROM ALBERTI The analogy of architecture and language is habitual, if often unexamined, in scholarship on late-medieval and Renaissance architecture, as it is in much architectural writing of the period itself.1 Broadly speaking, architecture may resemble language in terms of structure (i.e., grammar) or effect (i.e., rhetoric), though the history of postmedieval architecture is full of attempts to find eloquence in “pure” form or structure. In Brunelleschi’s buildings, in particular, both “legibility” and “eloquence” result from the materialization of a grammar transcending contingencies of place or patronage, though lending a generalized prestige to particular settings.2 In practice, Brunelleschi’s austere conception of architecture could not satisfy the growing interest in private self-representation, not least through residential construction.3 In architectural complexity, decorative embellishment, and even size, private buildings came to match public structures, though the decoration was often carried out in sgraffito or paint. Elements of the classical vocabulary appeared on palace facades, sometimes within a classical compositional framework, an obvious marker of status in a society that prized humanist learning and the exemplary value of Roman antiquity.4 On the other hand, a concern with peer solidarity and consensus also found expression on facades. The Palazzo Medici, cunningly, had it both ways; it would be much imitated, in contrast to the frankly and innovatively classical Rucellai facade. For the most part, classicism in Florentine palace architecture served to mark status between social classes rather than within the narrowing social elite of the later fifteenth-century city. The reticent facades occluded the rich material culture of the patriciate, but also effectively supported an echoing diffusion of heraldic insignia that signaled the overlapping territories of patrician families and identified their possessions, commitments, and alliances. In time, 94


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however, the stable, easily legible code of heraldry yielded somewhat to the more fluid codes of architecture or emblematics, though the fashion for restrained architectural self-representation persisted in the city, at times for ideological reasons.5 In relation to literal languages, architecture generally suffers from an inherent imprecision and even opacity, especially in a context of restrained formal preferences. Nevertheless, a model exists within Renaissance culture for reading an urban environment not only through relatively familiar codes, but also through attention to reticent configurations. Though left incomplete at his death in 1472, Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, was largely composed in the 1440s and early 1450s, perhaps beginning as early as 1443.6 In the previous decade, Alberti had spent much time in Florence, and his own experience of the city and his meditations on his family’s fortunes in and beyond Florence provided themes for some of his writings and deeply colored others, including the De re aedificatoria.7 When, in the latter, Alberti addresses the visual effect of distinct types of residence within their wider settings, however, he does so primarily in connection with rural residences (villas), though with greater focus on the view from than to a villa.8 Nevertheless, the terms of his discussion help to crystallize distinctions within the Florentine built environment, which would later constitute the far from neutral or passive milieu for some of his most architectural projects. The early difficulties faced by Leon Battista, an illegitimate member of an exiled family, are well known. His first extended sojourn in Florence was as a member of the papal staff during the Church Council that convened in Florence from 1434.9 In his important treatise on social themes Della Famiglia (“On the household”), Alberti draws on the vicissitudes and achievements of his own family, staging debates among prominent members of his family about the nature of the ideal household and its preservation in the face of the uncertainties and moral dangers attendant on engagement in the affairs of the city. A much more positive perception of the opportunities of urban life seems implied by Alberti’s praise, in the treatise On painting (De pictura/Della Pittura, 1435–36), of recent artistic and architectural innovations in Florence and of individuals, especially Brunelleschi, identified as the protagonists of these.10 Alberti specifically confined this, perhaps strategic, expression of local pride to the preface of the Italian version of the treatise, apparently designed for consumption by local audiences, including artists. His dedication of the original, Latin version to the princely ruler of a northern city suggests a double strategy for its dissemination, involving the negotiation of a polarity of courtly and civic milieus and cultural tendencies familiar from the imaginative world of Boccaccio’s Decameron.11 Significantly, Alberti himself is the suspected author of a novella written in a distinctly Boccaccesque manner.12 His whole life and literary production, moreover, were marked by a chameleonic accommodation to a variety of genres and diverse social situations and sources of patronage.13 In his wide range of authorial practices and personas, Alberti

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rarely directly betrays his specific experiences and reactions to events or environments, avoiding critical engagement with specific examples. Apart from scattered analyses of prominent ancient monuments, this is true of Alberti’s writing about architecture, consistently directed to the formulation of general norms.14 Ranging over diverse urban configurations, Alberti affirms the general principal of legibility, though distinct types of “reading” seem possible. He gives particular attention to the inscriptions and other means by which a city speaks of itself, and to buildings and spaces devoted to spectacle and self-representation of various kinds.15 On the other hand, different political systems – the crucial distinction is between the tyrant’s city and that of a benevolent ruler – shape urban space in contrasting ways, not necessarily consciously.16 When searching for an appropriate site, moreover, an astute “reader” can wrest meaning even from natural landscapes by scouring them for signs of their appropriateness for human habitation.17 Such decoding of “natural” (i.e., indexical) signs, though the context is different, provides insight into Alberti’s thinking about the determination and interpretation of structural features through which a city betrays its social and political character. In his treatise, Alberti displays a firmly Pythagorean – or, perhaps, protomodernist – neglect of the compositional or semiotic issues posed by house facades.18 Certainly, he applies Vitruvius’s prescription concerning the conspicuous siting of temples, ensuring visibility within the wider landscape, to private residential buildings.19 However, he also insists that a given building should be walled all around in a uniform manner, and that the interior and exterior surface should line up and match.20 While implying opposition to the very idea of projecting jetties or sporti, as we might expect from Alberti, this passage implicitly invalidates the independent architectural treatment of the front of a house, that is, any facade architecture. As noted in Chapter 1, further, Alberti does not use a term equivalent to the vernacular faccia or facciata, which had long been current in the building trades and in the language of notaries recording pertinent contracts and agreements.21 Alberti’s references to the expertise of men skilled in the building trades shows that he knew and was comfortable in this world, which of course was far removed – by design – from the learned and literary character of the De re aedificatoria, written in a highstyle humanist Latin.22

THE FACE OF THE WATER AND THE FACE IN THE WATER The term facies is an important element, nevertheless, of Alberti’s terminological arsenal in the De re aedificatoria. He uses it to characterize the overall facture of a building, in accordance with his insistence on the organic, but not anthropomorphic, aspect of a building.23 Even good latinists among Alberti’s contemporaries, however, perhaps naturally associated the term with current technical as well as nontechnical senses, whether in Latin or in the vernacular (i.e., as “face” or “vis-


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age” and as elevation of a building). In the De re aedificatoria, Alberti’s philologically accurate use of facies implicitly draws attention to the contrast between modern and ancient linguistic and cultural usage. There is no explicit recognition of the ambiguous logic of the notion of facade in Renaissance practice, turning on the contrast between an object viewed in depth and so apprehended in its threedimensional materiality, and one apprehended as frontal surface. This issue turns out, however, to be lurking in Alberti’s treatise on painting In the opening section of the De pictura, on geometry, Alberti elaborates his definition of a planar surface (superficies) through a single, presumably carefully chosen example, the surface of “the purest water.”24 This resonates with the opening of the second section, where Alberti refers to (and champions) the myth of the origin of painting in the self-absorption of the beautiful Narcissus, gazing at his reflection in a pool; for “what is painting but the act of embracing by art the surface of the pool?”25 But the emphasis on purissima aqua in the earlier passage implies the possibility not only of images on a reflective surface (notably the image of Narcissus’s face!), but also of transparency to the depths beneath. Here Alberti’s own text opens up into depths belied by, and “beneath,” the businesslike and technical, hence transparent, language of the treatise. Ambiguities and complexities assert themselves that invade – or are consciously exploited in – Alberti’s own architecture, not to speak of later developments.26 In any case, Alberti’s use of facies in the De re aedificatoria entails a conception of architecture in which, as in Brunelleschi’s major buildings, the exterior largely follows from the interior. Brunelleschi’s approach is also opposed, however, to the rhetorical resources and capabilities developed within humanism, alongside and sometimes in conflict with the ethical and technical discourses emphasized by the humanists themselves. In its texture and organization, of course, Alberti’s treatise is itself deeply rhetorical and profoundly indebted to Ciceronian paradigms.27 An insistent theme is the capacity of the built environment to mold conduct, and even to effect social discipline.28 There is, however, no hint in Alberti’s text of the deceptiveness associated with rhetoric by its critics, beginning with Plato’s own attack on the sophists.29 Rather, Alberti’s ideas are predicated on the familiar Platonist analogy between the configuration of the individual soul and that of the social body.30 On the one hand, architectural form and spatial organization may counteract and constrict the “natural” vehemence and disruptiveness of the lower classes or indeed of adolescents, that is, social elements corresponding to the baser passions. On the other hand, architecture accommodates and symbolizes the governing, intellective element. For the most part, Alberti evokes a built environment transparent to the ethical ideals and noble character of an idealized aristocracy, whether or not it needs to resort to naked force (i.e., in the case of the “tyrant”) to maintain its position. His recommendations, however, about the qualities desirable in the house of a political leader and appropriate to its public functions – it should be conspicuous, impressive, capacious, and so on – do little to guide a designer’s practical decisions.

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Alberti’s reception of Brunelleschi’s achievement was far from simple. As a theorist, he draws heavily on Brunelleschian conceptions of design. As an architect, on the other hand, he typically worked for powerful clients interested in assertive self-representation. Not surprisingly, he developed designs that, in the particular emphasis given to the facade or facade tract, depart from the principles enunciated in the treatise, but owe much to the work of “sculptor architects” like Donatello or even Ghiberti, willing to embellish their work with all’antica detailing or even formal quotations.31

ALBERTIAN ANTINOMIES Alberti’s encounter with Brunelleschi – the man and the work – occurred in a cultural milieu marked by debates about language, but with wider resonances. As an enthusiastic champion of the Tuscan vernacular as a literary language, Alberti inevitably came into contact with the pungent vernacular poet Burchiello, doubtless in the short time before the latter’s flight from Florence in 1434.32 The two exchanged far from complimentary verses, revealing a rift that primarily – or ostensibly – had to do with contrasting conceptions of Tuscan. The author of a grammar of Tuscan, Alberti envisaged and championed a vernacular capable of the same literary effects as classical Latin, and endowed with the same “ornaments of speech.” He sought to discipline a language whose protean vigor had been celebrated and copiously expanded by Burchiello, for whom such legislation of language was anathema, and whose favorite targets included grammarians in particular and “legislation” in general. Alberti, of course, was a jurist by training, with a degree in law from the University of Bologna that qualified him, inter alia, for the positions he held in the papal secretariat. Many early humanists were lawyers, and the traditional study of law soon attracted critical attention from humanists concerned with the codes handed down from antiquity less as systems of learning elaborated over centuries than as texts to be understood in relation to their original contexts.33 Alberti himself wrote about the law in his dialog De iure, in which he insists on the importance of underlying principle in the application of law, and rejects the punitive, not to mention sadistic, aspects of contemporary law enforcement.34 The concern with moral principle, however, justifies a reductive approach to the whole edifice of law as built up by medieval commentators and practitioners. Citing the Twelve Tables of ancient Rome, Alberti proclaims the advantages of a concise legal code in the formation of humane legal judgments, doubtless by way of an elaboration of situational discourse from axiomatic principles that is more indebted to Cicero than to any legal treatise.35 Nothing could be more distant from standard notarial practice, with its reliance on formulas allowing the generation of well-constructed (i.e., “grammatical”) propositions.36


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In his architectural theory, Alberti elaborates a prescriptive order of knowledge grounded in axioms contextualized through rich evocations of the classical world in which they were supposedly developed. His architectural practice, in contrast, betrays a willingness to draw on local and contemporary architectural traditions. This is not to establish a basis for the elaboration of a grammar, as in Brunelleschi, or to acquire technical expertise, but rather, as in an oration, to confer charm or render a work more compelling through quotations and similar “ornaments” of speech. Alberti’s famous tribute to Brunelleschi in the preface of the Della Pittura (the Italian version only) is the only mention of the older man anywhere in Alberti’s considerable oeuvre. Whatever significance might be ascribed to this, Alberti perhaps found Brunelleschi’s buildings unattractively impoverished in contrast to the splendors of imperial Rome, or even the refined, expressive, and ornamented classicism of such contemporary artists as Donatello and Ghiberti.37 Donatello and Ghiberti were of course first and foremost sculptors; thus their primary concern, as in Alberti’s treatise on sculpture of the 1440s, was the human body.38 Brunelleschi’s particular emphasis, as already noted, on membri e ossa (members and bones) runs counter to a sculptor’s understanding of the fully realized human body as a vehicle of expression and dramatic interaction with other bodies.39 This is surely implied in the evocation, in the De re aedificatoria, of bones as supporting and reinforcing elements of a substance formed of flesh and bounded by skin. The immediate reference is to the Roman use of concrete strengthened by riblike brickwork elements, and faced with a highly polished veneer or crust of supplemental material worked to attract and satisfy the gaze of the beholder.40 Such a veneer would often be colorful in the literal sense; Alberti knew well the decorative technique of inlay of differently colored marbles and other stones, and made it into a central metaphor in his meditations on cultural appropriation.41 Further, however, Alberti was certainly familiar with the wider rhetorical sense of color as the enhancement of a basic text through various ornaments to give it life and vivacity. Such ornament is far from merely supplemental to an architectural configuration that already exists, like fancy clothes on a human body. Instead, Alberti’s notion of ornament is grounded in a profound commitment to architecture as organic:42 ornament is not the dress, but the flesh of the architectural body. The organic metaphor is central, then, in Renaissance architectural discourse, but occurs in various inflections. The differences may echo an important debate in antiquity that began, as so often, in Aristotle’s dissatisfaction with a formulation of an issue by Plato.43 Besides the better-known cosmological meditations, Plato’s dialog Timaeus includes a discussion of the human body. Plato – or at least the character Timaeus – represents an older view that spirit is diffused through the body by means of the bone-encased marrow, especially that of the spinal column.44 The skeleton, then, is the essential element of the human body, and the flesh as well as the skin exist to shelter and protect it. If Alberti knew of Plato’s position, it was most probably through

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Aristotle’s emphatic rejection of it in his treatise De partibus animalium.45 This belongs to the corpus of Aristotelian zoological works studied and translated by the Byzantine refugee Theodore Gaza, whose presence in Ferrara in the 1440s situates him in a milieu much frequented by Alberti.46 Aristotle’s position is that flesh is essential, and for its sake all other parts exist.47 The seat of the soul and of the intelligence is the heart, from which soul is diffused throughout the whole body, of which it is a quality rather than a part. Though Aristotle’s conception of the body is characterized by antitheses of various kinds, he does not accept Plato’s tripartite arrangement of elements within the body, the model for the Platonist conception of a tripartite hierarchical order in the social body. Certainly, Plato’s schematic understanding of political order, especially as articulated in the Republic, is a foundational text for Alberti’s discussions in the De re aedificatoria of social and political bodies. Nevertheless, when he focuses on the architectural body, Alberti’s language and ideas betray, not a Platonist point of view, but rather a commitment to an Aristotelian, integrationalist model of the union of body and soul.48 The body metaphor introduced by Alberti in the De re aedificatoria, therefore, is very different from that associated with Brunelleschi. It accords with the rhetorical, even performative dimension of architecture that pervades the treatise, even if layered over a Brunelleschian conception of the process of design. In his own design projects, Alberti goes even further in a direction contrary not only to Brunelleschian practice, but also to the relevant Vitruvian doctrine, which he reconciles in his treatise with his own theoretical conceptions. Nor is there anything in the treatise that points the way to the facades, if not facadism, in most of Alberti’s buildings. In part, this may be a matter less of the principled application of a rhetorical notion of architecture than a diplomatic and certainly creative response – in a thoroughly un-Brunelleschian manner – to particular circumstances of topography, typology, and patronage. In the ideal domain of his treatise, after all, Alberti presents himself as an absolutely authoritative figure, qualified by virtue of his learning and grasp of axiomatic principle to prescribe norms of architecture and even statecraft to the mighty of his day. Following Vitruvius, Alberti conceives of domestic space as structured by successive thresholds along a horizontal axis, leading into the core of a house. Access to more private and exclusive quarters is a matter of penetration into increasingly hidden spaces, into the heart of invisibility.49 This conception of domestic space is consistent with Alberti’s normative account of design procedures, as laid out in the first book of his treatise, in which he gives particular emphasis to partitio or layout (i.e., the articulation of a ground plan) among the six parts of design.50 Further, the sequence of thresholds and spaces of different character along the route of access into a grander house provides opportunities for the aesthetically pleasing and socially or even psychologically appropriate variation of architectural treatment and decorative elements.


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Varietas is of course a crucial notion for Alberti, not least because of its inherent and inextricable aesthetic and social connotations, though the most expansive deployment of the term in the De re aedificatoria is in the account of domestic space, not of the city or public building types.51 Finally, of course, Alberti’s extraordinary wide knowledge of classical texts enabled him to draw on a range of descriptions and evocations of Roman domestic environments, notably the typical spreading Roman domus or patrician house. In the attempt to model a contemporary residence on its ancient counterpart, as we have seen, architects of the Renaissance were faced with the problem of the almost complete absence of accessible remains of a domus. In particular, there was little either in the literature or the architectural record to give orientation in the design of a facade. Alberti was among the first of many to confront the challenge of elaborating a classicizing house facade. An all’antica model for palace design existed in the Renaissance, however, in the Roman multistory insula block, which combined residential space, on the upper floors, with commercial premises on the ground floor.52 In Alberti’s treatise, however, no mention is made of the insula; instead, the model is always the domus, if not the even more expansive villa suburbana, since Alberti sees the compromise between rural spaciousness and urban refinement as the best of all possible house types.53 In central Florence, such a house was obviously unthinkable, though it was taken up later in the quattrocento by the humanist Bartolomeo Scala, Chancellor of Florence, for a house in a thinly populated, effectively suburban area.54 We can imagine the importance of Alberti’s treatise in the formulation of Scala’s house project, all the more so in view of the publication of the treatise in 1485, for the first time, with a dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Complicating Alberti’s presentation of residential architecture is his distinction of urban house types appropriate for two disparate groups of citizens, both clearly of means. He contrasts the requirements of patricians jealous of their privacy and freedom from public affairs (the type of Giannozzo in the Della Famiglia) with those of men engaged in statecraft and wielding authority within their cities. In the former case, houses should be hidden away, perhaps screened by trees; an assertive facade would be inappropriate.55 In the latter case, the house is clearly described as set up to accommodate the Roman rituals of salutatio, in which clients and visitors were granted access into a distinctly public area of the house in order to greet a patron or leader. The architectural design issue, therefore, is that of the suitable articulation of space and the marking of thresholds between more or less exclusive areas.56 In his treatise Alberti does not give particular attention to the house front or main entrance, though he does at least insist that the vestibule and entrance of a house should not simply accommodate servants in idle hours.57 In this ideal world, a house is appropriate to the status and wealth of a patron; it does not “represent” him, thus avoiding the danger of projecting a misleading image, or even a thoroughly dissimulating mask.

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THE PARADE OF ARTIFICE AND THE PARADOX OF AUTHENTICITY: ALBERTI AND THE PALAZZO RUCELLAI The Vitruvian approach to the design of a leading citizen’s house was of little relevance when Alberti came to design the facade of the Palazzo Rucellai, the one palace facade that can be firmly attributed to him (Fig. 4). This is altogether a matter of surface and seeming, a mere skin or crust applied to the front surface of a building formed through accretion and adaptation, a process entirely belied by the unitary facade of manifest classical inspiration.58 The prosperous merchant Giovanni Rucellai assembled the property from largely preexisting houses belonging to members of his extended clan. This was not an immediate or easy process: in its doubled front door the facade itself carries the marks of the expansion of Giovanni’s palace through additional acquisitions, while the jagged right-hand edge indicates the expectation of even further expansion. The unitary facade fronts, therefore, an assemblage of buildings. Exterior architectural unification implies an interior unification, at least in social terms, enabled by Giovanni’s leading position in his family and city. In view of the local knowledge of any member of Giovanni’s family or social world, however, it would be absurd to claim that, at least at first, the facade concealed earlier social and topographical realities. As a rule, Florentine palace builders tenaciously maintained residence in areas marked by continuity of family occupation, rather than seeking new and possibly larger or more commodious sites. Giovanni emphatically manifested his attachment to his family and neighborhood through his ecclesiastical patronage at nearby institutions. At his palace, too, he observed tradition by remodeling an ancestral site, even if he resorted to unaccustomed architectural forms. As a classicizing screen, then, the facade may marshal allusions to transcendent cultural and political models, but without suppressing local memory. The architect’s response to the problem of creating a classical house facade was to evoke the Roman architecture of spectacle, with allusions to the Colosseum, through the superimposition of three orders, and perhaps the Septizonium. The association with spectacle is enhanced by the famous loggia, constructed across the street from the palace (Fig. 34).59 This is a stylistically innovative realization of a familiar building type, the family loggia that typically served a patrician lineage as a kind of theater, accommodating and displaying such important ceremonial events as betrothal and marriage.60 In the time of Giovanni Rucellai’s construction projects, indeed, patrician marriages provided the occasion for lavish triumphal processions through the streets. At the latest by the 1470s such processions were associated with ancient Roman themes and values, not least through the images of an idealized ancient Rome on the paired marriage chests that were carried, in triumph, to a bride’s new home.61 Among other things, the loggia is a platform from which to view the facade of the Palazzo Rucellai, which demanded a remarkable degree of attention on


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34. Rucellai Loggia, Florence. In front of the loggia is the large open space achieved by cutting off the angle between converging streets.

the part of observers. The usual coat of arms, in a prominent position, is joined by other, less familiar kinds of insignia, a ring motif of controversial significance and a swelling sail indisputably linked with Giovanni Rucellai.62 While the coat of arms appears only once on the facade, each of these motifs is repeated insistently to form a frieze reinforcing a stringcourse, in the case of the sail evoking the rapid movement of Giovanni’s ship through the waves and billows of the sea of fortune. In formal terms, these motifs are integrated into the classicizing architectural ornament of the facade, and establish a clear contrast with the shield carrying the coat of arms, which seems affixed to the facade as an independent element, though made of the same stone. They embody, in short, the Albertian distinction of structure and ornament, or of immanent and applied ornament (compactum and affictum).63 The articulation of the facade through flattened, diagrammatic forms suggests a kind of architectural graphism, paradoxically carried out in (barely) three-dimensional stone, that emphasizes the rhetorical or semiotic aspect of the facade. This is produced both by the classical architectural apparatus – the superimposed orders – and by “affixed” heraldic and emblematic ornament. The balance of these two signifying elements is worked out with great sophistication; nevertheless, the Rucellai facade is an early example of the ambiguity of

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the orders, as signifiers per se and as prestigious framing elements for other signifers. Alberti clearly drew on the Vitruvian code of the orders to conceptualize inflections of character in buildings, though without tying this specifically to his own discussion of the orders.64 He was also a pioneer in a further movement of great importance in the development of architectural meaning, that of emblematics. At first, emblems were typically distinct objects, applied to larger configurations; in time, however, architectural solutions emerged that overcame this disjunction of frame and framed, and ground and sign. In my view, the Rucellai facade was crucially important in the development of architectural form fraught with emblematic resonances, though this would be brought to fruition in Rome, as we will see, in the work of Bramante and his associates. In the Rucellai facade, finally, meaning arises not from the symbolic resources within classicism, but rather from the symbolic resonance of a system of elements, symbolizing classicism itself, within the array of palace facades in the neighborhood, or even in the city as a whole. If, as is likely, Giovanni Rucellai was mainly concerned with his standing in the elite, his facade may be taken as indicating his social and cultural status in space – the space of the city – and time – since he must have been aware of the innovative character of his architectural patronage. Indeed, in terms of historical development, the Rucellai facade marks a crucial moment of the passage from a relatively uniform sea of stone to a variegated visual environment replete with signs of individual prowess and status. Needless to say, such a development would be taken further in milieus with stronger aristocratic traditions and attitudes than Florence.

IN BETWEEN: THE PALAZZO MEDICI When Alberti designed the palace facade for Giovanni Rucellai, the Palazzo Medici was already standing (Fig. 3). Certain important features of the Palazzo Rucellai facade seem adapted from the earlier palace, notably the windows, the emphatic and redundant display of insignia, and even the idea of cladding a building completely in a stone veneer of conspicuously high-quality craftsmanship. Unlike the Palazzo Rucellai, however, the Palazzo Medici unites fundamentally divergent conceptions of architecture in a consistent and unprecedented balance of opposites, a true architectural concordia discors that mobilizes classical as well as chivalric or feudal models, while maintaining a commitment to Florentine traditions of patrician architecture, both public and private. Most important, the palace translates several prominent features of the Palazzo della Signoria, the greatest governmental building of the city, to the domain of private residential architecture. As viewed from the appropriate sites, both buildings appear entirely clad in rusticated stone, though the organization of this in the Palazzo Medici in contrasted horizontal zones owes more to traditions of private than public building.65 Both buildings occupy a


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corner where two main facades meet at a right angle (at the Palazzo Medici there is a slight deviation from 90 degrees, but it is hardly evident) and project a cubic bulk into the surrounding space. The bifora windows of the Palazzo Medici clearly cite those of the Palazzo della Signoria, both in their type and in the placement of insignia in the central spandrels.66 The interior courtyard of the Palazzo Medici echoes that of the city palace, though the more immediate paradigm is the Palazzo Busini. Finally, both buildings include a chapel, in each case sheltering a cult not only of the Virgin but also of St. Bernard of Clairvaux.67 The famous chapel in the Palazzo Medici is a lavishly decorated, separate space set aside for the religious cult.68 As such it was unusual in fifteenth-century Florence, though altars and holy images were certainly widespread in palace interiors.69 More remarkably, the Medici chapel contained relics of the Passion of Christ, objects of extraordinary sacred power.70 Such associations marked the Palazzo Medici off from any preceding family palace, and were even perhaps legible in the facade, since bifora windows were used in contemporary ecclesiastical architecture.71 In 1441, shortly before the construction of his palace, Cosimo de’Medici took official control of the reconstruction of the nearby major church of San Lorenzo, and in subsequent years the construction project at the church was inextricably linked to that at the palace.72 Like its model, the early Christian basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, San Lorenzo faces toward the east; with its main entrance opening onto an open space providing access to the nearby Medici palace. Beside this topographical relationship, unmistakable architectural echoes link the basilica and the palace, especially the arcades of the courtyard, visible members of a gridded order governing the entire fabric.73 The contrast between this underlying Pythagorean geometry and the grand and lavishly ornamented pile of the palace suggests different inputs into the design; indeed, the standard attribution to Michelozzo has recently been questioned, and Brunelleschian features of the palace emphasized.74 Perhaps a Michelozzian, or even Albertian, “flesh” wraps around a Brunelleschian core, a rich exterior contrasting with an inner austerity, as symbolized in the peacock emblem favored by the Medici.75

THE RHETORIC OF THE CORNER At first sight, the location of the palace seems eccentric (Map 1). It turned its back to the main thoroughfare connecting the core of the city with a city gate, the Porta San Gallo, and traversing the recently expanded piazza in front of the church of San Lorenzo. It faced instead onto the Via Larga (Cavour), which was sufficiently broad, as its name suggests, to provide an impressive setting for the new palace (Map 1).76 More important, it was Medici territory, fronted by earlier Medici houses and leading past the convent of San Marco, which Cosimo rebuilt. The flank of the palace lies on the Via de’ Gori, on which are

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situated the church and piazza of San Lorenzo, with the splendid mausoleum of Cosimo’s father. The siting of Cosimo’s palace observed – or rather reinterpreted – a persistent pattern in the social and spatial fabric of Florence and other medieval cities, that of the formation of enclaves controlled by particular factions or families.77 Indeed, the obvious novelties in design disguise a certain archaizing quality. With its corner loggia, or rather volto, and towerlike profile (sacrificed in the later expansion), the Palazzo Medici harked back, typologically, to the “tower houses” (casa-torri) of the early trecento, before the ascendancy of the oligarchic reggimento. In particular, it contrasted with the spreading bulk of the major palaces of the previous regime, notably the Palazzo Capponi built by Niccolò da Uzzano (Fig. 26).78 The term “enclave” is a modern category of social and spatial analysis. To contemporaries, the Palazzo Medici stood on a canto (corner), a conspicuous point of interruption in a major street, perhaps at a bend or intersection, and implicitly recognized in Alberti’s typology of public spaces.79 Certainly, Leon Battista would have been very familiar with a conspicuous precedent for the combination of elements, both architectural and topographical, present at the Canto de’ Medici. At the heart of the Alberti district, two major streets, the Borgo Santa Croce and the Via de’Benci, intersected, forming a trivium, the Canto degli Alberti (Map 2). The Borgo Santa Croce connected this with the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce, the most important religious establishment of the neighborhood, and the local counterpart of San Lorenzo. No family chapel was more prominent in the great basilica than that of the Alberti.80 Architecturally, the Canto degli Alberti was enhanced by a tower, of markedly archaic character, at the point of intersection of the two streets (Fig. 27). Still extant at the foot of the tower is a small but visually prominent loggia, which once focused the view along the Via de’ Benci toward a conspicuous Alberti mausoleum at the head of the bridge (the Ponte alle Grazie).81 Like the Via de’ Gori, the Via de’ Benci marked the line of the “second” wall of Florence, the demolition of which produced attractive building sites, though few families acted with the decisiveness of the Alberti (in the early fifteenth century the Busini family and Niccolò da Uzzano built houses on the same circuit). In both site and character, then, the Palazzo Medici had much in common with the Alberti tower house, to which it was linked by metonymy (the line of the second wall) and by metaphor (as a comparable patrician enclave). Perhaps even before the 1434 coup, Cosimo moved to associate himself with the great church of Santa Croce through a functionally significant but relatively inconspicuous reconstruction project, with an obvious strategic dimension.82 Cosimo secured his position in Florence through the political and subsequent military defeat of Niccolò da Uzzano’s faction, which had driven the Alberti into exile. Until Cosimo’s own brief banishment in 1433 the Alberti had been the most prominent victims of the oligarchy; their return to their city


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and to their ancestral enclave coincided with – and was surely a factor in – Cosimo’s rise to power and his reinforcement of his political base.83 Less subtle than any overtures to the Alberti was Cosimo’s harsh treatment of his most serious economic and political rival, Palla Strozzi. Strozzi’s local power base lay in the western part of the city, around the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella, across town from Santa Croce. Here Cosimo proceeded more cautiously, eventually engineering a rapprochement with Giovanni Rucellai, Strozzi’s close associate, that was proclaimed on the facade of the Palazzo Rucellai by means of insignia and, perhaps, allusions to the architecture of the Palazzo Medici. Such architectural intertextuality was not new: it had already linked Cosimo’s new house to the evocative and authoritative model of the Alberti tower house. The facade of the Medici palace, indeed, mobilized new ways of inscribing meaning in architecture, reconciling transcendent and transient rhetorical objectives. Alberti learned from this innovation, if he was not already implicated in it.

CHAPTER SIX

SETTING AND SUBJECT THE CITY OF PRESENCES AND THE STREET AS STAGE

PERSPECTIVES IN THE PALACE: IMAGE AND SELF-IMAGE IN URBINO The Renaissance saw the development of a range of discourses and practices concerned with displaying and explaining the human interior in terms of the exterior.1 Physiognomy offered a proto-scientific approach, while the impresa, or emblematic forms in general, typically combined literary and artistic expression to challenge the wit and learning of its audience. However understood, the “exterior” of a person of rank included various forms of material and especially architectural self-representation. The elucidation of architectural meaning in the Renaissance cannot be conducted without connection to this wider frame of reference and indeed, at times, suggestions of a kind of anthropomorphism, not of physique but of character. Through its facade, a building projects a certain ethos or quality. In the elite residential architecture of the Renaissance, antithetic front and rear facades are not uncommon, one accommodated to an urban condition, and one to a garden, a symbolic green space, or to an actual suburban or rural setting. In some cases, they evoke(d) diverse qualities or interests of the patron.2 An early and prominent case is the ducal palace at Urbino, where one facade, towered and lofty, addresses a dependent landscape and the road linking Urbino with major seats of power (Fig. 35), while the other forms part of the city of Urbino and adapts itself to the relatively modest scale and character of its urban context (Fig. 36).3 This architectural antithesis embodies and projects diverse aspects of the character or at least desired self-image of the Duke of Urbino, Federico da Montelfeltro, the effective author as well as builder of the palace. More generally, however, the idea of the house, especially a residence with architectural pretensions, as a kind of surrogate for or symbol of its occupant, is a crucial theme in the study of Renaissance architecture as cultural artifact. 108

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35. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. View from Via Romana (i.e., from outside the city)

Such “embodiment” exists in a somewhat paradoxical relationship with the more obvious function of a major residential or institutional building, that of accommodating and framing the body or bodies of its occupants in the performance of ritualized actions, especially those requiring processional movement. The Ducal Palace of Urbino is a key example of the development of a palace architecture as a theater of princely self-representation, with its carefully calibrated sequences of varied spaces and decoration. In the course of his long and eventful career, Federico ceaselessly extended and reshaped his residence in a reciprocal interplay with redefinitions of his own political and social persona.4 As at the Palazzo Medici, an important model for Federico, medieval (or chivalric) and classical references and resonances coexisted.5 A confluence of ideas is especially evident in the often-noted expression, throughout the palace complex, of the theme of triumph, bringing within a single vast building the idea of procession through urban space, alongside grand facades.6

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36. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Street facade.

The articulation of the spaces of courtly life and ritual at Urbino betrays a high degree of self-consciousness. Federico was a firm supporter and, in his own way, exponent of the new learning, in part, no doubt, to allay the issue of the legitimacy of his rule. His famous library served as an inducement to major cultural figures, whose presence lent luster to Federico’s court. A striking feature of Federico’s own cultural interests was the convergence of humanistic knowledge and technologies of direct utility in warfare or the control of territory. This was evident in the decoration of the palace, notably in the relief panels of all’antica military machines and equipment once displayed on the city facade.7 It is still conspicuously evident in the imagery, in various media, that documents a particularly sophisticated appreciation of the techniques and expressive possibilities of perspective, reminding us of the association of Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Alberti with Federico’s court. The facades announce themes and formal ideas that pervade the palace, notably in architectural representations associating feudal castles with impeccably classical architecture of civilian character. In the extant palace such imagery is most conspicuous in marquetry panels embellishing many of the doors at major thresholds in the palace.8 The repeated images of magnificent streets and piazzas, city gates and towers, foreshadow and justify Baldesar Castiglione’s famous reference to a “palace in the form of a city.”9 Crucial to this analogy is the grand itinerary that, like a major urban thoroughfare designed

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Map 3. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Itinerary from palace entrance to duke’s apartment.

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to accommodate processional ritual, guides and frames the route of a visitor toward the symbolic center (Map 3).10 Though there are changes of direction, the path toward the prince is even now clearly marked, not least on the sculpted portals, by references in word and image to Federico’s person, titles, and interests.11 Open, airy spaces alternate with constricted and elongated spaces on the way from the front court, along the passagelike vestibule, past the expansive courtyard, and up the somewhat forbidding double stair. The Albertian aesthetic ideal of varietà merges with the political manipulation of visual codes and spatial experience.12 At the head of the stair, a visitor arrives at the opening of a long corridor, lined by finely sculpted portals, and confronts immediately a set of doors adorned with exquisite marquetry panels, the first such doors on the route to the staterooms. This is the Porta della Guerra, the entrance to the Iole wing, used by the duchess, Battista Sforza, until her much-lamented death in 1472. Trophies and other martial emblems carved in its sculpted surround proclaim Federico’s chivalric qualities and manly vigor and protectively surround marquetry images of Petrarchan triumphs on the doors that clearly refer to the duchess’s virtues and roles (Fig. 37).13 The formal elaboration and semiotic density of the ensemble of doors, sculpted surround, and wider setting cue the visitor’s response to the even more complex designed environments further along the route into the palace. Opposite the Porta della Guerra a corridor gives access to the duke’s apartment, with its intricate sequence of spaces of diminishing size, accommodating different kinds of interaction according to the status and/or number of the persons involved. Two doors open into the vast audience hall, with its paired mantelpieces, which can be circumvented by passage through a further door at the end of the corridor. According to the regulations for the household, the entire sequence of spaces from the stair to the duke’s bedroom was considered “public” (lochi publici).14 Access was presumably monitored at successive thresholds, where passage from room to room was dramatized by sculpted portals and elaborate marquetry doors. As in many later palaces, the sequence of spaces at Urbino permitted a graduated range of gestures of cordiality, respect, or honor – or, alternately, coolness and suspicion – on the part of the prince toward his visitors, though in the absence of an Urbinate Saint-Simon, the social code governing the use of these spaces seems unrecoverable.15 The palace was clearly designed to impress men of achievement and eminence in the many domains of human endeavor and learning embodied in the duke and represented in encyclopedic fashion both by manuscripts in the library and imagery distributed throughout the palace.16 No less than the portraits in various media arrayed within the palace, the latter was itself a kind of architectural portrait of Federico, evoking distinct facets of the duke’s public persona. The contrasting facades of the palace itself, echoed by fictive facades inside, establish the major themes: Federico’s commitment to the culture of humanism and his claim to rule as a kind of con-

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37. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Corridor at head of the grand stair, Porta della Guerra (entrance to Iole Wing). The portal receives its name from the military motifs incorporated into the elaborate sculptured surround.

stitutional monarch; his chivalric values; his professional prowess as a man of arms; and his extraordinary standing in the delicately balanced constellation of states that made up later fifteenth-century Italy. In the inmost recess of the palace, the studiolo (Fig. 38), literal and metaphorical forms of portraiture proliferate in a dazzling display of marquetry, a medium that constantly insists on the wonder of its own representational capacity, achieved through the assemblage of shards of expressly natural substance. This miniature environment, reached by intricate paths through the duke’s apartment, is multiply coded as a private space, making its display to qualified guests all the more effective. It was an accepted custom among Renaissance princes and potentates to open their cabinets and studioli to the

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38. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Studiolo, lower level, with marquetry paneling. On the right appears a muse and objects associated with the cultivation of the arts; to the right is the fictive view across a terrace to a distant landscape. Opening off the main space is a small alcove in which Federico’s arms are displayed as in a wardrobe, while the duke himself appears in an opening, framed in draperies. Examples abound of objects illusionalistically projecting into the viewer’s space, from open cupboards to shelves.

admiring gaze of visiting dignitaries: in his biography of Federico, for example, Vespasiano di Bisticci reports a visit to the Urbino studiolo.17

THE WINDOW MODEL AND THE DOORS OF PERSPECTIVE: DESIGN AND RULE Probably between 1474 and 1482, inlaid doors, still in situ, were installed in all the main rooms of the ducal apartment.18 On one door, images of books, armor, an armillary sphere, and musical instruments within a fictive cupboard echo the studiolo.19 On another door, a marquetry muse recalls a counterpart in the studiolo, as well as muses painted in the Tempietto delle Muse, on the floor below, which was also used as a study.20 Marquetry architectural perspectives

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39. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Studiolo. Marquetry landscape. The still life of the basket of fruit and the squirrel are located immediately in front of the space of perspective, which they are not part of.

appear on five sets of doors in the palace; four are in the duke’s apartment, with two in his bedroom, a clear indication of the cachet of the architectural motif as well as marquetry as a medium of representation. These panels echo not only the celebrated “Urbino panel” and other painted perspectives once in the palace, but also the remarkable marquetry panorama, in the studiolo, of a rural landscape framed in a portico (Fig. 39).21 No such evocation of landscape mitigates the emphatically urban character of the scenes and structures represented on most of the door panels; the many castles and towers reinforce the pervasive theme of military and chivalric prowess. On one door, however, the

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motto “It is better to be conquered and tell the truth than to conquer through deceit” qualifies the mood of triumphalism that some discern in these rooms.22 Even smaller than the studiolo is the duke’s dressing room, which nevertheless leads to the studiolo through two pairs of doors adorned with architectural motifs. Evidently the duke occasionally took visitors to his studiolo by this route, thereby avoiding the eyes of those waiting or stationed in the Audience Room. With its marquetry facades, this secret route paradoxically brought the analogy of city and house to the most intricate and intimate part of the palace. The largest and most impressive marquetry doors in the apartment, however, embellish the Sala degli Angeli, a festive reception room, and mark the threshold into the vast but relatively austere space of the Throne Room (Fig. 40). The upper panels on these doors show figures of classical deities, evoking the lost decoration of the Tempietto delle Muse, on the floor beneath.23 Apollo, on the left, plays a violinlike instrument appropriate to his role as god of inspiration, both prophetic and poetic. Minerva (Pallas Athena), the goddess of wisdom and artistry, stands erect, her martial bearing and her lance and shield expressive of her status as protector of cities, including Rome, where she was a member of the Capitoline triad.24 In the lower panels, grand porticoed facades recede into space. Beneath Apollo, a particularly grand palace displays fluted Corinthian pilasters on two levels; on the ground floor; these frame the residually Doric or perhaps Tuscan arches of the portico. In the palace beneath Minerva, the Ionic of the portico colonnade is the only architectural order on view. All three primary architectural orders occur, then, in an association with male and female deities evoking the gendered distinction of orders outlined by Vitruvius, though there is certainly no exact correspondence. The palace beneath Minerva is incomplete, its unframed windows mere blanks in a rough brick wall, opening into empty rooms. The panels provide no cues for the elucidation of the contrast of finished and unfinished architectures, but their likely date (c.1475) suggests an allusion to the premature death of the duchess, the Minerva of the palace, in 1472.25 If so, these fictive palaces, like the actual palace that contains them, constituted architectural portraits: the shuttered appearance of the left-hand palace alluded to the effect of Battista’s death on Federico.26 Such a connection was easier to make in the 1470s than now, for the famous double portrait of the duke and duchess by Piero della Francesca, perhaps a memorial to Battista, was probably kept in the duke’s apartment, and echoes of the triumphs on the rear of Piero’s panels appear in the inlaid decoration on one of the other doors of the Sala degli Angeli.27 Such devotion to a lady, especially one beyond reach, is consistent with the chivalric mood pervading the palace. The facade perspectives of the portal of Apollo and Minerva, finally, expressly connect the duke with skill in geometry, and so with architectural authorship, a connection made by Federico himself in his letters patent for Luciano Laurana.28 This is implied by elements of the studiolo decoration, notably the mazzocchio; it is made explicit in the representation of a compass

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40. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Sala degli Angeli, Doors of Apollo and Minerva. The door into the Throne Room from the duke’s apartment.

with Federico’s initials in the inlaid decoration of a portal between the Audience Room and the Sala degli Angeli.29 In Federico’s palace, then, the fashioning of self, architectural setting, and state are inextricably interwoven under the principle of “design and rule.”

APOLLO AND MINERVA: FROM FRAME TO STAGE As the second of two portals en enfilade, the portal of Apollo and Minerva marks a key threshold on the route from the duke’s inner sanctum to the Throne Room. Along the way the duke passed impressive Flemish tapestries of

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scenes from the Trojan War.30 Though couched in a Franco-Flemish chivalric idiom, the heroic classical imagery of the tapestries echoed and enhanced the imagery of the apartment doors, conjuring an analogy of Federico’s residence and the Trojan palace of Priam.31 In particular, the military theme was echoed in marquetry images of warriors – one with shield and lance, the other with bow and quiver – on doors facing the portal of Apollo and Minerva.32 Outstanding among the other marquetry doors in its artistic quality and combination of figural and architectural imagery, the portal of Apollo and Minerva appropriately marks the duke’s route toward the throne room. Because positioned at floor level, the receding palace facades frame an illusionistic space that seems to invade the actual space, beyond the doors, of the Throne Room; in contrast, the architectural perspectives on the other doors appear in the upper panels, as if in a window.33 Further, the Ionic order of the right-hand marquetry facade portico echoes that of the two fireplaces, with freestanding Ionic columns, that project boldly from the right-hand wall of the Throne Room (Fig. 41). The architectural perspectives of the portal of Apollo and Minerva are a virtuoso demonstration both of the novel techniques of artificial perspective and the closely allied technique of marquetry. Contemporary references characterize the Throne Room as a space of theater, as well as princely ceremony, and it is likely that Federico’s many erudite guests connected this marvel of marquetry to Vitruvius’s account of scenographic representation, echoes of which surely pervade the decor of the palace.34 In a further contrast with other architectural perspectives, however, the portal of Apollo and Minerva does not represent a confined urban environment, enclosed by a city gate or further buildings, but rather a space flowing out into a landscape of rounded hills. There is an unmistakable echo, then, of the marquetry landscape of the studiolo (Fig. 39), which also projects the imagination – and, in Federico’s case, the authority – of the viewer into wider distance.35 If so, the portal of Apollo and Minerva qualifies the Throne Room as a theater enveloping and impacting the outside world: the Montefeltro domains and, further beyond, the world of the great leaders of Italy, among whom, against all the odds, Federico had taken his place. As the duke approached the Throne Room, his path flowed into virtual space, conjured by the doors of Apollo and Minerva. The opening of the doors destroyed the illusion, perhaps transferring its grandeur to the hall beyond. The prince’s triumphal movement stamped the architectural perspectives along the way as emblems of power, akin to the proliferating devices and insignia – notably those of chivalric orders, the ermine and the garter – that once embellished the ducal apartment and person. There was perhaps also a celebratory autobiographical reference to Federico’s successful siege of the city of Volterra in 1472, if, as is likely, the architectural perspectives recall the images of captured cities carried by soldiers in a Roman triumph, as in Mantegna’s famous, slightly later visual reconstruction.36 More generally, one-point perspective

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41. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Throne Room, approximately as seen from the portal of Apollo and Minerva. The two fireplaces, with projecting mantels supported by Ionic columns, appear on the right.

implies the ordering gaze, the dominating view, of the prince or claimed by him; the imagery of the doors asserts his power over real and metaphoric territory. But what of the place of perspective in representations of the prince? I now turn to alternate modes of representation available to fifteenth-century artists and theorists, an issue raising the further question of the role of architectural representation within the larger history of image production.

JUTTING IMAGES Many marquetry panels in the studioli of Urbino and Gubbio, as well as in one pair of doors in the Sala degli Angeli at Urbino (Fig. 42), implement a manner of visual illusionism sharply distinct, at least in effect, from the one-point perspective theorized by Alberti in the De pictura.37 Instead of providing an Albertian window into fictive space, these panels counterfeit cupboard doors opening into the space of the beholder, thereby conferring immediacy and material presence on the objects revealed within.38 The occurrence of this motif in the Sala degli Angeli is especially striking, given the immediate contrast with

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42. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino. Marquetry doors in Sala degli Angeli. All four panels show cupboards whose latticed doors swing open to reveal objects associated with the arts of war (below) and peace (above).

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the architectural perspectives of the adjacent portal of Apollo and Minerva. Such fictive open cupboards, executed in marquetry, appear to originate in the paneling of the Sagrestia della Messe of Florence cathedral, executed by craftsmen in the circle of Brunelleschi, and during his lifetime.39 In Modena, in the 1460s, the Lendinara brothers used this technique to accentuate representations of architecture, in one case an octagonal baptistery.40 Such a building also appeared in the Lendinara brothers’ lost marquetry work of 1462–69 in the famous shrine of the Santo at Padua. This stimulated learned reflections by a local humanist, Matteo Colacio, on perspective, in a discussion remarkable for its neglect of Alberti’s theory. Instead, Colacio draws on passages in Cicero and especially Pliny relating to the ability of painters to make the subject seem to project forward (eminere, exstare) into the beholder’s space; for his part, Alberti had emphatically distanced himself from Pliny.41 Colacio’s aesthetic stance perhaps had an ideological dimension: his praise of cultural achievement in his adopted homeland, republican Venice, resonates with a Ciceronian insistence on the necessary connection of a true art of rhetoric and engagement in politics.42 Interest in Pliny at Urbino is certain: Pliny’s account of Apelles’s profile image of King Antigonus, concealing his blind eye, was clearly the model for Piero della Francesca’s famous portrait of Federico.43 The duke had a liking for images of himself; always in profile (Pliny’s obliqua figura), that asserted his dominance within fictive space and beyond.44 The portal of Apollo and Minerva framed the prince’s processional movement, enhancing it through a spatial illusion that necessarily fell victim to the duke’s appearance, as seen from the other side, in the doorway of the Throne Room. A telling political metaphor inserted by Alberti, unexpectedly, in the markedly technical first book of the De pictura may help elucidate the duke’s triumphant cancellation of perspectival illusion. In his account of the orthogonals converging to the distance point, Alberti calls the centric ray “the prince of rays.”45 As Colacio perhaps intimated, implicit in Albertian perspective is a contrast between an active observer and a passive subject; the centric ray structures a sovereign gaze, appropriate for a prince, who does not himself passively submit to an abstract organization of space.46

THE SUBJECT OF/IN PERSPECTIVE: BRUNELLESCHI’S PANELS In Alberti’s conception of perspective, which requires only the briefest summary here, architecture is doubly subordinate, both in terms of the observer’s gaze, and in relation to the historia, the dramatic narrative that it frames. Indeed, Alberti promoted a nonperspectival method of architectural drawing, but surely not only because perspectival rendering distorts dimensions and proportional relationships.47 With its emphasis on recession into space, onepoint perspective made buildings into mere setting.

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Alberti’s account of perspective is often presented as theorizing, or at least developing, a method of perspectival construction devised by Brunelleschi. Recently, however, the old monolithic idea of Renaissance perspective has receded,48 in particular, Brunelleschi’s procedure and Alberti’s prescriptions are recognized as different in kind.49 Brunelleschi famously demonstrated his procedure in the two lost panels, now known only from descriptions, notably those of Antonio Manetti and Vasari, and numerous scholarly reconstructions.50 The choice of the Baptistery and the Palazzo della Signoria as subjects suggests that the panels were not neutral demonstrations of a technique of representation. Indeed, both buildings were closely associated with the sedulously maintained image of Florence: the Baptistery, believed to be in origin a Roman Temple of Mars, referred to Florence’s claim to be the daughter of Rome, while the Palazzo della Signoria symbolized the power of the republic. The panels themselves, of unknown date and destination, were certainly made well before the Medicean coup of 1434, that is, in the period of Brunelleschi’s “political career.” When Manetti wrote his biography, however, they were prized items in the collection of Lorenzo de’Medici. Clearly, the panels’ ideological valence changed over time: it is likely that, at the time of their creation, they were of strategic importance both for Brunelleschi’s career as an artist and for his participation in the affairs of his city. The strategy paid off: in 1429 Brunelleschi received a commission for work in the Palazzo della Signoria, a project implicitly connected by Manetti with the panel.51 In reconstructions of Brunelleschi’s panels and in Renaissance images that may derive from them, the octagonal or cubic “almost ideal body” of each building (the phrase is Hubert Damisch’s) projects (eminet), dominating and indeed constructing the fictive space of the image.52 Further, completely lacking in Brunelleschi’s perspective demonstrations is any trace of human presence, still less of a historia, the raison d’etre of the images described in the De pictura.53 Manetti describes the represented architectural object in each panel projecting from a background constituted by the sky, whether viewed beyond the silhouette of cut-out buildings in the Piazza panel or reflected in a mirrored surface in that of the Baptistery. The inclusion, as opposed to representation, of the sky in the panels’ pictorial economy focuses attention on the material object of attention, the buildings, rather than on some unifying, abstract spatial order like that entailed by Alberti’s window model.54 Though Brunelleschi’s concern with the impression of a unified spatial order cannot be doubted, his panels evidently did not rely on the single vanishing point, and centric ray, that would be crucial in Alberti’s theoretical model. Instead, two lateral vanishing points must have allowed the consistent recession of the flanks of the central, projecting object of attention.55 In his image of the Baptistery, certainly, Brunelleschi made the central vanishing point evident to a viewer looking not directly at the panel itself, but through a peephole cut in the panel at its reflection in a mirrored surface. Despite this expedient, both panels approximated and rationalized the oblique view typical

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43. Anonymous late-fifteenth-century artist, View of Piazza della Signoria with the execution of Savonarola. Museo di San Marco, Florence. The viewpoint is impossibly high, but seems chosen to give full relief to the three-dimensional mass of the palace, as well as the volume of the loggia (to the far right). Various groups of well-dressed onlookers appear in the foreground, especially to the right, that is, in the approximate position of the Loggia dei Pisani.

of fourteenth-century painting, the so-called “scena per angolo” or “di spigolo,” with only the flanking buildings shown in recession toward the center.56 The “per angolo” procedure certainly survived in the Renaissance, especially in the north, and appears in the early sixteenth-century treatise on perspective of Jean Pélérin (alias Viator) under the name of “horned” or “double horn” perspective.57 With its double vanishing points, horned perspective is entirely compatible with one-point perspective, and indeed the two vanishing points, if joined, provide the “horizon” that appears in Alberti’s treatise as a guide to the relative placement of human figures in a “historia.”58 Brunelleschi’s panels were perhaps less radically innovative in terms of method than often supposed, whatever their sophistication of execution and extraordinary later fame.59 The relevance of conceptions of theater scenery for architecture, especially facade design, is often maintained, usually with reference to Serlio’s account of

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perspective, first published in 1540, which culminates in the famous representations, based on Vitruvius, of the “scenes” appropriate for tragic, comic, and satiric drama.60 The receding facades of his tragic (Fig. 43) and comic scenes are clearly complementary to the dramatic action, and subordinate to it. In Brunelleschi’s panels, in contrast, the buildings are themselves protagonists in a drama played out by venerable, magnificently housed institutions of crucial importance in the political and religious affairs of the city. The men who served these institutions came and went; the republican constitution ensured – or was designed to ensure – that the state would not fall into the hands of a dominant signore, a fate that Florence was fortunate to avoid. As we have seen, Brunelleschi was employed as an architect in the Palazzo della Signoria itself, and designed a new hall for the palace of the Parte Guelfa, an institution of crucial importance to the oligarchy displaced by the Medici coup of 1434.61 There seems every reason to set his panels in the same context of patriotic sentiment and political commitment.

BRUNELLESCHI AND THE PALAZZO DELLA SIGNORIA: QUESTIONS OF VIEWPOINT In Brunelleschi’s panel of the Palazzo della Signoria, it was not only the building itself that had ideological significance. Marvin Trachtenberg has shown that the palace and the surrounding piazza were designed with an optimal viewpoint in mind, and that this coincided with that of Brunelleschi’s panel, as specified by Manetti. From the entrance of the Via de’ Calzaiuoli, the street leading to the cathedral complex by way of the guild shrine at Orsanmichele, the two unencumbered “faces” of the palace come into view (Fig. 20).62 It was not, in other words, Brunelleschi who selected a viewpoint; rather the viewpoint imposed itself on Brunelleschi, who made explicit an existing spatial and architectural order.63 The shift from oblique to frontal viewpoints, especially of major buildings, was typical of the Renaissance.64 In the case of the Palazzo della Signoria, the former is exemplified in the fourteenth-century representation of the expulsion of the would-be tyrant, the Duke of Athens (Fig. 30); the Renaissance frontal viewpoint is exemplified in the well-known painting of the execution of Savonarola from the end of the fifteenth century (Fig. 44). As a pictorial celebration of the overthrow of a leader regarded by the traditional elite as hostile to Florentine traditions, this image draws on Brunelleschi’s posthumous status as a heroic figure of the republican past, especially the oligarchic phase admired by many of Savonarola’s most fervent enemies. Yet rather than the convergence of the two faces of the building, the anonymous painter presents the west front, lined up with the gridded pavement of the piazza, as a true facade. This was certainly not the view from the Via dei Calzaioli. In the Renaissance, the best view of the west front of the Palazzo della Signoria was available from the so-called Tetto dei Pisani, a kind of elongated overhang

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44. Serlio, Tragic Scene. The perspective effect is subtly modulated by the variety of architecture and the siting of buildings in relation to the principal axis. This is also a feature of the portal of Apollo and Minerva.

along the western edge of the piazza, opposite the facade of the palace. According to Giorgio Vasari, Brunelleschi included it in his panel, though there is no mention of it in Manetti’s biography, which Vasari used. Vasari perhaps included the Tetto for its associations, rather than its at best minimal role in Brunelleschi’s panel. While the view from the Via dei Calzaioli to the palace was available to all, the Tetto was well known as a favorite meeting place of the Florentine political and literary elite, especially the “civic humanists” of the early fifteenth century.65 Built by the restored Guelph oligarchy in 1386, it was an important element of the remodeling of the piazza following the suppression of the Ciompi uprising of 1378. Already in 1380, however, the government closed the north door of the palace, through which the Ciompi had forced their way into the palace, which they briefly held. This door led into the armory, used by the militia that protected the government in the early republic; it was not easily visible from the Tetto, which instead commanded the rectilinear area organized by the pavement grid and bounded by the palace’s planar facade, the Tetto, and the Loggia della Signoria, and evocative of the somewhat repressive political and social order of the late trecento.66

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In his panel, Brunelleschi implicitly celebrated the triumph of the political order of the time through a vision of its seat of power thrusting forward into the piazza, the building as protagonist. His insistence on the oblique view suggests an archaizing reaction against the more “modern” space shaped by the Tetto. Perhaps his emphasis on the northern door, anticipating Machiavelli, subtly promoted the idea of a citizen militia. When Vasari wrote his Life of Brunelleschi, however, the republic had long ceased to exist and the palace had become a princely residence, no longer a symbol of republican pride and a setting for intense debate among citizens, but a backdrop for the rituals of a monarchic state, for which the Tetto was a convenient gallery. Both the various images of the palace, especially Brunelleschi’s panel, and accounts of the latter are (or were) profoundly informed by ideology. As represented in Brunelleschi’s panel, the Palazzo della Signoria was emphatically not setting but subject, as was appropriate not only to its place in a novel scheme of representation, but also to its importance in the organization of communal memory. This was surely reinforced by ideas about talismanic powers inherent within certain objects and substances. Insufficient attention is usually given to the relics and altars of guardian saints crucially preserved in the Palazzo della Signoria, with its chapel dedicated to the Virgin and Saint Bernard.67 In addition, the building’s charisma depended on the many documents, insignia, and trophies of the republic stored within it and variously evocative of significant events in the life of the republic, while supporting its claims to autonomy and authority. In some cases, legal documents were publicly affixed to the stones of the palace, whose symbolic valences we have reviewed.68 In such a meeting of stone and script, or even nature and history, one drew sustenance from and reinforced the other. In the Torre della Vacca, as we saw, the Palazzo della Signoria incorporated within its bulk an expressive remnant of the Ghibelline faction defeated by the new republic. This is, literally, a case of architectural incorporation, even ingestion. The metaphor is especially apposite at a site of ritual cannibalism, a rare practice in medieval Italy, but documented here in the aftermath of the expulsion in 1343 of the Duke of Athens, who used the palace as a base for the imposition of “tyrannical” rule on the city whose republican liberty it had been built to secure.69 The vestigial presence of the Torre della Vacca, still manifested by the interruption of apertures in the facade, suggests that the tower’s incorporation into city hall was not an act of cancellation, but rather of symbolic appropriation on the part of newly dominant social forces, concerned to draw sustenance from their vigorous, if violent, aristocratic predecessors. Following the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, the Florentines took great care, in Villani’s phrase, to accecare (literally to “blind”) all signs of his regime in their city hall.70 Villani’s choice of this anthropomorphic metaphor – imagining the palace as a kind of person, equipped with eyes – effectively figured the surveillance carried out from the heights of the building by the duke, who cleared a new street to improve his line of sight.71 The restored republic was

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soon making alterations to the palace that went well beyond the cancellation of the signs of the Duke’s regime.72 Both major entrances into the buildings were equipped with paired sculpted lions, and in 1349 the Marzocco, the heraldic lion of Florence, was set up at the northern end of the ringhiera, the platform running around the base of the palace. In 1353, four gilded sculptures of lions were placed in niches high up at the four corners of the palace, associated spatially with the arms of the city, its protectors, and its administrative regions.73 The invisibility of at least one of these lions from the piazza indicates their talismanic quality; there is an emphasis on the quadrangular mass of the palace. The late fourteenth-century emphasis on the west facade departed, then, from earlier conceptions of the palace, to which, however, Brunelleschi returned with an image of city hall that evoked the traditional values of the republic, and perhaps subtly appealed for their closer observance. The republican “facade” of Medicean Florence74 gave way, in 1494, to a restored but short-lived republic, before the return of the Medici to absolute power, more tentatively in the period 1512–27 and definitively in the centralized granducal state established in the 1530s. In accordance with their political strategy, the fifteenth-century Medicean regime had impacted the physical Palazzo della Signoria in relatively subtle ways, and there was little that needed to be done in 1494 to expunge Medici associations. Under the republic the building had served as the official residence for the exclusively male group of priors.75 The first archduke of Florence, however, Cosimo I, used the palace to accommodate the ducal family, including his wife and progeny.76 In the evolving absolutist state, an emphasis on dynastic lineage and filiation, centered on the physical body of the duke, displaced the old guiding metaphor of the building as body. The orchestrator of the renovation of the venerable building to satisfy new needs was Cosimo’s court architect, Giorgio Vasari, who likened the palace to a crippled and wasted body to which he was giving new life. He even compared his own work to Michelangelo’s celebrated achievement in wresting a figure of David from a block of marble that earlier sculptors had apparently ruined.77

ON AN IMPLICIT PARAGONE: ARCHITECTURE AS STATUE AND SURROGATE SUBJECT The idea of the building as protagonist, as a quasi-subject or a source of utterance, immediately raises the issue of the relationship between architecture and public statuary in Renaissance culture. The fifteenth century saw the emergence of the human body as a privileged carrier of expression and meaning, not least in works of sculpture liberated from the architectural frames of medieval statuary, and occasionally of colossal dimensions. Still, the Renaissance deployment of public statuary cannot be cleanly distinguished from medieval practices and even attitudes, like the attribution of talismanic

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power to statues.78 The environs of the Palazzo della Signoria, seat of an often embattled republic, were an obvious place for the display of talismanic statuary, such as the heraldic lion, the Marzocco, an example of a familiar type of totemic shield bearer and door guardian. Consistently with its apotropaic function, it stood on the corner of the ringhiera, the speakers’ platform projecting out from the western facade of the Palazzo della Signoria. The installation at and around the palace of statues of outstanding artistic quality and civic iconography was a signal feature of the revived republic that followed the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Notably, Donatello’s Judith, formerly in the Medici Palace, and Michelangelo’s David, intended for the cathedral, were set up successively in a prominent position in front of the palace. Clearly, as symbols and embodiments of republican values and aspirations these statues shed earlier connotations and took on new ones that depended in no small part on the proximity of the palace.79 The intense debate about the destination of the David is too well known to require more than a brief summary here. On January 24, 1504, a commission of thirty experts convened to discuss the siting of the statue, by now known generally as the “giant,” which Michelangelo had been working on since 1501. By now the original site, atop a cathedral buttress, had been abandoned. The deliberations of the commission ranged inconclusively over a number of possible locations for the statue and, in the end, the governing council resolved the matter. Michelangelo played no explicit role in the deliberations, though one speaker urged that his view be followed, while another speaker, Giuliano da Sangallo, may have served as the artist’s “mouthpiece.”80 It is likely that Michelangelo supported the site eventually selected, at the portal of the palace, on the understanding that he would provide a second colossal statue, a figure of Hercules, as a pendant to the David.81 A large block for this second statue, held in reserve for Michelangelo until his departure from Florence in 1508, had presumably been identified some time before, perhaps as early as 1504, when various proposals for a pendant statue for the David had emerged in the deliberations of the committee.82 In the changed political climate following the establishment of the Medicean principate in Florence, the commission for the Hercules eventually went to Bandinelli, an artist closely identified with the Medici regime.83 In the deliberations of January 1504 concerning the site for the David, most speakers focused on the issue of the statue’s architectural setting, and almost all recommended a location in the area of the Palazzo della Signoria. Some speakers envisaged the David as emphatically freestanding, associated with and characterizing the open space of the piazza rather than any specific building. The majority argued, however, for a relatively enclosed and protected site; indeed, the possibility of politically motivated damage at an exposed position was an issue in the consultations. Giuliano da Sangallo and others recommended a position within the Loggia della Signoria: this combined maximal security with public visibility, and set the statue within an impressive archi-

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45. Michelangelo, David, on original site in front of the Palazzo della Signoria, Florence.

tectural frame. Others favored the substitution of the David for Donatello’s Judith, which had been brought from the Palazzo Medici following the fall of the Medici regime and set up in front of the portal of the Palazzo della Signoria, in close proximity to the base of the mighty building. This was the site eventually assigned to the David (Fig. 45).84 In his account of the installation of the David, Giorgio Vasari uses the revealing phrase insegna del palazzo of the statue, emphasizing its symbolic identity with the palace and the republic that it housed, and perhaps drawing on a conception contemporary with the statue’s transfer.85 In functional terms, the idea of Michelangelo’s statue as the insegna del palazzo assimilates it to the totemic Marzocco. Indeed, the proposal that the David replace the Marzocco surfaced in the deliberations of 1504, while the idea of the talismanic properties of public

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statuary, explicitly cited by at least one speaker, was clearly tacitly shared by all.86 The David’s eventual position was very different from that of the Marzocco’s position at the corner of the ringhiera, at a distance from the palace wall and still more from the entrance, where the David would be installed, also on the ringhiera. The issue was not only that of balancing concerns for visibility and security. Even without a pendant, Michelangelo’s giant at its post in front of the palace entrance framed, dramatized, and gave dignity to the act of entry into the building, its polished white marble surface conspicuous against the darker and rougher rustication of the palace facade. Such an active framing and qualifying function would certainly have been lacking if the statue had been set within the Loggia della Signoria, contained visually and symbolically by a kind of architectural tabernacle.87 Since the latter site was favored by a clear majority of the thirty commissioners, strong arguments – unfortunately unrecorded – must have prevailed to offset the commissioners’ recommendation and the initial decision of the government itself to place it there. Somehow, such arguments must have turned on the “giant’s” talismanic power and its identification – perhaps as its insegna – with the authority of the republic.88 Noting the simplicity of the pedestal made for the David, Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt has emphasized, in particular, the absence of an inscription.89 A more complex and even higher pedestal, especially if carrying text, would have stamped the David as an independent statue, while drawing attention to its own framing function.90 As installed, the ensemble of statue and base enhanced and characterized the architecture of the palace. In the sixteenth century, the David set a new standard for the sculptural exploitation of the affective resources of the human body. Not by chance, Vasari likens the David to the Marforio, one of the famous speaking statues of Rome and closely associated with republican liberty in that city.91 The juxtaposition of such a work and the rough, relatively inert mass of the palace focuses attention on the imbalance between the resources of the arts of sculpture and architecture at this moment. An important current of sixteenth-century architecture, in which Michelangelo played a crucial role, was concerned to overcome this imbalance through the enrichment of the expressive language of architecture, not least in facade design. Michelangelo would soon commence a profound rethinking of architectural signification, central in which was the ascription of a kind of subjectivity to a building’s facade, or at least, in view of Michelangelo’s problematization of the concept of facade, to a building. It was not just a joke when Michelangelo proposed a campanile at San Lorenzo in the form of a giant, its voice the sound of the bells.92 The David was originally destined for display in a sacred site, alongside figures of saints of importance in the ritual life of Florence. In its eventual setting it shared some of the sacred power of a holy image of a saint that conferred visible presence on the relics of that saint embedded in an adjacent altar. The David gave visual form to ethical and civic qualities central to

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46. Maarten van Heemskerck, View of Piazza Capitolina and the Palazzo dei Conservatori before the remodeling of 1563f., showing the bronze wolf affixed to the facade and the colossal head of Constantine in front of the office of the bovattieri guild. The group of the lion and horse, very summarily drawn, appears at the head of the steps to the Palazzo Senatorio.

Florentine self-representation, which persisted even through drastic changes of political regime affecting the functions and character of the building, as we have seen. At the same time, the decision to move the David to city hall was perhaps prompted in part by knowledge of a notable decision to associate secular sculpture with a civic site, the recent removal of politically/ideologically charged statuary to the Roman Campidoglio under the aegis of Pope Sixtus IV, for whom Botticelli, a member of the 1504 commission, had worked in Rome. In particular, the famous bronze she-wolf, symbol of ancient Rome, was affixed to the facade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the Roman equivalent of the Palazzo della Signoria, as an insegna di palazzo (Fig. 46).93 In Massimo Miglio’s view this was a political gesture of great importance, displacing the lion, symbol of the free commune whose liberties and privileges Sixtus was concerned to suppress. In any case, in the Palazzo dei Conservatori as redesigned by Michelangelo, the bronze wolf disappeared into the interior, and new, more subtle clues to the building’s meaning enlivened the exterior and the main entrance, evocative of Michelangelo’s concern to give architecture the expressive power as well, perhaps, as the semantic openendedness of sculpture, while rethinking the very idea of the architectural facade.94 The crucible of Michelangelo’s experimentation was the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, where he worked in close succession on three diverse architectural projects for Pope Clement VII de’Medici, whose family mausoleum the church had become.95 Michelangelo developed a remarkable range of designs for a patron whose enlightened connoisseurship was by no means disinterested. The enhancement and enlargement of the Brunelleschian basilica of San Lorenzo associated Clement with artistic innovation of extraordinary

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power and quality that continued and celebrated, yet also raised to new levels, the great new tradition of Florentine art that Brunelleschi and others had founded a century earlier. This was now retroactively claimed by the Medici, and David stayed at his post. In concert with the Medicean resignification of the palace, his meaning shifted, as any Italian of the period would have expected of an insegna.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BRAMANTE AND THE EMBLEMATIC FACADE

AVOIDING ANTITHESIS: LATE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY FLORENCE In the “building boom” of later fifteenth-century Florence, an array of grand new palaces jostled the civic buildings that had hitherto given the city its visual identity, and inscribed on the skyline the ascendancy of private over public interests. Most impressive of all, the Palazzo Sforza still dominates its neighborhood with its sheer bulk and expanse of expensively worked stone reaching from the built-in bench at ground level to the mighty cornice marking the upper limit (Fig. 10).1 In these respects, as in its conspicuous rustication, the Palazzo Strozzi belongs to a group of palaces that overtly echo the Palazzo Medici (Fig. 3); a conspicuous example is the Palazzo Gondi (Fig. 47).2 Deferential recognition of Medicean cultural as well as political leadership was of course a feature of Lorenzo’s “masked principate,” when the family palace became the center of an exemplary, quasiprincely court. Nevertheless, certain striking points of contrast between the Palazzo Medici, and many of its aristocratic satellites throughout the city, are of particular significance in the discussion of the evolution of facade types. The traditional organization of Florentine palace facades in distinct horizontal fields found sophisticated expression at the Palazzo Medici. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, however, there was a marked tendency to treat the facade as a single, homogeneous surface, often of markedly sober character.3 This departure from the Medicean model was not, or not necessarily, politically motivated; as we saw in Chapter 5, some houses of this type belonged to close associates of the Medici. Nevertheless, the fashion soon came to have specific, anti-Medicean ideological overtones in the reformist and pietistic current of the last decade of the century, constituting a kind of architectural “plain style.”4 Under the sixteenth-century principate, on the other hand, such sober exterior architecture suited the transformation of the Florentine patriciate into a bureaucratic elite.5 133

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47. Palazzo Gondi, Florence. In many respects this is an updated and markedly more horizontal, as well as less powerful, version of the Medici facade.

For the architectural elaboration of palace facades in the “High” Renaissance, we must largely look beyond Florence, notably to Rome, though here too Florentine models, in the hands of Florentine architects, were of importance. On occasion, the gap between the architectural culture of Rome and Florence became glaringly apparent: a remarkable case of this bifurcation was the rejection, even ridicule, elicited by the facade of the Florentine Palazzo Bartolini (1520–23), a design whose formal complexity and rhetorical character would not have occasioned controversy in Rome.6

COMPOUND AND PALACE: EXCEPTIONAL ROME Already in the fifteenth century, developments in residential architecture in Rome had very little in common with Florentine models. Florence was a dynamic and crowded center of commerce and industry, a major metropolis by European standards, where clear principles of urban order had long been implemented. Rome was another matter, not least in the prejudiced eyes of Florentine intellectuals resident there in the decades following the return of the papacy to Rome in 1421, after an absence of nearly a century.7 As a result of the professional opportunities available in papal service and in the ecclesiasti-


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cal administration, Rome soon became a leading center of the new learning, attracting humanists who disconsolately viewed the decayed and shrunken contemporary city through the prism of their enthusiasm for antiquity. For many Romans, by contrast, the fragmentation of antiquity was a livelihood, and a whole quarter of the city took its name from the limekilns that turned marble, even exquisite sculptures or architectural ornament, into cement.8 In this chapter I discuss a major architectural project that not only signaled a metaphoric reintegration of the ancient city, but did so, ironically, by transforming cement into all’antica architectural ornament. As for the modern Romans and their wives, Florentine and other foreign observers found them rustic, even barbaric in their dress and customs.9 Certainly, the wealth of the urban elite was based in “agriculture,” that is, mainly the exploitation of an extensive system of pastoral transhumance that linked Rome and its hinterland with distant mountain ranges and sheepruns.10 Also in the mountainous districts near Rome loomed the fortresses of old feudal families, who often maintained impressive fortified enclaves within the city, like the surviving complex of the Orsini family at Monte Giordano.11 These “barons” formed a social group distinct from the urban patrician class, which controlled the municipal government of Rome, though effective power, after 1421, was increasingly concentrated in the papal administration, often working, needless to say, through local institutions and networks of affiliation.12 In important respects, Renaissance Rome was a colonial city, in which a foreign governmental apparatus adapted the urban fabric and the major spaces of circulation and assembly to serve its particular needs and interests. Nevertheless, the centralizing tendencies of papal rule were moderated by various factors. Most obviously, the peculiar institution of an elected monarchy often resulted in short-lived and precarious papal regimes, fostering tensions between rival factions that might at the same time represent local and macropolitical interests. Throughout the period, moreover, Rome was a place of overlapping jurisdictions and institutional frameworks, whose relative authority and effectiveness might fluctuate in response to shifts in the political environment, especially following the death of a pope, when local institutions laid claim to traditional prerogatives.13 Early Renaissance Rome was a place of extremes, a major center of the new art and learning, set within a wild and extensive landscape of pastoralism and feudal violence passing gradually and incompletely under papal control.14 Domestic architecture was shaped accordingly: until late in the fifteenth century, most larger residences were compounds of clustered buildings, often of different date, well fortified with towers and walled yards. The frequent mingling of occupants of diverse profession and class in an individual complex of buildings made it a kind of microcosm of the city or society as a whole. The persistence of such social mingling was certainly related to the high demand for housing in a city marked by high immigration, but perhaps also to the continuing importance of broadly feudal modes of association. Even new palaces

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were loosely planned; the Florentine and Urbinate model of a tightly proportioned central courtyard was slow to arrive, and, when it did, toward the end of the fifteenth century, it received striking local inflections. Nevertheless, significant changes occurred not just in palace design but also in the general housing stock in the course of the century or so following the return of Martin V. In particular, the porticoes that once fronted many houses fell victim to papal edict and, no doubt, to shifts in social practice, as in the case of the exterior loggias in Florence.15 Papal policies encouraged the construction of large palaces, and the competitiveness, sophistication, affluence, and fluidity of Roman elite society fostered the emergence not only of fashions of architecture but also of architectures of fashion. A group of remarkably innovative architects elaborated strikingly distinct design idioms, clearly in response to new types of demand. The larger process is the subject of Chapter 8; I turn now to the Palazzo Caprini by Bramante, or at least its extraordinarily important and influential facade.

BRAMANTE’S EXORDIUM IN ROME: THE ORDERS DISPLAYED Bramante came to Rome in 1499 in the aftermath of the successful French attack on Milan and the fall of the Sforza dynasty. An early documented association was with the Palazzo della Cancelleria (Fig. 6), constructed largely between c. 1490 and 1514, where Bramante apparently provided technical consultation.16 This was the most advanced palace of its time in Rome, and the patron was Cardinal Raffaele Riario, nephew of Sixtus IV Della Rovere, a man of outstanding wealth, social prominence in Rome, and interest in evolving cultural models. The first printers in Rome, Sweynheim and Pannartz, set up shop in Riario’s palace, where they published the first printed edition of Vitruvius’s treatise, a product of engagement with Vitruvius’s text on the part of Sulpizio da Veroli and other scholars associated with and supported by Riario.17 With its echoes of the ducal palace of Urbino, the Cancelleria brought the classicizing palace type to Rome, but it achieves a cunning compromise between imported design ideas and architectural principles, on the one hand, and local building traditions and topographical conditions, on the other. The great, cubic courtyard is truly of urban scale, with its array of monolithic granite columns that had supported first the ancient barracks of a chariot racing team, and then the medieval church sacrificed to Riario’s architectural and other ambitions. For all the obvious echoes of Urbino, the Cancelleria courtyard exemplifies the contemporary Roman preference for expansive courtyards rising through multiple layers of porticoes. On the exterior, two highly disparate main facades address spaces of different character: the parade front, with the main entrance, faces a formal piazza; while a subsidiary facade, containing a line of shop openings, follows the line of the commercial and heavily trafficked Via de’ Pellegrini. This designed


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adjustment of contrasted facades to their immediate environs recalls, in principle, the contrasted facades of Urbino, though here applied to the hierarchic characterization of spaces within a city. The immensely wide main facade, with its two entrances, unifies a building complex made up of highly disparate elements, the palace proper and a major church.18 The Cancelleria provides an especially striking example of a facade as screening device. Contemporaries noticed: a Florentine friar commented explicitly on the lack of a vestigium of the church on the exterior!19 The architectural screen that clothes the main front is clearly modeled, on the upper two floors, on Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai with its superimposed pilaster orders. In contrast to Alberti’s facade, the ground floor of the Cancelleria forms a distinct horizontal base for the palace, punctured only by relatively small and high rounded windows and the two portals. As at the Palazzo Rucellai, the shallowness of the facade revetment emphasizes its character as mere surface. At either end, it wraps around a slightly projecting, somewhat residual tower, linking it to the established Roman palace type, though the towers do not rise above the main block of the building.20 Like the prow of a ship, the southwest corner thrusts forward toward the Campo de’ Fiori. Here, at least, Riario may have envisaged a true tower; instead, a prominent coat of arms dramatizes the palace’s location on a major thoroughfare.21 In his first independent Roman project of note, Bramante worked for another important prelate and patron of the arts, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa. At the convent of S. Maria della Pace (1500–1504; Fig. 48), he contrived a courtyard deep within, as if excavated from, the dense core of the city.22 In its geometrical rigor and sophisticated classicism, it is an enclave of manifest order tucked away in a tangle of narrow streets and irregular blocks, and lacking an exterior facade. Nevertheless, Bramante successfully demonstrated his capacities in architecture and urban design: Julius II would soon commission him to undertake monumental architectural and urbanistic projects affecting wide landscapes, indeed the city as a whole. Bramante’s design for the courtyard at S. Maria della Pace is complex and ingenious, deploying no fewer than four distinct classical architectural orders in a single, constricted space.23 For Vitruvius, the respective orders are architectural subsystems that draw character and meaning from difference of formal aspect, origin, and association with specific classes of deity; the orders, in short belong to a code.24 This was not borne out by Roman practice. Most prominently on the exterior of the Colosseum, the orders appear in superimposition, in such a way that the specific semantic potential of the elements is sacrificed to the overall effect of an imposing articulating device. In the Cortile della Pace, Bramante adapts the classic model of superimposition, by distributing the orders, two apiece, on each of the two levels of porticoes surrounding a central, piazza-like space.25 On each floor, however, one of the two orders has a clear semantic function, which is emphasized by the relative cheapness of the materials used and the flat treatment of the forms. The

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48. S. Maria della Pace, courtyard. This view stresses the contrast of the high arcades on the ground floor, framed by flat Ionic pilasters, and the square spaces above, subdivided by strongly profiled Corinthian columns.

dominant order of the courtyard is the Ionic, associated by Vitruvius with divine matrons; here the architectural reference to the Mother of God is less explicit – as is the way of architecture – than the inscription in the frieze that runs around the courtyard, in an echo of Urbino. The Tuscan characterizes the entrance and the passage around the courtyard, wittily coinciding with the moldings at the springing points of the arches. Both the Corinthian and Composite orders appear on the upper floor; here Vitruvius’s association of the Corinthian with virginity is evoked by the delicate, diminutive Corinthian columns marking the private living areas of the celibate monks. This is a highly sophisticated architectural game, mobilizing two apparently incompatible conceptions of the classical orders. Bramante combines the


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display of the prestigious system of the orders in toto with the mobilization of the Vitruvian architectural code, now transferred to a Christian context, expanded by the inclusion of the two Roman orders (Tuscan and Composite), and miniaturized from the urban scale of Vitruvius’s account, in which the orders characterize different temples. At S. Maria della Pace, nevertheless, Bramante mobilized semantic possibilities inherent in the classical system. In his project for the Palazzo Caprini, certainly, he gave further evidence of his mastery of the classical orders, but he went further by admitting, indeed flaunting, contrasts or even collisions of disparate elements, though without sacrificing overall artistic unity. Bramante’s design is remarkable for its reflexivity, as a reflection on the newly established protocols of classical architecture and the culture that supported it. The Caprini facade interrogates the boundary between architecture and its “others,” instantiating an architecture paradoxically defined by the incorporation of its “outside” into its inside. And this was a true manifesto, for unlike the secluded Cortile della Pace, the Palazzo Caprini occupied a prominent site on the most important route of religious and diplomatic pilgrimage in sixteenth-century Europe.

AN ARCHITECTURE OF DISSIMULATION: BUILT STRUCTURE AND IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURES Between St. Peter’s basilica and the river stretched the district called the Borgo Leonino, or simply Borgo, scene of transformations central in the evolution of facade architecture and discussed in the following chapter. The focus here is on Bramante’s Palazzo Caprini (Fig. 12), variously dated between 1501 and c.1510, a brilliantly innovative building, though adapting important features of the much larger palace diagonally across the street, the Palazzo Castellesi (c.1499–1503; Fig. 49).26 As contemporaries already noted, the facade of the Palazzo Castellesi in turn develops the contrast on the Cancelleria facade between a plainer basement story and a piano nobile embellished with an order, a contrast made more emphatic by the opposition of a rusticated lower story and doubled Doric pilasters above. Both the earlier palaces lack the assertive three-dimensional quality of the Caprini facade, and dissipate the contrast of the two lower floors through a third floor, a standard element in Roman palace architecture.27 To judge from contemporary representations of the Palazzo Caprini, it was specifically the facade that excited admiration.28 It has been so often imitated that it is easy to miss the originality of Bramante’s design. The house itself, relatively modest on such a site, was absorbed in the later sixteenth century into a larger palace, and so must be reconstructed from visual records that include a drawing once in the possession of Andrea Palladio (Fig. 50).29 The elevation consisted of two emphatically demarcated and differently treated horizontal zones.30 The lower zone was occupied at the center by the palace entrance, flanked by shop openings and, above them, small windows lighting mezzanine

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49. Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia (Castellesi), facade. In the foreground appears the fountain of the Piazza Scossacavalli, which no longer exists.

rooms provided for the use of the shopkeepers. The small windows of an invisible attic floor, presumably for servants, were incorporated into the architectural ornament of the palace facade; the contrast with the emphatic doubled attic of the slightly older Palazzo della Rovere, just across the piazza, is especially striking.31 The Caprini facade, therefore, shows just two of three actual full stories. The result is a strongly binary facade that, in this respect, recalls the Florentine tradition of residential design. It is not clear if Bramante knew this firsthand; it is especially unfortunate that a project for a remodeling, perhaps only a refacing, of the house of the Florentine Cardinal Soderini, also on the Via Alessandrina, has not survived, for it may have consciously evoked Florentine models.32 For the Caprini, further, Bramante designed a facade that gains impressiveness by concealing interior arrangements, allowing the deployment in the piano nobile of especially powerful columns within a nascent colossal order. No less than the Cancelleria facade, but in a different way, this facade is emphatically not a vestigium or index of the spaces within, but an architectural formula whose short physical existence on the Via Alessandrina contrasts with its extraordinary fortune as a widely applicable model for palace architecture. Indeed, the Caprini facade entered the European imagination as a floating


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50. Anonymous follower of Bramante, corner of Palazzo Caprini, as seen from a position on the Via Alessandrina in front of the Palazzo Castellesi. The windows of the servants’ quarters are clearly visible in the Doric frieze.

architectural signifier, its cultural cachet guaranteed by its association with Raphael, who lived and died in the palace, and soon became identified as its architect. In classic sign theory, as outlined in Chapter 1, the “index” is one of three logically distinct major sign types, though in the world of experience all three are usually present in some admixture.33 The index is the most “natural” sign, involving the interpretation of a physical mark or imprint; an obvious example is a footprint – in Latin, vestigium – that betrays someone’s passage or presence. The other two sign types are the icon, related to its referent through similitude, and the symbol, which receives meaning through convention. The distinction of iconic and symbolic signs has been problematized in recent decades in a debate between conventionalists and those who hold that iconic representation, especially when informed by modern perspective method, is prior to cultural conditioning (i.e., relatively “natural”) and so closely related to the index.34 It is not necessary to take sides in this debate to recognize that many “symbols,” in the technical sense used here, exploit a strategic resemblance to icons or indices in order to reinforce their own semiotic efficacy and authority.

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This is the case with the Caprini facade. Even as it hides its full interior spatial configuration, it offers a specific social configuration to the view, providing a compelling picture or “icon” of a domestic world divided between upper and lower, with distinct classes assigned to their appropriate spaces and functions.35 In a strategic fusion of semiotic categories, the highly artful iconic representation of the Caprini facade poses as an index, that is, as the exteriorization of an interior structured according to forms of life understood as, or claimed to be, immune to historical contingency.36 The resulting image – for this is very much architecture as image – calls irresistibly to mind the familiar Marxian opposition of base and superstructure, as well as the Marxian definition of ideology as the naturalization of social difference through cultural mechanisms whose artificial status has been forgotten or occluded.37 Further, there is an almost Machiavellian cunning in Bramante’s rhetorical and situational handling, in the Caprini facade, of the language of classicism, with all its inherent claim to transcendent validity.38 Beside the formal logic of the Caprini facade, its binary division was fleshed out, in its physical materiality, through contrasts of surface treatment and architectural characterization. The facade sets a columnar upper story over a rusticated base; it is a classical arrangement, with obvious Roman precedents, that also echoes medieval building practice. Bramante contrived, then, not just a revival of “authentic” antiquity, as usually claimed, but also an implicit claim about the persistence of crucial traditions of architectural representation from the ancient into the “modern” era.39 His choice of material for the rusticated stratum of the facade is notorious: he used stucco (gesso) as an “iconic” representation of stone, indeed of stone worked in a way that emphasizes its natural materiality.40 It is a remarkable paradox, suggesting a disjunction between signifier and signified that is also a disjunction between art and nature. Further, the stucco rustication not only represents stone but also assumes the symbolic connotations of real stone, in a period that saw the publication of an influential account of the “virtues of stones,” talismanic powers thought to be inherent in different varieties of stone.41 At very least, the Caprini facade’s evocation of the sheer strength of quarried stone surely resonated with the constant concern with security in the unruly city of Rome. Such “inherent” qualities exist and have meaning within the compound entity of the Caprini facade. Architectural historians tend to emphasize the formal unity of the facade composition, thus downplaying the internal contrast. Interpretation of the design, however, has focused on the conspicuous deployment of the Doric order, relating it to factors external to the design itself, like Bramante’s predilection for the order, the Vitruvian prescription for decorum in matching orders to particular circumstances, or the cultural and ideological context of the Rome of Pope Julius II.42 In particular, reversing the Vitruvian hierarchy of the orders, the selection of Doric may have seemed appropriate to the bourgeois status of the owners, four brothers from Viterbo, the most successful of whom was a relatively inconspicuous papal functionary. Like the


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choice of site, however, the display of Doric was perhaps less a matter of the registration of a fixed social position than part of a strategy of social and official advancement. The crucial feature of the Caprini facade is the antithesis of order and substrate, an architectural contrast that, as we will see, evokes other binary oppositions of fundamental importance in the cognitive world of the early sixteenth century, indeed throughout Western civilization as a whole. Enacting the rhetorical trope of synecdoche, the part standing for the whole, the architectural order conjures up classical culture, indeed a realm of artful and “civilized” making and ordering in general, in contrast to the raw, pre-architectural substance represented by the rustication beneath it. With great skill Bramante links the symbolic dimension of the facade and the satisfaction of practical concerns. The rusticated base admirably accommodates the paired apertures, of contrasting size and shape, of each ground-floor shop. The alternating metopes and triglyphs of the Doric frieze, on the other hand, unobtrusively accommodate the windows of the servants’ quarters, which would have introduced aesthetically and socially unacceptable interruptions into an Ionic or Corinthian frieze. Metopes usually carry images of solemn character; it was therefore perhaps a subtle joke on Bramante’s part to make them frame, at least potentially, the faces of servants.43

ARCHITECTURAL ALLEGORY: THE BUILDING AND THE STATE The major model – as we have seen, both ancient and medieval – for the Caprini facade was the building type known as the insula, comprising shops below residential stories. Prestigious specific examples of the type were accessible to Bramante, notably buildings surrounding the central courtyard and temple in the Forum of Julius Caesar, adjoining the Roman Forum, which drew the attention of Renaissance draftsmen.44 The evocation of the ancient city in the Caprini facade was no antiquarian gesture; rather it asserts the correspondence of ancient and contemporary structures of domestic and social organization, legitimating the latter by means of the former. The Caprini facade not only symbolizes social hierarchy; it also implements and displays it. This is less obvious in the only extant records of the building, graphic representations that institute a relationship of figure and ground as wall and void. In the physical building, the facade apertures were not simply “void,” but rather stages for human activity. There is an obvious contrast between the low, arched shop openings in the ground floor and the high, rectilinear, somewhat attenuated windows above; in the inhabited building, they accommodated and displayed men and/or women of contrasted occupation and social status. On the ground floor, bowed shop openings enclosed tradesmen bent over their benches and defined by the surrounding rustication and the materials with which they worked as close to nature.45 At least potentially, on

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the other hand, the high windows and balustrades of the piano nobile framed the protagonists of a life of leisure and/or surveillance, and echoed their upright posture. This was an architecture literally enlivened by human presence or its trace.46 The facade dramatized a social contrast that was certainly not confined to the house; indeed, it extended throughout the city, especially in the fashionable quarters attractive to affluent building patrons. More generally, the palace was an image, however reductive, of the hierarchical order inherent in any early modern European urban society and increasingly manifested through spatial segregation.47 In this sense, Bramante’s facade design constitutes an embodiment of the famous analogy proposed by Alberti in the De re aedificatoria: the house is a small city.48 Alberti’s analogy presupposes the assumption, explicit in his treatise, that human societies are necessarily organized, irrespective of scale, by a distinction of those who work and those who command and/or think.49 Both in its temporal and spatial dimensions, however, the classicism of Bramante’s Caprini facade design is more specific than the city imagined by Alberti. It is anchored spatially by proximity to the remains of ancient Rome, in and on which the “modern” city had developed, and to the social world of that modern city, which it encapsulates. At the same time, in a historical dimension, the facade conjures an ancient building type that, on the lines of the Caprini facade, already represented and contained the social world of its time. The Caprini facade, in short, presents a model of the city, both ancient and modern, articulated and defined by asymmetries of power grounded in nature (and so “naturalized”), even if it does so by means of counterfeited “nature” (plaster made to simulate stone). Such insistence on the natural basis of social and political stability might seem little less than utopian in the period of great instability and insecurity marking the turn of the century, not least in the domain of visual representation. The slippage between essence and counterfeit at the Palazzo Caprini belongs in a wider cultural context marked by concerns about the validity of imagery in religious art and, more generally, by more or less self-conscious departures from recently established rational models of pictorial illusion, notably as theorized by Alberti.50 Especially in secular, courtly milieus, a fashion was developing for emblematic forms, in the development of which, as we saw, Alberti was also implicated.

ARCHITECTURE AND ITS OTHERS: THE EMBLEMATIC GRAFT The Renaissance emblem is typically a hybrid of text and image; indeed, the idea of division is etymologically present in the term “device” commonly appplied to such forms.51 During the late Renaissance a distinction became established between two major emblematic forms, the impresa and the emblem proper. Though related to heraldic and related insignia of courtly and chivalric


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milieus, the impresa typically refers not to a family or institution, as in heraldry, but to an individual, or rather to his or her specific qualities or to a course of action the person intends to undertake (the literal meaning of impresa). Emblems, on the other hand, tend to be of universal, often moralizing reference. In the impresa, the image is usually paramount, while the text of an emblem may well precede the addition of an image, as in the case of the famous emblems of Alciati, first published in 1531 and countless times thereafter.52 In existence in cultured Italian circles by the mid fifteenth century, the impresa soon spread into diverse contexts and applications. By the mid sixteenth century, a fluid period of experimentation was beginning to give way to one of categorization and legislation, in the context of a general trend, already noted, toward the regularization of social discourses and practices, including those concerned with conduct and manners and with architecture and the city, the frame and setting of mannerly behavior.53 An early such text was the De cardinalatu of Paolo Cortesi, an eminent humanist and polemicist based at the papal court. His book, which went through various versions between 1501 to 1510, deals inter alia at length and in detail with the type of residence appropriate for a cardinal.54 The section is heavily dependent on Alberti and Vitruvius, though Cortesi also works from personal observations, which I take up in the following chapter. Cortesi recommends the use of emblematic devices or imprese (he calls them aenigmata) in the decoration of an elite residence.55 He foresees their display, however, only in relatively secluded and intimate spaces, like a studiolo. This may reflect Cortesi’s acceptance of Neoplatonist conceptions of symbolism as an arcane, quasi-magical mode of access to ultimate reality, rather than as a useful form of visual rhetoric closely linked to older communicative codes, like heraldry. More obviously, it jibes with Cortesi’s preoccupation with the security concerns familiar to any affluent resident of Rome, and with his insistence that, above all, a palace should present a strong public face to the city. The forceful, somewhat austere rhetoric of the Caprini facade accords with Cortesi’s recommendation: there are no imprese on the facade, while the heraldic shields visible in the London drawing (Fig. 50) over the windows of the side facade are lacking in other representations and perhaps were not part of Bramante’s design. But this is a case not of a facade carrying emblems, but as itself, as a whole, deeply emblematic; it is so in two ways, in terms both of symbolic valence and logical structure. It is also important that emblematic meaning is never fixed, in contrast to heraldry; similarly the discussion of the Caprini facade will discover fluidity and multiplicity of meaning, though always constrained by its binary logic. The elaboration by Bramante of an “emblematic” architecture is certainly consistent with what we know of his own interests and of the milieu in which he operated in Rome. Bramante’s own fascination with hieroglyphic writing is documented: in particular, he unsuccessfully proposed an inscription in “hieroglyphs” (simple pictorial equivalents for syllables) for the Vatican

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palace, perhaps even in anticipation of a positive response from Pope Julius II. The Caprini brothers happened to be from Viterbo, site of a “hieroglyphic” inscription of some notoriety, though perhaps later than Bramante’s experiment.56 In addition, one of the brothers, Aurelio Caprini, was appointed in 1499, around the probable date of the commission, to direct the papal mint, including the minting of coins and medals.57 This may be significant since the combination of text and image of a typical impresa occurs also on medals, which typically also carry an impresa on the reverse; in design terms, they are cognate visual practices. In his project for the Caprini brothers, then, Bramante may have encountered particularly congenial patronage.58 In general, the Caprini facade design emerged in a climate of intense interest in “hieroglyphs,” as imprese were often known. The very fictivity of the plaster rustication challenges the beholder to understand it as sign, or rather conceit, rather than as a straightforward element of architectural classicism. But if the facade is “emblematic” in some sense, this is a matter of the composition of the whole and the logic of its assembly. In Renaissance reflections on emblematic forms we encounter, already by the late fifteenth century, two guiding metaphors, both justified by etymologies of the term “emblem.” One, patently architectural, is the idea of the emblem as an inlay or mosaic, a metaphor with medieval roots that Alberti perhaps takes up in his famous account of cultural process as the recombination of the fragmented elements of antiquity to make new forms, as noted in Chapter 5.59 Bramante left no explicit reflections on his design principles, but his approach could be defined as an “inlay” style, melding individual elements to make a coherent entity, in contrast to the so-called “chronicle style,” involving the insertion of discrepant classical citations into the decoration of a building.60 In the choir of S. Maria del Popolo he contrived an immensely influential combination of decorative devices and elements of very different character.61 Beyond the insertion or citation of ancient spolia, however, the fashion for the embedding of “natural” or found objects in larger complex objects, so typical of sixteenth-century taste, was already current in Bramante’s cultural milieu.62

ART AND NATURE A more important semantic field of “emblem” in this context, however, was derived from the discourse of horticulture. In the original Greek the term emblema had the meaning “graft,” the artful joining into a living organism of a rootstock and a whip from distinct species, one robust but crude, the other fragile but fruitful and/or floriferous thanks to human improvement or at least selection.63 In other words, grafting was a method of propagation involving the artful combination of something natural and something already “improved” by human artifice to make a third entity that, though a product of culture, nevertheless grew and fruited as if it was “natural.” As such, grafting


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could become not only a metaphor for the compound character of emblems in general, the grafting of one sign-system on another.64 It might even itself become an emblem.65 Whether or not Bramante knew of the symbolism of grafting, his emblematic facade combined or at least signified the combination of two distinct manifestations of stone, as raw material (nature) and as shaped by the hand of the mason to embody a prestigious architectural system (culture). Directly or indirectly, this contrast echoes or rather exploits Vitruvius’s idea of naturalis decor, and his distinction between natural and conventional forms of architectural elaboration.66 It also echoes ideas about the relation of art and nature current in different, but overlapping, discursive domains. A remarkable formulation, with Aristotelian resonances, emerged in Bramante’s own Roman milieu. In the De cardinalatu, Paolo Cortesi ranks the facades of the Castellesi and Della Rovere palaces, near neighbors of the Palazzo Caprini, in terms of the contrast of nature and art: the Palazzo Della Rovere facade, carrying an incised decoration of fictive stone on its facade, is inferior to the real stone of the Palazzo Castellesi.67 More perceptive reflections occur in Serlio’s earliest publications (1537), which reveal his deep admiration of Bramante’s work and draw on the crucial years Serlio himself spent in Rome; his repeated reference to the binary art/nature surely echo discussions in early Cinquecento Rome.68 Finally, the metaphor of grafting is particularly appropriate to the logic of the Caprini facade, since the patterning of the “stones,” hinting at a vertical axis beneath each column, conveys the conceit that the order, rather than quarried violently from “living rock,” seems to grow out of its rustic substrate, and draw sustenance from it.69 This too reverberates with an important philosophical topos, the Aristotelian distinction of different conceptions of nature itself, in the well-known scholastic formulation, natura naturans and natura naturata, that is, between “nature” as a productive, generative principle and as the array of phenomena resulting from it.70 In the Caprini facade, indeed, the ground-floor rustication evokes natura naturata, while the order of the upper floor is the result of the imitation of natural principles, as laid out by Vitruvius. The grafting in the Caprini facade of representations of culture and of nature raises important issues of interpretation. The Doric order embodies a realm of culture identified not only through inherent characteristics but also, perhaps especially, through its position relative to its contrary, its “other,” the rough rocky surface beneath.71 The latter is nevertheless included within what had seemed to be defined through its exclusion. Here rustication is not only positionally defined as nonculture within a specific cultural domain, it also itself represents a significant and necessary, if certainly subordinate, constituent of that domain.72 As a whole, the binary configuration hints at a conception of culture defined by the incorporation rather than the exclusion or outright suppression of nature or indeed of human societies deemed to be in the state of nature. Ironically, Bramante’s design for the Tempietto for the

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“most Christian monarchs” of Spain, roughly contemporary with the Caprini design, celebrated the imperial expansion of Europe that, in the long term, created material and epistemological conditions destructive of any such inclusive notion of culture, or even of human society.

ORIGINS IN ARCHITECTURE The Doric piano nobile of the Palazzo Caprini relates to its “stone” substrate as a finished artifact to the raw material from which it was made; it evokes, then, the Vitruvian story of the role of architecture in the socialization of early humans. Clearly, in such a perspective, the upper realm of art is superior to the base material below. However, other perspectives are possible; we have already encountered Cortesi’s assignment of superior value to nature over art. Further, the Doric story of the Caprini facade appears to grow from the “natural” stone beneath, suggesting the priority of the latter in its original, authentic, and, most notably, “living” state.73 Nature can be present in a house in two ways, through the adjustment to a “natural” site and through the invocation of the innate qualities of the natural substance that its making necessarily transforms and subjects to the sharp edge of cutting tools. The two aspects coincide in a remarkable passage of the Odyssey, in which Penelope contrives a sign to assure herself that the stranger before her is indeed her long-lost husband Odysseus.74 She challenges him to move the marriage bed, which she knows is impossible, since Odysseus himself had crafted the bed from the stump of a great olive tree around which the house had been built. The passage resonates with the widespread custom in Mediterranean societies of enclosing nature within a house, but also with symbolic and literal inclusions of “nature” within domestic space in the Renaissance. A remarkable case, certainly known to Bramante, is the Sala degli Assi in the ceremonial apartment in the castle of Milan, frescoed by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo’s decoration presents the conceit of trees rising on all sides, their branches forming the vault and their trunks evoking columns. At dado level the roots of the painted trees reach into and part the rock beneath, producing the effect of a natural rustication. Apart from the obvious Gothic overtones, Leonardo surely draws on the Vitruvian conception of nature as operating in an architectural way.75 Similarly, in the convent of S. Ambrogio in Milan, Bramante introduced the conceit of a column representing – in stone – a primitive post fashioned of a “naturally” straight and vertical tree still carrying the stumps of sawn-off branches, as if had grown there before becoming architecture.76 The “naturalness” of the Palazzo Caprini, then, comes out of a rich tradition of thought and visual experiment. From one perspective, the rustication of the Palazzo Caprini represents a natural substrate giving legitimacy and quasi-talismanic strength to the realm of


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artifice above. Because of its location specifically in Rome, however, such a conspicuously all’antica building could hardly fail to address its setting and the local echoes of its architecture. This was surely not just a question of the imaging of the social relations of the ancient city through the imitation of formal “sources,” but also of the evocation of origins, a preoccupation of architectural theorists since Vitruvius.77 The Caprini facade is designed around a contrast of the order, which by itself figures architecture in the Vitruvian system, and the raw substrate out of which it rises. The order and substrate combine, however, in a new synthesis, a new architecture, claiming a historical grounding not found in Vitruvian theory, because located literally in the ground beneath the building, that is, in the rock already figured by the rusticated basement. This substrate may be understood as evoking the emergence of Rome itself from a landscape of caves and caverns peopled by savage beings, notably the monstrous Cacus, whose overthrow by Hercules was celebrated by the construction of a major Doric temple, a key point of reference in the early sixteenth-century deployment of the Doric order, as explored in the following chapter. Such ancient resonances reinforce the motif of social division within the binary symbolic field established by the Caprini facade, even assimilating the artisanal population of the ground-floor shops to wild and monstrous figures like Cacus. As Louise Fradenburg has noted, the upswing in wild man iconography occurred contemporaneously with the elaboration of discourses of courtesy and civility, a process in which early sixteenth-century Rome played a crucial role, as we have seen. The wild man, she writes, is a product of court culture’s “intense preoccupation with the mannering of the body.”78 Bramante’s distinction of stories might be understood, then, in terms of a Bakhtinian contrast between the grotesque and classical body. Certainly, such a dichotomy gives due weight to the differences between both the human types associated with each story and the spaces they inhabit, one permeable, the other lofty and impermeable, one the seat of reason, the other the space of commerce.79 In some cases, moreover, dichotomy itself was construed as monstrous, for in Renaissance culture a monster was often no more than an unexpected montage of disparate elements.80 More probably, however, the rusticated substrate of the Caprini facade did not so much figure the prior condition of ancient Rome, so much as that of the modern city, built on and out of the substance of the old, and drawing sustenance from it.81 In the context of humanist Rome, the physical appropriation of ancient sites was allied with the emulation of ancient Roman architecture, including not only the insula blocks previously noted, but also prominent cases of rustication applied to the foundation structures of a major monument, with the suggestion of the art/nature interplay found at the Palazzo Caprini.82 The substrate of the Palazzo Caprini, then, perhaps conveyed not just a force to be overcome and repressed, but (also) a source of strength. The analogies and correspondences evoked by the binary logic of the Caprini facade are fluid and multiple, a matter of visual rhetoric rather than the

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registration of truth, as in medieval analogical thinking, at least as understood by Renaissance scholars.83 In fact, the interpretation of the facade in terms of its place in the wider city, whether ancient or “modern,” leads away from analogy toward the trope of metonymy, though certainly the metonymic relationship of house and city irresistably takes on a metaphoric, indeed analogical dimension. The relationship to the city, however, does not exhaust the facade design’s metonymic dimension, its place in the world. After all, the Albertian analogy of house and city is based on Aristotle’s distinction in the Politics between the household, in which a master rules over slaves and requires less stringent obedience from his wife, and the community of free men of the polis. It is in this context that Aristotle conducts his notorious defence of slavery, providing key arguments for the enslavement of vunerable populations in the processes of imperial expansion and exploitation getting under way as the Palazzo Caprini was under construction. For all the modest scale of the actual palace, the facade design of the Palazzo Caprini supplied a fundamental motif in the architecture of absolutism and western triumphalism, the colossal order. This is an arrangement of columns or pilasters that rises through two or more stories, thereby breaking free of any even residual link to the idea of the column as a post, supporting a floor. Instead, the columnar forms take on a new scale and semiotic function appropriate to the space of the city or some other wider setting of princely or courtly ceremonial and ritualized public life. The still somewhat embryonic colossal order used at the Palazzo Caprini suggests a conscious rejection of the motif of superimposed of orders that is recognizably present, though much elaborated, at the Cortile della Pace. The latter was a community, a utopian enclave of monks. The palace rose, however, at the gates of the greatest palace in the Western world at the time of the implementation of an at least proto-absolutist style of rule on the part of successive popes, especially Julius II, Bramante’s great papal patron. Indeed, certain scholars situate Bramante’s design firmly within the ideological structures and requirements of Julius’s Caesaropapist court.84 Nevertheless, Bramante was no ideologist of authoritarianism and imperialism. The Caprini facade design’s complexity of reference and signification suggests not the expression – still less reflection – of existing power relations, so much as the formulation of alternate, including anti-absolutist and anti-instrumentalist, possibilities within early modern culture or even, more specifically, within European classicism.85 The motif of continuity between the stratified zones of the facade is no less important than the monumental gesture of the colossal order, which of course we inevitably experience through the prism of its later applications in marble behemoths from St. Petersburg to Washington and beyond. It is crucial that, following Stephen Toulmin, we register this dimension of alterity and critical complexity within European culture, at a time when, at least within the American academy, we witness a marginalization of the humanities justified, in part, by their complicity in the horrors wrought in the name of “civilization” and modernization.86

CHAPTER EIGHT

FACADES ON PARADE ARCHITECTURE BETWEEN COURT AND CITY

THE VIA ALESSANDRINA: THE STREET AS STAGE As an ideal model of the well-ordered city, or human society in general, the type of the Caprini facade transcended its own specific location and physical disappearance, enjoying widespread diffusion in Rome and far beyond.1 It also stimulated, however, innovative and striking cases of a self-conscious, even polemical departure from the example set by Bramante; indeed, such counterdesigns appeared in close proximity to the Palazzo Caprini, in a blatant attempt to upstage it (the metaphor is entirely appropriate). In this chapter I discuss the novel urban “stage” on which the Caprini facade and its rivals made their appearance and which they helped to shape through an architecture of unprecented rhetorical ingenuity and capacity to position a patron in his social or cultural world. The chapter ends with a review of the very different history and topography of a group of Roman palaces frankly indebted to the Caprini facade. In 1499 Pope Alexander VI Borgia commanded the opening of a straight street between the portal of the papal palace of the Vatican and the piazza in front of the Castel S. Angelo (Map 4; Fig. 51).2 Officially designated as the Via Alessandrina, the street was generally known as the Borgo Nuovo, and was aligned roughly parallel to the existing major route (Borgo Vecchio or Carreria Santa) leading from the city toward St. Peter’s basilica. It was opened with an eye on the upcoming Jubilee, though not necessarily to relieve congestion. Indeed, the Borgo Vecchio was closed off at times during the Jubilee, forcing pilgrims to complete the final stage of their journey to the Vatican along Alexander’s new thoroughfare.3 Little more than half-finished at Alexander’s death, the street was extended under Leo X to the glacis at the Castel S. Angelo.4 As a planned avenue aligned with a focal point, the Via Alessandrina was an important model for subsequent urbanism in Europe and beyond. The present focus, however, is not on its planned origin, but its unplanned evolution, 151

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51. Etienne Dupérac, view of Rome 1577, detail, showing the Borgo district stretching from the Castel and Ponte S.Angelo and the piazza in front of the atrium and nave of the Constantinian basilica, still fronting the new construction. Around it is a suburban landscape of vineyards and gardens. Along the “Via Alexandrina” the major palaces are clearly indicated, including the tall Palazzo Branconio close to the opening of the street into the piazza.

beginning already before Alexander’s death in 1503, and of crucial importance in the development of facade architecture. Alexander had prescribed a uniform environment, but his vision was soon negated by the dynamics of the court.5 In a short time, the Via Alessandrina became a pioneer example of a characteristic sixteenth-century urban formation, the “palace street,” a cluster of elite residences along an axial and relatively spacious thoroughfare serving typically as a setting for state ceremonial. Accordingly, most palace streets are also parade streets; the function of the street and the aspect of the houses are closely intertwined.6 We can usefully distinguish two ideal types of early-modern parade street, both exemplifying a general tendency to horizontal (or topographical) social stratification. A parade street might form an adjunct to a princely residence, accommodating courtiers whose advancement or even survival depended on

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access to the prince and ability to catch his eye. An effective strategy was architectural patronage on a conspicuous thoroughfare, satisfying the typical princely interest in the decus urbis and in the city as a place of spectacle, as in the mid-sixteenth-century development of the Via Maggio in ducal Florence.7 On the other hand, a parade street might evolve as a cluster of aristocratic residences in a zone defined mainly by exclusivity, rather than by proximity to a princely center of power; none is more famous than the Genoese Strada Nuova, or at least its image as widely diffused by Rubens in a magnificent printed volume.8 An important predecessor was certainly the Venetian Grand Canal, already framed, by the late fourteenth century, by an array of grand palaces turning their main facades to the watery route between the major economic and political centers of the city.9 Together these facades projected an architectural image of the competitive as well as cohesive instincts of the Venetian patriciate, while providing an appropriate setting for the ritual performances for which Venice was famous. The phenomenon of spatiosocial segregation in a late-medieval Italian city has been especially well studied in relation to Florence. Here, as elsewhere, aristocratic enclaves were a feature of the urban fabric; some, like the Borgo degli Albizzi, were early examples of palace streets. Though the tendency for different classes to occupy separate districts was certainly a feature of the medieval city, medieval social segregation mainly affected less affluent populations, concentrated in peripheral districts of the city or in areas associated with particular trades.10 The emergence and architectural elaboration of a “noble quarter,” by contrast, was a phenomenon of the Renaissance, with the emergence of a distinctive type of urban residence – the “palace” as an architecturally defined container – that displaced socially and spatially more fluid and porous residential compounds.11 Still, this was long and far from simple development: even at the Strada Nuova, the architectural expression of exclusive aristocratic solidarity disguised a more traditional urban condition.12 At first sight, Renaissance Rome was an unlikely setting for the evolution of new models of urban living. The settlement pattern in the city was marked by the persistence of typical “medieval” characteristics, notably the multiple occupancy of residential space and the close proximity of widely divergent individuals and groups. In 1527, for instance, we encounter a bishop (Cristoforo Jacobacci of an old Roman family) living in a group of associated houses also inhabited by at least one prostitute, a barber, and a variety of other artisans.13 It is significant that the Via Alessandrina lay outside the municipality of Rome in an area still, in 1500, more amenable to papal planning decisions, while it potentially helped relieve the flow of pilgrims through a street network often strained by the demands placed upon it on major feasts. From a functional perspective, the creation of the Via Alessandrina built on the tradition of street improvement projects carried out in Rome by earlier fifteenthcentury popes, notably Nicholas V and Sixtus IV.14 Indeed, the work on the Via Alessandrina was supervised by Sixtus IV’s nephew, Cardinal Raffaele Riario,

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builder of the finest cardinal’s palace in Rome, the Cancelleria, which accommodated its lateral facade to the curving route of the newly improved Via del Pellegrino, the “street of the pilgrim.”15 In general, these earlier improvement projects did little to change the course and width of the thoroughfares concerned. The Via Alessandrina, by contrast, was a radical incision in the existing fabric, where previously there had been, at most, an inconspicuous alley. More important, it was aligned, long and straight, on a focal point, the portal of the papal palace.16 The idea of such a street had already been formulated. About 1455, in an encomiastic biography of Nicholas V that included an apologia for that pope’s extensive building campaigns, the humanist Giannozzo Manetti describes at length Nicholas’s largely unrealized vision of urban transformation.17 Manetti not only dwells on ambitious plans for the papal palace and St. Peter’s basilica, he also describes the reorganization of the Borgo Leonino around three avenues, the central one on axis with the entrance of the basilica, and another aligned with the entrance of the papal palace. All three streets were to be uniformly lined by colonnades sheltering shops, a commercial function that was certainly compatible with palace architecture, as at the Palazzo Caprini. However, Manetti mentions no major palaces on the streets of his ideal Borgo, clearly the emphasis was on the economical provision of accommodation for staff and ecclesiastical officials, while giving the Vatican a more impressive approach. The ordinances relative to the Via Alessandrina stipulate only the height of the fronts of buildings and the observance of a fixed street line. The contrast with the more elaborately conceived streets of Nicholas V draws attention to the secondary importance of architectural or aesthetic considerations in the planning of Alexander’s avenue. Indeed, residents were given two months to front their properties with a wall of the required height, a remarkably ungenerous time-limit that clearly indicates the papal concern exclusively with the effect of regularity and uniformity produced by high walls. These were evidently intended to screen from the street the damage resulting from the demolitions of 1499, but perhaps also the melange of occupants and activities behind the walls.18 In contrast, further, with Nicholas’s plan to distribute high-class trades among the three streets, with goldsmiths in the central avenue, Alexander’s bull does not specify the occupations of any residents. It was the look of the street that mattered, not the contents of the houses. The planning of the Via Alessandrina hardly engaged the talents and cultural interests of Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who saw to its creation. Nevertheless, there is a correlation between the intended role of the new street as a kind of linear theater, a setting for procession and public ritual, and the activities over which the cardinal presided at his palace, the Cancelleria, which he made into a center of Vitruvian studies and all’antica theatrical performances.19 There was much on the site of the Via Alessandrina to interest Riario’s humanist circle. In particular, a prominent ancient monument, the pyramidal Meta Romuli,

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interrupted its route. The name meta was given in antiquity to stone posts marking the central barrier or spina of a circus (a structure purpose-built for chariot racing), like the Vatican circus, site of mass martyrdoms under Nero, including the crucifixion of St. Peter “between two metae.”20 Until its demolition under Leo X, the Meta Romuli was identified in the Renaissance as one of these metae. Whatever its Christian associations, the Meta Romuli under Alexander played a role in public spectacles of a far less edifying character than the processions of pilgrims. In 1501 the celebration of carnival was brought forward to late December in honor of Lucrezia Borgia, Alexander’s daughter, whose betrothal was solemnized after the final race.21 Since the time of Paul II the traditional route of the races of carnival had been along the Via Lata, soon renamed the Corso for this reason.22 On this occasion, however, the final stretch of the races was along the Via Alessandrina to the Piazza S. Pietro.23 Among the competitions in Lucrezia’s honor was a race of prostitutes that started at the Meta and ended in front of the basilica; according to Alexander’s master of ceremonies, the women ran for the usual prize (a palio), suggesting that such a race was a standard event of carnival.24 It is difficult to understand the motivation of such a spectacle, though it resembled even more shocking events held in private to amuse the pope and his guests, including a torchlit race of naked prostitutes.25 Alexander also transferred the bloody bullfights of carnival to St. Peter’s Square (Julius II brought them to the Vatican in 1509, but to the relative privacy of the new Belvedere courtyard).26 It is possible that Alexander’s strategy was to dramatize papal authority in Rome, while also integrating his new street, as a kind of surrogate Corso, into the often savage ritual practice of the city. After all, on his mother’s side the Spaniard Alexander was of Roman patrician descent, and before his accession he had played a conspicuous role in the life of the city from his base in the Palazzo della Cancelleria Vecchia.27

FACING OFF: A BATTLE OF STYLE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS The district traversed by the Via Alessandrina, the Borgo Leonino, had long been a far from desirable residential area.28 Apart from St. Peter’s, the major institution of the district was the hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia, administered by the eponymous confraternity, which had benefited from the support of Sixtus IV and the Della Rovere family.29 The focus of palace building had been elsewhere: prelates, curial officials, and diplomats chose to reside in the city proper, outside the Borgo, though certainly often in areas of reasonably easy access to the Vatican. Nevertheless, the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century saw important palace building projects in Borgo, and the census of 1527 indicates a remarkable concentration of large households headed by cardinals and other

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52. Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere/dei Penitenzieri, Borgo Vecchio. The benches and lamp standards of Mussolini’s Via della Conciliazione appear in the foreground.

high-ranking prelates.30 The first “Renaissance palace” in Borgo was begun in the pontificate of Sixtus IV, doubtless with his encouragement. Perhaps as early as 1478, a nephew of Sixtus, Cardinal Domenico Della Rovere, began to erect a large palace on the Borgo Vecchio, though the bulk of the construction work occurred in the 1480s and early 1490s.31 This looming residence, usually known after its later function as the Palazzo dei Penitenzieri (Fig. 52; Map 4), faced a piazza that was perhaps created as part of the palace project and is certainly referred to in early documents by the name of the current occupant of the palace. More often it appears as the Piazza di San Jacopo in Scossacavalli, after the small church fronting it on the eastern side. The architecture of the palace of Domenico Della Rovere is markedly conservative (or local), with its serried cross-mullioned windows and its battlemented tower, though the interior boasted up-to-date decorations by no less a painter than Pinturicchio.32 An unusual feature of the facade is the presence of two stories, of diminishing height, above the piano nobile, where we would normally expect one (or at least the appearance of one). Like the stories below, the two attic stories are distinguished by prominent stringcourses, as if to assign representative value to the unaccustomed display of servants’ quarters.33 The Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere fronted the Borgo Vecchio. Perhaps the first new palace on the line of the Via Alessandrina itself was that of Bishop, Francesco Soderini, created cardinal in 1503. This was a plain and ungainly building with all the appearance of a line of modest shop houses; it was evi-

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Map 4. Borgo Leonino, Rome.

dently not built as a “cardinal’s palace.”34 If, as seems likely, the Palazzo Soderini was built before 1499, it effectively established the northern street line of the Via Alessandrina.35 It was soon followed by other palaces of contrasting scale and architectural idiom, as the uniformity foreseen in the 1499 bull gave way to a markedly variegated built fabric.

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Soon after the creation of the Via Alessandrina work began on a palace of great size and design sophistication; its facade, in particular, clearly pays homage to Raffaele Riario’s Cancelleria. The construction of the Palazzo Castellesi (Fig. 49), now known as the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia, was perhaps a tactical move in the campaign to secure a cardinal’s hat for the wealthy builder, Adriano Castellesi, raised to the rank of cardinal on May 31, 1503.36 Castellesi himself continued to reside in the Piazza Navona area, near other major palaces of cardinals and aristocrats.37 Perhaps he planned from the start to use the building as a pawn in political dealings and already in March 1505, he transferred the building to his patron, the King of England, though retaining ownership himself.38 The rapidly constructed facade tract, thrown up in advance of the rest of Castellesi’s palace, respected the line of the Via Alessandrina and acknowledged the papal desire for the expeditious erection of an impressive street wall.39 As built, however, the facade greatly exceeded the upper limit stipulated in the 1499 bull, suggesting that the third story was a later addition.40 From the beginning, in any case, Castellesi wanted his house to command the expanse of Piazza Scossacavalli; which he accomplished in part by opening one of the alleys framing his palace’s facade; the piazza and the palace facade, of equal width, were thereby closely integrated.41 A two-story facade would hardly have satisfied so ambitious a patron. With the construction of the Palazzo Castellesi, the Piazza Scossacavalli, now the intervening open space between two palaces, became the site of a frontal confrontation of sharply contrasting facade idioms.42 The effect was not lost on Bramante and his most important patron, Pope Julius II (1503–13), who opened the Via Giulia, a monumental avenue that in many respects followed the model of the Via Alessandrina, though the major building projected for the street was an important public building, a vast palace of justice abandoned as a titanic fragment at Julius’s death.43 In front of this palace Bramante envisaged a piazza extending to the Palazzo della Cancelleria Vecchia, formerly the residence of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who had largely rebuilt it before his accession as Alexander VI. The conception of a monumental straight street interrupted by a piazza framed between contrasted palaces irresistibly recalls the Via Alessandrina; the suburban Borgo became a model for the city.44 The contrast between the palaces confronting each other across the Piazza Scosscavalli was striking enough to be noticed by a prominent figure in late fifteenth-century Roman intellectual circles, even forming the starting point for his classification of palace facades. Paolo Cortesi was also the author of a defence of Ciceronianism, in which he expressed strong views about questions of literary style and the proper approach to the imitation of antiquity.45 The discussion of the appropriate residence for a cardinal in Cortesi’s treatise De cardinalatu includes comments on palaces in Borgo that reveal attentiveness to issues of style and type in architecture, no less than in literature. In view of Cortesi’s conviction that the college of cardinals was the contemporary equiva-

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lent and descendant of the ancient senate, questions concerning the imitation of antiquity in architecture necessarily came up. Though Cortesi’s discussion of the ideal cardinal’s residence focuses on the interior, he does not neglect the exterior aspect.46 Cortesi mentions various well-known palaces of the time, but draws a pointed and emphatic contrast between the Palazzi Castellesi and Domenico Della Rovere (dei Penitenzieri), then in the hands of Cardinal Alidosi.47 He does not use a term equivalent to “facade,” but distinguishes three types of exterior ornament, as he calls it.48 The most important criterion is the nature of the material employed; there is a hierarchy of travertine, brick with travertine details, and stucco with incised decoration. The first is praiseworthy because of the excellence of the stone, while art makes the third type acceptable. Cortesi says little about the second, as if it was merely a mean between the other two, or introduced on the basis of the familiar triadic schema of the levels of style, which had already begun to color the Renaissance reception of Vitruvian distinctions between architectural idioms.49 What matters is the contrast of the first type, exemplified by the Palazzi Cancelleria and Castellesi, and the third type, exemplified by the Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere. As we have seen, for Cortesi this contrast of facades illustrates the more general opposition of nature and art/artifice: just as nature is superior to art, so quarried stone trumps fictive surface decor, by which Cortesi evidently means sgraffito ornament used, mainly, to give the effect of ashlar masonry. The Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere was a leading early site of sgraffito ornament, a recent fashion in Rome; remarkably it included a portrait medallion of Vitruvius.50 Of Cortesi’s three facade types only one is derived explicitly from an external model: the Castellesi and Cancelleria facades are articulated “ad amphitheatri symmetriam,” that is, employing the scheme of superimposed orders prominent at the Colosseum and revived by Alberti at the Palazzo Rucellai.51 Significantly, Cortesi reserves the term symmetria for his first type of palace exterior, while using the phrase concinna artificio for his third type, implying that the highest architectural quality is achieved solely through the execution in “true” materials of an authentic classical design, a convergence of nature and antiquity. As a modern case of manifest symmetria, Cortesi admiringly cites the Palazzo Medici in Florence, which he associates with the rusticated rear wall of the Forum Augustum, then considered, though windowless, the facade of the “palace of Nerva.”52 Still, he connects Palazzo Medici with a previous era (patrum memoria), as if inappropriate for a contemporary cardinal’s residence. Cortesi offers a further distinction in terms of design (ratio ornandi), contrasting the impressiveness (dignitas) of some facades with the mediocritas (here tantamount to the modern “mediocrity”) that induces contempt, making a palace vulnerable to the city’s endemic violence.53 Such defensive justification for elaborate exterior architecture recalls both Nicholas V’s idea that buildings should express strength, and Alberti’s famous assertion that the beauty of

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a building preserves it from the ravages of time, presumably including the effects of human agency.54 Nevertheless, Cortesi frowns on sheer bulk, implying a dismissive attitude toward such prominent and large Roman palaces as the Palazzo Venezia, which is absent from his discussions, for all its similarity to the Palazzo Alidosi. It is not only its ornament that redeems the Palazzo Alidosi. Its setting in the suburban Borgo corresponds to Cortesi’s recommendation of a site physically removed from the noise and activity of the city, since a cardinal’s residence should be a haven for the contemplative life. Its interior layout should not only accommodate the requirements of a cardinal’s household, but also his cultural interests.55 In particular, in the vestibule of his private chamber, the potentially infinite reach of the learning of a (certainly ideal) cardinal and of the authority of the Church should be expressed through a display of maps of the world.56 For all Cortesi’s concern for the palace interior as a contemplative space, he nevertheless recognizes the inevitability of an urban site and, consequently, of a facade. His preferred model, the Colosseum, was of course not a residential building, and perhaps partly for this reason rarely served as a model for residential architecture. Instead, contemporaries of Cortesi, whose work leaves no trace in his text, searched the ruins of Rome for plausible paradigms for facade design, or at least as starting points for a far from imitative design process. This endeavor was to leave an important mark on the Via Alessandrina, where existing modern models were quickly abandoned by the ambitious and brilliant young designer who held the field following Bramante’s death in 1514.

RAPHAEL’S CRITIQUE OF BRAMANTE: MEDIUM AND MESSAGE Under Julius II the Via Alessandrina project stagnated, as attention was diverted to the Vatican itself and, across the river, to the Via Giulia. Leo X, Julius’s successor, committed funds to the completion of the Via Alessandrina, but the most important construction was a matter of private commissions, albeit in response to papal concern or even pressure.57 In particular, two remarkable palaces rose on the street to designs by Raphael, who from 1517 lived in the Caprini palace. Raphael’s commitment to the Via Alessandrina and the papal enclave in Borgo, however, was not long term. He was soon preparing plans for a new palace in the Florentine quarter then developing around the northern end of the Via Giulia, which had lost its official function following Leo’s abandonment of Julius’s Palace of Justice.58 Raphael’s plan was frustrated by his premature death, in the Palazzo Caprini, in 1520. Raphael’s two palaces in Borgo have been exhaustively discussed in recent years.59 The Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia of 1515 (Fig. 53), built for the pope’s doctor, exists only as a distorted version of its original condition. Here, converting symbol to index, Raphael adapted the general schema of the Palazzo Caprini to the frank display of three stories. Pilasters replaced half-columns on the

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53. Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia, facade. The motif of the triumphal arch is clearly visible on the secondary facade.

facade, but at least they were of real stone, and the prominence of the piano nobile was also enhanced by the contrast with ground-floor shops, as in Bramante’s building, and by a triumphal arch motif that originally sported the pope’s Medici arms. This ornamented the narrow side elevation at the entrance of a side street and was clearly designed to catch the eye of a traveler approaching down the Via Alessandrina from the Vatican, in an apparent allusion to the ephemeral architecture of processions.60 With its accommodation to the Via Alessandrina as triumphal thoroughfare and, more generally, to papal/Medicean interests and agendas, the facade of the

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Palazzo da Brescia is a pragmatic and flexible adjustment of its Bramantesque model. In 1519 the Brescian doctor who commissioned the house was displaced to make way for Leo’s nephew, Luigi Ridolfi, husband of a niece of Cardinal Soderini, whose own house was along the street.61 The marriage was clearly intended to foster reconciliation between the Medici and the great republican clan of the Soderini; Raphael’s architecture now became both an instrument and symbol of Medicean diplomacy. The Palazzo da Brescia marks a striking development of the more static Caprini facade. Designed to be experienced in and through physical motion along the street, Raphael’s facade establishes the connection of the building and its wider context, both topographical and political. With its sophisticated exploitation of perspective (Vitruvius’s “scenography”) and its allusions to public ceremonial, the facade’s visual rhetoric revives, with a new expressivity, the original conception of the Via Alessandrina as a kind of stage, defined by scenographic facades. As such it crystallizes the enthusiasm in contemporary Rome for ancient theater and ceremonial, for which Leo’s court was especially known and which sometimes temporarily transformed parts of the city.62 Raphael’s activity as set designer and history painter here closely intersected with that as architect and urban designer.63 It was a significant step, for rather than a mere decoding of static signifiers, this profoundly theatrical facade elicits a complex and dynamic process of mediation and response, anticipating an important aspect of baroque built environments. Raphael’s other palace in Borgo, the Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila (Fig. 17), probably designed in 1518, is known only from drawings.64 Located in a conspicuous position near the entrance of the Via Alessandrina from the Piazza S. Pietro, it marked an abrupt departure from the type of the almost adjacent Palazzo Caprini, echoing the general critique of Bramante’s understanding of antiquity evident in the projects of Raphael’s last years.65 The display of rich and varied ornament in a complex but static, even frozen, composition is also markedly at variance with the dynamism of Raphael’s own Palazzo da Brescia. The facade is divided into three main horizontal zones, with shops on the ground floor. The columns are now on the ground floor, framing the shops and the portal. The windows of the piano nobile are framed in impressive Ionic aediculas, and alternate with niches, designed to contain statues that carry upward the line of the columns. Once again the Medici arms appear, here above the central window. The alternating segmental and triangular pediments of the window aediculas rise into a mezzanine zone with small, plainly framed windows and, between them, relief medallions and associated swags, masks, and ribbons, no doubt in stucco. The attic story is frankly expressed, and the wall surface between the rather large windows is articulated by panels ornamented with narrative images, presumably painted.66 The commercial zone of the ground floor, with its plain Doric order, is contrasted with the elaborate and festive piano nobile, whose Ionic window aediculas subtly suggest a pattern of superimposition.67 The treatment of the attic

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floor is crucial to the analysis of the piano nobile, given the integration, over both stories, of decoration organized, first of all, in terms of a hierarchy of artistic medium and technique. A horizontal band of three-dimensional sculptures is succeeded by one of relief medallions, which in turn is succeeded by illusionary images on a flat plane; real (or fictive?) carved stone is succeeded by molded stucco, which gives way to painted surfaces. Such contrasts of medium reinforce the more striking contrasts of image type: narrative (the painted panels), portraiture (the relief busts), and allegory (the niche statues). In the absence of information about the iconography of the facade, its logic is highly suggestive. The interaction of the horizontal zones is enforced through the rhythmical alternation of vertical triangular fields of contrasted character. One set, made up of apertures, includes the relatively broad shop openings and progressively narrower windows above; the other comprises the ornamented fields, which widen from the top down, producing a series of inverted triangles.68 Each triangle links and coordinates three distinct modes of representation, suggesting a connection between the individual portrayed in the central medallion and a virtue exemplified in his life (allegory) as well as an event in which this virtue was manifested (narrative). In itself, indeed, the virtuosic commingling of representational modes and media of representation is surely a device of self-affirmation.69 Contained in circular fields, the portrait busts import the medallion format into facade decoration.70 The inclusion of “medallions” specifically alludes to the builder of the palace, Giovanni Battista Branconio, a noted numismatist and collector of ancient and all’antica medallions and coins. Apparently, Branconio’s antiquarian and artistic knowledge and interests endeared him to Raphael, who celebrated their friendship through a double portrait of them both.71 Certainly, Roman coins were increasingly valued as sources of architectural motifs and as undeniably all’antica models for the representation of facades.72 Further, it was customary to wear all’antica medallionlike objects, like hat badges.73 The transfer of the medallion format to a palace facade perhaps also assimilated the revetment or “dress” of a building to the dress of a fashionably clothed human body. The link between Raphael’s palace design and the fashion for medallions, whether new or antique, is particularly suggestive since the typical Renaissance medallion, like the Branconio facade, combines different orders of representation and signification: portraiture, text, history, and emblematic device, itself already a combination.74 Indeed, the combinative aspect of the Branconio facade echoes that of emblematic composition. The medallion motifs of the Branconio facade are by no means the only reference to the patron. The eagles over the entrance allude to Branconio’s origins in the town of L’Aquila, while the design as a whole calls attention to his intellectual horizon and cultural interests. Such celebrations of ownership were echoed nearby in the imagery designed by Raphael for the facade of another close friend, his compatriot Giovan Antonio Battiferri, on which, in an allusion to the patron’s family name, Vulcan and the cyclopes appeared at their anvils.75

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Battiferri showed tact; both scenes on his facade showed the smiths at work for specific patrons, Jupiter and Cupid, doubtless in allusion to Leo’s cultural role. The arms of Leo X were prominently displayed, moreover, on the facades of the Palazzi Branconio and Jacopo da Brescia, while Leo’s emblematic lions frolicked, in association with a scene of Apollo and the muses, on a facade opposite the Palazzo Branconio.76 The remarkable formal and semiotic complexity of the Branconio facade depended on the availability of the ancient technique of stucco decoration, reinvented in Raphael’s workshop in or soon after 1516. This provided a relatively cheap, yet impressive means to revive the visual qualities that Raphael associated with the ancient built environment, and to give a festive and triumphant air to palaces of brick and aggregate.77 In his design work for the Palazzo Branconio, the new technique allowed or even encouraged Raphael to emulate an especially prestigious ancient paradigm. An early design for the Palazzo Branconio is clearly dependent on “Trajan’s palace” (i.e., the hemicycle of the markets), with its economically constructed brick facade elaborated through window aediculas, niches, and other sculptural and architectural motifs, including the orders, and suggesting a scaenae frons.78 Leading experts on Raphael’s architecture maintain that the palace facade celebrates Leo X in the image of Trajan, the model prince; thus the eagles flanking the papal coat of arms allude not just to Branconio’s hometown, but also to eagles sculpted on the base of Trajan’s column and other imagery associated with the emperor.79 There are serious problems with this account.80 Most seriously it ignores a crucial implication of the striking discrepancies between the executed design and the Trajanic sketch: what is at stake here is the genealogy of an architectural solution, not its meaning. According to the “Trajanic thesis,” however, the complexity and virtuosity of the Branconio facade served primarily to advance specifically papal agendas and interests. Such an account exemplifies a historiographical approach that represents the cultural phenomena of the period as, at the same time, instruments and expressions of a lengthy but unremitting process of proto-absolutist centralization in the papal territories, especially Rome.81 In its sheer virtuosity and richness, however, the Branconio facade does not so much communicate one or other message or meaning by means of art; rather it displays the very resources of art, as developed by Raphael. It associates new standards of artistic achievement with the papal court, while celebrating the friendship of Raphael and the numismatist Branconio, as well as their shared commitment to antiquarian study.82 The palace design emerged in the context of Raphael’s campaign, cut short by his premature death, to accomplish a survey of the remains of the ancient city and an imaginative reconstruction of its splendor. If the Caprini facade embodied an iconic/symbolic representation of the ancient city; a markedly different relationship to antiquity and the ancient city is inherent in Raphael’s design for the Branconio facade. A crucial cue is Raphael’s reduction of the architectural order to a device articulating the ground floor, separating one commercial space from another,

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rather than organizing the contrast of hierarchical domains. Not only does the Vitruvian architectural vocabulary play a subordinate role, but also, in their association with shops and the street, the columns of the ground floor recall the traditional facade porticoes of Roman housing, if not the medieval “Portico of St. Peter,” once a prominent feature of the Borgo. By now no vestiges of the late-ancient porticoes were apparent, but the tradition of a colonnaded street connecting the Vatican to the city survived into the Renaissance and was surely operative, for instance, in the Manettian project for the Borgo.83 In a spatial as well as a historical dimension, therefore, the columns of the Palazzo Branconio tied the building to the thoroughfare on which it stood. Nor does Raphael grant a significant role to allegory, in terms, say, of the metaphoric aspect of the Vitruvian orders or the binary articulation exploited in the Caprini facade. Instead of metaphor, Raphael’s design exploits metonymy, constituting the facade as a field for signs, indeed for an array of diverse signs, rather than as itself a sign. The restrained Palazzo Caprini stood for the ancient city, modeling social hierarchy in a heroic metaphorical gesture. The exuberant Palazzo Branconio stood (literally) within a complex network of resonances and allusions to the ancient city that Raphael and his colleagues passionately sought to research and reconstruct, at least in the imagination. Further, it instituted a metonymic relationship to the painted and sgraffito decoration increasingly prevalent in the modern city, not least in the Via Alessandrina itself.84 Here, in the physical world of the court of Leo X, palaces of diverse aspect confronted one another in an elaborate social game, positioning their owners in their courtly milieu as surely as their allotted place in a ceremony or the clothes they wore. The display of papal insignia only slightly moderated this expression of the competitiveness intrinsic in any court society.85

THE SCENE OF THE COURT AND THE SPACE OF THE CITY Competitiveness had its limits, nevertheless, in the context of the formalization of conduct in early modern Europe, a long-term trend that was stimulated and shaped by a literature of politeness and the moderation of conduct that included key works by authors connected with the papal court. At the same time, needless to say, this literature and the attitudes associated with it fostered strategies of dissimulation and masking, opening a space for libertinism.86 In the Book of the Courtier, the most famous example of this literature, Baldesar Castiglione presents an ideal portrait of a court. Castiglione was a close friend of Raphael, whose celebrated portrait of him represents not just an individual subject but an ideal courtier, linking Raphael’s power of pictorial representation with Castiglione’s literary skill and his status as an exemplary exponent of the courtly arts. Indeed, Raphael’s pictorial art was not only produced in and for a leading court, it was also, in a deeply considered and selfconscious way, a courtly performance.87

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There is no need to stress the key role of literal portraits among the celebratory modes and representative devices available to the early sixteenth-century papal court.88 No less important and far more widely diffused were metaphoric forms of portrayal developed in an aristocratic culture preoccupied with heraldic and emblematic self-representation, in various media and situations.89 As we saw, the medallion was a conspicuous site of the combination of image and motto, metaphoric portraiture and literal portraits, that provided a model and precedent for Renaissance imprese.90 In the cultural matrix of Leonine Rome, in which echoes of Urbino persisted and the fashion for medallions spread to architecture, we can understand the disparate palace facades of the Via Alessandrina as an assembly of metaphoric portraits of courtiers – or as collectively a metaphoric portrait of a court, an incremental realization of Castiglione’s vision.

ARCHITECTURAL CULTURE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE: FLUIDITY AND RIGIDITY IN THE ROMAN CITYSCAPE In early sixteenth-century Rome, the cityscape as a whole was marked by contrasts of residential architecture. A fashion for elaborate and protean facade decoration, often in stucco or paint, contrasted with the relatively restrained observance of existing canons of format and design. The prime exponent of the latter tendency was Antonio da Sangallo, whose palace facades, discussed in Chapter 1, impress through solemnity, the prime Latin virtue of gravitas, and whose major projects were done for patrons interested in expressing a not quite legitimate claim to romanità.91 Both styles of facade treatment in some cases, occurred at Peruzzi’s Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, with the splendid Travertine facade commanding the Via del Papa (Fig. 54), while the rear of the palace carried sgraffito decoration in the manner of Polidoro da Caravaggio, whose specialization as a facade decorator was hugely successful. Here, at least, a hierarchy of surface treatment was maintained.92 The Massimi belonged to the Roman patriciate, which maintained a conspicuous presence in the city, even in an era of architectural self-affirmation on the part of the cardinals and high-placed curial officials. In contrast to the topographic concentration and social consistency of the Via Alessandrina, the Roman patrician families maintained their traditional pattern of dispersion throughout the districts (rioni) of the city, which provided leading families with a significant initial arena for political engagement and a foundation and training for ascent to citywide office (Map 5). Typically, such families stressed the continuity of their residence in Rome as well as networks of alliance, built up over time, with other important local families and with leading confraternal and corporate institutions of the city. For most patricians, unlike courtiers, there was no question of expressing solidarity through choice of site. Instead, scattered in neighborhoods throughout the city, they resorted to other means, not least architecture, to express their often passionate attachment to their city and their class.93

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54. Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Rome. Facade on Via del Papa.

At least in the early sixteenth century, then, Rome was a city of overlapping social and architectural typologies and fashions. Highly decorated facades tended to cluster in areas settled predominantly by outsiders, in contrast to the more sober and traditional architectural image favored in other areas, where the local elite still largely set the tone.94 Remarkably, a small but significant group of patrician families chose to adapt a facade type that originated in the court enclave, inaugurating the remarkable diffusion of Bramante’s design for the Palazzo Caprini.95 Statistically the five or so palaces that constitute this group are perhaps insignificant, though they make up one-fifth of the palaces outside the Borgo listed in Frommel’s magisterial work on Renaissance Roman palaces. Many of these of course were built for foreign and/or curial patrons; indeed, the palaces studied by Frommel as built for local patrons not in this group turn out to be either far earlier or later. PATRICIAN ARCHITECTURE: CROSS-TOWN CONSISTENCY AND THE INTERESTS OF ROME’S CITIZEN ELITE The earliest of these palaces, the Palazzo Alberini Cicciaporci (Fig. 55), was designed by Raphael for a site in the banking district that began at the southern end of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, that is, in the cosmopolitan Rione Ponte at no great distance from the court enclave of Borgo. Though built for a major patrician

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.


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Palazzo Alberini Cicciaporcia Palazzo Baldassini Palazzo Branconio d’Aquila Palazzo Capranica Palazzo Caffarelli Palazzo Cancelleria Palazzo Castellesi Palazzo dei Conservatori Palazzo Della Valle Palazzo Farnese Palazzo (Angelo) Massimo Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne Peruzzi Medici (Madama) Palazzo Missini Palazzo Orsini (Monte Giordano) Palazzo Sacchetti Palazzo San Marco (Venezia) Palazzo Senatorio Palazzo Stati Villa Farnesina

Map 5. Rome, major palaces.

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55. Palazzo Alberini Cicciaporci. The low-relief patterning across the facade diminishes the expected contrast between the commercial zone and the residential floors.

family, the Alberini, the palace may have been intended from the beginning as a speculation. The Palazzo Stati-Maccarani (Fig. 56) was designed by Raphael’s leading pupil/successor, Giulio Romano, a native Roman, for a site opposite the Customs Office (dogana di terra) that was one of the centers of the economic world of the patriciate.96 The Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli (Fig. 57) was especially closely modeled on the Palazzo Caprini; it stood in a marked concentration of patrician palaces or, as in most cases, compounds in central Rome, close to the Via del Papa.97 I will address later the Palazzo Missini Ossoli and the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, an extraordinarily sophisticated adapation of the basic model.98 All these palaces display the basic organizing motif of Bramante’s facade, the opposition of a rusticated basement story and a piano nobile ennobled with

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56. Palazzo Stati-Maccarani, facade. From Ferrerio and Falda, Palazzo di Roma, 1655. Giulio Romano’s famous portal includes elements (a pediment, voussoirs) of emphatically semiotic rather than architectonic function.

an architectural order. The vertical contrast is now played down, however, in favor of an overall characterization of the building as Doric or at least Tuscan, recalling the shift away from architectural stratification in late fifteenth-century Florentine palaces.99 Rustication accompanies rather than contrasts with the order in these cases; indeed, the Tuscan/Doric of the Palazzo Stati encompasses the rustication. This overall decor may allude specifically to Hercules;100 in one case, this allusion is explicit, even emphatic.

A HOUSE FOR HERCULES: ARCHITECTURAL AND GENEALOGICAL LINEAGE The celebrated Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne was designed c.1533 by Baldassare Peruzzi (Fig. 54) for the eminent patrician Pietro de’ Massimi. Here the basic scheme of the Palazzo Caprini is upended: Doric columns appear on the ground floor, forming in the center a portico that flexes to follow the line of the Via del Papa, the major processional thoroughfare of Rome.101 This is the only facade portico in a sixteenth-century palace; it is surely not just a reference to an earlier portico on the site, but also a commemoration of traditional Roman patterns of social organization and political engagement.102 The facade celebrates, further, the family’s recovery – and that of the patriciate as a whole – from the Sack of Rome.103

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57. Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli. The paired Doric columns of the facade evoke – or quote – the Palazzo Caprini.

The inventive classicism of Peruzzi’s architecture is justly famous. Not only does the palace evoke antiquity in general; it also asserts the specific claim of the Massimi family to descent from the Maximi of republican Rome, who in turn claimed descent from Hercules himself. These claims are spelled out in images of ancestors frescoed in the main reception room of the palace.104 The armorial crest of the Massimi, a lion rampant, itself suggests an association with Hercules, whose identifying attributes were the lion skin and club. There is no doubt about the great heraldic crest in the panel of the portico ceiling above the main portal; here the club-wielding hero engages in combat with a centaur, probably Cacus, a monstrous, thieving giant whom Hercules overthrew on the site of Rome.105 Long before the foundation of the city by Romulus, Hercules’s sacrifice of a bovine recovered from Cacus marked the beginning of the orderly practice of religion in Rome.106 The crucial reference to Hercules, however, is the curving Doric portico itself, evoking the circular Doric temple of the Unconquered Hercules, the most important Herculean cult in the ancient city. This formerly stood in the Forum Boarium, the ancient cattle market, on the site of Hercules’s own inaugural sacrifice, but its remains were destroyed in the course of fifteenth-century excavations.107 The temple was well known in the sixteenth century; Pirro Ligorio refers to studies by Peruzzi himself.108 It had already served as a model for the Tempietto, a shrine to a Christian Hercules who through self-sac-

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rifice (rather than the sacrifice of an animal) had inaugurated a new era of Roman religion.109 Along with a number of inscriptions relating to the cult of Hercules, the excavations revealed the bronze cult statue; this was removed to the Campidoglio and prominently displayed there.110 The totemic beast of the Roman municipality, headquartered on the Campidoglio, had long been, not the wolf, but the lion.111 The leonine and Herculean imagery of the Palazzo Massimo belongs to a long tradition of republican or Ghibelline sentiment that periodically welled up in the Roman patriciate, which constantly chafed against papal rule. A catalog of sculptures in Rome in 1549 indicates numerous statues of Hercules in the city’s private collections of antiquities, many formed, not only from antiquarian motives, by leading Roman families.112 The patrician cult of Hercules would soon be eclipsed by the prominence given to the hero in the collections and iconography of such grand aristocratic families as the Farnese and d’Este.113 The Palazzo Massimo remained a unicum in Roman palace architecture; perhaps the moment for the display of local patriotic sentiment was fleeting, overwhelmed by the profound transformation of society and culture in mid-sixteenth-century Rome. One of the most striking architectural contrasts in Rome is that between the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne and the exactly contemporary palace adjoining it, built for Angelo de’ Massimi, Pietro’s brother. The sober, unornamented facade suggests that Angelo was interested in architecture as the frame, not the vehicle, of self-representation.114 Pietro de’ Massimi was expert enough in architecture to serve on the committee charged in 1537 with the implementation of plans – perhaps already by Michelangelo – for a remodeling of the Campidoglio. He was certainly a bovattiere, deriving his wealth, like most of his class, from the pastoral economy of the Roman hinterland.115 The guild of the bovattieri, later the mercanti di campagna, was the most important of the city’s guilds, and guildsmen were prominent in the municipal government and the city’s major confraternities. The classicism of Pietro’s house did not mask the owner’s involvement in a commercial and industrial sector that gave a far from elegant appearance to much of the city; indeed, in some parts of Rome it was customary to stretch animal hides to dry on the fronts of buildings, even on the facades of churches.116 At the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne the pliability of the facade revetment and the strange cut-out quality of the window surrounds on the upper floors may even introduce the motif (or rather, perhaps, the conceit) of stretched hide into a refined formal context. If so, this too hints at Hercules’s association with cattle, as a kind of ur-bovattiere, in the myth of his Roman sojourn.117

THE WALKING BULL AND THE MADONNA IN THE TREE There was perhaps an allusion to Hercules, as forerunner and emblematic hero of the citizen elite, in the Doric order used in other patrician palaces modeled on the Palazzo Caprini. The closest topographical if not architectural

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connection between the Caprini schema and the economic base of Rome appears, however, in a palace built, not for a Roman patrician, but for an immigrant from a provincial city. Giordano Missini hailed from Orvieto, an important city of the province of the Patrimonio di San Pietro, immediately to the north of Rome, and a center of the significant pastoral economy in the province. Many immigrants left the Patrimonio to seek their fortune in the related sector of the Roman economy. The Rione Regola (Arenula), adjoining the river but downstream from the emerging noble quarters, was the most heavily industrial quarter of the city, with numerous shops of tanners and leather workers.118 Here Missini settled, along with numerous maremmani from the Maremma in the Patrimonio, between Viterbo and the sea.119 The religious center of the large community of maremmani and Viterbesi in Regola was the church of S. Maria della Quercia (unfortunately entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century). After a series of miracles attributed to an image of the Virgin in an oak tree, the important pilgrimage cult of the Madonna of the Oak (S. Maria della Quercia) had been established near Viterbo in the later fifteenth century. The cult soon became a focus of popular devotion, but prospered especially through the support of powerful pontiffs, notably Julius II and Paul III, who visited the shrine in person in 1536 and saw to the construction of a new road and fountain for the relief of pilgrims. The Roman church by no means only ministered to the Viterbesi; it was here that in 1532 the butchers’ guild of Rome, which had recently merged with the association of the Viterbese butchers, set up a confraternity dedicated to the cult of S. Maria della Quercia.120 The confraternity enjoyed the patronage of one of the most important patrician families of the area, the Capodiferro; the frontispiece of a handsome illuminated manuscript, produced in 1536, of the confraternity’s statutes shows the apparition of the Virgin in an oak tree with a large bull walking behind the bole of the tree, in an unmistakable reference to the bove passante of the Capodiferro arms.121 In the early 1520s the Orvietan entrepreneur Giordano Missini built a fine palace in Regola (Fig. 58), close to the church of S. Maria della Quercia and the Capodiferro palaces.122 Perhaps designed by Giulio Romano himself, it was in the latest architectural fashion, and must have stood out in this neighborhood of immigrants and merchants in hides and skins.123 As for Giordano Missini himself, little is known about him, but he was evidently not an uncultured or unlettered man; perhaps he knew the Caprini, who were also immigrants from the Patrimonio.124 Nevertheless, it is surprising to find him as the patron of a significant palace. Missini’s choice of architect and format for his palace facade can hardly have been casual; it provokes questions about his strategy of self-representation, even glorification, in a context in which he can have enjoyed social success only within quite limited circles. But it is too easy to write this handsome facade off as just that, a mere facade dissembling the relatively humdrum life, in the narrow and often noisome streets of the Rione Regola, of an Orvietan huckster trying to pass, architecturally, as a gentleman of Rome. Instead, the

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58. Palazzo Ossoli Missini, Rome. Originally the palace fronted a narrower space.

Missini facade challenges us to come to terms with the complexity of reference and resonance of architecture produced within the labile and multifaceted social world of early sixteenth-century Rome. In such cases, a facade – even, more abstractly, architecture itself – neither hides nor displays a given status quo, but rather emerges in and contributes to the negotiation and definition of social and cultural position.

CHAPTER NINE

FROM STREET TO TERRITORY PROJECTIONS OF THE URBAN FACADE

TRANSCENDED CONTRASTS The Palazzo dei Conservatori (Fig. 9) is crucial in any account of the Renaissance facade, though, as so often with Michelangelo’s work, it troubles descriptive categories, including the idea of “facade.”1 There has been considerable controversy about the date of Michelangelo’s design for the palace itself, not least because construction did not begin until 1563, shortly before the architect’s death.2 By then much had been done in the environs of the palace, which, as seat of the main officers (conservatori) and deliberative body of civic government, was the effective city hall of Rome.3 In October 1537 the municipal government appointed a committee of eminent Roman patricians to oversee work on “the palace and the piazza,” both of which urgently needed modernization, and to select a contractor for the project.4 The palace in question was clearly that of the government itself (i.e., the Palazzo dei Conservatori), though in the 1540s attention shifted to the adjacent Senator’s Palace, which housed judicial tribunals. The committee initiated substantial landscaping work, which surely included the famous oval ordering the surface of the piazza (Fig. 59), documented in drawings of the 1550s.5 The three men named to the committee were all experienced in government and in the administration of architectural and planning projects. One was Pietro de’Massimi, who perhaps owed his appointment in part to the striking architecture of his new palace, which was rising not far away (Fig. 54). The often-noted correspondences between the Palazzo Massimo and the Palazzo dei Conservatori further support a date in the later 1530s for the basic conception of the latter’s facade.6 On his definitive transfer to Rome in 1534, Michelangelo’s contacts with the city’s elite were probably eased by his friendship with the young patrician Tommaso de’Cavalieri.7 In December 176

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59. The Campidoglio according to Michelangelo’s design, as engraved by Etienne Dupérac, 1569. The print gives great prominence to the sculpture, for which Michelangelo’s architecture now serves as support.

1537, when he took Roman citizenship, he was perhaps already at work on his only overtly political work, the bust of the tyrannicide Brutus (Fig. 60). This is always connected with Michelangelo’s associations with Florentine republican enthusiasts in exile in Rome; the immediate context of its creation, however, was the climate of fervid republicanism in Rome, with which it can be directly connected.8 If indeed the basic conception of the Conservatori facade was formulated before 1540, it was in a time of good relations between the city and Pope Paul III. The so-called Salt War of 1541 set the papacy against the Roman Colonna faction;9 the remodeling of the Palazzo dei Conservatori was a casualty of the changed political climate. After Michelangelo’s death in 1564, with the palace under construction, his successor, Giacomo Della Porta, redesigned the central window of the facade.10 Michelangelo had balanced the vertical emphasis of his colossal pilasters with horizontal strata fronting the guild offices below and government above. The orthodox Corinthian order of the pilasters framed – and established an emphatic formal and symbolic contrast with – the startlingly unorthodox Ionic order, associated with grotesque masques and swelling, leathery forms, of the ground-floor portico. In an unmistakable echo of the Palazzo Caprini, indeed, a zone of state rationality and control sur-

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60. Michelangelo, bust of Brutus. The unfinished state of the sculpture is readily apparent, though there is little consensus about the reason for this.

mounted one expressive of the material basis of the economy.11 Della Porta’s window, however, anticipated the dynamic permeability of boundaries in baroque designed environments by directing the focus to the central bay, thereby accentuating the threshold, the path into the interior, and distracting attention from the semiotic charge of the facade as a whole.

ROMAN ITINERARIES: THE CAMPIDOGLIO AS LABORATORY AND EXEMPLUM The emphasis in the 1560s on the itinerary through the building may have revived an important aspect of an earlier project, or at least earlier thinking. The concern in 1538 for a single palace and its ambient space soon gave way to an emphasis on an axis marked by the statue of Marcus Aurelius and a ramp linking the piazza and the city, and aligned with the portal of the Senator’s Palace. This perhaps reflected papal interests, but the preoccupation with municipal self-representation also received expression through a transverse axis connecting the entrance of the Palazzo dei Conservatori with


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61. Anonymous drawing of the Campidoglio, c. 1555. The double stair of the Palazzo del Senatore is in place, as is the statue of Marcus Aurelius in an expanse of ground on which the famous oval has already been inscribed. The niche in the wall in front of S. Maria in Aracoeli is empty, except for an apparent statue base. In front of it, to the left, is the group of the lion and horse. To either side of the niche the friars’ washing hangs on the wall to dry.

a prominent niche in the otherwise flat retaining wall below the church of S. Maria in Aracoeli (Fig. 61). Removing the church from the immediate field of view, the retaining wall focused attention on the two existing palaces (the third, the Palazzo Capitolino, was not built until the seventeenth century) and urgently posed the issue of their spatial and symbolic relationship. The niche served to introduce a degree of balance into this relationship, especially if we imagine it as containing statuary that might further enhance the transverse axis. Until the end of the century, however, no statue was placed in the niche, nor were documented plans made to do so. Since 1594 it has contained the celebrated Marforio, one of Rome’s “speaking statues,” which Sixtus V moved in 1588 from its traditional site in the Roman Forum.12 The colossal scale and symbolic resonances of the Marforio – perhaps a model for Michelangelo’s own “giant,” the David – indicate the niche’s visual and symbolic potential.13 The delay between the relocation of the Marforio and its transfer to the niche sug-

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gests that this was not yet planned in 1588, still less before. Nevertheless, a niche of such size and prominence was surely designed from the outset to receive a prominent statue, most probably one of those already on the Capitoline hill.14 Visually, it would need to command the space in front of it, and its symbolic connotations would have to be consistent with, if not explicitly expressive of, the ideals of the municipal elite.15 Such a statue was an ancient sculpture of a lion attacking a horse that had long served both as a symbol and instrument of the administration of justice on the Campidoglio.16 This statue was stationed next to the niche in the sixteenth century, but, significantly, was never placed in it. As I have suggested elsewhere, an entirely appropriate statue for the niche was the famous bronze figure of Hercules, originally the cult statue in the hero’s major Roman temple.17 The contemporary civic associations of Hercules with the Roman patriciate, however, would soon be overshadowed by the claims of other princely families – like the d’Este, discussed in a later section – to Hercules as patron or even founder of their lineage. The patron deity of the ancient Capitoline Hill was Hercules’s father Jupiter, whose temple, over whose vestiges the Palazzo dei Conservatori rises, was the most important shrine of ancient Rome. In the Renaissance the courtyard of the palace contained a wellhead inscribed with an appeal to the god to favor the city with life-giving rains.18 If the piazza and courtyard evoked a world of cosmic symbolism and originary myth, passage into the palace interior brought a visitor into the presence of frescoed narratives of the political and military history of the Roman republic.19 The approach to the halls of state, then, was a physical itinerary of architectural and landscape elements, as well as a symbolic itinerary structured by imagery resonating with the site’s historical and mythical associations. The idea of a landscape as coherent narrative emerged in garden architecture in the later 1530s, in approximate coincidence with the initial project for the remodeling of the Campidoglio.20 Sixteenth-century views of the latter often emphasize the rustic or even pastoral character of the place, dispelled only with the completion in the early seventeenth century of the slow process of transformation.21 The condition of the Campidoglio as a designed landscape, rather than an urban piazza, was probably anticipated by the citizen elite, for whom the strategic placement of statues and other mobile elements provided a more convenient and economical way than architecture to achieve representational objectives. Significantly, one of the three commissioners of 1537, Angelo Del Bufalo, played an important role in the transformation of the ancient Sacred Way from a neighborhood into a kind of linear archaeological park for the entertainment and edification of Emperor Charles V in 1536.22 The Del Bufalo family also owned a significant sculpture garden, containing a noted statue of Hercules, in which some degree of thematic arrangement of its contents can be dated to before 1525.23


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62. Villa d’Este at Tivoli, as engraved by Etienne Dupérac. The framing towers of the palace were never executed, but the double stair still exists. The water organ was located to the far left, on axis with the line of fishponds. This was to culminate, to the right, in a fountain of Neptune in a projecting semicircular bastion; it was never executed.

GARDEN ICONOGRAPHY AND PROJECTIONS OF ARCHITECTURAL MEANING Unmistakable formal echoes link the Campidoglio with a famous villa garden, not far from Rome. The Villa d’Este at Tivoli consists of an acropolitan palace high on the slope overlooking the access road from Rome.24 The terrain below the house is elaborately shaped to create the famous gardens, through which a visitor, entering at the original portal, approached the palace above. This relatively featureless building was nevertheless clearly meant to cite the Senator’s palace (Fig. 62, cf. Fig. 59): a double-ramped stair rises to a balustraded platform in front of the main door, while a view published in the 1560s shows double towers of obvious derivation. In miniaturized form, the garden encompassed the urban marvels of Rome and the natural wonders of Tivoli, both stretched out for the visual delectation and controlling gaze of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, Governor of Tivoli.25 Indeed, the presiding presence within the imagery of the garden was Hercules, patron deity of ancient Tivoli, from whom the patron claimed descent. A bewildering variety of themes and allusions was contained, however, within a complex

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interlacing of iconographic programs and topographic patterns that once organized the vast garden and invaded the decoration of the palace.26 Cutting across this continuity, however, a broad walkway in front of the palace marks a caesura between the steep, thickly planted slope of the garden and the flat masonry of the palace front. The walkway divides the domain of architecture from that of landscape, or even nature, designated less by plantings and other “natural” material than by symbolism, notably a statue of Nature as a many-breasted female. This was originally displayed at the center of a vast triumphal arch that overlooks the garden from the side, aligned with a line of fishponds and, in the sixteenth century, an aqueous vault of water rising from countless jets. In the triumphal arch itself, an organ powered by rushing water feigned the roar and crash of the Deluge itself, the sounds of Nature at her most terrible. The uncanny dimension of Bomarzo is already realized at Tivoli, where the all-pervasive air of mutability was keyed to imagery from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though modulated by the firm gaze of Hercules over the central axis of the garden.27 The contrast of art and nature adumbrated, with purely architectural means, in the Caprini facade is here evoked through recourse to a copious abundance of resources of different type. Bramante’s antithesis of rusticated basement and piano nobile structured and gave meaning to a relatively two-dimensional palace facade. Here the emphatic disjunction of house and garden displays a threedimensional confrontation of landscape elements. It is as if Pirro Ligorio, the architect, combined the logic of the Caprini facade (or indeed the Conservatori facade) with the idea of a larger symbolic landscape organizing the Campidoglio. Antithetic organization found a keen emulator in Andrea Palladio, whether at the scale of the urban facade or the designed landscape. Most obviously, Palladio adapted both the Caprini and Conservatori facades in designs for palaces for the local elite in Vicenza, though he tended to diminish the formal contrast of Bramante’s or Michelangelo’s originals.28 This was consistent with his explicitly Vitruvian position on facade design; thus in the Quattro libri, he cites Vitruvius in support of his own preference for marking a building’s entrance with a pediment. At the same time he downgrades the term “facade,” using the term facciata to designate the front of a subordinate building in contrast with the main face (faccia principale) of the landowner’s house.29 At the Villa Rotonda, certainly his most famous project, Palladio placed an identical facade on all four fronts, thereby depriving the building of a facade in the sense we have been using (Fig. 63). The villa is not an object in a landscape; rather we must understand it as a compound of built form and landform. In a famous, typically laconic passage in his treatise, Palladio characterizes the landscape around the Villa Rotonda as architecture, most explicitly likening the encircling hills to an amphitheater.30 In addition to this obvious classical reference, Palladio emphasizes the visual and topographic rapport of the house with a varied working landscape, cultivated with fruit trees and vines and traversed by a navigable river.31 This is also part of the architectural setting of the


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63. Villa Rotonda, Vicenza. The villa is nestled between a wooded area (foreground) and an area of cultivation sloping down to the main road, visible in the upper right of the photograph. The present entrance comes in from a secondary road on the left and leads past service buildings built later than the house. The original main entrance came up directly from the main road.

house, a natural substratum to the elegant, Ionic-porticoed house, emblematic of rationality and humanist culture, an architectural “eye” with attic spaces offering opportunities for surveillance.32 Here, indeed, Palladio gave full threedimensional realization to values inherent in the Caprini facade.

“AND NATURE IS THE ARCHITECT”—ARTIFICE AND LANDSCAPE AT THE ROTONDA AND OTHER PALLADIAN VILLAS Implicit at the Villa Rotonda is a hierarchical structuring of expansive sloping terrain, a recurrent theme in Palladio’s villa projects, though generally through literal architectural means.33 Few of his “acropolitan” projects, with lavish terracing and colonnaded outbuildings rising to a dominant architectural element, came to completion or even commencement.34 The principle is clear, however, at the relatively small-scale Villa Badoer, which is raised above its

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64. Villa Badoer, Fratta Polesine. From the air the main house of the villa appears centered in a rectangular enclosure. It is accessed by an axial route that traverses a canal, enters the low wall of the villa grounds, crosses a flat area defined by the low lateral service buildings, and rises up the impressive front stair toward the portico.

level site on a high basement. From the house a magnificent central flight of stairs cascades into a semicircular front court, defined by curving dependencies to either side (Fig. 64).35 The marked vertical articulation of the house, evoking (according to Palladio himself) a long-gone feudal castle, distinguishes it from the horizontal emphasis of the lateral buildings, as does an emphatic contrast of architectural orders.36 This is not just a matter of the formal contrast of the Ionic order of the lofty temple portico, fronting the house, and the Tuscan of the stocky dependencies, but also of the strict observation of ancient prescriptions about the spacing of columns. The widely separated Tuscan columns require architraves of timber, a humble material expressing the everyday function of the dependencies within the everyday landscape of canals, ditches, and irrigated fields.37 The code of architectural classicism mobilized at the villa distinguishes yet embraces (through curving “arms”!) the realms of intellectual activity and aristocratic refinement, marked by the Ionic order, and of manual labor and the direct engagement with natural stuffs and processes on the part of the estate workers, marked by the Tuscan.


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65. Sebastiano Serlio, Satyric Scene. What appears at first to be a woodland growing out of an abandoned quarry turns out on inspection to be thickly set with thatched huts, in marked contrast to the rectangular blocks occurring, apparently naturally, in the strata of stone. The effect of perspectival recession is clear, though the huts mostly evade it.

As the preoccupation with satyrs and other mischwesen indicates, Renaissance culture lacked a firmly demarcated conceptual boundary between the domain of humanity and that of the natural. To the elite, peasants and persons of low status existed in a more or less natural state, especially in relation to the new standards of conduct and habitation (including designed shelter) self-consciously diffused in the sixteenth century.38 In the certainly ironic phrase of Palladio’s friend and occasional collaborator, G. B. Maganza, “nature is the architect” no less in connection with the cottages of peasants than the nests of birds.39 The demarcation at the Rotonda between the gleaming white house on the hill and the vernacular landscape below was one between architecture, as defined in recent prescriptive literature, and nature, for all the marks of human agency in the fields and vineyards.40 As we have seen, however, the evocation of nature at the Villa Badoer – or indeed at the Palazzo Caprini – was made from within the resources of classicism itself. In a sense, this was true of the Villa Rotonda too.

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66. Andrea Palladio, ideal reconstruction of (or capriccio based on) the Temple of Fortune, Palestrina. The colonnaded courtyards shown to left and right are inspired by the ancient temple of Hercules in Tivoli. In the central axis, Palladio contrasts a typically frontal Roman temple with a culminating three- (or four-?) fronted domed building. This drawing is Palladio’s most elaborate architectural landscape.

No Tuscan colonnades adorned the environs of the Villa Rotonda; instead, the landscape was the articulated result of rational and effective practices of agricultural production and land management that survived into this century. Viticulture coexisted with cereal production, with vines trained on roughly parallel lines of pollarded trees (usually elms; sometimes fruit trees) leaving space for the plow.41 Beneath the Ionic porches of the villa, such lines of trees constituted a vernacular, “natural” order, echoing the colonnades – especially the Tuscan colonnades – in the earlier acropolitan projects. Similarly, in his famous treatment of the Vitruvian dramatic scenes in his Second Book (first published in 1545), Serlio presents the satiric scene as a wooded but peopled


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67. Villa Rotonda, Vicenza. Hall with satyr’s mask drain cover in center of floor. The painted decoration on the curving walls of the hall is not sixteenth century.

rustic landscape ordered according to the principles of one-point perspective (Fig. 65).42 Palladio does not articulate such connections, needless to say, though they certainly accord with his published reflections on the relationship of landscape and architecture, and with his sensitivity to the qualities of specific sites.43 In his treatise, further, he compares lines of trees at a country villa to the arcaded streets and squares of a city, an idea evidently closely linked with his general belief in an architecture that follows nature.44 There are many references in the decoration of Palladian villas to the agricultural economy, usually in fresco, but at the chapel of the Villa Barbaro at Maser, the stucco festoons that link the column capitals in the porch not only give a suitably rustic air to a miniature Pantheon, but also evoke the vines festooning the pollarded trees in the fertile countryside overlooked by the chapel and the nearby Villa Barbaro.45 Whatever the classical models for this motif, it surely represents a commingling of local learned and vernacular culture. Like any educated Venetan patricians who owned Terraferma property, the Barbaro brothers knew and profited from the important ancient literature on farming and land management. They were surely familiar with the ancient farmer’s calendar, with its feasts at turning points of the year, many still celebrated, in Christianized form, in the sixteenth century. In view of the obvious association of festoons with harvest, the Maser

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portico may refer equally to known or surmised rites of antiquity, and to village celebrations of the bounty of autumn.46 Such parallels illuminate the synthesis at the Villa Rotonda between sublime architecture and rustic substrate. The porches provide platforms from which to survey the dependent landscape as well as a stage for self-presentation within the encircling landscape identified by Palladio as a kind of theater. The genealogy of this synthesis is clear in Palladio’s sketches of acropolitan ancient monuments, dominated by theaters or theatral motifs (Fig. 67), as in the tiered and lofty complexes at Palestrina or Tivoli, or even nearby Verona. It is difficult to exaggerate their importance for Palladio’s architectural imagination.47 The stakes of the metaphoric architecture of the Villa Rotonda were high. The treatment of the countryside as a kind of natural architecture, subordinate but also akin to the splendid house atop the hill, celebrated hierarchy while naturalizing the insertion of both house and patron into the landscape. This is a general issue in Palladio’s villa architecture; it is even parodied in Maganza’s pungent poem about the Villa Barbaro, cited previously, which problematizes the relationship of “Vitruvian” architecture and the vernacular environment.48 More than any other of Palladio’s buildings, the Villa Rotonda conveys the comforting message that neither architecture nor social power is imposed on a landscape. Maganza’s jaundiced view about the antinomies of power and representation typical of the Venetian Terraferma, or any other colonial landscape, had little effect in its own time, and still less on modern Palladio scholarship.49

GIANTS BENEATH: “THUS ARE THE MONSTERS TAMED” Landscapes were peopled, however, and the people were not always passively compliant.50 In the Villa Rotonda itself, a detail of the decor, though largely ignored, draws attention to the fragility of the place of the master, or indeed of architecture, within the landscape. Set in the floor of the central, cylindrical hall, face up to the originally open oculus in the dome, is a Roman drain cover shaped as a satyr’s head (Fig. 67).51 Prominent by virtue of its position and its apparent status as the only ancient artifact incorporated into the building, the mask draws attention to chthonic powers lying beneath the harmonious and rational surface contrived by Palladio and his associates. Such a contrast of enlightened authority and dark substrate was, we have seen, crucial to the logic of the Palazzo Caprini; it is explicit on the facade of Achille Bocchi’s Bolognese palace-academy.52 Indeed, the opposition of a realm of radiance and rationality, and one of dark and even monstrous striving, is a favorite “mannerist” motif. In the famous case of the Room of the Giants in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, the rocks entombing the defeated, grotesque giants echo the strange rusticated architecture of the palace courtyard, especially through


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68. Garden facade of Casino di Pio IV, Vatican, as engraved by Giuseppe Vasi, 1761. The faun caryatids that supported the viewing platform are clearly visible, as is the effect of a architecture grounded in natural rock and water.

the inclusion of broken fragments of splendid architecture among the “natural” rocks.53 Here the association, implicit at the Palazzo Caprini, of an architectural contrast with that of human types is made fully manifest. The giants suffer and expire in chaotic piles of unworked and worked stone, while the gods float in space around the throne of Jupiter, identified by a canopy in the form of a finely proportioned and ornamented tholos.54 Whether constructed or on paper, more strictly architectural versions of the motif occur with some frequency in the sixteenth century, drawing in part on ancient models.55 In a discussion of such environments as the garden building at Fontainebleau known as the Grotte des Pins, built between 1541 and 1543, Liliane Chatelet Lange has coined the term “grotto-casino.”56 At the Grotte des Pins, roughly sculpted giants metamorphize into or out of the craggy rock of the facade, while a visitor entering the building would have looked up to ceiling paintings, now lost, of Olympian gods enthroned in latticework tempietti. In Italy, relatively simple, even schematic examples of the “grotto-casino” type are part of the repertoire of several major sixteenth-century architects, from Giulio Romano to Serlio and Palladio, often associating the “natural” substrate with water as well as with unhewn or unfinished rock.57 In his most iconographically complex building, the Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican, completed in the early 1560s, Ligorio contrived an elegant loggia that faces the main house across an oval court, on one side, but on the other towers high over the Vatican gardens (Fig. 68). In the exterior view, looking up from the gardens, the loggia surmounts a basement section articulated by three niches originally flanked by

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herms in the shape of giant satyrs standing on rough rock at the edge of a pool.58 As atlantes, (i.e., support figures), the herms make a conspicuous contrast with the refined ornament of the loggia above. Directly or indirectly, the genealogy of such projects includes the great hillside shrine of Palestrina, where ancient Roman engineers and architects had transformed a steeply sloping terrain into architecture. The temple complex was dedicated to the goddess Fortuna Primigenia, and the elaborate architecture accommodated the crowds who came to consult the goddess, within a deep cave, at a Greek-style oracle. At the summit an elegant tholos once rose above a semicircular exedra with curving steps reminiscent of a Roman theater, in a deployment of architectural motifs much beloved in antiquity.59 This dramatic motif crowned a series of ramps and terraces descending to the flatter area where the core of the settlement, in antiquity and in later epochs, was located. The vast, complex was studied by both Ligorio and Palladio (e.g., Fig. 67), who in one drawing reconstructs a quadruple-fronted temple at the summit, anticipating the Villa Rotonda.60 In part the fantastic aspect of such “reconstructions” was a result of the occupation of the site by modern townspeople, impeding archaeological research, but Palladio evidently incorporated elements from other tiered complexes in the region, such as the Temple of Hercules at Tivoli (then thought to be a palatial villa). In recent centuries, Palestrina had been a major fortress of the Colonna family, traditionally hostile to the papacy, and the site had suffered from the depredations of attacking armies and papal demolition orders. The surviving inhabitants found shelter and a degree of security in natural caves or in cavelike spaces tunneled into the hillside or formed within the massive substructures of Roman construction. The ambiguity in such a place between manmade and artificial landforms recalls familiar Renaissance conceits turning on the erosion or subversion of the distinction of art and nature, as in such sophisticated examples of self-conscious architectural bravura as the Palazzo Te or Fontainebleau. At sixteenth-century Palestrina, then, an elegant tholos rose above a territory of troglodites, implying social divisions that were only enhanced by the incorporation of the tholos within a baronial castle, an instrument and symbol of political control of the settlement below.61 Renaissance antiquarianism did not exist in an ideological vacuum, nor can we aprioristically assume that those who studied the architectural remains of antiquity consistently dissolved away their contemporary associations, their place in a landscape of continuing social and ideological connotation.62

IDEOLOGY AND LANDSCAPE Beside the famous temple at Palestrina, there was a shrine of Fortuna Primigenia in Rome itself. For a short but crucial period, Renaissance scholars located this Temple of Fortune on the Pincian Hill, overlooking the Campo


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Marzio district of the city.63 Here a series of terraces and other ruined structures ascended the slope toward a circular building, a miniature Pantheon that was by no means implausibly identified as a religious structure. The vague resemblance of the site to Palestrina and the hypothesized coincidence of religious function were mutually reinforcing, but ideological factors were also important.64 Later in the century the association with the goddess Fortune disappeared and the site itself was partly destroyed. Nevertheless, the memory of a cascading, terraced ensemble on the hillside apparently persisted, serving as a model for later grandiose and ideologically saturated projects that culminated in the Spanish Steps. These drew on the sixteenth-century understanding of the Pincian slope as a vast theater of state ritual, where white-robed candidates for office in the ancient republic had displayed themselves to the voters assembled below.65 The antiquarian study of the site is associated particularly with Pirro Ligorio, architect of the Villa d’Este, whose identification of the Pincian rotunda with the Roman Temple of Fortune was clearly related to contemporary political concerns.66 Palladio surely met Ligorio during his last visit to Rome in 1554, when the early stages of work on the Villa d’Este elicited the admiration of Palladio’s patron and traveling companion, Daniele Barbaro; as we have seen, both architects were interested in multileveled structures.67 In particular, there are revealing affinities, as well as differences, between the Villa d’Este and Palladio’s most mature, if also subtle, statement of the theme, the Villa Rotonda. The differences are more obvious: at Tivoli, Ligorio designed a complex of house and garden, while at the Villa Rotonda Palladio set a house in existing environs; Ligorio paraded antiquarian and mythological learning in his topographical iconography, while Palladio developed the metaphoric potential of the “natural” site.68 Yet even Ligorio’s erudite and complex garden design was anchored in a conception of the “nature of the ground” that is surely related to Palladio’s own interest in the genius loci.69 Palladio’s extant drawings fully document his critical engagement with vast and intricately planned architectural monuments of antiquity, from bath complexes, on level ground, to the acropolitan structures we have discussed. In some of Palladio’s studies of the latter, he contrives a formula of representation that shows both groundplan and elevation, creating a complex and compelling figure of transparency.70 At the Villa Rotonda, the quadrupled temple fronts open the house to the landscape, enhancing the intersection of interior and exterior, house and cosmos, in a clear and surely conscious abandonment of the opaque facade set before a building. As we have seen, Palladio drew on and distilled both architectural and nonarchitectural sources and resources in the incorporation of a working landscape into a composite ensemble, transcending the separation wrought by the typical Renaissance residential facade. The result is a deeply allusive, in my view profoundly emblematic, building, whose meaning resides not, as some have claimed, in some pregiven, stable symbolic content, but rather in the response to the play of difference and iden-

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tity in its articulation. Like an emblem, the villa is a professed metaphor or “hieroglyph”; more important, however, its symbolic valence depends on the cunning deployment of metonymy, on the position of elements within a simultaneously conceptual and physical topography. In an important respect it departs from, or rather varies, Palladio’s explicit conception of the similitude of house and body, which depends especially on an equivalence between the noble and base parts of a human body and of a building, in both of which such parts should remain hidden. At the Rotonda, such parts can only be below the floor, that is, below the mouth of the satyr in the central hall. In the absence of dependencies, the basement of the villa presumably accommodated some farm functions; indeed, passages were later cut through an exterior flight of stairs to facilitate the access of wagons to the basement.71 As a whole, the Villa Rotonda constituted a kind of facade, an ideological no less than architectural construct dissembling its own dependence on the storerooms, as well as the landscape, beneath.

CODA: ARCHITECTURES OF POWER, AND THE POWERS OF ARCHITECTURE We have seen that the symbolic naturalization of the patron/owner in his estate was a crucial impetus in many sixteenth-century villa designs, especially in those of Palladio, though the means and media deployed to achieve these ends were widely disparate.72 On the other hand, certain significant shifts in cultural attitudes and, no doubt, in corresponding social structures increasingly militated against the architectural expression, however abstract, of conciliatory values. In the Veneto, Palladian architecture supplied a rationally hierarchical and orderly facade to a landscape of sharpening social division and oppression.73 This too perhaps found expression or evocation in artistic media, as in the interior decorations of some of Palladio’s own villas by images of the fall of the giants or the flaying of Marsyas, themes whose frequency and association with coercive practices and attitudes of the period need no emphasis.74 Nevertheless, the humanity of Palladio’s architecture prompts us, perhaps rightly, to see it through a utopian lens, especially in view of the diffusion in Palladio’s milieu of reformist religious ideas and even a degree of social egalitarianism.75 The issue remains, however, of the relationship of the rational architecture of Palladio and Palladianism to the landscapes of social power in which it evolved and found enthusiastic and widespread acceptance. Its celebration and legitimation of a dominant landowning class was all the more effective the more it combined its appeal to transcendent values with responsiveness to actual or imagined local settings and traditions. The elegance and refinement of such architecture often screened appalling forms of exploitation, especially when exported to the plantation economies and colonial landscapes of the


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Atlantic world. The use of Palladian forms to ennoble the houses in the metropolitan capitals at one end of the trade routes is better known, of course, than the Palladian architecture on the plantations themselves.76 In the history of the rise of the West to global dominance, indeed, we encounter not only an architecture of facades framing the stage of social action and interaction, but also an enlightened, rational architecture masking the unsettling and ultimately irrational exercise of power that made it possible.77 We are no longer concerned merely with facade architecture, but rather with architecture itself as facade. The theme of the facade leads, then, to consideration of the “darker side” of the civilization that produced it.78 But to leave things there would be unfortunate. In their facade designs, after all, the major architects of the Renaissance were no mere instruments of self-assertion on the part of the dominant forces in society. Indeed, many facades disclose and display, rather than simply naturalize, the ideological underpinnings of political and social power. Further, the complexity (even in restraint) and sophistication of facade architecture produces expressive and aesthetic effects that exceed mere utilitarian concerns, of whatever kind. More broadly, if any urban environment is a place of intense interpersonal and intergroup contact, exchange, and of course contestation, Renaissance facade architecture makes these – with remarkable self-consciousness – into the stuff of architecture itself, though certainly not in any transparent way. Varying effects of animation (literally, the endowment with soul or life) appear central in the formal languages of the period, crystallizing human interests and desires; in this respect, the study of Renaissance architecture belongs intimately with that of painting and sculpture. It may be said, however, that architectural animation, of one kind or another, is remarkably widespread across human societies. Indeed, it is useful to understand any urban environment, not only those of the Renaissance, not just as a space susceptible to technical and qualitative analysis, but rather as a place of drama enabled, or even enacted, by the buildings themselves.79

NOTES

Introduction 1. Friedrich Nietzsche ends the preface to the second edition of his Fröhliche Wissenschaft (“La Gaya Scienza”) with an exclamation beginning: “O those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity.” See F. Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, Munich: Musarion, 1924, 12: 8–9; The gay science, edited with a commentary by W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books, 1974, p. 38. I am grateful to Jack Wilcox for the citation. 2. For a concise account of the emergence of the facade in the context of a general tendency for architecture to become image, see A. Capuano, Iconologia della facciata nell’architettura italiana: la ricerca teorico-compositivo dal trattato di Vitruvio alla manualistica razionale, Rome: Gangemi, 1995, esp. pp. 7–10, 31–36; C.P. Warnke, “Rhetorik der Architektur in der frühen Neuzeit,” in K. Bussmann, F. Matzner, and U. Schulze, eds., Johann Conrad Schlaun, 1695–1773: Architektur des Spätbarock in Europa, Munster: Oktagon, 1995, pp. 613–621. 3. See Leon Battista Alberti’s critique of Egyptian architecture; L.B. Alberti, De re aedificatoria VI.3 (referring to “Asia,” but mentioning pyramids). Here and throughout I cite the following editions: L’Architettura, ed. and trans. S. Orlandi with introduction and notes by P. Portoghesi, Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1966, 2:450–455; On the art of building in ten books, ed. and trans. J. Rykwert, R. Tavernor, and N. Lynch, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1988, p. 157. In Alberti’s view, the institution of a proportional correspondence between the body of the viewer and that of the building is a leitmotif of the architectural tradition, beginning in Greece, that he wishes to revive. At De re aedificatoria VII.16, Alberti recommends statuary as the most appropriate means to commemorate an individual, in contrast, especially, to vast buildings like pyramids (ed. Orlandi, 2:653; ed., Rykwert, p. 239f.). For Alberti’s “abhorrence” of pyramids, see also ibid., VIII.3 (ed. Orlandi, 2: 680–683; ed. Rykwert, p. 250), where he follows his criticism of Egypt with that of exorbitant building on the part of “our Etruscans.” The ostensible target is the ancient king Porsenna, though Alberti perhaps also had contemporary Etruria in mind. 4. For an effective account of the transformation in question, see H. Broise, “Les maisons d’habitation à Rome: aux XVe e XVIe siècles: les leçons de la documentation graphique,” in J.-C. Maire Vigueur, ed., D’une ville à l’autre: structures matérielles et organisation de l’espace dans les villes européennes (XIIIe–XVIe siècle), Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 1989, p. 613.

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“L’apparition au XVe siècle d’une vision plus globale de la ville liée à une volonté unificatrice visant à lui donner une signification idéologique précise se heurtera très rapidement a cette conception à la fois individuelle et subie de la ville, et se concretisera par la réglementation promulguée à partir du pontificat du Nicolas V. La façade jusqu’alors définie par le rapport intérieur-extérieur sera concue inversement à partir de l’extérieur, à partir de la ville en tant qu’unité composée d’objets construits, alors que’en revanche, dans la Rome mediévale, ce sont ces objets construits inséres dans une topographie acquise qui composent la ville.” Like many of the authors in this otherwise excellent volume, Broise exaggerates the unifying tendencies in the early modern city. See Chapters 3 and 8. Briefly, I refer here to the work of Paula Spilner, Samuel Cohn, Thomas Szabo, and Vittorio Franchetti Pardo for Florence, and Jean-Claude Maire-Vigueur and Henri Broise for Rome. For orientation see C.S. Peirce, “Logic as semiotic: the theory of signs,” in R.E. Innis, ed., Semiotics, an introductory anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985, pp. 1–23, with introduction by Innis. On connotation in architecture, see U. Eco, “Function and sign: semiotics of architecture,” in M. Gottdiener and A. P. Lagopoulos, eds., The city and the sign: An introduction to urban semiotics, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 55–86. For a contrasting perspective on the phenomenon, see B. L. Bailey, From front porch to back seat: Courtship in twentieth-century America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. For current cultural/architectural transformations, see P. Virilio, The lost dimension, New York: Semiotext(e), 1999, p. 99: “We can now better understand the precise materiality of architecture which fascinated Walter Benjamin. It was connected less to the walls, floors, and opacity of surfaces than to the primacy of the access protocol of doors and bridges, but it referred equally to the ports and other means of transport, that prolonged the nature of the threshold, the practical function of the entryway. This protocol of physical access gave all its meaning to the primacy of the sedentary over the nomadic ways of our origins. And all of this is now being swept away by advanced technologies, especially those of domestic teledistribution.” L. Walker, “The front porch: an old tradition returns,” House Beautiful 127 (1985): 86–87. On the movement in general see P. Katz, The new urbanism: toward an architecture of community, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. A painting by Fra Angelico (Presentation in the Temple, Madrid, Prado) shows a typical Florentine street, lined by rusticated palaces, in which the openings have been walled up, as noted by A. Rinaldi, “La formazione dell’immagine urbana tra XIV e XV secolo,” in Maire Vigueur, D’une villa à l’autre, pp. 802f., with Fig. 8. I have discussed the general issue in C. Burroughs, “Spaces of arbitration and the organization of space in late-medieval Italian cities,” in B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka, eds., Medieval practices of space, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 64–199. This is a much discussed topic; for an already “classic” account, see J. Rykwert, The dancing column: Order in architecture, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996. An obvious example is the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; K. Brodersen, ad voc., in S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds., The Oxford classical dictionary, 3rd ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 1397, notes the persistence of lists of wonders into the Christian era, with Christian buildings in the place of pagan temples. For updated lists, including, e.g., Florence cathedral, in the Renaissance, see C. W. Westfall, In this most perfect paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the invention of conscious urban planning in Rome 1447–1455, University Park: Penn State Press, 1974, p. 124. On Vitruvius’s famous account of Dinocrates’s project to transform Mt. Athos into the colossal figure of a man holding a city in his hand, see Chapter 1. The tradition persisted into the Renaissance, e.g., in Giannozzo Manetti’s famous invocation of Nicholas V’s plans for St. Peter’s Basilica. See Westfall, In this most perfect paradise, pp. 120f., with further bibliography.

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13. Alberti, De re aedificatoria I.2, VII.5, in the latter passage referring to a generic “animal,” not to the human body as guiding metaphor (ed. Rykwert, pp. 8, 199; ed. Orlandi, 2:559). For the notion of machine see A. Tzonis and L. Lefaivre, “The machine in architectural thinking,” Daidalos 18 (1985): 16–26; D. Cosgrove, The Palladian landscape: Geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy, University Park: Penn State Press, 1993, pp. 229f., implicitly illustrating the impact of Vitruvius’s emphasis on mechanics in De architectura X. 14. Alberti’s conception of ornament has been much discussed recently. For a monographic treatment see V. Biermann, Ornamentum: Studien zum Traktat “De re aedificatoria” des Leon Battista Alberti, Hildesheim and Zurich: Olms, 1997. 15. C. Thoenes, “‘Il carico imposto dall’economia’: appunti su committenza ed economia dai trattati di architettura del Rinascimento,” in idem, Sostegno ed adornamento. Saggi sull’architettura del Rinascimento: disegni, ordini, magnificenza, Milan: Electa, 1998, p. 183; “gli abiti delle antiche architetture non si confanno ai corpi delle moderne.” 16. The work of Richard Goldthwaite is fundamental; see his “The economic and social world of Italian Renaissance majolica,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 1–32. For more general treatment of the origins of a fashion economy and “craze for fashion,” see F. Braudel, Civilization and capitalism, 15th–18th centuries, volume 1. The structures of everyday life: The limits of the possible, New York: Harper and Row, 1981, pp. 311–333. 17. One of the more effective exercises in self-promotion of the late twentieth-century postmodern turn in architecture was of the so-called Strada Novissima, the “newest street,” exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1980 and later in San Francisco; C. Jencks, The language of postmodern architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1991, p. 11. It consisted of facades by diverse architects working in classical idioms. 18. G. Gorse, “A classical stage for the old nobility: the Strada Nuova and sixteenth-century Genoa,” Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 301–327; L. Müller Profumo, “La funzione dell’ornamento: forme e significati nella decorazione di tre palazzi genovesi del Cinquecento,” Palladio, rivista di storia dell’architettura 4 (1991): 23–66. 19. Gorse, “A classical stage,” 317–322, distinguishes four major facade types distributed among the palaces on the street. Giovanni Alessi was responsible for the overall design, though different architects had responsibility for individual palaces. 20. The term “transparency” has played a significant role in modernist discourse about architecture; see, notably, C. Rowe with R. Slutzky, “Transparency, literal and phenomenal,” part 1, in C. Rowe, The mathematics of the ideal villa, and other essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976, pp. 159–184; part 2, in C. Rowe, As I was saying: Recollections and miscellaneous essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 73–106. The idea is already articulated in Goethe’s response to the temples of Paestum: “Nothing is inside/nothing is outside/what is not inside/is not outside.” Quoted by W. Ernst, “Framing the fragment: archaeology, art, museum,” in P. Duro, ed., The rhetoric of the frame: essays on the boundaries of the artwork, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 54,56. 21. The notion of pastiche, central in some accounts of postmodernism, in not unknown in modernism, as noted by P. Anderson, The origins of postmodernity, London and New York: Verso, p. 80. In general, the imagistic excesses of postmodernism, as well as a hard and fast distinction with “modernism,” appear to have subsided. 22. Robert Venturi’s best known and most influential work, written with D. Scott Brown and S. Izenour, is Learning from Las Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of architectural form, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977 (original edition 1972). On the context and legacy of Venturi and his firm, see J. L. Cohen, “Knowing how to look at Las Vegas,” Lotus International 93 (1997): 96–108; also, on a more abstract level, Müller Profumo, “La funzione dell’ornamento,” pp. 23–31. More recently, Venturi and Scott Brown have embarked on what might be called “electronic facadism,” what they call “a malleable architecture of applied electronic information.” See J. S. Russell, “VSBA today,” Architectural Record; 186 (1998): 58–67.

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23. For the argument that it would be anachronistic to apply Platonist categories to the ideas and buildings of the early Renaissance, see C. Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism: Ethics, aesthetics, and eloquence, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 24. R. Wittkower, Architectural principles in the age of humanism, 4th ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. 25. For an excellent contextualization of Wittkower’s book, a relatively minor project within his own oeuvre, and for its effects see A. Payne, “Rudolf Wittkower and architectural principles in the age of modernism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 (1994): 322–342. 26. See the title essay in Rowe, Mathematics of the ideal villa, pp. 1–28. 27. On the genealogy of the villa of modernism see J. S. Ackerman, The villa: Form and meaning of country houses, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991; M. Dennis, Court and garden: From the French hotel to the city of modern architecture, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1985. 28. For an elegant account of the duality in Le Corbusier’s thinking see A. Colquhoun, Modernity and the classical tradition: Architectural essays, 1980–1987, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989, p. 168. 29. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, V.14 (ed. Rykwert, p. 140). 30. At Vignola’s Villa Lante (Gamberara) at Bagnaia, the major axis of the garden splinters the house into two quite separate portions; see C. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance garden: From the conventions of planting, design, and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century central Italy, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 243–269. Palladio’s development of the central axis in his villas is more subtle, though the lost Villa Repeta paired matching portions across a courtyard; B. Boucher, Andrea Palladio: the architect in his time, rev. ed., New York: Abbeville Press, 1998, p. 130. Boucher stresses its dissimilarity from other of Palladio’s villas, but at the Villa Emo, the house is split, beyond the portico, by a corridor decorated as a pergola carrying vines. 31. In the introduction to his important book The historical anthropology of early modern Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 9–14, Peter Burke includes a section expressly titled “Facades.” In this section, remarkably, Burke hardly mentions the architectural facade, except to comment on a disparity of scale and magnificence between facade and building. In his view, facades tend to be grander; in fact, the reverse is often the case. Burke’s interest here is to examine the somewhat stereotypical idea of Italy as a land of facades, in contrast to northern cultures of sincerity. Quite independently, the only monographic treatment known to me of the architectural facade throughout its history, written by an Italian, is also concerned with the ethical connotations of facade architecture, even in Italian modernism; see Capuano, Iconologia della facciata nell’architettura italiana, pp. 36–50. For architectural historical discussions, apart from Friedman’s extremely important and original contributions, cited in n. 32, see the useful summary account of N. Adams and L. Nussdorfer, “The Italian city 1400–1600,” in H.A. Millon and V. Magnago Lampugnani, eds., The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The representation of architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1997, pp. 205–232, esp. 210–213, emphasizing the representational, rhetorical function of the facade and its diffusion into wider social milieus. The rather uniform, even simple, concept of “facade” employed in this account, however, does not do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. 32. D. Friedman, “Palaces and the street in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy,” in J.W.R. Whitehead and P.J. Larkham, eds., Urban landscapes: International perspectives, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 69–113; idem, “Il palazzo e la città: facciate fiorentine tra XIV e XV secolo,” in S. Valtieri, ed., Il palazzo dal rinascimento a oggi, In Italia, nel regno di Napoli, in Calabria, Rome: Gangemi, 1989, pp. 101–111. See also G. M. Rossi, “Facciata,” in Dizionario enciclopedico di architettura e urbanistica, Rome: Istituto editoriale romano, 1969, 2:308; Capuano, Iconologia della facciata nell’architettura italiana, pp. 11f.

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Chapter 1. The Forked Road to Modernity 1. This has been something of an academic industry in recent years; I have drawn orientation especially from C. Thoenes, “‘Il carico imposto dall’economia.’ Appunti su committenza ed economia dai trattati di architettura del Rinascimento,” in idem, Sostegno e adornamento. Saggi sull’architettura del Rinascimento: disegni, ordini, magnificenza, Milan: Electa, 1998, pp. 177–185, with bibliographical postscript; G. Barbieri, “‘Co ‘I giudizio e con la mente esperta’: l’architettura e il testo,” in L. Puppi, ed., Andrea Palladio. II testo, l’immagine, la città: bibliografia e iconografia palladiane, cartografia vicentiana, Palladio accademico olimpico, Milano: Electa, 1980, pp. 17–26. The excellent volumes of A. Payne, The architectural treatise in the Italian Renaissance: architectural invention, ornament, and literary culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, and V. Hart and P. Hicks, eds., Paper palaces: The rise of the Renaissance architectural treatise, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, appeared too late to be fully considered in this very different project. 2. A. Capuano, Iconologia della facciata nell’architettura italiana: la ricerca teorico-compositivo dal trattato di Vitruvio alla manualistica razionale, Rome: Gangemi, 1995, p. 11. 3. Similarly, Renaissance discourse on the orders lagged developments in practice; Thoenes, “Gli ordini architettonici: rinascita o invenzione,” in Sostegno e adornamento, p. 126. In this case, discourse did catch up. 4. S. Battaglia, ed., Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, Turin: UTET, 1968, 5:553–559. The term facciata had a broader range or reference than now, and could be used of the rear or side as well as the front of a building, or of the interior elevation of a courtyard or large room. It was necessary to specify (e.g., facciata dinanzi or. facciata di canto); see A. M. Finoli and L. Grassi, eds., Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete: trattato di architettura, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1972, 1: 227f.,248. G. Vasari, La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. P. Barocchi, Milano: Ricciardi, 1962, p. 72 (1550 edition), uses facciata of the interior wall of the Sistine Chapel. 5. On major features of Renaissance facade architecture transmitted from Italy to France, see C. Mignot, “L’articulation des façades,” in A. Stegmann, ed., L’automne de la Renaissance, 1580–1630, Paris: J. Vrin, 1981, pp. 343–344. 6. H. Saalman, The transformation of buildings and the city in the Renaissance: A graphic introduction, Champlain, NY: Astrion, 1996, pp. 36–42, claims that some palace facades were designed to take advantage of the view from a distance, unusual in central Florence. 7. On the facade drawing in Siena, see Chapter 3. For related fourteenth-century Florentine usage, see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 32 (uniform facade program for houses around the Baptistery, expressly involving the whole of each house front), p. 67 (model sinopia drawn on a house in the Via S. Reparata). 8. By the second decade of the early sixteenth century, the canonic triad of architectural representation – elevation, plan, and section – was becoming established, at least in Rome, though the terminology was in flux. In both versions of his famous Letter to Leo X, Raphael uses the same term, parete, for elevation and section (“parete di fuora” and “parete di dentro”), implying an emphasis on the homogeneity of interior and exterior, F.P. Di Teodoro, ed., Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera a Leone X, Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1994, section 18, pp. 124, 152; see also C. Thoenes, “Vitruvio, Alberti, Sangallo: la teoria del disegno architettonico nel Rinascimento,” in idem, Sostegno e adornamento, pp. 161–163. The basis for Renaissance discourse was Vitruvius’s triad of ichnographia, orthographia, and scaenographia; see Vitruvii de architectura libri decem I,2 (Vitruv, Zehn Bücher über Architektur, ed. C. Fensterbusch, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964, p. 37). Vitruvius does not seem to have had a term equivalent to “section,” as noted by M.T. Bartoli, “Orthographia, ichnographia, scaenographia,” Studi e documenti di architettura 8 (1978): 197–208: Thoenes, “Vitruvio, Alberti, Sangallo,” p. 162.

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9. C. Smith, “The De re aedificatoria,” in Millon and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, p. 457. For the distinction in Alberti’s De pictura between space and place (spatium and locus) see J.M. Greenstein, “Mantegna, Leonardo and the times of painting,” Word and Image 15 (199): 241 n.50. Alberti refers to the spatium loci (the “space of [a] place” in Greenstein’s translation), meaning by spatium the two-dimensional area corresponding to a three-dimensional body, or at least represented by a painter as such. In this early work, significantly, Alberti writes as if no gap could open up between the two. 10. For a formalist discussion of windows in facade design, see E. Heil, Fenster als Gestaltungsmittel: Palastfassaden der italienischen Früh- und Hochrenaissance, Hildesheim and Zurich: Olms, 1995. 11. “Serlio admits that the windows of urban residences are not ‘divided by equal distances to accommodate themselves to reality’”; A. Belluzzi and K.W. Forster, “Giulio Romano, architect at the court of the Gonzagas,” in M. Tafuri, et al., eds., Giulio Romano – architect, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 96, quoting Book VII. I have found no other explicit reference to this issue in Renaissance architectural literature. 12. E. Panofsky, “Excursus: Two facade designs by Domenico Beccafumi and the problem of mannerism in architecture,” in idem, Meaning in the visual arts, New York: Doubleday, 1955, pp. 226–235, connects the second of two designs discussed in the article with mannerist stylistic preferences. 13. See Chapter 3. An early case in Florence was the integration of the Cerchi arms into the capital of their loggia, probably by 1301; S. Sinding-Larsen, “A tale of two cities: Florentine and Roman visual context for 15th century palaces,” Acta ad Archeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 6 (1975): 171f. 14. The Pazzi dolphins appear in column capitals at the Palazzo Pazzi; the Medici palle ornament some windows on the exterior of the Palazzo Medici and appear in variously shaped fields above the courtyard arcades. 15. P. Boudon, “Introduction to the semiotics of space,” in Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, City and the sign, p. 111, notes the convergence, in symbolic terms, of vertical and horizontal spatial articulation; thus a ceremonial avenue might be understood as a rotated vertical plane. He reaches this formulation partly on the basis of his analysis of typical forms of Western architecture since the Renaissance, defined, p. 107, as “an architecture of the plan (architectural graphisms) projected on the forms of the habitation (palace, gardens) or of the urban (facade, royal squares, perspectives).” 16. On gendered space in Renaissance Florence, see R.M. San Juan, “Mythology, women and Renaissance private life: The myth of Eurydice in Italian furniture painting,” Art History 15 (1992): 127–145. 17. P. Aries and G. Duby, eds., History of private life, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1987–1991, volumes 2 and 3, critiqued as a “neo-Burckhardtian celebration of selfhood” by D.A. Wojciehowski, Old masters, new subjects: Early modern and poststructuralist theories of will, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, p. 197, n.3. L. Montrose, “Spenser’s domestic domain: poetry, property, and the early modern subject,” in M. De Grazia, M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass, eds., Subject and object in Renaissance culture, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 95f., argues that the evolving private sphere was not autonomous from the larger public realm, but was rather an effect of the “state’s increasing concern to regulate the lives of its subjects”; under these conditions, the household was the “nucleus of social order.” P. von Moos, “Das Öffentliche und das Private im Mittelalter: für einen kontrollierten Anachronismus,” in G. Melville and P. von Moos, eds., Das Öffentliche und Private in der Vormoderne, Cologne: Böhlau, 1998, pp. 3–86, notes that the phenomenon of privacy or private life precedes the concept (cf. facade!). On the Renaissance reception of the Stoic distinction of vita privata and vita civilis (and preference for the former), see J. Kraye, “Moral philosophy,” in C.B. Schmitt


18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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and Q. Skinner, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 363; C. Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism: Ethics, aesthetics, and eloquence, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 8, noting theoretical representations of the house as a space of self-fashioning, set within, or against, the larger world of nature. C. Peirce, “Logic as semiotic: the theory of signs”; F. Merrell, Sign, textuality, world, Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 1992, pp. 188–211. See also Chapter 8. On this distinction see my “Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture: Alberti and Brunelleschi,” Res: Aesthetics and Anthropology 34 (1998): 39–63. R. Wittkower, Architectural principles in the age of humanism, 3rd ed., London: Tiranti, 1957, pp. 32–37; cf. the note “Beauty and ornament,” in Alberti, On the art of building in ten books, ed. Rykwert, Tavernor, and Lynch, p. 420. See also Chapter 5. Vitruvius, De architectura IV.2 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 190). J.S. Ackerman, “The faces of Palazzo Chiericati,” in D. Rosand, ed., Interpretazioni veneziane: studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Michelangelo Muraro, Venezia: Arsenale editrice, 1984, p. 217: in Barbaro’s reconstruction of a Roman domus the entrance gives access to a court framed by loggias, expressly identified as merely leading to the house, not forming part of it. This largely accords with the reconstructions of modern archaeologists; A. WallaceHadrill, “The social structure of the Roman house,” Papers of the British School at Rome 56 (1988): 43f.,54–58; F. Coarelli, “La casa dell’aristocrazia romana secondo Vitruvio,” in H. Geertman and J.J. De Jongh, eds., Munus non ingratum: Proceedings of the international symposium on Vitruvius’ De architectura and the Hellenistic and republican architecture, Leiden: Babesch, 1989, pp. 128–187. On an important architectural paradigm that was never a facade, see A. Tönnesmann, “Das ‘Palatium Nervae’ und die Rustikafassade der Frührenaissance,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 21 (1984): 61–70. On the “Palace of Trajan” see Chapter 8. For a pioneering discussion of horizontal spatial ordering, see J.S. Ackerman and M.N. Rosenfeld, “Social stratification in Renaissance urban planning,” in S. Zimmerman and R.F.E. Weissman, eds., Urban life in the Renaissance, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989, pp. 21–49. See also Chapters 3 and 7. See E.T. Hall, The hidden dimension, New York: Doubleday, 1982, pp. 157–161, suggesting that changes in architectural boundaries should be understood in a larger context of interpersonal relations, especially in a period of the conscious ordering of conduct. Hall is an anthropologist; for a historical account, focusing on fifteenth-century Rome, see H. Broise and J.-C. Maire-Vigueur, “Strutture famigliari, spazio domestico e architettura civile a Roma alla fine del medioevo,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1983, 3.5:99–160. For the cumulative effect of small-scale individual and institutional rivalries, though in a later era, see J. Connors, “Alliance and enmity in Roman baroque urbanism,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 25 (1989): 207–294. Capuano, Iconologia della facciata, p. 12, notes that the scaenae frons and the triumphal arch were the only two ancient Roman building types to have a facade. The facade of a church at Fano on the Via Flaminia includes a low-relief image (c. 1505) of the adjacent Roman triumphal arch, indicating how easily triumphal arch architecture could be reduced to the two-dimensionality typical of palace facades. See W.L MacDonald, The architecture of the Roman Empire, 2: The urban approach, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986, p. 85. The effect of assemblage is especially evident in Giuliano da Sangallo’s drawings of ancient arches, as also in his own architectural designs; see S. Borsi, Giuliano da Sangallo: i disegni di architettura e dell’antico, Rome, Officina: 1985, e.g., pp. 117–124 (Arch of Constantine), pp. 191–193 (Malborghetto); pp. 219–222 (Arch at Fano); P.N. Pagliara, “Due palazzi romani di Raffaello: Palazzo Alberini e Palazzo Branconio,” in C.L. Frommel and M. Winner, eds.,

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31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

NOTES TO P. 19 Raffaello a Roma: il convegno del 1983, Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1986, p. 337; G. Pochat, Theater und bildende Kunst im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance in Italien, Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1990, pp. 345ff. F. Cruciani, Teatro nel rinascimento: Roma 1450–1550, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983, p. 544, observes that neither textual nor graphic representations of triumphal entries tend to be accurately descriptive. For the Casa Crivelli facade, which gave permanent form to scenes from the apparati of a public procession, see G. Clarke, “Paul III and the facade of the Casa Crivelli at Rome,” Renaissance Studies 3 (1989): 252–266. The triumphal arch motif articulating the facade of the Palazzo Jacopo di Brescia in the Via Alessandrina evokes the processional function of the street; see Chapter 8. See now A.M. Petrioli Tofani, “From scenery to city: set design,” in Millon and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, pp. 529–537, with catalog entries 163–177; cf. G. Pochat, “Peruzzi’s Bacchides: reconstruction of a stage performance in Rome in 1537,” in T. Hall, ed., Docto peregrino: Roman studies in honor of Torgil Magnuson, Rome: Istituto svedese di studi classici, 1992, pp. 516–519. L. Partridge and R. Starn, Arts of power: Three halls of state in Italy, 1300–1600, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992, pp. 157–212; idem, “Triumphalism and the Sala Regia in the Vatican,” in B. Wisch and S.S. Munshower, eds., “All the world’s a stage …”: Art and pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, University Park: Penn State University, 1: 22–81. On the numerous sixteenth-century editions of Flavio Biondo’s Roma triumphans; see K. Herrmann-Fiore, “La retorica romana delle facciate dipinte da Polidoro,” in M. Fagiolo and M.L. Madonna, eds., Raffaello e l’Europa, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1990, p. 281. See now A. Payne, “Creativity and bricolage in architectural literature of the Renaissance,” Res: Aesthetics and Anthropology 34 (1998): 20–38, esp. 22. For early Cinquecento Roman art, in general, as one of “contamination” and on Giulio’s idea of Roman art as combinative, see M. Tafuri, “Giulio Romano: language, mentality, patrons,” in idem, ed., Giulio Romano – architect, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 32. S. Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, ed. V. Hart and P. Hicks, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 172 (on the Septizonium, incorporating reused columns); p. 200 (triumphal arches). L.B. Alberti, Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III, in Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, Bari: Laterza, 1960, pp. 160f.; cf. Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism, pp. 69f., p. 235 n. 74, noting the lack of a classical source for Alberti’s literary image. See also C. Smith, “Leon Battista Alberti e l’ornamento: rivestimenti parietali e pavimentazioni,” in J. Rykwert and A. Engel, eds., Leon Battista Alberti, Milan: Electa, 1994, pp. 196–215. Wood inlay of great technical proficiency was being done in Florence by the 1430s; see M. Ferretti, “‘Casamenti seu prospective’: le città degli intarsiatori,” in C. De Seta, ed., Imago urbis: dalla città reale alla città ideale, Milan: F.M. Ricci, 1986, pp. 75f. For sixteenth-century reflection on combination in architectural theory (though without recourse to the idea of mosaic), see Payne, “Creativity and bricolage,” pp. 28f. . Alberti, De re aedificatoria IX.5 (ed. Rykwert, p. 303; ed. Orlandi, 2: 818f.); see also Rykwert’s note, “Bones and paneling,” ibid., p. 421. Alberti’s organic metaphors relate buildings to the physical structure of animals, though he surely knew (e.g., from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) of the ancient conception of the structure of the earth itself in terms of the human body, with stones as bones; B. Lincoln, Myth, cosmos and society: Indo-European themes of creation and destruction, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 5,7,10,16f.,132. Late-medieval Italian writers developed a eucharistic reading of this topos, applying it to the metaphorical body of the Church, also presented as a paradigmatic building; Westfall, In this most perfect paradise, p. 55. According to Westfall, p. 123, Giannozzo Manetti owed his notion of the human body as a construction (fabrica) to Alberti.


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37. Sinding-Larsen, “Some functional and iconographical aspects of the centralized church in the Italian Renaissance,” p. 241; cf. Eco, “Function and sign: semiotics of architecture,” p. 78; Onians, Bearers of meaning, p. 244: “The meaning of a piece of architecture is neither inherent in its form nor attributed to it by a text, but derives entirely from its context and from the changing feelings and expectations of the typical spectator.” This is an exaggeration, swinging to the other extreme from the hypothesis of a relatively fixed code of the orders; e.g., E. Forssman, Dorico, ionico, corinzio nell’architettura del Rinascimento, Bari: Laterza, 1973. 38. For the theoretical issues in question here, see J. Tagg, “A discourse (with the shape of reason missing),” Art History 15 (1992): 358, reviewing Derrida’s discussion of the parergon: “The frame stands out against the two grounds it constitutes – the work and the setting – and yet, with respect to each of these, it always dissolves into the other.” 39. On “pictorial liminality,” see P. Wagner, Reading iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution, London: Reaktion Books, 1995, p. 75. 40. I am indebted to Randolph Starn’s observations about the multiple and open-ended referentiality of literary classicism, which derives prestige mainly from its “effect.” For the application of this idea to visual imagery, see R. Starn, “Seeing culture in a room for a Renaissance prince,” in L.A. Hunt, ed., The new cultural history, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 228f. 41. K. Weil-Garris Brandt, “The relation of sculpture and architecture in the Renaissance,” in Milion and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, p. 77. 42. An obvious case is the paired columns of Charles V. E. Rosenthal, “Plus ultra, Non plus ultra, and the columnar device of Emperor Charles V,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 204–228; idem, “The invention of the columnar device of the Emperor Charles V,” ibid., 36 (1973): 198–230. 43. For Serlio’s doctrine of “linee occulte” (in Book II on perspective, first published in 1540), see Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, ed. Hart and Hicks, p. 48, cf. Hart’s Introduction, p. xxviii. 44. On Serlio’s drafts of his intended Book VI, see M.N. Rosenfeld, ed., Sebastiano Serlio on domestic architecture: different dwellings from the meanest hovel to the most ornate palace: The sixteenth-century manuscript of book VI in the Avery Library of Columbia University, New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1978; S. Serlio, Architettura civile. Libri sesto, settimo, ottavo nei manoscritti di Monaco e Vienna, ed. F.P. Fiore and T. Carunchio, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1994. For his Book VII, Serlio planned a “before-and-after” view of a medieval palace modernized according to classical principle: H. Burns, catalog entry in Burns, L. Fairbairn, and B. Boucher, eds., Andrea Palladio: the portico and the farmyard, London: The Arts Council, 1975, no. 43, pp. 33f. 45. The passage appears in Serlio’s first publication, the Regole generali of 1537, which is particularly dependent on Serlio’s experiences in Rome as a junior associate of Baldassare Peruzzi. See Hart and Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, p. 378. On the fashion for facade decoration itself, see Herrmann-Fiore, “La retorica romana delle facciate dipinte da Polidoro,” pp. 269–271, with reference to Serlio’s response. This echoes Vitruvius’s wellknown denunciation of the contemporary fashion for “unnatural” architectural motifs in wall paintings; Vitruvius, De architectura V.5 (ed., Fensterbusch, pp. 332f.). 46. L. Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Eros, furore, and humanism in the early Italian Renaissance, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997, p. 52. 47. See the remarks on the portal designs included in some printings of Vignola’s treatise in C. Thoenes, “La Regola delli cinque ordini del Vignola,” in idem, Sostegno e adornamento. Saggi sull’architettura del Rinascimento, p. 80, with further citations. 48. On the Libro extraordinario see Onians, Bearers of meaning, pp. 280–282; M. Carpo, La maschera a il modello: teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell’ Extraordinario Libro di Sebastiano Serlio (1551), Milan: Jaca Book, 1993. For a pioneering account see G.C. Argan,

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50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

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NOTES TO PP. 22–26 “Il libro extraordinario di Sebastiano Serlio,” in idem, Classico, anticlassico: il rinascimento da Brunelleschi a Breugel, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984, pp. 304–310. Argan correctly emphasizes Serlio’s radical departure from classical principle through “abstraction” and, especially, a tendency to isolate and reassemble architectural elements, as if “gems” (p. 301). However, Argan focuses exclusively on aesthetic aspects of Serlio’s work, to the exclusion of semantic properties. In Vitruvius’s account of the scaena of the theater, the central portal (or at least doors: mediae valvae!) recalls a royal palace (aula); De architectura V.7 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 232). Vitruvius uses the term ianua both of the entrance into a house and thresholds within a house; L. Callebat and P. Fleury, eds., Dictionnaire des termes techniques du De architectura de Vitruve, Hildesheim and New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1995, p. 126. According to Cicero, De natura deorum 2,27,67, only the front doors of secular buildings are ianuae; evidently the distinction between entry into a sacred building and into a house mattered to him, though Vitruvius, De architectura VI.6 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 276; cf. Callebat and Fleury, p. 127), associates the vestibule of a house (fauces) with the design of ostia (portals, door opening) that should follow the rules for temple portals. Alberti, De re aedificatoria IX.4 (ed. Orlandi and Portoghesi, 2:808; ed. Rykwert, p. 301), specifies the enhancement of the vestibule (i.e., the entrance passage) as opposed to that of the house as a whole. Onians, Bearers of meaning, p. 280, quotes the passage in a discussion that overlooks the importance in the designs of places for signage. For a perhaps exaggerated account of Serlio’s unorthodoxy in his religious views and alliances, see Carpo, La maschera e il modello, pp. 85ff; in a telling phrase, Carpo, p. 116, calls the libro extraordinario a case of “simulazione architettonica.” Serlio, Libro Extraordinario, caption to portal no.6 (cf. Onians, Bearers of meaning, p. 281): “La presente porta e tutta dorica, ma stravestita e fatta maschera, come sono le colonne non finite, ma vi sono pero le sue misure” (italics mine). Serlio had hinted at the same idea as early as 1537; Carpo, La maschera e il modello, p. 70, n. 14. According to V. Hart, “A peece rather of good Heraldry, than of Architecture’: heraldry and the orders of architecture as joint emblems of chivalry,” Res: Aesthetics and Anthropology 23 (1993): 52–66, heraldry and classical architecture functioned, at least in Renaissance England, as complementary to each other; this is to overlook explicit indications of tension (including the quotation in the title) between the two domains, for all their shared chivalric associations and settings. Serlio, Libro extraordinario, Fig 29. Compare Machiavelli’s distinction between law and bestial force, and his subsequent discussion of political invention and imitation entirely in terms of the latter; Kahn, Machiavellian rhetoric, p. 23. Machiavelli’s major contemporary example of the successful manipulation both of force and the appearance of peace is clearly Julius II; The Prince, ed. A. Codevilla, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 67. There is no specific mention of architectural patronage, but the implication is clear. The multiplicity of panels in most of the Libro extraordinario portals (e.g., that on fol. 8 has four panels or cartouches in three different formats, as well as three mascheroni) distinguishes them from portals illustrated in earlier books, like the doric portal with rustication in Book IV, fol. 27, which boasts only a single panel, clearly in the form of a heraldic shield. L. Puppi, “Prospetto di palazzo e ordine gigante nell’ esperienza architettonica del 500,” Storia dell’arte 38/40 (1980): 273. A. Bruschi, “Michelangelo in Campidoglio e l’invenzione dell’ordine gigante,” Storia Architettura 4 (1979): 4: 7–28; Puppi, “Prospetto di palazzo e ordine gigante,” p. 267. Bruschi, “Michelangelo in Campidoglio.” For a reading of the Campidoglio as originally, if anything, an anti-absolutist project, see C. Burroughs, “Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: Artistic identity, patronage, and manufacture,” Artibus et Historiae 28 (1993): 85–111. On inlay work see Chapter 6.


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59. D.L. Drysdall, “Préhistoire de l’emblème: commentaires et emplois du terme avant Alciati,” Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 6 (1988): 29–44; M. Bregoli Russo, L’Impresa come ritratto del Rinascimento, Naples: Loffredo, 1990, p. 104. The term “emblem” was first used in print of a composite sign by Andrea Alciati in 1531; see H. Miedema, “The term ‘Emblema’ in Alciati,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 234–250; B.F. Scholz, “‘Libellum composui epigrammaton, cui titulum feci Emblemata’: Alciatus’s use of the term emblema once again,” Emblematica 1 (1986): 213–226. Alciati’s use of the term clearly grew out of earlier practices. 60. For a good recent discussion see C. Smith, “The winged eye, Leon Battista Alberti and the visualization of the past, present and future,” in Millon and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, pp. 452–455, with catalog entries 40–42. 61. The short prose work Anuli (“Rings”) is available in L.B. Alberti, Dinner pieces: a translation of the Intercenales, ed. D. Marsh, Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1987, pp. 210–217. Similar interests are evident in the Convelata (“Veiled sayings”), ibid., pp. 154–158. In general see Watkins, “L.B. Alberti’s emblem.” 62. T.C. Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio: the historian and the crisis of sixteenth-century Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 247–249. 63. K. Hoffmann, “Alciati und die geschichtliche Stellung der Emblematik,” in W. Haug, ed., Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie: Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1978, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979, pp. 515f., assesses the contrast between early modern emblems and medieval image types. 64. A. Petrucci, Public lettering: script, power, and culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 26. 65. F. Vuilleumier, “La rhétorique du monument: l’inscription dans l’architecture en Europe au XVIIe siècle,” Dix-Septième Siècle 39 (1987): 291–312. On Italian use of inscriptions in architecture, see A. Petrucci, Public lettering: script, power, and culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 16–51; M. Kiefer, Emblematische Strukturen in Stein: Vignolas Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna, Freiburg-im-Breisgau: Rombach, 1999. 66. On this aspect of Vitruvius’s doctrine, see G. Morolli and M. Barresi, L’architettura di Vitruvio: una guida illustrata, Florence: Alinea, 1988, pp. 20–26,29. 67. As suggested by A. Nova, “Bartolommeo Ammannati e Prospero Fontana a Palazzo Firenze,” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 21 (1983): 74, n.62. A famous quattrocento example is the Palazzo Medici in Florence, where the deployment of imprese on the facade coincided with their widespread occurrence in a range of architectural and nonarchitectural sites; see Chapter 5. 68. For the controversy about the intelligibility of early Renaissance “hieroglyphics,” see K. Lippincott, “The genesis and significance of the fifteenth-century Italian impresa,” in S. Anglo, ed. Chivalry in the Renaissance, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1990; pp. 49–76; her conclusion that imprese were easily accessible seems exaggerated, in view of the emphasis on social exclusivity current in the period. On the spatial character of the emblem, see G. Mathieu-Castellani, “The poetics of place: The space of the emblem,” Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 30–40; cf. W.J. Ong, “System, space and intellect in Renaissance symbolism,” in The barbarian within, and other fugitive essays and studies, New York: Macmillan, 1962, pp. 68–87; idem, “From allegory to diagram in the Renaissance mind,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17 (1959): 423–440. 69. For an excellent characterization of the “emblematic world view” see W.B. Ashworth, “Natural history and the emblematic world view,” in D.C. Lindberg and R.S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the scientific revolution, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 35f. 70. On Bramante’s Palazzo Caprini, see Chapter 7. 71. For the quattrocento background of Cinquecento theory and theoretically informed practice, see A. Belluzzi, “L’Opera rustica nell’architettura italiana del primo Cinquecento,” in M. Fagiolo, ed., Natura e artificio: l’ordine rustico, le fontane, gli autonomi nella cultura del manierismo europeo, Rome: Officina, 1979, pp. 98–102.

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72. Already in medieval Italian cities occasional house facades proclaim the commitments and even character of the proprietor. For the case of Giovanni d’Andrea see E.F. Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp. 64f.,74. A leading jurist at the University of Bologna, Giovanni closely identified himself with St. Jerome, even taking “di san Girolamo” as his name and, by 1334, having scenes from the saint’s life painted on the front of his house. 73. On the cautious return to notions of individualism in scholarship on early modern and/or Renaissance mentalities, see Wojciehowski, Old masters, new subjects, pp. 30–36. 74. D. Russell, The emblem and device in France, Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985, pp. 24,30. The customary term for the obverse of a medal was “faccia”; Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 554, no.11. This may have colored architectural terminology in a period of significant intersection between the two domains. 75. T.M. Greene, “Erasmus’s ‘Festina lente’: vulnerabilities of the humanist text,” in J.D. Lyons and S.G. Nichols, eds., Mimesis: From mirror to method, Augustine to Descartes, Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1982, p. 135. On the emblem as inherently dissimulative, see E.S. Watson, Achille Bocchi and the emblem book as symbolic form, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 91. 76. In the seventeenth century Claude Perrault commented that the love of a building resembled the passionate love of a face; O. Grabar, The mediation of ornament, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 40. I know of no exact antecedent, but the idea of architectural patronage as a kind of madness certainly occurs in the fifteenth century; see my From signs to design: Environmental process and reform in early Renaissance Rome, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990, p. 59. 77. Vitruvius, De architectura VI, preface (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 258f.). 78. Vitruvius, De architectura 2, preface (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 74–76); Hercules’s mythical achievements included works of engineering and building. On the Renaissance fortune of the story, see B. Reudenbach, “Die Gemeinschaft als Körper und Gebäude. Francesco di Giorgio’s Stadttheorie und die Visualisierung von Sozialmetaphern im Mittelalter,” in K. Schreiner und N. Schnitzler, eds., Gepeinigt, begehrt, vergessen: Symbolik und Sozialbezug des Körpers im späten Mittelalter und der frühen Neuzeit, Munich: Fink; 1992, 171–177. More explicitly, Vitruvius, ibid., 6, preface (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 258), condemns overly ambitious architects. 79. De architectura 3, preface (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 132f.). Vitruvius specifically applies the conception to artifices whose accomplishment otherwise might unjustly remain obscure, and denounces displays of flattery and charm that conceal and compensate for the lack of true knowledge. I have found no specific application of this passage in Renaissance architectural discourse, though it may have informed Vignola’s thinking, as reconstructed by Thoenes, “La Regola delli cinque ordini del Vignola,” pp. 96f.; cf. his “Architettura e società nell’opera del Vignola,” ibid, p. 112. 80. Vitruvius, De architectura 1,1 (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 23ff); L. Callebat, “Organisation et structures du De architectura de Vitruv,” in De Jongh, Munus non ingratum, pp. 34–38; E. Romano, La capanna e il tempio: Vitruvio o dell’Architettura, Palermo: Palumbo, 1990, pp. 47–80. On encyclopedic conceptions in the Renaissance, see A.H.T. Levi, “Ethics and the encyclopedia,” in F. Sharratt, ed., French Renaissance studies 1540–1570: humanism and the encyclopedia, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976, p. 175; F. Simone, “La notion d’encyclopédie,” ibid., p. 258, noting encyclopedic projects in Florence and Rome; J. Céard, “Encyclopédie et encyclopédisme à la Renaissance,” in A. Becq, L’encyclopédisme, Paris: Klincksieck, 1991, pp. 57–67. 81. Citing Norbert Elias’s work, Thoenes, “La Regola delli cinque ordini del Vignola,” p. 85, briefly notes the significance of architectural writing, especially that of Vignola, in the larger history of the “process of civilization.”


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82. On anthropometry in Vitruvius’s doctrine (as opposed to iconic anthropomorphism, ascribed to him by Renaissance readers), see Morolli and Barresi, L’architettura di Vitruvio, pp 29f., distinguishing between Vitruvius’s derivation of forms from the originary hut, and that of proportions from the human body. See also Reudenbach, “Die Gemeinschaft als Körper und Gebäude,” 171–177; H.W. Kruft, A history of architectural theory: From Vitruvius to the present, London: Zwemmer; New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994., p. 28; Burroughs “The building’s face,” pp. 7–9; Payne, Architectural treatise in the Italian Renaissance, especially p. 44. Perhaps scrupulously following Vitruvius, Alberti maintains a reserved attitude to anthropomorphism; see L. Freedman, “A theory of Doric and Ionic capitals in Quattrocento Italy,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 60 (1991): 151, citing a Russian publication of V.L. Zoubov. On Alberti’s fame as a mathematician and astronomer, see H. Biermann, “Die exempla in L.B. Albertis De re adificatoria,” in U. Ecker and C. Zintzen, eds., Saeculum tamquam aureum: Internationales Symposium zur italienischen Renaissance des 14–16. Jahrhunderts, Mainz: Olms, 1997, pp. 179f.. 83. Vitruvius, De architectura, 1,4–5 (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 24–27), spelling out the literary and historical knowledge required of an architect. 84. Vitruvius, I dieci libri dell’archittettura, tradotti e commentati da Daniele Barbaro, 1567, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1987, p. 30. The hero of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499) encounters two colossal sculptures of human beings that are also buildings, in which the various organs constitute rooms in “an anatomical theater”; Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia, p. 53. 85. G. Muratore, ed., Il Campidoglio all’epoca di Raffaello, Milan: Electa, 1984, p. 49. 86. For the notion of “empire,” see W.A. Rebhorn, The emperor of men’s minds: Literature and the Renaissance discourse of rhetoric, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. 87. See Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 67ff. On the idea of the building as modeled on the human body, i.e., the exemplary body of Christ, see C. Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism: Ethics, aesthetics, and eloquence, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 48–50, 190ff. 88. J.M. Ferrante, “Good thieves and bad thieves: a reading of Inferno XXIV,” Dante Studies 104 (1986): 83–98. In this crucial double canto, Dante lashes the thievery of his compatriots, giving particular attention to the merchants’ vice, usury. For general remarks on the term faccia and its cognates in the Divine Comedy, see M. Shapiro, Dante and the knot of body and soul, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, esp. p. 176. 89. Freedman, “A theory of Doric and Ionic capitals,” pp. 149–159. For the impact in architecture of the Aristotelian classification of character types, in the aftermath of the sixteenthcentury rediscovery of the Poetics, see H. Burns, “ ‘Quelle cose antique et moderne belle de Roma’: Giulio Romano, the theater and the antique,” in Tafuri, Giulio Romano – architect, p. 139. 90. Burroughs, “The building’s face,” p. 6, n.3. It is notable that Dante already uses the term faccia to mean an aspect, whether true or false, e.g., of the earth, when an apparent covering of snow turns out to be merely frost (Inferno, 24,13: “veggendo ‘I mondo aver cangiato faccia”); see F. Salsano, ad voc. “faccia,” Enciclopedia dantesca, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Treccani, 1970, 2: 776. 91. The locus classicus is, of course, the Book of the Courtier of Baldesar Castiglione. For the historical importance of this see W. Rebhorn, Courtly performances: Masking and festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978; A. Buck, “Baldassare Castigliones Libro del Cortigiano,” in idem, ed., Höfischer Humanismus. Acta humaniora, Weinheim: VCH, 1989, pp. 5–16; R.L. Regosin, “The name of the game/the game of the name: Sign and self in Castiglione’s Book of the courtier,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18.1 (1998): 21–47; P. Burke, The fortunes of the courtier: The European reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, University Park: Penn State Press, 1996. More broadly see P. Zagorin, Ways of lying: Dissimulation, persecution, and conformity in

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92. 93.

94.

95.

96.

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NOTES TO P. 32 early modern Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990; F. Whigham, Ambition and privilege: The social tropes of Elizabethan courtesy literature, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; E. Muir, “The sources of civil society in Italy,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1999): 379–406. The cause célèbre is of course the career of Martin Guerre; see N.Z. Davis, The return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. For a general account, see now U. Reisser, Physiognomik und Ausdruckstheorie der Renaissance: der Einfluss charakterologischer Lehren auf Kunst und Kunsttheorie des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Scaneg, 1997; cf. J. Pope-Hennessy, The portrait in the Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 3. The reception of Aristotelian rhetorical theory is important in this context; George of Trebizond, the great popularizer of Aristotle’s rhetoric in the fifteenth century, made the claim that “here [in Aristotle’s text], everything about the ways of men … is judiciously laid out, clearly explained, and suitably described, so completely that nothing is missing. Here we can peer into, not just the secrets of Nature … but even peer into the hidden minds of men, into the hidden emotions of men, and we can do so harmlessly.” See L.D. Green, “Aristotle’s rhetoric and Renaissance views of the emotions,” in P. Mack, ed., Renaissance rhetoric, London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, pp. 4f. D. Summers, “David’s scowl,” in W.S. Sheard and J. Paoletti, eds., Collaboration in Italian Renaissance art, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 113 (quoting Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura, Florence, 1514, p. 125): “We deduce the appearance of his palace from the status and character of a lord.” Interestingly, this implies the existence of a familiar hierarchy of residential types, associated with men of diverse social rank, on which an observer may draw when considering everything else that confers status. For such a hierarchy in Renaissance thought and practice, see Rosenberg, “Courtly decorations and the decorum of interior space.” M. Barasch, Imago hominis: Studies in the language of art, New York: New York University Press, 1994, pp. 42f.; he also, pp. 59–63, notes the use of the tragic mask as model for physiognomic exploration. Of course, the interest in “chirologia,” the decoding of gesture, remained important; see D. Knox, “Late medieval and Renaissance ideas on gesture,” in V. Kapp, ed., Die Sprache der Zeichen und Bilder: Rhetorik und nonverbale Kommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit (Ars Rhetorica, 1), Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990, pp. 22–28. See, e.g., the characterization of Leonardo’s portrait of “Mona Lisa” in A. Chastel, L’illustre incomprise, Paris, 1988, p. 101: “non plus la sourire du Quattrocento florentin, qui signifie une transparence de l’âme, mais une autre, celui de l’attente et de l’opacité, qui procède d’une froideur calculée.” On the association of portraits with general moral qualities, see L. Freedman, “The counter-portrait: the quest for the ideal in Italian Renaissance portraiture,” in A. Gentili, P. Morel, and C. Cieri-Via, eds., Il ritratto e la memoria: materiali, III, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993, pp. 62–63, with the qualifications advanced by L. Syson, Introduction, in N. Mann and L. Syson, eds., The image of the individual: portraits in the Renaissance, London: The British Museum Press, 1998, p. 190, n. 10; cf., G. DidiHuberman, “The portrait, the individual, and the singular: Remarks on the legacy of Aby Warburg,” ibid., pp. 165–188. For single sheets with printed images of facades, see J.K. Schmidt, “Zu Vignolas Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 13 (1967): 83–94. Serlio’s seventh book “On architectural accidents” contains recommendations on the refacing of existing buildings in up-to-date style; see Hart and Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, p.xxxi; S. Serlio, Tutte le opere, ed. G.C. Scamozzi, Venice: Franceschi, 1619, pp. 156f. P. Burke, The historical anthropology of early modern Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 12f.; E. Muir, “The Virgin on the street corner: the place of the sacred in Italian cities,” in S. Ozment, ed., Religion and culture in the


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Renaissance and Reformation, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 11. Kirksville, MO, 1989, pp. 28f. P. Auksi, Christian plain style: The evolution of a spiritual ideal, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995; P. Burke, “The repudiation of ritual,” in idem, The historical anthropology of early modern Italy, pp. 223–238; A. Carr, “‘Because he was a prince’: St. Leopold, Habsburg ritual strategies, and the practice of sincere religion at Klosterneuburg,” in D.A. Rutledge, ed., Ceremony and text in the Renaissance, Newark: Delaware University Press, 1996, p. 51. In a story, set in the Lateran basilica in Rome, in Poggio’s immensely popular Facetiae, a corpse spits out the wafer administered during the last rites because it was received in a state of insincerity; P. Bracciolini, Facetiae no. 229 (Opera omnia, Torino, Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964, 1:479). On Poggio’s attacks on monastic hypocrisy and merely external nobility, see E. Bigi and A. Petrucci, ad voc, Poggio Bracciolini, in A. Ghisalberti, et al., eds., Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 13, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1964, p. 644. Burke, “Repudiation of ritual,” pp. 233f. A striking example of the parade of sincerity is the impresa of Pier Candido Decembrio, an open book with the motto liber sum; A. Reynolds, “The private and public emblems of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et de la Renaissance 45 (1983): 274f., no. 8. Insincerity and dissimulation, associated with Renaissance court culture, were perhaps among the chivalric attitudes and behaviors revived in the fourteenth century; see G. Chiecchi, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare, Venice: Marsilio, 1994, p. 10. On the Circe story as evidence for witchcraft see G. Roberts, “The descendants of Circe: Witches and Renaissance fictions,” in J. Barry, M. Hester, and G. Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in early modern Europe: Studies in culture and belief, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 191. In a large literature on Nicodemism, see especially Zagorin, Ways of lying, p. 84f.; Carpo, La maschera e il modello, pp. 107–130. C. Ginzburg, “Titian, Ovid, and erotic illustration,” in Clues, myths, and the historical method, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, p. 79, distinguishes two “iconic circuits” in the period, one exclusive and the other socially undifferentiated. On the interest in classical theater and its implications for architecture, see Chapter 8. See especially the section “The semantics of play” in M. Tafuri, “Giulio Romano: language, mentality, patrons,” in idem, Giulio Romano, pp. 48–50. Tafuri evokes a “culture of play” in the sixteenth century, which he implausibly sees as existing within a wider, somewhat neoplatonist cultural horizon of commitment to ultimate truths and values, even in court milieus. Many essays in the volume touch on the role of architects, like Giulio, as court functionaries, and its implications. M. de Grazia, “The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece,” in idem, Quilligan, and Stallybrass, Subject and object in Renaissance culture, pp. 17–42. An excellent account of the more extreme manifestations of this tendency is S. Benedetti, Fuori dal classicismo. Sintetismo, tipologia, ragione nell’architettura del Cinquecento, Rome:, Multigrafica, 1984. There is an instructive contrast between the garden and villa designs of Pirro Ligorio (Villa d’Este, Casino di Pio IV), and his facade for the Palazzo Lancelotti in Piazza Navona. See G. Smith, The Casino of Pius IV, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pres, 1977, p. 25, emphasizing the “monotonous austerity” of the palace. Obvious examples of disparity between exterior and interior “facades” include the Villa Giulia and the Villa Medici. D. Cibelli, “The architectural title page in sixteenth-century Italy,” Ph.D. dissertation, Binghamton University, 1993. For the claim that the diffusion of printing transformed architectural discourse and practice alike, see M. Carpo, “The making of the typographical architect,” in Hart and Hicks, Paper palaces: The rise of the Renaissance architectural treatise, pp. 158–169.

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111. D. Peil, “Architectural motifs as significant or decorative elements in emblems and frontispieces,” in P. Daly and H. Böker, eds., The emblem and architecture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Brepols Press: Turnhout, Belgium, 1998, pp. 209–230. 112. On aedicula frontispieces in architectural treatises see Thoenes, “La Regola delli cinque ordini del Vignola,” pp. 87–97. 113. Vitruvius, De architectura 4, preface (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 166: “dignam et utilissimam rem putavi … disciplinae corpus ad perfectam ordinationem perducere et praescriptas in singulis voluminibus singulorum generum qualitates explicare” (my italics). See also ibid., 5, preface (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 204). 114. The problematization of the preface is central in J. Derrida, Disseminations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. On framing elements or parerga (including columns on a facade!), necessary yet considered extraneous to a work see idem, The truth in painting, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, esp. pp. 37–82. 115. I quote V. Wohl, Intimate commerce: Exchange, gender, and subjectivity in Greek tragedy, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998, pp. 42f. Wohl notes that “since tragedy is necessarily located at the site of the visible (the body or the prosopon, the face or the mask)” the Attic tragedians “extrapolated the interior male subject from external appearance (prosopon), physical actions, and reputation.” In correspondence Joseph Rykwert draws attention to the captatio benevolentiae frequent at the opening of ancient literary works, involving the dedication to a friend or patron; the examples known to me are far less elaborate than Renaissance usage. For an especially insightful account of the “paratextual” elements present in early sixteenth-century printed books and their self-conscious manipulation by a major writer concerned to determine the reception of his text, see S. Kinser, Rabelais’s carnival: Text, context, metatext, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, pp. 17–45. 116. L.O. Fradenburg, City, marriage, tournament: Arts of rule in late medieval Scotland, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 206: “The decorated body of the knight is a site wherein the coincidence of exteriority and inner virtue is pictured for the gaze.” 117. K. Dunn, Pretexts of authority: the rhetoric of authority in the Renaissance preface, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 6. 118. I quote Dunn, Pretexts of authority, p. 6. For a specifically Italian case of the tension between court and market culture, the predicament of Benvenuto Cellini, see J. Tylus, Writing and vulnerability in the late Renaissance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. 119. P. Burke, “Individuality and biography in the Renaissance,” in E. Rudolph, ed., Die Renaissance und die Entdeckung des Individuums in der Kunst: Die Renaissance als erste Aufklärung, II, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998, p. 70. According to Burke, the phenomenon begins in the late fifteenth century. 120. The obvious example is Brunelleschi’s project for a facade (or its negation) for the church of Santo Spirito; W. and E. Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, ein kunstgeschichtliches Handbuch, Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1953, 5:168ff., n. 36; H. Saalman, Brunelleschi, the buildings, University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993, pp. 373–377. In 1486 Giuliano da Sangallo pleaded with Lorenzo de’ Medici for the retention of Brunelleschi’s design for the front. For an especially striking characterization of Brunelleschi as a protomodernist see the chapter “Modern architecture and the eclipse of history,” in M. Tafuri, Theories and history of architecture, New York: Harper and Row, 1980, pp. 11–78. 121. Brunelleschi’s model, famously, was the Florentine Baptistery; for the correspondence of interior and exterior at the Baptistery and its imitation by Rossellino in the cathedral of Pienza see M. Bulgarelli, “La cappella Cardini a Pescia,” Ph.D. dissertation, IUAV, Venice, 1988, p. 79. On Alberti’s notion of lineamenta, see De re aedificatoria, I.1 (ed. Orlandi, 1:18–21; ed. Rykwert, p. 7); the idea of a consistent scale is crucial; see Rykwert’s note, ibid., p. 425. On “grammar” and “rhetoric” in architecture, see Burroughs, “Grammar and expression.”


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122. Under Lorenzo, “public politics and private palaces could not be separated”; F.W. Kent, “Palaces, politics, and society in fifteenth-century Florence,” I Tatti Studies 2 (1987): 69. On the ideal, mathematicized unity of the great Florentine palaces of the quattrocento see G.L. Hersey, Pythagorean palaces: Magic and architecture in the Italian Renaissance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976, p. 128; Hersey’s arguments have been implicitly confirmed by M.T. Bartoli, “Le caratteristiche geometriche e numeriche di Palazzo Medici,” in G. Cherubini, Giovanni and G. Fanelli, eds., II Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, Florence: Giunti, 1990, pp. 76–81. See also G. Morolli, “‘Concinnitas’ e tipi,” in idem, ed., L’architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Florence: Silvana, 1992, p. 266, insisting on “optical” rather than rigorously mathematical proportionality; Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” pp. 193f. and M. Lingohr, Der Florentiner Palastbau der Hochrenaissance: Der Palazzo Bartolini Salimbeni im seinem historischen und architekturgeschichtlichen Kontext, Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997, p. 197. 123. For palaces associated with or attributed to Brunelleschi, see E. Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi: The complete work, New York: Rizzoli, pp. 350–352. 124. The great humanist Poliziano made an important and, to his friend Lorenzo, convenient contribution to the politically charged issue of the identification of the founder, see C. Burroughs, “The altar and the city: Botticelli’s ‘mannerism’ and the reform of sacred art,” Artibus et Historiae 18 (1997): 9–40. 125. Early sixteenth-century Medicean palace projects for the Palazzo Navona in Rome and the Via Laura in Florence certainly embody the domus type. Though no evidence exists for its implementation, it is likely that the conception for a palace-villa project had existed under Lorenzo, as a suburban counterpart to the villa rustica at Poggio a Caiano. Certainly the extant villa suburbana of Lorenzo’s chancellor, Bartolomeo Scala, draws directly on Vitruvian precept. For recent discussion of the evidence see L.A. Pellecchia, “Designing the Via Laura palace: Giuliano da Sangallo, the Medici, and time,” in M. Mallett and N. Mann, eds., Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and politics, London: Warburg Institute, 1996, pp. 37–36, and “The patron’s role in the production of architecture: Bartolomeo Scala and the Scala palace,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 258–291; S. Borsi, “Il progetto del Palazzo Mediceo di via Laura,” in Morolli, L’architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, p. 85. 126. The geometry of the Palazzo Medici contributed more to the effect of magnificence than the rustication, according to Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” pp. 193f.; cf. Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 197. 127. In the famous model of the Palazzo Strozzi, an apparatus of separate, stacked parts representing the stories, suggests that the indication of the ground plan on each level was at least as important as the exterior treatment, which was frankly a supplement. Alternate designs for the upper part of the facade were explored through strips applied to the surface of the main model, but in all cases, the stringcourses run at the level of the window bases. See Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 202, Figs. 123,124. 128. H. Klotz, “Der Florentiner Stadtpalast: zum Verständnis einer Repräsentationsform,” in F. Möbius and E. Schubert, eds., Architektur des Mittelalters: Funktion und Gestalt, Weimar: Böhlau, 1983, pp. 307–343, notes that the skeletal structure of house fronts in Siena and Pisa enabled the attachment of sbalzi and sporti. Elsewhere, however, the screening facade appeared in a Gothic milieu; E. Arslan, Gothic architecture in Venice, London: Phaidon, 1971, pp. 21–25. 129. Frommel, “Introduction. The drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger,” pp. 21ff., suggests that Bramante introduced the Gothic combination of interior and exterior views into Roman practice. On the persistence of this “mixed” method see Thoenes, “Vitruvio, Alberti, Sangallo,” p. 164. According to Manfredo Tafuri, transparency became the objective, or result, of design procedures used by Jacopo Sansovino and Giulio Romano, who though working in the North were formed in Florence and/or Rome; M. Tafuri, “Giulio Romano and Jacopo Sansovino,” in S. Polano, ed., Giulio Romano: atti del Convegno

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132. 133.

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NOTES TO PP. 36–37 Internazionale di Studi su “Giulio Romano e l’espansione europea del Rinascimento,” Milan: Electa, 1989, pp. 77–87. Hart and Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, p. 5. Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 205f., demonstrates the political resonances of successive fashions in palace architecture from the era of Lorenzo to the autocracy of Cosimo I. The major architect of the revived republic of 1494–1512 was Simone del Pollaiuolo (d. 1508), known as “Il Cronaca” for his rather pedantic enthusiasm for all’antica detail (e.g., a famous cornice for the Palazzo Strozzi), which he combined with fidelity to a severe, overtly Brunelleschian manner, both in sacred architecture and, almost certainly, in a group of highly influential palace facades, notably the Palazzo Dei-Guadagni, of 1503–6. C. Elam, ad voc., “Cronaca,” Dictionary of art, London: Macmillan, 1996, 8: 197f., sees Simone’s own Savonarolan piety as a factor in his attitude to design. This point is made by Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 206. The antique sources are different: the Rucellai facade is derived from the superimposed orders of such buildings as the Colosseum; the Cancelleria facade echoes the triumphal arch schema. The two-story facade of the Palazzo Pandolfini presents superimposed rows of impressive aedicular windows integrated into a complex composition of layered planes and wall strips, forming emphatic all’antica horizontal and vertical accents. Boldly projecting stringcourses mark the division of the upper and lower zones, and provide a footing for the pedestals supporting the columns of the great window aediculae of the piano nobile, while a second, less prominent stringcourse runs at the level of the window bases. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1:107, emphasizes Raphael’s taste for “horizontalism” rather than any concern with technical issues. See also P.N. Pagliara, ad voc., in C.L. Frommel et al., eds., Raffaello architetto, Milan: Electa, 1984, pp. 189–195. Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 213, insists on the Roman character of the Palazzo Pandolfini, but it seems likely that Cardinal Pandolfini was concerned to emphasize his Florentine lineage as much as his position in the court of Pope Leo X, and that the combination of an effect of transparency and rich though dignified ornamentation was intended to reconcile Florentine and Roman fashions. For a concise account of Antonio’s oeuvre and style see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau,1: 41ff.; idem, “Living all’antica: palaces and villas from Brunelleschi to Bramante,” in Millon and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, p. 199. There is still no better analysis than that of J.S. Ackerman, The architecture of Michelangelo, rev. ed., Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 176f., in the course of a discussion of the Palazzo Farnese. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1:122. The arrangement recalls important Florentine palaces, notably the Palazzo Pazzi (1458–69; see E. Mandelli, Palazzi del rinascimento dal rilievo al confronto, Florence: Alinea, 1989, pp. 138–145) and numerous Trecento facades. This type of palace facade recurs in buildings designed by Giovanni Mangone; see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 3: 44,250 (Palazzi Baschenis and Massimo di Pirro). C. Rowe, “Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Maccarani and the sixteenth-century grid/frame/lattice,” in idem, As I was saying: Recollections and miscellaneous essays, ed. A. Caragonne, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996, pp. 125,131: because of “contrary systems of organization” a building becomes “something like a skin which simultaneously both conceals and discloses the musculature and the bone structure lying behind it.” Rowe associates the practice with the work of Giulio Romano (like Sangallo, a follower of Raphael) and Vignola. Frommel, “Introduction: the drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger,” pp. 21ff., insists on Raphael’s commitment to a correlation between interior and exterior; this is the context of his introduction of Gothic design/drawing method as a lurking paradigm. However, Frommel, “Raffaello e gli ordini,” p. 121, himself notes Raphael’s institution of a contrast between exterior and interior through disparities of column type and, presumably, associated connotations. In the Palazzo Branconio, moreover, the relatively simple,


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apparently Tuscan order used on the exterior to articulate the commercial ground floor originally appeared in a hierarchical relationship with the richer Doric order of the courtyard. On the drawings, attributed to Giulio Romano, for the courtyard of the Palazzo Branconio, see C.L. Frommel, catalog entry in idem, Raffaello architetto, p. 289. R. Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991, p. 50, notes that in the 1556 edition of his Vitruvius translation and commentary, Daniele Barbaro publishes a plan of the typical Roman domus that is unmistakeably based on the Palazzo Farnese. The author of the plan was probably Palladio. At the Palazzo Baldassini, this is a matter of suggestion, even deceit! By pushing the corner forward into the street, Sangallo creates the effect of a cubic block otherwise concealed in the surrounding urban fabric. For an excellent analysis of Sangallo’s approach, see C.L. Frommel, “The Roman works of Giulio,” in Tafuri, Giulio Romano – architect, p. 78, contrasting Sangallo’s preference for design consistency or even uniformity on different fronts of a building with Giulio Romano’s willingness to set dissonant facades side by side. Vitruvius, De architectura VI.7 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 277), deals briefly with the entrance of a domus, noting that the door surround should be in accordance with the prescriptions for the design of temple doors according to the order employed in the temple design as a whole (ibid., IV.6, pp. 191f.). The choice of the order for the entrance seems to require consistency with the order used elsewhere in the house. Ackerman, The architecture of Michelangelo, p. 177, compares Sangallo’s procedure at the Palazzo Farnese with a modernist curtain wall. P. du Prey, The villas of Pliny: From antiquity to postmodernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 62f. C. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance garden: From the conventions of planting, design and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century Italy, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990, especially pp. 272f. H. Bredekamp, Vicino Orsini und der heilige Wald von Bomarzo: ein Fürst als Künstler und Anarchist, Worms: Werner, 1985, 1:64, on Orsini’s Epicureanism and the conception of his bosco as a representation of the gardens of Epicurus. On the mask see Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance garden, p. 142. Bredekamp, Vicino Orsini und der heilige Wald von Bomarzo, 1:164–167, noting the concealment behind it of place of levity and feasting. For “hell” as an analogue of carnival, see Kinser, Rabelais’s carnival, p. 53, with reference to Nürnberg. Possibly the idea was more widespread, or the much-traveled Vicino Orsini knew of it. Classical accounts of the spaces imaginatively traversed in recollection evoke the sequential spaces of the domus; F.A. Yates, The art of memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 3.

Chapter 2. Domestic Architecture and Boccaccian Drama 1. G. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. V. Branca, 2nd ed., Turin: Einaudi, 1984, pp. 526–533. 2. For the fifteenth-century reception of the Decameron see D. Marsh, “Boccaccio in the Quattrocento: Manetti’s Dialogus in symposio,” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 338; J.M. Ricketts, “Illuminating metaphors: The tale of Tancredi, Ghismunda, and Guiscardo,” in her Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on illustrations of the Decameron, from Giotto to Pasolini, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 58. On Giovanni Della Casa and the theory of civil conversation in the sixteenth century see di Benedetto’s introduction to Prose di Giovanni Della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del comportamento, ed. A. di Benedetto, Turin: UTET, 1970, p. 16, n.7. 3. For correspondences in the Decameron between the articulation of the narrative and that of the spaces, especially the domestic environment and passages and thresholds accessing it, in which the narrative is set, see Ricketts, Visualizing Boccaccio, pp. 32–58, esp. 49–51.

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4. The play of courtly and mercantile/urban culture in the Decameron has been much discussed; see, e.g., G. Padoan, “Mondo aristocratico e mondo comunale nell’ideologia e nell’arte di Giovanni Boccaccio,” in idem, II Boccaccio: le Muse, il Parnaso e l’Arno, Florence: Olschki, 1978, pp. 1–91. Scaglione, Knights at court, p. 214, suggests that Boccaccio, “born to a more open society, [was] struggling against the feudal social fetters that had shaped an illustrious literary tradition.” 5. Boccacio, Decameron, ed. Branca, p. 532, n.3. As it happens, the brothers, fearing that their crime might become known in Messina, escape to Naples. 6. J. R. Lupton, Afterlives of the saints: Hagiography, typology, and Renaissance literature, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. See the chapter “Old wine in new skins: the Decameron and secular literature,” ibid., pp. 85–109. 7. Lupton, Afterlives of the saints, p. 95; cf. Boccacio, Decameron, ed. Branca, p 6. G. Mazzotta, The world at play in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 30–32, stresses the claim of the book as a therapy for the melancholy of lovesickness in women, who were unable to undertake the vehement physical exercise recommended for men, and so suffered more seriously from “morbid fears and concealed passions” by their seclusion “without any diversion in the gloom of their chambers.” 8. M.O. Boyle, Loyola’s acts: The rhetoric of the self, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 160. The story of Dina is at Genesis 34: 1–2. There were many patristic and patriarchal glosses on the passage, notably in Jerome’s letter to his young female follower Eustochium, advising her to remain locked in her room; Select letters of St. Jerome, ed. F.A. Wright, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954, p. 109. A remarkable image of Dina in a highly moralized urban environment is a painting by Giuliano Bugiardini (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) showing painters at work on images from Genesis, notably the Creation of Eve and the Fall, on the facade of a city hall, while a group of “respectable” women is shown to the left in front of a figure of abundantia and a forbidding palace. See M. Ferretti, “‘Casamenti seu prospective’: le città degli intarsiatori,” in C. De Seta, M. Ferretti, and A. Tenenti, eds., Imago urbis: dalla città reale alla città ideale, Milan: F.M. Ricci, 1986, p. 92. 9. According to J.C. Brown, “A woman’s place was in the home,” in M.W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N.J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The discourses of sexual difference in early modern Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 215, “The confinement [of women] to domestic spaces had started much earlier [i.e., than the Renaissance], growing gradually over the course of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries, until they were barred even from attending the funerals of their kinsmen.” 10. On the ambivalence informing Boccaccio’s treatment of both courtly and bourgeois themes and characters in the Decameron – and, indeed, in Boccaccio’s own attitudes and ambitions – see now A. Scaglione, Knights at court: Courtliness, chivalry, and courtesy from Ottonian Germany to the Italian Renaissance, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 212–217. 11. G. Chiecchi, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare, Venice: Marsilio, 1994, p. 154, characterizes the Lisabetta story, with its emphasis on mercantile calculation, as a bourgeois pendant to tales that turn on the issue of aristocratic honor. 12. For M. Cottino-Jones, Order from chaos: Social and aesthetic harmonies in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982, p. 76, the pot of basil symbolizes “the private world.” For a fourteenth-century patrician woman, needless to say, this private space was largely coterminous with the house, if not with an inner part of it. 13. Recent scholarship on enclosed religious women (anchorites) has been lively and extensive: see, notably, R.M. Bell, Holy anorexia: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 14. Alberti interprets symbols on signet rings in his intercenale “Rings” (Anuli) in idem, Dinner pieces, ed. D. Marsh, Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1987, pp. 210–217. The plant itself is referred to a “bassilico salernetano,” a term that Branca explains as a corruption of selemontano (Decameron, ed. Branca, p. 530, n.10). It is worth noting, however, that the first character introduced in the opening tale of Day Four is the proud and tragic Prince of Salerno, an


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19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

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important Norman fief (ibid., p. 471, n.4), who kills his daughter and her lover, but finally gives them burial in a lovers’ tomb. His turn to repentance and regret contrasts sharply with the conduct of Lisabetta’s unfeeling brothers. Lisabetta’s basil of Salerno, then, evokes the chivalric ethos and setting of other tales of Day Four. From a Renaissance perspective, the theme resonates with Lorenzo de’Medici’s famous emblem of the sprouting stump of laurel; see P. Ventrone, ed., ‘Le Tems Revient’ – ‘II Tempo si Rinuova’: Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449–1492). Milan: Amilcare Pizzi Editore, 1992. Lupton, Afterlives of the saints, p. 100; Boccacio, Decameron, p. 550, cf. p. 16. Lupton, Afterlives of the saints, pp. 88–93, discusses both the older reading, established by Petrarch and continuing into the twentieth century, of the Griselda story as a redemptive episode within the work as a whole with more recent readings emphasizing the equivocations and ironies that figure in this story too. In her conclusion to the chapter, Lupton, p. 108f., characterizes the Decameron not “as the sublation of hagiography but as its symptom,” and writes of the intensification of religious paradigms through secularization. Of course, non-Christian moral ideas are also influential here; on, e.g., Aristotelian and Ciceronian paradigms see Scaglione, Knights at court, p. 215. Dante, Paradiso, canto 15, 97ff. The poet imagines a city as an organic community formed of citizens whose loyalty for their city and each other has not been corroded by luxury. Dante’s text is ironically taken up by Boccaccio, Decameron, 6.9, a “nostalgic evocation of the Florence of old” (Mazzotta, World at play, p. 67), though, as Mazzotta notes, Boccaccio also stresses the estrangement of the main figure of this novella, the Epicurean poet Guido Cavalcanti, from contemporary society. R.A. Goldthwaite, The building of Renaissance Florence: An economic and social history, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 353, states that “the improvement of the Florentine worker’s standard of living immediately after 1348 is a notable – and dramatic – fact in the social history of the city.” The workers’ expectation of higher wages could be satisfied because of the demand for Florentine luxury goods. The population decline occasioned by the plague is estimated at between one-half and one-third (ibid., p. 334). According to G.E. Brucker, Renaissance Florence, rev. ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983, p. 26, there was a marked housing surplus following the plague, and rents did not again rise until the 1360s. Brucker, Renaissance Florence, p. 26. Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, p. 13, sees the emergence of “a distinct architectural form” for urban residences of the elite as a phenomenon of the second half of the fourteenth century, though he subsequently (p. 14) mentions the year 1400 as a watershed. D. Friedman, Florentine new towns: Urban design in the late middle ages, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, pp. 216–220, quotation from p. 218. The case for a trend toward the nuclear family is argued by Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, pp. 103–108; idem, “The Florentine palace as domestic architecture,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 977–1012. For the contrary view (persistence of traditional extended household structures), see F.W. Kent, “Palaces, politics, and society in fifteenth-century Florence,” I Tatti Studies 2 (1987): 41–70, and “II palazzo, la famiglia, il contesto politico,” Annali di architettura 2 (1991): 59–72, summing up much earlier research. Both positions, especially Goldthwaite’s, evoke an architecture that dissembles the life within. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VIII.5 (ed. Orlandi and Portoghesi, 2:698f.; ed. Rykwert, p. 257). Marsh, “Boccaccio in the Quattrocento,” p. 338. For a good recent discussion of this, see M. Casini, I gesti del principe. La festa politica a Firenze a Venezia in età rinascimentale, Venice: Marsilio, 1996, pp. 122–125. Casini, Gesti del principe, p. 125: “E chiaro che solo esprimendo al massimo livello il carattere di una civitas ricca, serena, religiosa, ordinata, la festa patronale può essere in grado di costruire un volto aristocratico e onorevole al ceto mercantile.”

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27. R. Rainey, “Dressing down the dressed up: reproving feminine attire in Renaissance Florence,” in J. Monfasani and R.G. Musto, eds., Renaissance society and culture: Essays in honor of Eugene F. Rice, New York: Italica, 1991, pp. 217–238; M.J. Rocke, Forbidden friendships: Homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 28. Auksi, Christian plain style, pp. 91, 98. 29. Auksi, Christian plain style, p. 124, citing Augustine, De doctrina christiana, ed. and trans. D.W. Robertson, New York, 1958, p. 163: “the subdued style … does not come forth armed or adorned, but as it were, nude, and in this way crushes the sinews and muscles of its adversary.” 30. Boccacio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 29; see also Chiecchi, Giovanni Boccaccio e il romanzo familiare, p. 130. 31. In other words, not just a moral code was at stake here but also the customs of female association and mutual support in certain situations involving the care of the body. An especially important example is the birthing process, which in images of the birth of the Virgin and other saints generally takes place in a space filled with and presumably presided over by women. I refer here to unpublished studies of Laura MacCaskey, doctoral candidate at Binghamton University. 32. Boccacio, Decameron, ed. Branca, p. 48: “O quanti gran palagi, quante belle case, quanti nobili abituri … rimaser voti!” 33. M. Scalini, “The Chivalric ‘Ludus’ in Quattrocento Florence,” in C. Acidini Luchinat, ed., Renaissance Florence: The age of Lorenzo de’ Medici 1449–1492, Milan and Florence: Edizioni Charta, 1993, p. 62. I am grateful to Domenico Zanre for this reference. R. Lightbown, Botticelli: Life and work, New York: Abbeville, 1989, p. 152, points out that the female figure in Botticelli’s Pallas and the centaur (he identifies her as the Italian virgin huntress Camilla) of c. 1482, carries the attribute of a guard (the halberd) and refuses entrance to a sacred place to a centaur, an obvious figure of lust. Lightbown emphasizes the dilapidated fence in the background, without mentioning the much more prominent rock face, which evokes a rusticated palace, perhaps the haunt of nymphs, from which the centaur is barred by a “servant of Diana.” Chastity and sexual vehemence engage in conflict, then, at the entrance of a palace, figured as a space of female virtue. The painting itself, in situ, marked an important interior threshold. 34. T.M. Greene, Besieging the castle of ladies, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1995. 35. For Lorenzo’s manipulation of the festive economy, see N. Carew-Reid, “Feste e politica a Firenze sotto Lorenzo il Magnifico,” Quaderni medievali 24 (1993): 24–55. On Platonism within the political culture and ideological framework of the period, see A. Brown, “Platonism in fifteenth-century Florence,” in eadem, The Medici in Florence: The exercise and language of power, Florence: Olschki, 1992, pp. 215–246.

Chapter 3. Between Opacity and Rhetoric 1. The fundamental study of the dynamic of “honor” and calculation in the Florentine mercantile elite is that of Richard C. Trexler, notably in Public life in Renaissance Florence, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1980, especially pp. 76f. See also M. Casini, I gesti del principe: la festa politica a Firenze e Venezia in età rinascimentale, Venice: Marsilio, 1996, p. 122. On the spread of courtly fashions among the Florentine bourgeoisie see F. Cardini, “Concetto di cavalleria e mentalità cavaleresca nei romanzi e nei cantari fiorentini,’ in D. Rugiadini, ed., I ceti dirigenti nella Toscana tardo comunale, Florence: Papafava, 1981, pp. 157–192. 2. C. Klapisch-Zuber, “Ruptures de parenté et changements d’identité chez les magnats florentins du XIVe siècle,” Annales ESC 42 (1988): 1205–1240; F. Cardini, “Symbols and rituals in Florence,” in A. Molho, K. Raaflaub, and J. Emden, eds., City states in classical antiquity


3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

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and medieval Italy, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991, p. 502. For a general account of the political and social roles of aristocrats in Florence, see S. Raveggi, “Gli aristocratici in città: considerazioni sul caso di Firenze,” in J.-C. Maire-Vigueur, ed., D’une villa à l’autre: structures matérielles et organisation de l’espace dans les villes européennes (XIIIe–XVIe siècle), Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1989, pp. 69–86. The city government enjoined this public display of private wealth and possessions, including the women; Trexler, Public life in Renaissance Florence, pp. 247–249. Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, XV, 97–102 (spoken by Dante’s heroic ancestor Cacciaguida); “Firenze dentro dalla cerchia antica/ … /Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica./Non avea catenella, non corona,/ Non gonne contigiate, non cintura/Che fosse a veder più che la persona” (translation mine). Dante goes on (XV,106) to mention the “empty houses” (“case di famiglia vuoti”) of his own time, perhaps already referring to buildings too large and sumptuous for their inhabitants, i.e., as facades dissimulating the life within; see note to The Divine Comedy, 3. Paradise, ed. D.L. Sayers and B. Reynolds, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962, p. 196. Dante’s assertion that the adulteration of a native population is a key factor in moral decline seems echoed by Alberti, De re aedificatoria VII.1 (ed. Orlandi, 2:535; ed. Rykwert, p. 191) on the effect of peregrinorum contagia. On sumptuary laws in Florence, see Rainey, “Dressing down the dressed up: Reproving feminine attire in Renaissance Florence”; C. Kovesi Killerby, “Practical problems in the enforcement of Italian sumptuary law, 1200–1500,” in T. Dean and K. Lowe, eds., Crime, society and the law, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 99–120. For a wider perspective see D. Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary laws and social relations in Renaissance Italy,” in J. Bossy, ed., Disputes and settlements: law and human relations in the west, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 69–99. On the continuing fashion for literary forms apparently inconsistent with the ideology of sumptuary laws see Cardini, “Concetto di cavalleria e mentalità cavaleresca.” M. Dachs, “Zur ornamentalen Freskendekoration des Florentiner Wohnhauses im späten 14. Jahrhundert,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 37 (1993): 83, cites a passage in a sermon preached in 1303 by an eminent Dominican reproaching the people of Florence, inter alia, for the immoderate expense on the decoration of houses. Beyond Florence, courtly imagery was conspicuous even in the decoration of seats of republican government; see, e.g., C.J. Campbell, The game of courting and the art of the commune of San Gimignano, 1290–1320, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. The famous image of Good Government in the city hall of Siena includes chivalric lifestyles in its panorama of an idealized city republic; see L. Partridge and R. Starn, Arts of power: Three halls of state in Italy, 1300–1600, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992, p. 55. The “genial accommodation of diversity” at Siena (ibid., p. 50) was apparently not paralleled at Florence. Koniger, “Die profanen Fresken des Palazzo Davanzati in Florenz,” p. 278; cf. Dachs, “Freskendekoration,” p. 107. Koniger, “Die profanen Fresken,” pp. 251f.; Dachs, “Freskendekoration,” pp. 77f. On the loss of medieval houses, many containing wall paintings, in the Mercato Vecchio area in the nineteenth century, see Dachs, pp. 80–83. Dachs, “Freskendekoration,” p. 75, on the so-called Stanza della Castellana. Francesco di Tommaso Davizzi married Catelana degli Alberti, scion of a family noted for displays of chivalric prowess, especially in the years from c.1380 to 1391. According to Trexler, Public life, p. 229, these constituted a deliberate challenge to the regime. The discussion is much indebted to M. Trachtenberg, The dominion of the eye: Urbanism, art, and power in early modern Florence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. L. Macci and V. Orgera, Architettura e civiltà delle torri: torri e famiglie nella Firenze medievale, Florence: Edifir, 1994.

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13. Such legislation was first introduced in 1250, during the “primo popolo,” the initial and, for the moment, temporary phase of the guild government; see G.L. Maffei with G.F. Caniggia, and V.L. Orgera, La casa fiorentina nella storia della città dalle origini all’ottocento, Venice: Marsilio, 1990, p. 170. 14. C. Romby, “Norme e consuetudini per construire nella Firenze del Quattrocento,” in F. Gurrieri, ed., La città del Brunelleschi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1979, pp. 93–99; V.L. Orgera, “De aedificiis communibus”: fonti e problemi dell’edilizia minore a Firenze, Florence: EDIFIR, 1995, p. 15. Known as the Ufficio di Torre only from 1549, the Ufficio dei Sei was instituted at the end of 1293 and included the Ufficio dei beni dei ribelli, the office responsible for confiscated properties. In the revision of the city statutes in 1355, the magistracy was confirmed, and the number of officials raised to eight, i.e., two for each quarter, in accordance with the reform of the administrative division of the city. On the display of the truncated towers as symbolic of the incorporation of the nobility into the new polity see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 265f. 15. As suggested by Sinding-Larsen, “A tale of two cities: Florentine and Roman visual context for fifteeth century palaces,” p. 168. 16. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 92f. 17. N. Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, 1298–1532: Government, architecture, and imagery in the civic palace of the Florentine Republic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 8f. The presence of the Foraboschi tower in the foundations of the palace tower is noted in Villani’s chronicle; see Rubinstein, cit., p. 10, n.51. 18. For purchases made from the Foraboschi, see Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, pp. 9f., n.43. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 251, suggests that the connotations of forced demolitions (i.e., those of Uberti property) carried over to later, uncoerced cases. According to Trachtenberg, “What Brunelleschi saw: monument and site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47(1988): 16–25, the tower was projected only following the completion of the great bell in 1307. On collective memory in the context of urban transformation, see C.M. Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and urban development in Renaissance Ferrara, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 5. 19. As noted by Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 275. 20. On this and what follows see Baxendale, “Exile in practice,” pp. 720–756, also n.7. The loggia was probably built around the time of the funeral of Messer Nicolaio Alberti, celebrated in 1377 with particular magnificence. This followed closely on the foundation at the end of the Ponte Rubaconte of the Oratory of the Madonna della Grazia by Messer Jacopo di Caroccio degli Alberti in 1374; see L. Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence: Their history and art, Firenze: Cassa di risparmio di Firenze, 1985, 2:617, and discussion in a later section. The event must have occasioned lavish ceremonies and celebrations. 21. Baxendale, “Exile in practice,” pp. 729ff. 22. By contrast, at least one major Alberti residence was destroyed in the aftermath of the Ghibelline victory of Montaperti in 1260; see Orgera, De aedificiis, p. 24. 23. As suggested by H. Bauer, Kunst und Utopie: Studien über das Kunst-und Staatsdenken in der Renaissance, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965, p. 16f. The late thirteenth-century guild regime profited from the lease of property confiscated from Ghibelline clans; Orgera, De aedificiis, p. 18. 24. D. Friedman, Florentine new towns: Urban design in the late Middle Ages, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, and New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1988. 25. Three major public projects involved the installation of uniform ground-floor facades: the space around the Baptistery (1336f); the Via delle Fondamenta around the north and east of the cathedral (1379–81, 1388–9), and the Via dei Calzaiuoli between the cathedral complex and the Piazza della Signoria (1389); see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 32, 67f., 156; cf. D. Friedman, “Palaces and the street in late-medieval and Renaissance Italy,” in J.W.R.


26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

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Whitehead and P.J. Larkham, eds., Urban landscapes: International perspectives, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 92. For orientation on the political history of Florence between the Ciompi revolt and the Medici coup see Brucker, Renaissance Florence, pp. 137–160. The developments in secular architecture in the period are well discussed by N. Rubinstein, “Palazzi pubblici e palazzi private al tempo di Brunelleschi (Problemi di storia politica e sociale),” in G. De Angelis D’Ossat, ed., Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il suo tempo, Florence: Centro Di, 1980, pp. 27–36. For the claim that the architectural elaboration of late-medieval palaces contributed more to the enhancement of the “face” of the city than to the glorification of individual clans, see H. Klotz, “Der Florentiner Stadtpalast: zum Verständnis einer Repräsentationsform,” in F. Möbius and E. Schubert, eds., Architektur des Mittelalter: Funktion und Gestalt, Weimar: Böhlau, 1983, p. 317. Orgera, “De aedificiis,” p. 10, notes a fourteenth-century turn from “capricciosi segni” on houses to a more uniform pattern of marks of ownership. Klotz, “Der Florentiner Stadtpalast,” p. 317, contrasts Florence mainly with Siena and Pisa. B. Preyer, “The ‘chasa over palagio’ of Alberto di Zanobi: A Florentine palace of about 1400 and its later remodelling,” Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 389, notes local cases of standardization of elite residences. On the tendency to standardization in ordinary housing, see F. Sznura, “L’abitazione privata nel quadro dell’edilizia minore fiorentina: limiti ed esperienze (XII–XV secolo),” Ricerche storiche 16 (1986): 461. The consistency between elite and ordinary housing in Florence is emphasized by Maffei, La casa fiorentina, p. 196, though his claim seems exaggerated, p. 53, that Florence shifted from being a “serial” city to one defined by polarization only in the fifteenth century. Friedman, “Palaces and the street”; idem, “II palazzo e la città: facciate fiorentine tra XIV e XV secolo,” in S. Valtieri, ed., II palazzo dal rinascimento a oggi, In Italia, nel regno di Napoli, in Calabria, Rome: Gangemi, 1989, pp. 101–111. In recent scholarship, the work of Norbert Elias has assumed crucial importance. For his argument that modern civility emerged from the particular attitudinal climate of the early modern court, marked by self-restraint and the regularization of norms of conduct; see the chapter “Towards a theory of civilizing process,” in N. Elias, Power and civility, New York: Pantheon, 1982, pp. 229–336. On the legacy of Elias, see W. Reinhard, “Disciplinamento sociale, confessionalizzazione, modernizzazione. Un discorso storiografico,” in P. Prodi, ed., Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna, Bologna: il Mulino, 1994, pp. 101–124. Against Elias, D. Knox, “Disciplina: the monastic and clerical origins of European civility,” in J. Monfasani and R.G. Musto, eds., Renaissance society and culture: essays in honor of Eugene F. Rice, New York: Italica, 1991, pp. 107–136, places the roots of civility in medieval monasticism. It is at least as likely that Italian late medieval city states were a crucial arena for the elaboration of new standards of conduct. The emergence in Florence itself of a culture of calculation and self-control has been well studied; see the classic accounts of C. Bec, Les marchands écrivains, affaires et humanisme à Florence, 1375–1434, Paris: La Haye-Mouton, 1967; M. Baxandall, Painting and experience in fifteenth-century Italy: A primer in the social history of pictorial style, 2nd ed., Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. On the suppression of “deviancy,” see Rocke, Forbidden friendships: Homosexuality and male culture in Renaissance Florence. From the early fifteenth century, the Venetian state took comparables measures against sodomy, as noted by E. Crouzet-Pavan, “La ville et ses villes possibles: sur les expériences sociales et symboliques du fait urbain,” in Maire-Vigueur, D’une ville à l’autre, p. 675. On the sumptuary laws of Florence, see earlier. Generational tension is a major theme of Trexler, Public life; see, e.g., p. 367. J.C. Brown, “Woman’s place was in the home: Women’s work in medieval Tuscany,” in M. Ferguson, ed., Rewriting the Renaissance: The discourses of sexual difference in early modern

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34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

NOTES TO PP. 58–62 Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 206–226. On the explicitly gendered division of exterior and interior in early modern residential architecture, see C. Anderson, “A gravity in public places: Inigo Jones and classical architecture,” in L. During and M. Wigley, eds., Gender and architecture, Chichester and New York: Wiley, 2000, pp. 7–28, dealing with the introduction of Italian models into England. Trexler, Public life, p. 225, notes that women’s as well as men’s festive brigades had existed in early fourteenth-century Florence, but that the former survived into the fifteenth century only “embalmed in the reveries of Boccaccio.” The term is from P. Fumerton, Cultural aesthetics: Renaissance literature and the practice of social ornament, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; see especially the chapter “Exchanging gifts: the Elizabethan currency of children and romance,” ibid., pp. 29–66. On women and children as “ornaments” in Florence see Trexler, Public life, p. 249. B. Preyer, “L’architettura del palazzo mediceo,” in G. Cherubini and G. Fanelli, eds., Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, Florence: Giunti, 1990, p. 62. Her exact term is pietra forte, the robust stone used in Florence for exterior walls. Brunetto attributes the hostility to Dante within Florence to: “quell’ingrato popolo maligno,/Che discesse di Fiesole ab antico,/E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno.” Brunetto also suffered banishment (he was among the Guelphs exiled after the battle of Montaperti). See B. Ceva, Brunetto Latini, l’uomo e l’opera, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. For the importance of Ser Brunetto’s compilation as a source and organizational model for medieval republican imagery, see Partridge and Starn, Arts of power, pp. 39f. Preyer, “The ‘chasa over palagio’ of Alberto di Zanobi,” p. 389, notes cases of consistent facade construction on the part of adjacent families. In Florence itself this would be the case under the crypto-principate of Lorenzo and, even more, the overt monarchy of Cosimo I. See Trexler, Public life, p. 496f. On the Palazzo della Signoria as an emblem of romanitas, see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 256; idem, “Scénographie urbaine et identité civique: réflexion sur la Florence du Trecento,” Revue de l’art 102 (1993): 16. As Trachtenberg suggests, the probable model for the palace was the “Palace of Nerva,” the rear wall of the Forum of Augustus (discussed later as a crucially important paradigm in the fifteenth century). Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 133f.; Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” p. 92. On the Muro dei Pisani, see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 137f. For this and other feudal castles, notably that of the Guidi dynasty of Poppi, in relation to the development of Florentine secular architecture, see Klotz, “Florentiner Stadtpalast,” pp. 336–339. Many such enclaves, accessed through great arches, appear in the Bonsignori view of 1584; R. Goldthwaite, “The Florentine palace as domestic architecture,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 981. A prominent and enduring example is the enclave of the Peruzzi family on the site of the ancient amphitheater at the Piazza S. Croce; for the clan’s maintenance of architectural and social solidarity, see D.V. and F.W. Kent, “A self-disciplining pact made by the Peruzzi family of Florence (June 1433),” Renaissance Quarterly 34 (1981): 337–355. A document of 1453 refers to the restoration of the family loggia; ibid, p. 346, n.29. Ginori-Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 2:55lf.; B. Preyer, “Two Cerchi palaces in Florence,” Renaissance studies in honor of Craig Hugh Smyth, Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1985, 2: 615. Klotz, “Florentiner Stadtpalast,” p. 13. Klotz even asserts that “Flachrustika” became the most common wall treatment from the end of the fourteenth century. His main example, the Palazzo Canigiani, was not built until the mid fifteenth century; H. Saalman, “Tommaso Spinelli, Michelozzo, Manetti, and Rossellino,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26 (1966): 161. Klotz does not mention the assertive, neonaturalistic style connected by Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” pp. 186f., 191, n.2, with the Via de’ Calzaiuoli and other buildings of the last decade of the fourteenth century and later, including the Palazzo Da Uzzano. Sinding-Larsen himself, p. 180, notes examples of flat rustication


48. 49. 50.

51.

52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

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already between the 1350s and 1370s, and tentatively hypothesizes, p. 188, a fashion for coated facades setting in before the end of the fourteenth century, presumably linked with a general absence of rustication of any kind “during the two or three decennia preceding the construction of the Palazzo Medici.” Begun in the 1330s, the gridded pavement was extended to the whole square in the 1380s; Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 94;151. Friedman, Florentine new towns, pp. 117–148. On the neonaturalistic style, e.g., on the Via dei Calzaiuoli facades, and at the Palazzi Salviati and Giandonati, see Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” p. 187f.; on its ideological aspect see ibid., p. 191. The self-conscious opposition of facade styles occurred c.1450 with the construction of the Palazzo Canigiani next to the Palazzo Da Uzzano in the Via de’ Bardi, well illustrated by Maffei, La casa fiorentina, pp. 122f. On the date of the Palazzo Canigiani see Saalman, “Tommaso Spinelli, Michelozzo, Manetti, and Rossellino,” p. 161. On Dominici see M.D. Reeve, “Classical scholarship,” in J. Kraye, ed., The Cambridge companion to Renaissance humanism, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 34. On Salutati see R. Witt, Hercules at the crossroads: The life, works, and thought of Coluccio Salutati, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VIII.5 (ed. Orlandi, 2:699; ed. Rykwert, p. 257), clearly refers to the building of towers as a fashion of an earlier age. He presents the shift from wood to stone architecture as part of his own experience; ibid., VIII.5: “quantas urbes totas asserulis compactas pueri videbamus, quas nunc marmoreas reddidere!” (ed. Orlandi, 2:699; ed. Rykwert, p. 257). The reference to “marble” must be hyperbole. A. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, preceduta dalla Novella del Grasso, ed. D. De Robertis with introduction and notes by G. Tanturli, Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1976, p. 54. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 9. For an exhaustive classification of varying types of stone surface treatment used in Florence over a period of 150 years, see Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” 163–212. On Sinding-Larsen’s assignment of an ideological dimension to particular styles in rustication, see earlier. For binary division as characteristic of the medieval palace front, see Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” p. 88. He claims that it became a compositional principle in the late fourteenth century, with the state-sponsored redevelopment of the Via dei Calzaiuoli and Via delle Fondamenta (where sporti were rigorously excluded from the rebuilt facades). See also G. Caniggia, “La casa-corte mercantile. Definizioni ed enunciati,” in Maffei, La casa fiorentina, p. 81. Mandelli, Palazzi del rinascimento, pp. 52f., operates with a triadic classification of facade types – munito, fiorito, and misto. The latter appears, e.g., at the Palazzo Pazzi (ibid., p. 145), in evident allusion to older binary facades along the Borgo degli Albizzi (Borgo San Pier Maggiore). Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” p. 92. Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” p. 192: “necessity was turned into a virtue.” The Palazzo Davanzati, which has two superimposed piani nobili of the same height, may occupy an important place in this development; Koniger, “Die profanen Fresken,” p. 246; E. Mandelli, Palazzi del rinascimento, dal rilievo al confronto, Florence: Alinea, 1989, pp. 58,92. Wachs, “Freskendekoration,” pp. 72–74, notes the abundance of rooms of comfort and style, but avoids the term piano nobile. Yet this palace, for all its unaccustomed breadth (five window axes wide on the upper stories) still has the vertical character of a tower house, as noted by Mandelli, p. 90, and lacks the binary logic that marks the major houses of the next generation, such as the Palazzi Alessandri and Da Uzzano, discussed later. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” pp. 86–88; Orgera, De aedificiis, p. 53. Patrician houses with side jetties include the Palazzi Davanzati (Davizzi) and Cocchi. In the latter case a grand Renaissance facade distinguished, unusual in Florence, by the use of the

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63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

NOTES TO PP. 65–72 architectural orders on the upper part, extends laterally to the edge of the jetties overhanging the sidestreets on both sides; M. Bucci, Palazzi di Firenze. Quartiere di Santa Croce, Florence: Vallecchi, 1971, pp. 97f. For the jettied facade of the Palazzo dell’ Antella on the Piazza S.Croce, see Bucci, pp. 99–105. Bucci, “Architettura a Firenze,” in idem, Palazzi di Firenze. Quartiere di Santa Croce, pp. 12f.; Maffei, Casa fiorentina, pp. 81,171f. A case in point is the palazzo Giandonati of the later fourteenth century; see G. and C. Thiem, Toskanische Fassaden-Dekoration in Sgraffito und Fresko, 14. bis 17. Jahrhundert, Munich: Bruckmann, 1964, p. 52, n.2. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” pp. 88f.; Orgera, De aedificiis, p. 70, n.10. According to Friedman, legislation against sporti first issued in 1295, was renewed during the late fourteenth-century redevelopment of the center of the city. Friedman also notes a highly remunerative tax on sporti that undermined the laws against them, except in specific areas of interest to the government, when specific ordinances were passed. He suggests that a general ban on sporti existed in the fourteenth century, but that it was largely disregarded, though there was a tendency for sporti to disappear from the fronts of houses, but not from the sides facing onto alleys. According to Orgera, however, a statute of 1299 banned sporti in new streets, but only in the sixteenth century were general ordinances issued (1532 and 1540) forbidding either new construction of jetties or the repair of those in existence. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” p. 93f. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” p. 88, notes several examples, notably the Palazzo Gianfigliazzi. See also Maffei, La casa fiorentina, p. 171. Thiem and Thiem, Toskanische Fassaden-Dekoration, p. 51. For medieval references to the “marking” of palaces, as well as other items, with insignia, see C. Frugoni, A distant city: Images of urban experience in the medieval world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 97. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” pp. 88f., stresses the view of Florence of 1342 at the Bigallo and the streetscapes by Masolino and Masaccio, evoking an austere ancient city, in the Brancacci Chapel of c.1425. The Bigallo view presents the imago urbis as a whole by means of abstraction from signs of particular allegiances and forms of self-identification, such as still clustered thickly and around the nearby Baptistery; Sinding-Larsen, Tale of two cities, p. 188. The frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, within the great mendicant church of the Carmine, variously satisfy the requirements of decorum: the narrated events did not occur in Florence (even if, as often, an equivalence is suggested, or even asserted, between the setting of the narration and the narrative setting), while the paintings evoke the originary, “primitive” church, e.g., through the architecturally suggestive group of apostles encircling Christ in the Tribute Money, and in the scenes of St. Peter’s pastoral work. On stylistic plainness as a virtue associated with early Christianity, see, in general, Auksi, Christian plain style, and M. Meiss, “Scholarship and penitence in the early Renaissance: the image of St. Jerome,” in idem, The painter’s choice: Problems in the interpretation of Renaissance art, New York: Harper and Row, 1976; pp. 189–202. Sinding-Larsen, “Tale of two cities,” p. 182. Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 2: 665–72; N. Rubinstein, “Palazzi pubblici e palazzi privati,” pp. 30f. Maffei, La casa fiorentina, pp. 122–124. Orgera, De aedificiis, p. 24; B.Preyer, II Palazzo Corsi-Horne: dal diario di restauro di H.P. Horne. Rome: Instituto poligrafico e zecca dello Stato, 1993, pp. 13–19. W. and E. Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1954, 3: 3–7; Preyer, Palazzo Corsi-Horne, pp. 26–27. The octagonal building is clearly visible in the Chain View of Florence, suggesting it was conspicuous enough to dominate the lower Via de’ Benci and the bridge area; it was erected before 1384 by Jacopo di Caroccio degli Alberti, who himself provided the design, identified by a contemporary as an imitation of the Holy Sepulcher.


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75. M. Bucci and R. Bencini, Palazzi di Firenze, Florence: Vallecchi, pp. 47–51. The authors, p. 49, even compare the palace formally to an extant Alberti residence (between Corso dei Tintori and Borgo S. Croce). See also Chapter 4. 76. The binary contrast of upper and lower sections of house fronts was especially emphatic in the many cities in which porticoes were customary or even the result of statutory prescription; on the famous case of Bologna, see F. Bocchi, “Un simbolo di Bologna: i portici e l’edilizia civile medievale,” in M. Miglio and G. Lombardi, eds., Simbolo e realtà della vita urbana nel tardo medioevo, Manziana, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1993, pp. 119–132. The requirement to build a portico occurs in the statutes of 1288, issued by a popular regime triumphant over aristocratic adversaries (Bocchi, p. 127). After 1506 the absence of a portico became a familiar status symbol of the new elite allied with the papal government (Bocchi, p. 132). 77. For the identification see F. Toker, “Gothic architecture by remote control: an illustrated building contract of 1340,” Art Bulletin 67 (1985): 67–95; cf. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” pp. 94f. 78. Toker, “Gothic architecture by remote control,” p. 76, noting that the use of stone for the ground floor of a palace was rather old-fashioned in Siena. 79. V. Biermann, Ornamentum: Studien zum Traktat ‘De re aedificatoria’ des Leon Battista Alberti, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1997. 80. The most famous example is Giotto’s grisaille images of Justice and Injustice in the Arena Chapel in Padua. The figures are enthroned, Justice in a Gothic structure, while Injustice’s ruined throne is in Romanesque (or Roman?) style. Reflecting the patron’s interest, Giotto specifically connects Justice and Injustice with typically mercantile interests and concerns in predella scenes, beneath the enthroned personifications, manifesting their operation in the world of human experience. The thrones have the architectural form of city gates, evoking the urban matrix of the emergence of a world of peace and profit. For a critique of the interpretive tradition, which goes back to Boccaccio, that Giotto’s imagery is essentially a “valorization of the visible world,” see Partridge and Starn, Arts of power, p. 47. Finally, the architecture of the symbolism is no less suggestive than the symbolism of the architecture: Giotto’s superimposition of an allegorical image over a narrative predella exemplifies a familiar hierarchy of abstract or ideal over “real” that resonates distantly with the binary facade type. 81. The image of an idealized Siena in Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government prominently includes construction in progress. 82. An ordinance of 1297 required windows in palaces overlooking the Campo (including the main facade of the Palazzo Sansedoni) to be modeled on the three-light windows recently installed in the Palazzo Pubblico; Toker, “Gothic architecture by remote control,” p. 76. 83. Lingohr, Der Florentiner Palastbau der Hochrenaissance, pp. 2f., n. 113. See also Chapter 4.

Chapter 4. The Facade in Question 1. G. Tanturli, “Rapporti letterari del Brunelleschi con gli ambienti letterari fiorentini,” in G. De Angelis D’Ossat, et al., eds., Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il suo tempo, Florence: Centro Di, 1980, 1: 130. 2. A recent attempt to define a consistent artistic personality for Brunelleschi has resulted in the exclusion from his oeuvre of one of the most important – and in most critics’ view – characteristic buildings, the Pazzi Chapel: see M. Trachtenberg, “Michelozzo and the Pazzi Chapel,” Casabella 61 (1997): 56–75. 3. Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” pp. 130–135; he notes, p. 130, that “l’umanesimo cittadino si era indotto, volente o nolente, a comporre l’epigrafe funebre dell’architetto” (Carlo Marsuppini, chancellor of Florence, composed the epigraph). 4. D.F. Zervas, “Filippo Brunelleschi’s political career,” The Burlington Magazine 121 (1979): 630–639; eadem, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello (I Tatti Studies, 8), Locust Valley, NJ: Augustin, 1987, pp. 93f.

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5. Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” pp. 125,130. Alberti also may have conducted, more subtly, a polemic against Niccoli, who appears to be the model for the vain pedant Libripeta in the intercenale Corolle; see R. Cardini, “Satira e gerarchia delle arti: dall’Alberti al Landino,” in idem, Mosaici, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990, pp. 54f. 6. Zervas, Parte Guelfa, p. 94, emphasizes that Brunelleschi had been “on the fringes of the reggimento.” 7. B. Preyer, “L’architettura del palazzo mediceo,” in G. Cherubini, and G. Fanelli, eds., II Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, Florence: Giunti, 1990, pp. 58–75. For a critique of Preyer’s arguments see Trachtenberg, “Michelozzo and the Pazzi Chapel,” p. 74, n.17, whose ideal contrast between the two architects is undermined somewhat by Brunelleschi’s late exedrae for the cathedral, carefully accommodated to their context by means of colored marble. Trachtenberg does not mention the work of Maria Teresa Bartoli, discussed later. 8. The crucial contribution is that of Howard Burns, notably his “Quattrocento architecture and the antique: some problems,” in R.R. Bolgar, ed., Classical influences on European culture, AD 500–1500, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 269–287. 9. H. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi: the buildings, University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993. See, e.g., his concluding remarks, p. 422. 10. A. Bruschi, “Note sulla formazione architettonica dell’Alberti,” Palladio 3rd series, 25 (1978): 6–44. 11. For a discussion of Burchiello’s circle in relation to Brunelleschi and Alberti, see Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” pp. 126–128, and my “Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture: Alberti and Brunelleschi,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 34 (1998): 39–63, greatly dependent on Tanturli. Subsequent to Tanturli’s article important research on Burchiello and his milieu has been published; see, e.g., A. Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo rinascimento(1375–1449), Rome, 1991; A.K. Smith, “Fraudomy: reading sexuality and politics in Burchiello,” in J. Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 84–106; A. Toscano, “II Polisenso della parola nel Burchiello,” Forum Italicum 10 (1976): 360–376. I am grateful to Alan Smith for orientation in the literature on Burchiello. 12. On the association of the reggimento with classicizing artistic tendencies see especially Zervas, Parte Guelfa, p. 94. 13. Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” pp. 127f.; E. Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Milan: Electa, 1989, pp. 321–327. 14. V. Hoffmann, “Brunelleschis Architektursystem,” Architectura 1 (1971): 54–71; idem, “L’origine del sistema architettonico del Brunelleschi,” in Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e il suo tempo, 2: 447–458. 15. A. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, ed. D. De Robertis with an introduction by G. Tanturli, Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1976, p. 65; cf. Tanturli, “Rapporti,” p. 129. Manetti reports of Brunelleschi’s architectural studies in Rome that “parvegli conoscere un certo ordine di membri e d’ossa.” Manetti’s biography was of course written several decades after Brunelleschi’s death in 1446 and the composition, at about the same time, of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria. For the hypothesis of an Albertian origin see Tanturli’s note to Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 65, n.1. I have discussed the issue more fully elsewhere; see Burroughs, “Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture,” pp. 51–53. 16. C. Burroughs, “The altar and the city: Botticelli’s ‘mannerism’ and the reform of sacred art,” Artibus et Historiae 18 (1997): 9–40. 17. Saalman, Buildings of Brunelleschi, p. 421, notes various features common both to Brunelleschi’s work and major examples of medieval public architecture, in many cases designed by Arnolfo or at least by his office. Saalman does not mention Arnolfo, however. 18. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 86, quoting a contract of 1420 between Brunelleschi and the relevant authorities; it is noteworthy that the term gonfiato, strikingly put to use by Alberti in the preface to his Della Pittura, already occurs. The document uses the term faccie


19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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27.

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in describing the position of the subsidiary ribs invisible from the exterior, i.e., the great building is conceptualized as transparent. Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 5: 553 no.4 (including cases of this usage from the fifteenth century). Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 54. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 54: “e volendo murare Apolonio Lapi suo consorto la casa … assai vi s’adoperò Filippo; e vedesi che v’é drento assai del buono, del comodo, e del piacevole; ma era circa a’ que’ tempi molto rozzo el modo del murare, come si può vedere pe’ muramenti fatti da quivi a dietro.” On the evidence of the extant fabric, see P. Sanpaolesi, Brunelleschi, Milan: Edizioni per il Club del libro, 1962, p. 35, using the term atrio of the space designed by Filippo. Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi, pp. 76–78,350–352, reviews the evidence of Brunelleschi’s activity as a palace builder. We have only Manetti’s word for it that Brunelleschi worked on the Lapi house. Of course, if he did accept commissions for residential projects, especially in his earlier career, it is probable that they would have been for political enemies of the Medici. Therefore, either Brunelleschi himself, after Cosimo’s coup, or Manetti, probably writing in the aftermath of the Pazzi conspiracy (1478), would have had reason to underplay them. It is interesting that a persistent tradition, dating back to Vasari, identified Brunelleschi as the architect of the grandiose palace of the unsuccessful conspirator Jacopo Pazzi, even though this was not begun until 1458; see Mandelli, Palazzi del Rinascimento, pp. 138f. Brunelleschi was paid in 1429 for work in the Palazzo della Signoria, see Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, p. 24; on the Parte Guelfa see Zervas, Parte Guelfa, pp. 93f. Koniger, “Die profanen Fresken,” pp. 257,259. The extant painting in the Stinche prison has been variously attributed, e.g., to Giottino (by Vasari), Taddeo Gaddi, and Orcagna; on the debate see Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, p. 16, n.106. It is based on a lost original, an image painted on the tower of the Palazzo del Capitano (Bargello) in 1343, soon after Walter’s expulsion on July 16, 1342. See D. Norman, “‘The glorious deeds of the Commune’: civic patronage of art,” in D. Norman, ed., Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, society and religion 1280–1400, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995, 1: 141. Though entirely speculative, my suggestion is consistent with Diane F. Zervas’s conjecture (Parte Guelfa, p. 94) that Brunelleschi actively lobbied to convince the political elite of the merit of his schemes. A documented case is his advocacy of the notoriously disastrous plan to effect the capture of Lucca through an artificial flood. Zervas focuses on Brunelleschi’s membership in government committees, but it is surely also likely that he exploited both his own artistic talent and the elite’s interest in an appropriate domestic setting. Tanturli, “Rapporti del Brunelleschi,” p. 129, attributes the poem to Antonio Pucci and implausibly understands it as a parody of the Brunelleschian idea of the structural membering of architecture as a skeletal system. It is easily accessible in G. Ponte, ed., Il Quattrocento (Classici italiani), Bologna: Zanichelli, 1966, p. 435 (Domenico di Giovanni, detto il Burchiello, Sonetti, VII). By permission Zanichelli editore. Andando la formica alla ventura, Giunse dove era un teschio di cavallo, Il qual le parve senza verun fallo Un palazzo Real con belle mura: E quanto più cercava sua misura si gli parea più chiaro che cristallo; E si, diceva, egli è più bello stallo Ch’al mondo mai trovasse creatura. Ma pur quando si fu molto aggirata,

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31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

NOTES TO PP. 84–86 di mangiare le venne gran disio, E non trovando, ella si fu turbata; E diceva “Egli è pur meglio che io ritorni al buco dove sono usata, che morte aver; però mi vo con Dio.” Cosi voglio dir io: La stanza è bella, avendoci vivanda; Ma qui non è, s’alcun non ce ne manda. I paraphrase the title of A. Vidler, The architectural uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. For this debate, between F.W. Kent and Richard Goldthwaite, see Chapter 3. This boom was, in part, a response to incentives offered by the state to prospective house builders; for the major legislation see Goldthwaite, Building of Renaissance Florence, p. 17, though he doubts its effect. The legislation was repealed in 1494. For the date of the Palazzo Busini, see H. Klotz, Filippo Brunelleschi: The early works and the medieval tradition, New York: Rizzoli, 1990, p. 162, n.27, referring to the catasto entry of 1427. Given the probable duration of the building works, Klotz argues that the date of commencement should be pushed back a few years. It is not improbable, however, that the brothers embellished an existing palace in the years following 1427, especially given the inducement in the new tax system to palace construction. On the architectural historical significance of the palace see B. Preyer, “L’architettura del palazzo mediceo,” p. 63; Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 176. According to Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, p. 609, n.94, “the palace plays a fundamental role in the history of secular architecture.” On the typology of the courtyard see A. Tönnesmann, Der Palazzo Gondi in Florenz, Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1983, p. 8. Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 2: 609, n.94. Other than the Casa Lapi, Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 103, mentions only one private palace design by Brunelleschi, that for Nicolò Barbadori, whose support for the project soon collapsed following his imprisonment for fraud. The house was conspicuously situated at the head of the Ponte Vecchio; no other evidence confirms Manetti’s assertion that the little work done there displayed particular inventiveness. In the recent literature, views on the attribution of the palace to Brunelleschi divide according to nationality: Italians are more likely to accept the attribution (e.g., Ginori Lisci, Bartoli, Bucci, but not Battisti), non-Italians to reject it (Heydenreich/Davies, Klotz). In his monumental monograph of 1993, indeed, Howard Saalman does not even mention the Palazzo Busini, which he had earlier attributed to Michelozzo; H. Saalman, “The Palazzo Comunale in Montepulciano: An unknown work by Michelozzo,” Zeitschift für Kunstgeschichte 28 (1965): 34,40. This is seconded and developed with an excellent formal analysis of the building (but not the facade!) by Klotz, Brunelleschi, pp. 57–65. For the redevelopment of the area of the second circle, see Orgera, De aedificii, p. 15; V. Franchetti Pardo, Storia dell’urbanistica dal Trecento al Quattrocento. Bari: Laterza, 1982, p. 169. Klotz, Brunelleschi, p. 39, calls the facade “typical of the late Trecento.” Generally the facade is dated either to the 1420s, notably by scholars interested in upholding Brunelleschi’s authorship of the palace as a whole (e.g., Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 1:609), or after Agnolo Bardi’s purchase of the house in 1483. For the latter, see especially Preyer, Il palazzo Corsi-Horne, p. 47, n.2. It is true that palace facades of the type of the Palazzo Busini were common toward the end of the century; Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 173, 205f.. Nevertheless, in my view correctly, Lingohr, p. 206 with n.111, assigns an early date to the Busini facade. Brenda Preyer has herself argued that the catasto of 1427, limiting real estate taxes to buildings with commercial functions, encouraged the disappearance of shops from palace facades; “The ‘chasa over palagio’ of Alberto di Zanobi: a Florentine palace of about 1400 and its later remodelling,” Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 393. The presence of several shops in


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38.

39.

40.

41.

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the Palazzo Busini is documented in 1485, though it is unclear how they correspond to those currently in the building. Further, it is highly unlikely that the Busini arms, still mounted on the corners, would have survived a thoroughgoing remodeling. The records document extensive work on the house after 1483, including the roof, but do not mention the facade. Finally, the obvious inconsistencies on the facade at street level may indicate the incorporation of diverse structures into a single palace in the 1420s, rather than a reconstruction in the 1480s. It occurs in a few extant fifteenth-century residences, none of the size and pretension of the Palazzo Busini. For the Palazzo Morelli see Thiem and Thiem, Toskanische FassadenDekoration in Sgraffito und Fresko, p. 58, n.10. The Thiems date the facade as a whole to the “early fifteenth century” but observe that some features, notably the portal, seem to belong to the mid-century. Apparently, the palace received its present appearance around the same time as the Busini brothers were engaged in the reconstruction of their residence, situated in the same neighborhood. Noting certain architectural elements and tendencies common to the housing of different social classes, G. Caniggi, “La ‘casa a schiera’: definizioni ed enunciati,” in Maffei, Casa fiorentina, p. 196, calls for the study of palace architecture within its wider urban context. G.L. Maffei, La Casa fiorentina nella storia della città dalle origini all’ottocento, Florence: Marsilio, 1990, pp. 242f. On the wider tendency to overall plastered facades see also G.C. Romby, Per costruire ai tempi di Brunelleschi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1979, p. 63. On the latter, see M. Bucci and R. Bencini, Palazzi di Firenze, vol.1. Quartiere di Santa Croce, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973, p. 86. Bucci sets this palace in a line of descent from the Palazzo Quaratesi (perhaps a reference to the Palazzo Busini, with which this was often confused) and the Palazzo Pazzi, where he suspects a Brunelleschian plan. For Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 168, the architectural separation from contiguous arcading was a mark of the emergence of the Renaisance palace. In view of the prevalence of arched openings in palaces of the reggimento period and of the occurrence of openings apparently always plugged with a plastered wall, Brenda Preyer argues that they had significance as formal markers, perhaps through reference to the arcades of the Via de’ Calzaiuoli remodelling (it seems to me also likely that an open volto or vaulted space in the ground floor of a palace could be used or even set aside for ceremonial or festive as well as commercial functions). See B. Preyer, “The ‘chasa over palagio’ of Alberto di Zanobi: A Florentine palace of about 1400 and its later remodelling.” Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 387–401, pp. 392f. A more immediate model was the coherent series of arches in the nearby Peruzzi and Alberti houses (a possible model, as Preyer notes, for the Via de’ Calzaiuoli). If so, the symbolic associations of particular forms along the Via de’ Benci were reinforced if not determined through spatial contiguity. This of course makes the Palazzo Busini even more remarkable. Friedman, “Palaces and the street,” p. 94. The principle of coherence is enunciated in a contemporary note on a drawing of a facade of early fifteenth-century style; see Battisti, Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 351, relating it to prescriptions in (later) treatise literature. There is no reference to neighboring buildings, or to the effect when seen from the street. For Alberti’s preference for suburban houses that combine the convenience of the city and the salubriousness and beauty of the country, see De re aedificatoria IX.2 (ed. Orlandi, 2:791; ed. Rykwert, pp. 294f.). In his account of different kinds of thoroughfare, Alberti contrasts the major streets of a city, which should be wide and straight, with meandering secondary streets, offering shade and aesthetic variety, as well as security for their residents, especially in blind alleys, which ensure privacy by baffling intruders. See De re aedificatoria IV.5, ed. Rykwert, pp. 106f.; ed. Orlandi, 1:307. These passages are consistent with the recurrent praise of modesty and restraint in the treatise, as also in Alberti’s Della famiglia; R.N. Watkins, ed., The family in Renaissance Florence: A translation of I libri della famiglia by Leon Battista Alberti, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969, pp. 192f.

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44. While emphasizing the use of rustication (bozze) in certain major Florentine palaces of the fifteenth century, Vasari notes its absence on the facade of the Palazzo Tornabuoni, which he attributes to Michelozzo and considers an externally more modest version of the Palazzo Medici, fashioned in “maniera ordinaria.” The palace was built 1466–69 in connection with the marriage in 1466 of the patron, Giovanni Tornabuoni, to Francesca Pitti, daughter of Luca; it was transformed beyond recognition in succeeding centuries. See Giusti, Edilizia in Toscana dal XV al XVI secolo, p. 43; Ferrara and Quinterio, Michelozzo di Bartolommeo, pp. 375–377; Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 30,270. In the same district the Palazzo Antinori (front tract of 1461–69) has a similar unitary facade of all-over flat rustication; see Mandelli, Palazzi del Rinascimento, pp. 105–119; Bucci, Palazzi di Firenze, 3:55. Constructed by the merchant Giovanni Boni, it passed c.1475 into the possession of Lorenzo il Magnifico, who yielded it immediately to his close associates Carlo and Ugolino Martelli. The palace thus became an appropriately dignified as well as deferential satellite of the Medicean center of power. The architectural interest of the palace is gained through its “island” site between alleys, its location as a fondale along a major street leading from the cathedral, and the subtle gradation of the size of the façade blocks. The height of the ground floor, unusual for a fifteenth-century palace, may indicate (Mandelli, p. 10) the incorporation of earlier fabric. 45. The so-called Palazzo Pazzi “della Congiura,” attributed to Brunelleschi in the older literature, was built in 1458–69, long after Brunelleschi’s death. See Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 2: 545, n.81; Mandelli, Palazzi del Rinasscimento, pp. 138f. 46. Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 2:547. 47. Zervas, Parte Guelfa, appendix 1a, no.3, pp. 233f. A list of property destroyed on June 22, 1378, includes a house at the entrance of the Ponte alle Grazie and opposite one of the Alberti houses. In July, the Peruzzi houses were among a number attacked; ibid., p. 236, n.6. 48. Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, p. 173. The model seems to have been the courtyard of the Palazzo della Signoria. 49. Lingohr, Florentinischer Palastbau, p. 174, sees the vogue enjoyed by this facade type between 1494 and 1512 in terms of a conscious, ideologically motivated rejection of the Medici palace type. An early, securely dated example is the portal of the Palazzo Gerini (Neroni), of c.1450; P. Ruschi, “Conferme Michelozziane per il Palazzo di Dietisalvi Neroni a Firenze,” in G. Morolli, ed., Michelozzo, scultore e architetto (1396–1472), Florence: Centro Di, 1998, pp. 215f. 50. Ginori Lisci, The palazzi of Florence, 1:612, 51. For a succinct and lucid account of the political factions in late trecento and early quattrocento Florence, see D.F. Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello, Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1987, p. 18. The Busini are described as one of the stalwart popolani families by L. Martines, The social world of the Florentine humanists, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 56. In the 1427 catasto, Tommaso di Niccolò del Buono Busini is named as the thirty-first wealthiest man of the S. Croce quarter, with a capital of 6,576 florins; his brother Buono is in the thirty-ninth position with 5,360 florins: Martines, appendix 2, p. 366. 52. For the relative economic prominence of Tommaso and Buono di Niccolò del Buono Busini in the S. Croce quarter in 1427 see previous note. No other family members appear in the list of affluent residents published by Martines, Social world, appendix 2, p. 366, on the basis of the 1427 catasto. Tommaso and Buono are clearly the brothers for whom the palace was built – or remodeled – a few years later. Their father Niccolò del Buono had enjoyed a prominent political career; Martines, pp. 158–159, notes that he held office thirty-six times between 1392 and 1413. In the citywide list of those paying the prestanze in 1403 he appears in thirtyeighth place; see Martines, p. 353. 53. Martines, Social world, p. 57, n.144, cites the elder Busini as an example of the exaggerated and self-conscious concern with family genealogy that he sees as a marked phenomenon of


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the early fifteenth century and “a landmark on the way to the aristocratic society of the sixteenth century.” In the third book of the Della Famiglia, Alberti makes his kinsman Giannozzo Alberti a proponent of the virtues of self-sufficiency; see Watkins, The family in Renaissance Florence, esp. p. 177: “A man wants to live for himself, not for others.” In the early 1420s, for example, Michelozzo was probably already associated with the Medici, e.g., working on a small church in the Mugello, an area long dominated by the Medici; see Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy, ed. Davies, p. 25. He went into exile with Cosimo in 1433–44. This suggests that the Busini benefited from good relations with Giovanni di Bicci, if not with Cosimo himself. For astute characterizations of Michelozzo’s approach to design, see Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 151; M. Trachtenberg, “Michelozzo and the Pazzi Chapel,” Casabella 61 (1997): 56–75. M.T. Bartoli, “Le caratteristiche geometriche e numeriche di Palazzo Medici,” in Cherubini and Fanelli, Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, pp. 76–81. The most notorious case is an ecclesiastical project, the basilica of Santo Spirito, where Brunelleschi’s radical conception of exterior bulges corresponding to interior apsidal chapels was soon abandoned; see Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi: The buildings, pp. 364,375f.; S. Borsi, Giuliano da Sangallo: i disegni di architettura e dell’antico, Rome, Officina: 1985, esp. pp. 338–345. At the secular Parte Guelfa complex, the inscription of interior proportions and spatial relations on the exterior has the effect of graphic images on the smooth ground of a tightly jointed ashlar surface; Saalman, pp. 330–337. Giovanni Tanturli dates the biography to c.1480. See his introduction to Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. xxxv. Biermann, Ornamentum, p. 145, n.56. On Alberti’s use of the metaphor, see Chapter 5. Giovanni Tanturli suggests that the passage in question draws on Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, which had been in circulation for over two decades before Manetti wrote the biography; see Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 65, n.1. W.J. Ong, S.J, “System, space and intellect in Renaissance symbolism,” in The barbarian within and other fugitive essays and studies, New York, Macmillan, 1962; idem, “From allegory to diagram in the Renaissance mind,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17 (1959): 423–440. Grendler, Schooling, pp. 115f. See also Burroughs, “Grammar and expression,” p. 52. K. Jensen, “Humanist reform of Latin,” in J. Kraye, ed., Cambridge companion to Renaissance humanism, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 69; Grendler, Schooling, p. 169. The earliest direct and explicit humanist attack on the older grammatical tradition was mounted, far from Florence, by Lorenzo Valla, challenging the preeminence of usage, as recovered from classical literature, over the rigid and aprioristic categories of the modistic approach. For the hypothesis of a breakthrough by Valla to a convention theory of language, see R. Waswo, Language and meaning in the Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Chapter 5. The Bones of Grammar and the Rhetoric of Flesh 1. C. Thoenes, “Spezie e ordini di colonne nell’architettura del Brunelleschi,” in Filippo Brunelleschi: la sua opera e la sua vita, 1: 469, n.51: “il parallelo fra architettura e lingua, tanto diffuso nella topica storicoartistica d’oggi, ha la sua origine proprio nella letteratura rinascimentale.” Thoenes cites passages from Filarete and Serlio, and notes that Alberti, more circumspectly, advises architects to study ancient buildings in the same way that students of literature study the classic auctores. See Alberti, De re aedificatoria IX.10 (L’architettura, ed. Orlandi, 2: 855; ed. Rykwert, p. 315). 2. This is even more clearly the case if Marvin Trachtenberg’s exclusion of the Pazzi Chapel from Brunelleschi’s oeuvre is accepted; see M. Trachtenberg, “Michelozzo and the Pazzi Chapel,” Casabella 61 (1997): 56–75. The convergence of architecture and other visual media in the

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NOTES TO PP. 94–95 chapel is often noted (also the prominence of the Pazzi arms). In contrast, Brunelleschi’s biographer represents him c.1480 as opposed to the adulteration of architecture by supplementary decoration in the Old Sacristy; Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, ed. De Robertis, p. 110 (with Tanturli’s introduction, p. xl). On occasion, of course, Brunelleschi accepted the need for a decorated surface, as in the case of the mosaics planned for the cupola of S. Maria del Fiore, as noted by G. Careri, “Le vertige du mélange: architecture, sculpture, peinture,” Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne 39 (1992): 9. Careri contrasts this with the controversy, emblematic of the new architecture, about the decoration in the Old Sacristy. Studies of fifteenth-century Florence shift the focus to the urban palace, in contrast to the concern with the wider built environment evident in scholarship on domestic space and shelter in the fourteenth-century city. This is even the case of studies written from a social and economic historical perspective. Even R.A. Goldthwaite, The building of Renaissance Florence: An economic and social history, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, deals with the building industry (the supply side) as a whole, but the discussion of the built environment (the demand side) focuses on the palaces. The importance of Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai (see later) in this development is obvious, but as a sophisticated expression of a wider tendency, as already suggested by K.W. Forster, “The Palazzo Rucellai and questions of typology in the development of Renaissance buildings,” Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 109–113. A (probably) rather earlier case of the display of a classical, Corinthian pilaster order on a facade is the Palazzo Gerini (originally Neroni); see G. and C. Thiem, Toskanische Fassaden-Dekoration in Sgraffito und Fresko, 14. bis 17. Jahrhundert, Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1964, pp. 59f., n.12; P. Ruschi, “Conferme Michelozziane per il palazzo di Dietisalvi Neroni a Firenze,” in G. Morolli, ed., Michelozzo, scultore e archietto (1396–1472), Florence: Centro Di, 1996, pp. 215–230. The Thiems, followed by Ruschi, date the sgraffito facade to c.1450, associating it with the architectural decoration favored by Donatello, Ghiberti, and others. In the era of Savonarola’s ascendancy and the revived republic of Pietro Soderini, plainness functioned as a marker of religious and political commitment; Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau der Hochrenaissance, pp. 205ff. On inadequate evidence, the completion date (or at least date of presentation) of Alberti’s manuscript is usually given as 1452; for a discussion of the issues see Burroughs, From signs to design, p. 241. See, notably, Tönnesmann, “Zwischen Bürgerhaus und Residenz,” pp. 74f., referring specifically to Alberti, De re aedificatoria V.6 (ed. Rykwert, pp. 125f.; ed. Orlandi, 1:359). He deduces that the passage belongs to the part of the treatise (books 1–5) written before the reconceptualization of the whole enterprise indicated at the beginning of book 6. This requires that Alberti wrote his treatise in a linear process, which seems hardly likely. In general, moreover, Tönnesmann is excessively literal in his accostamento of Florentine architecture and Albertian theory. On the optimal site of a gentleman’s villa see Alberti, De re aedificatoria, V.17 (ed. Rykwert, pp. 141,145). It should be carefully set in the landscape, though Alberti is more concerned with the view from than to a villa. Indeed, in the absence of actual views, he counsels decorating a house with painted landscapes; ibid., IX.4 (ed., Rykwert, p. 299). Obviously, such paintings could be as easily set in an urban as in a rural house, though Alberti finds landscape representations specifically appropriate for country houses, according to his fateful distinction of genres of images. G. Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, 2nd ed., Rome: Bardi, 1967 (reprint of 1911 edition), p. 69. It is possible that Alberti returned already in 1428, though his first extended sojourn in Florence was as a member of the papal staff during the Church Council that convened in Florence from 1434. L.B. Alberti, “De pictura” in Opere volgari 3, ed. C. Grayson, Bari and Rome, 1973, pp. 7f.; On painting, ed. and trans. C. Grayson, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 34f. On possible sources and contexts of Alberti’s preface see C. Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism:


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Ethics, aesthetics, and eloquence, 1400–1470, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 19–53. For the dedication of the Latin edition to Giovan Francesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, see L.B. Alberti, On painting, ed. and trans. C. Grayson, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 36. The “Istorietta amorosa fra Leonora de’Bardi e Ippolito Bondelmonti” was published in Padua by Lorenzo Canozzi, 1471, along with texts indisputably by Alberti. See A. Bonucci, ed., Opere volgari di Leon Battista Alberti, vol.3, Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1845, pp. 269–274. Bonucci accepts the authorship of Alberti, but skepticism is now more prevalent; see, e.g., J. Rawson, “The novella of Ippolito and Leonora and its attribution to Alberti: A computer analysis of style and language,” in P. Hainsworth, et al., eds., The languages of literature in Renaissance Italy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 19–30. In any case, the novella was connected with Alberti in his lifetime. On Cristoforo Landino’s characterization of Alberti as a chameleon, see Biermann, Ornamentum, p. 60, interpreting Landino as meaning merely that Alberti had a knack for finding the appropriate stylistic idiom for any situation. This is surely overly restrictive, in view of Alberti’s elusive authorial persona and his frequent references to dissimulation and masking, as noted later. Alberti makes extensive use of often exotic exempla, but without analysis. Yet Rykwert’s index includes only the following buildings or sites in Rome itself: the Capitol, the Circus Maximus, the Pantheon, a major road (the via Portuense), St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s basilicas, the tomb of Augustus, and the Temple of Vespasian; Alberti, On the art of building in ten books, ed. Rykwert et al., p. 439, index. Only one ancient building warrants an extended discussion, the Pons Aelius (Ponte S. Angelo), perhaps because Alberti had a role in its restoration; see Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 231f. On inscriptions (tituli), see Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VII.10 (ed. Orlandi, 2:611; ed. Rykwert, 220); VIII.4 (ed. Orlandi, 2: 693f.; ed. Rykwert, pp. 255f.). On theaters and amphitheaters (spectacula) see ibid., VIII.7–8. On the tyrants’ city see Alberti, De re aedificatoria V.1 (ed. Rykwert, pp. 117–118); cf. Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 171–177. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, I.5–6 (“on selecting a locality”; ed. Orlandi, 1: 43f.; ed. Rykwert, pp. 15f.); cf. ibid., X.4 (ed. Rykwert, p. 317; on finding hidden sources of water). In the former passage, Alberti discusses the inditia, from deformed children to eroded rocks and from physical to psychological maladies, that are relevant in choosing a location for a settlement. His sources range from diagnoses in medical literature to myths told by poets, as would surprise no reader of M. Foucault, “The prose of the world,” in The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences; New York: Vintage Books, 1994, part 2, pp. 17–45. This is, inter alia, a brilliant account of the epistemological conditions for the confusion in Renaissance culture of things in the world with, to us, radically different ontological status, including things read (legenda). The idea recurs in Della Famiglia; books 1 and 3, see Watkins, The family in Renaissance Florence, pp. 60,183. In the former passage, Alberti assimilates the act of “reading” a landscape to that of “reading” a human being. In a symptomatic peroration on the correctly designed building, Alberti, De re aedificatoria IX.9 (ed. Rykwert, p. 314), insists that the gaze of an observer “might flow … over the entire interior and exterior face of the work” (ut per coronas per intercapedines omnemque per intimam extimamque faciem operis quasi fluens libere et suave decurrat intuitus” (italics mine). The work itself should be altogether “measured, bonded and composed by lines and angles, connected, linked and combined.” Note that Alberti here refers to a single facies, which is both interior and exterior, obviously this contrasts with the idea of the facade as qualifying just an exterior front. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, V.17, specifically on suburban villas (ed. Rykwert, p. 145); Vitruvius, De architectura V.1 (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 168ff.). Friedman, “Palace and the street,” p. 94, contends that Alberti recognizes the facade as the part of a building “most

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24. 25.

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27. 28.

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on display to the public and deserv[ing] of the most handsome treatment.” This seems exaggerated. Alberti, De re aedificatoria III.8 (ed. Orlandi, 1: 207; ed. Rykwert, p. 72). The word translated by Rykwert as “skin” is cortex, which denotes the skin or rind of plants and their fruits, especially the bark of the cork tree (so it often means simply “cork”). In classical Latin it is not used of human skin. It is important to note that faccia or its cognate facciata are not used in medieval documents to mean “face” in the sense of a single, privileged surface or aspect of an architectural object. Instead, the term faccia dinanzi retains currency into the sixteenth century; see, e.g., Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 70f. This is an entirely non-anthropomorphic use of the term. See, e.g., his approving reference to “periti architecti” at Alberti, De re aedificatoria III.8 (ed. Rykwert, p. 72; ed. Orlandi, 1:205). Obviously he does not mean “architect” (the term used by Rykwert) in the current sense, even if his treatise was crucial in its evolution. Alberti is interested in the coherent linking of elements and parts in a well-functioning totality, i.e., the “corpus quoddam” in the preface of the De re aedificatoria (Orlandi 1: 15); and he says a building should be “veluti animal”; ibid. VI.3 (ed. Orlandi, 2: 453); or at its lean and functional best, as in the beginnings of Roman architecture, it should specifically be like a horse; ibid., IX.5 (ed. Orlandi, 2: 811). Ancient shipbuilders looked to fish for their model; ibid., V.12 (ed. Orlandi, 1: 389). Alberti, De pictura, liber 1.4 (Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson, Bari: Laterza, 1973, 3:15); cf. On painting, ed. Grayson, p. 39. Alberti, De pictura, liber I1.26 (Opere volgari, 3:47); cf. On painting, p. 61. On the passage and its implications see C.L. Baskins, “Echoing Narcissus in Alberti’s Della pittura,” Oxford Art Journal 16 (1993): 25–33. According to Baskins, Alberti’s emphasis on Narcissus as inventor of painting was unique in its time. R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the art of building, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 91ff., suggests that the articulating system of the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai corresponds to Alberti’s idea of the palace façade as a portico serving, in particular, as a platform for viewing gladiatorial games staged in the street or piazza beneath. Tavernor cites theatral buildings, notably the Septizonium, as possible models. If this is correct, the Rucellai facade oscillates between the effect of transparency and that, much more emphatic, of the play of largely linear elements on the surface. Architectural transparency (literally “appearing through”) is associated, moreover, with the evocation of a “view through” on the part of notional spectators. Logic and experience coincide. This point is made by J.B. Onians, Bearers of meaning: The classical orders in antiquity, the middle ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 151–155. The ideal city layout encloses and so controls the unruly mob, keeping them separate from the elite; see Alberti, De re aedificatoria V.1; ed. Rykwert, p. 118. Certain open spaces encourage surveillance of young people, perhaps unruly by age rather than class and occupation, by their elders; ibid., V.9; VIII.8; ed. Rykwert, pp. 131,263. For the fortunes of Plato’s Gorgias in the Renaissance, beginning with Leonardo Bruni’s translation, see B. Vickers, “Rhetoric and poetics,” in C.B. Schmitt, Q. Skinner, and E. Kessler, eds., The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 731ff. Alberti, De re aedificatoria IV.1 (ed. Rykwert, p. 93). On the importance of the soul/state analogy in key Renaissance architectural conceptions, see also Chapter 7. A. Bruschi, “L’antico e il processo di identificazione degli ordini nella seconda metà del ‘400’,” in J. Guillaume, ed., L’emploi des ordres dans l’architecture de la Renaissance, Paris: Picard, 1992, p. 15. Bruschi emphasizes the “linguistic diversity” and responsiveness to local conditions of Alberti’s actual projects; as a result, it is difficult to connect the architecture and the treatise.


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32. L.B. Alberti, Rime e versioni poetiche, ed. G. Gorni, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1975, no.1, pp. 3–7. On this and what follows see my “Grammar and expression in early Renaissance architecture: Alberti and Brunelleschi,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 34 (1998): 39–63. On Burchiello, who was also in contact with Brunelleschi, see Chapter 4. 33. On the status and activities of the different branches of the legal profession in Florence, see L. Martines, Lawyers and statecraft in Renaissance Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968; A. D’Addario et al., eds., Il notaio nella civiltà florentina, Florence: Vallecchi, 1985. 34. Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, pp. 142–145. He calls it (p. 142) “un opuscolo di straordinaria importanza.” Mancini used the text published in Alberti, Opera, Florence, 1499(?). For all its anticipatory brilliance the work seems not to have been subsequently published, or even cited in scholarship on Alberti (e.g., the otherwise appropriately titled J.K. Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal man of the early Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 35. Alberti’s debt to Cicero is explored by Onians, “Bearers of meaning,” pp. 154f. For his interest in the Twelve Tables see H. Mühlmann, Ästhetische Theorie der Renaissance: Leon Battista Alberti, Bonn: Habelt, 1981, p. 92. 36. I explore the links between law and architecture in Burroughs, “Grammar and invention.” I also deal with shifts in legal culture in Florence and those in the place within the wider society of branches of the legal profession in Burroughs, “Spaces of arbitration and the organization of space in late-medieval Italian cities,” in B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka, eds., Medieval practices of space, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 64–199. 37. Certainly Alberti greatly admired the cathedral, but Tanturli, “Rapporti letterari del Brunelleschi,” pp. 130–133, sets this in the context of the humanist praise of Brunelleschi as an engineer, rather than as a designer. The dome of course was a part, however important, of a larger, richly ornamented structure, designed by others. 38. On Alberti’s De statua see Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal man, pp. 80–84. 39. The sculptor Brunelleschi’s failure to integrate separately cast figures into a unified and gracious composition perhaps cost him the award of the Baptistery doors. See R. Krautheimer and T. Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970, 1: 46–49. In Alberti’s later terminology, this was a deficiency in the istoria. 40. For Alberti’s use of the term crusta, which had the technical meaning of incrustation or veneer, see De re aedificatoria III.8 (ed. Rykwert, p. 72; ed. Orlandi, 1:207). 41. See Chapter 1. 42. The point is well made by J. Rykwert, “Inheritance or tradition,” Architectural Design 49 (1979): 2–6, esp. p. 5. Rykwert’s insight has been expanded by Biermann, Ornamentum, p. 145. 43. For what follows see A.E. Taylor, A commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, pp. 518–523. 44. Plato, Timaeus, 73 b 1–5. 45. Aristotle, De partibus animalium B 653 b 21, cited by Taylor, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, p. 529. The passage in the Timaeus criticized by Aristotle did not appear in the famous but incomplete medieval Latin version by Chalcidius of the Timaeus, which remained a standard authority on cosmology until deep into the Renaissance. In 1456 Marsilio Ficino completed his Institutionum ad Platonicam disciplinam libri IV, a “virtual commentary on the Timaeus based entirely on the Latin sources.” This had little in common with the commentary prepared in 1484 for inclusion in the corpus of Plato’s works in translation, and informed by a close reading of the entire Greek text. See J. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden: Brill, 1991, p. 483. 46. Theodore Gaza came to Italy for the Council of Florence in 1438. From 1442 he was a resident of Ferrara, where he studied with Vittorino da Feltre. He soon became the first professor of Greek at the University of Ferrara (1447–49). See Q. Skinner, E. Kessler and J. Kraye, eds.,

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48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

56.

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NOTES TO PP. 100–101 The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 819. For Alberti’s links with Ferrarese intellectual circles and friendship with the ruler, Leonello d’Este see C. Rosenberg, The Este monuments and urban development in Renaissance Ferrara, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 57–61; J. Rykwert, “Leon Battista Alberti at Ferrara,” in Rykwert and Engel, Leon Battista Alberti, pp. 158–161; C. Burroughs, “Grammar and expression.” Aristotle, De partibus animalium, B. 653 b 21: “flesh forms the very basis of animals and is the essential constituent of their bodies” (translation in Taylor, Commentary on Timaeus, p. 519). For the early modern reception of this distinction, see S.M. Stevens, “Sacred heart and secular brain,” in D. Hillman and C. Mazzio, eds., The body in parts: Fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 265f. Alberti, De re aedificatoria V.1–2,17; IX.1 (ed. Rykwert, pp. 119f.,145,292f.). Alberti, De re aedificatoria I.9 (ed. Orlandi, 1: 65; ed. Rykwert, p. 23). On varietas in general, see Alberti, De re aedificatoria I.10 (ed. Rykwert, p. 24). For the importance of varied spaces along an itinerary through a house see ibid., IX.2–3, on the villa (ed. Rykwert, pp. 294f.). In a famous passage, ibid., IX,1 (ed. Rykwert, p. 292), he describes the varied capitals and other ornaments suitable for a garden room or other places where the relaxation of formality is permissible. The centrality of the concept of variety in Alberti’s thought and in early Renaissance culture in general is a major theme of Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism, esp. pp. 69f., 78f., 98–129; cf. Bruschi, “L’antico e il processo di identificazione degli ordini,” p. 15, n.9. For the suggestion that the tradition of the insula block persisted into the Middle Ages, to be taken up in the Renaissance as an architectural type ripe for enhancement in place design, see A. Boethius, “The domestic architecture of the imperial age and its importance for medieval town planning,” in idem, The Golden House of Nero: Some aspects of Roman architecture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960, pp. 129–188. A. Tönnesmann, “Zwischen Bürgerhaus und Residenz: zur sozialen Typik des Palazzo Medici,” in Beyer and Boucher, Piero de’ Medici, pp. 74f., claims that Alberti’s account of the ideal palace at De re aedificatoria V.6 (ed. Orlandi, 1:359) is based on his experience of Florentine domestic architecture, including the Palazzo Medici. Bulst, “Sala grande,” ibid., pp. 108,112, points out correspondences between interior spaces and their arrangement and prescriptions in the De re aedificatoria. Evidently Alberti carefully read Vitruvius’s account of the Roman house against his “reading” of the palace architecture of his own time, though naturally this affected his understanding of Vitruvius. On this house and on the related Medicean projects for a palatial domus in the same district see L.A. Pellecchia, “The patron’s role in the production of architecture: Bartolomeo Scala and the Scala palace,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 258–291; “Architects read Vitruvius: Renaissance interpretations of the ancient house,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51 (1992): 377–416; “Reconstructing the Greek house: Giuliano da Sangallo’s villa for the Medici in Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (1993): 302–317. See also G. Morolli, “La fortuna di Vitruvio,” in L’architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, L’architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Milan: Silvana, 1992, pp. 191–194. Alberti, De re aedificatoria IV.5 (ed. Rykwert, p. 107). The paradigmatic secluded house, screened by trees, is that of Aeneas’s father Anchises as evoked in Virgil’s Aeneid; ibid. V.6 (ed. Rykwert, p. 125). Alberti, De re aedificatoria V.17 (ed. Rykwert, p. 145: “each house … is divided into public, semi-private, and private zones”). In general, a house should be as self-sufficient as possible, like the city or state that is its analogue or model; see ibid., V.14 (ed, Rykwert, p. 140). See also the previous note. Alberti, De re aedificatoria V.2 (ed. Rykwert, p. 119). He says that the entrance and vestibule should be “in the center of the bosom (sinus) of the building,” and that the sinus acts “like a


58.

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62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

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public forum, toward which all other members converge”; ibid., V.17 (ed. Rykert, p. 146). It is not clear what he understands this sinus to be, but it is certainly not necessarily the front section of a house, and indeed seems to be preceded by open space with porticoes, etc. (ed. Rykwert, p. 145). The standard work on the palace is F.W. Kent, G. Perosa, and B. Preyer, Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo zibaldone, II. A Florentine patrician and his palace, London: The Warburg Institute, 1981. See especially B. Preyer, “The Rucellai Palace,” ibid., pp. 155–228, with an extensive discussion of the facade (pp. 179–201). For an excellent recent account, see Tavernor, On Alberti and the art of building, pp. 79–86. On the loggia see Preyer, “The Rucellai Palace,” pp. 202–207; F.W. Kent, “The Rucellai Family and its Loggia,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 397–401. Preyer argues that the construction of the loggia opened up space in front of the original three-bay facade of the palace, and stimulated the expansion that produced the solecism of a grand palace with two identical front doors. On loggias in fifteenth-century Florence see C. Burroughs, “Spaces of arbitration and the organization of space in late-medieval Italian cities,” in B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka, eds., The medieval practices of space, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. C. Klapisch-Zuber, “Les femmes dans les rituels de l’alliance et de la naissance à Florence,” in J. Chiffoleau, ed., Riti e rituali nelle società medievali, Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 1994, pp. 3–22. On the emblems on the facade see Preyer, “The Rucellai Palace,” pp. 198f. For the antitheses see, for the first, R. Wittkower, Architectural principles in the age of humanism, 3rd ed., London: Tiranti, 1967, pp. 33–37; for the second, Biermann, Ornamentum, pp. 144f. For Vitruvius’s famous association of the orders with deities or heroes of distinct character, largely on the basis of gender criteria, see De architectura I.2,5; IV.1,7 (ed. Fensterbusch, pp. 38f., 170f.); cf. G. Morolli, L’architettura di Vitruvio: una guida illustrata, Florence: Alinea, 1988, p. 61. For the long-term impact of this threefold articulation of architecture see E. Forssman, Dorico, ionico, corinzio nell’architettura del Rinascimento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1988. Alberti, De re aedificatoria IX.5 (ed. Rykwert, p. 303); refers to modi of decoration in this passage, but not specifically to columns. He had discussed columns without any mention of the orders: ibid., I.10 (Rykwert, p. 25). Finally, he briefly connects columns with the orders only at ibid., IX.7 (ed. Rykwert, p. 309). On the contrasted positions of Vitruvius and Alberti see Onians, Bearers of meaning, pp. 154f. S. Sinding-Larsen, “A tale of two cities: Florentine and Roman visual context for fifteenthcentury palaces,” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 6 (1975): 163–193. Bifora windows appear in roughly contemporary Roman palace architecture (e.g., the Palazzo Capranica); see P. Tomei, L’architettura a Roma nel quattrocento, Rome: Multigrafica 1977 (1942), pp. 60ff.; T. Magnuson, Studies in Roman quattrocento architecture, Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1958, pp. 227ff. C. Acidini Luchinat, “La Cappella medicea attraverso cinque secoli,” in G. Cherubini and G. Fanelli, eds., Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, Florence: Giunti, 1990, pp. 82–97. Acidini Luchinat, “Cappella medicea,” p. 84; R. Hatfield, “Cosimo de’Medici and his chapel,” in Ames-Lewis, Cosimo ‘il Vecchio’, pp. 241f. Hatfield notes the presence of St. Bernard in the chapel’s altarpiece and speculates that Cosimo, not Piero, would have commissioned a painting with such express references to the virtue of humility. It is interesting that Hatfield’s thesis opposes the Gombrichian notion of distinct spheres of interest on the part of father and son in the construction and decoration of the palace. I am speculating that there was a cult, as such, of St. Bernard in the Medici chapel; the main dedication was to the Trinity. See E.H. Gombrich, “The early Medici as patrons of art,” in idem, Norm and form: Studies in the art of the Renaissance, vol.1, London: Phaidon, 1978, pp. 35–57. There was a chapel in the palace of Niccolò da Uzzano that perhaps served as the immediate model for the one built by Cosimo and Piero; see M. Bucci and R. Bencini, Palazzi di Firenze,

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72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77.


Florence: Vallecchi, 4: 48. Somewhat paradoxically, the sole remnant of the chapel’s fresco decoration is a fragment, in a “cavalleresco” style, showing the austere St. Anthony Abbot. Acidini Luchinat, “Cappella medicea,” pp. 82f.; the reliquary (the “Reliquario del Libretto”), once on the altar of the Medici palace chapel, is now in the Opera del Duomo. For example, in the restoration work at St. Peter’s in Rome that was roughly contemporary with the construction of the Palazzo Medici; see Magnuson, Studies in Roman quattrocento architecture, pp. 163–214. See I. Hyman, Fifteenth-century Florentine studies: The Palazzo Medici and a ledger for the church of San Lorenzo, New York: Garland, 1977, pp. 122f., suggesting not only that the projects were administratively indissoluble, but also that the same intelligence was responsible for the basic layout of both buildings, which are equally distinguished by rigorous attention to the consistent and proportional organization of space in three dimensions. M.T. Bartoli, “Le caratteristiche geometriche e numeriche di Palazzo Medici,” in Cherubini and Fanelli, Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, pp. 76–81, has argued that the palace is rigorously proportioned in three dimensions and that the placement of apertures and the dimensional relations on the facades are part of this overall system. For an alternative recent view see G. Morolli, “Concinnitas e tipi,” in G. Morolli, C.A. Luchinat, and L. Marchetti, eds., L’Architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Florence: Silvana, 1992, p. 266. Morolli does not cite Bartoli’s article. Preyer, Preyer, “L’architettura del Palazzo Medici,” in Cherubini and Fanelli, Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, pp. 58–75. On the peacock, certainly one of many devices used by the Medici, see Ames-Lewis, “Early Medicean devices,” pp. 132–134. In general, the peacock was a standard attribute of an aristocratic lifestyle and ornament of an exclusive garden setting; see L. and S. Dittrich, “Der Fasan: zoologische Identität und Ikonographie,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 57 (1996): 101–131, esp. p. 127, n.50 and n.55. The peacock often appears as a self-conscious object of visual attention, perhaps as a figure of visuality itself, an association reinforced by the mythic origin of the “eyes” of the peacock’s tail as taken from the hundred-eyed giant Argus, Juno’s unfortunate watchman. Apart from the familiar negative association with pride, the peacock’s incorruptible flesh qualified it as a symbol of Christ Himself; AmesLewis, p. 132, n.46. This lack of coincidence between interior and exterior is crucial in the tradition of peacock symbolism, with its recurrent emphasis on an authentic inner essence, whether good or bad, concealed by outward finery; the peacock indeed could serve as an emblem of the Renaissance facade. Cosimo, a privately austere and pious man, was perhaps comforted by the idea, articulated by Petrarch, Epistolae familiares, 13.4.20–25, that a voluntary poverty that spurns wealth, though constantly surrounded by the trappings of wealth, is of greater merit than mere indigence; it was the mark of a noble mind to scoff at gold rather than to shun its light. See M. O. Boyle, Loyola’s acts: the rhetoric of the self Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 145, noting the influence of Petrarch’s position throughout the Renaissance. From such a perspective, the exterior magnificence of his palace, including the reception areas, was not only consistent with Cosimo’s position in the state, but also made his interior, private piety even more admirable. C. Elam, “Il palazzo nel contesto della città: strategie urbanistiche dei Medici nel Gonfalone del Leon d’Oro, 1415–1430,” in Cherubini and Fanelli, Il Palazzo Medici Riccardi di Firenze, pp. 44,47. Elam notes that the Via Larga did not reach much farther north than the rear of the church of S. Marco; in other words, the street gave access to, but not through, a quite circumscribed area, a kind of enclave. On enclaves in Florence, see R. Goldthwaite, “The Florentine palace as domestic architecture,” American Historical Review 77 (1972): 981; D. Friedman, Florentine new towns: Urban design in the late middle ages, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 215–218; Friedman, p. 121, also notes the mark of such enclaves on the names of streets and squares. R. Goldthwaite, “The Florentine palace as domestic architecture,” American Historical


78. 79.

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81. 82.

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Review 77 (1972): 981, notes that in the Bonsignori plan of 1584 arches are visible over the entrance to some side streets; he plausibly suggests that these marked family enclaves. On the phenomenon in general, see L. Macci and V. Orgera, Architettura e civiltà delle torri, Florence: Vallecchi, 1994. In contrast to Venice, none are now extant in Florence. On the original facade on the Via Larga, with just three ground-floor openings, see Preyer, “L’architettura del Palazzo Medici,” p. 61. Noting that the position of the Palazzo Medici on a corner accorded with current topographical preferences, Elam, “Il palazzo nel contesto della città: strategie urbanistiche dei Medici,” pp. 44,47, finds it a further reason for discounting the legend of Brunelleschi’s plan for a grand piazza in front of San Lorenzo. Alberti, De re aedificatoria VIII.6 (ed. Rykwert, p. 263), defines a trivium, strictly a place where three streets meet, as sharing characteristics of the forum (piazza) and the street. Rykwert translates trivium as crossroads, which would properly be a quadrivium; “intersection” seems the more appropriate term. The most famous example, familiar to Alberti, was Trevi in Rome; Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 93,96f. The Alberti controlled the cappella maggiore and a space in the final bay of the nave; F. Canali, The basilica of S. Croce, Florence: Bonechi, 1997, p. 65; Saalman, Brunelleschi: the buildings, p. 340. The chapel of S. Maria delle Grazie was built from 1371, with funds from Jacopo Alberti, and even to his design; Paatz, Kirchen von Florenz, 3:3. It was demolished in 1874. The reconstruction of the convent of S. Croce following a fire in 1423 is “generally attributed to Michelozzo”; M. Trachtenberg, “Michelozzo architetto della Cappella Pazzi,” in Morolli, Michelozzo, pp. 205–206. Cosimo and his son Piero funded the construction of the novitiate and its chapel, marking the latter with the Medici arms; if they were implicated in earlier reconstruction work, it was unobtrusively. The work on the novitiate was “probably carried out in the years after 1434 by Cosimo”; Saalman, Brunelleschi: the buildings, pp. 224,227. See also Canali, Basilica of S. Croce, p. 4; Paatz, Kirchen von Florenz, 1:56. The ban against the Alberti was raised in 1428, though Leon Battista may not have reached the city until 1434, in the entourage of Pope Eugenius IV who was driven from Rome in that year. See C. Grayson, ad voc, “Leon Battista Alberti,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani 1 (1960): 703.

Chapter 6. Setting and Subject 1. Physiology was not distinct from psychology; D. Hillman, “Visceral knowledge: Shakespeare, skepticism, and the interior of the early modern body,” in D. Hillman and C. Mazzio, eds., The body in parts: Fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 80–105, esp.p. 83. P. Burke, “Individuality and biography in the Renaissance,” in E. Rudolph, ed., Die Renaissance und die Entdeckung des Individuums in der Kunst: Die Renaissance als erste Aufklärung, II, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998, pp. 72f., emphasizes the diffusion of Plutarchan biography as the elucidation of the private man by means of tiny clues. 2. A key early example is the papal palace at Pienza, predating the urban/rural distinction at Urbino. In his project for the Palazzo Farnese, Michelangelo contrived an axis linking the constructed world of the city and a contrasting green landscape; this highly self-conscious differentiation of aspects of a building recurs as a prominent feature of houses in the vicinity of Rome, such as the Villa Giulia or the Villa Medici. 3. L. Benevolo, “Il palazzo e la città,” in G.C. Baiardi, G. Chittolini, and P. Floriani, eds., Federico di Montefeltro: lo stato, le arti, la cultura, Rome: Bulzoni, 2:20; E. Londei, “Lo stemma sul portale di ingresso e la facciata ‘ad ali’ del palazzo ducale di Urbino,” Xenia 18 (1989): 93–117. According to Londei, pp. 93f., the contrast between the two facades echoes Alberti’s antithesis between the tyrant’s and king’s palace. Both aspects are present on the city facade, which carries battlements, albeit of purely ornamental, or rather emblematic

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9.

10.

NOTES TO PP. 108–112 character; F.P. Fiore, “Interventi urbani in una signoria territoriale del ‘400 a Urbino e Gubbio,” in Maire-Vigueur, D’une ville à l’autre, p. 423, n.43. L. Benevolo and P. Boninsegna, Urbino, Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1986, p. 104, regard the palace facades as self-consciously developed “frontispieces” for Federico’s regime. C.W. Westfall, “Chivalric declaration: the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino as a political statement,” in H.A. Millon and L. Nochlin, eds., Art and architecture in the service of politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978, pp. 20–45. C. Cieri Via, “I trionfi di Piero,” in P. Dal Poggetto, ed., Piero e Urbino, Piero e le corti rinascimentali, Venice: Marsilio, 1992, pp. 126–135; M.G. Pernis and L.S. Adams, Federico da Montefeltro and Sigismondo Malatesta: the eagle and the elephant, New York: Peter Lang, 1996, pp. 95–106. The reliefs on the palace facade (now in the museum within the palace) were executed c. 1474–81 to designs by Francesco di Giorgio Martini. See M. Mussini, entries in F.P. Fiore and M. Tafuri, eds., Francesco di Giorgio architetto, Milan: Electa, 1993, pp. 360–365; G. Bernini Pezzini, Il fregio dell’arte della guerra nel Palazzo ducale di Urbino: catalogo dei rilievi, Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1985. M. Trionfi Honorati, “Prospettive architettoniche a tarsia: le porte del Palazzo Ducale di Urbino,” Notizie da Palazzo Albani 12 (1983): 38–50, esp. 42; idem, “La prospettiva nelle porte del palazzo,” in Dal Poggetto, Piero e Urbino, pp. 232–235. The doors in question adorn the duchess’s bedroom and the entrance from the duke’s bedroom into the Sala delle udienze. B. Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano del conte Baldesar Castiglione, bk. 1, ch.2 (ed. V. Cian, 4th ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1947, p. 16): “nell’aspero sito d’Urbino edificò [Federico] un palazzo, secondo l’opinione di molti, il più bello che in tutta Italia si ritrovi; e d’ogni oportuna cosa si ben lo fornì, che non un palazzo, ma una città in forma di palazzo esser pareva.” In this paradigmatic early modern court, functions formerly distributed at different sites, including the increasingly irrelevant centers of civic authority, were concentrated in one site; P.G. Pieruzzi, “Lavorare a corte: ‘Ordine et officij.’ Domestici, familiari, cortigiani e funzionari al servizio del duca d’Urbino,” in Baiardi, Chittolini, and Floriani, Federico di Montefeltro: lo stato, le arti, la cultura, 1:234–239; Benevolo, “Il palazzo e la città,” p. 20, emphasizing the articulation of the palace in a set of distinct building units. Alberti’s related analogy of city and house (De re aedificatoria, I.9, V.2, and V.15) had perhaps already stimulated the planning of the palace, where he was a frequent visitor; G. Morolli, “Nel cuore del palazzo, la città ideale. Alberti e la prospettiva architettonica di Urbino,” in Dal Poggetto, Piero e Urbino, pp. 215–229. Federico’s own manuscript of Alberti’s treatise, ornately bound in purple, reveals his admiration; Pernis and Adams, The eagle and the elephant, pp. 68, 151, n.57. The influence of Norbert Elias is crucial here; see the chapter “The structure of dwellings as an indicator of social structure” in N. Elias, The court society, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, pp. 41–65. Also important, though apparently completely independent of Elias, is M.B. Becker, Civility and society in western Europe, 1300–1600, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. For the lively Italian reception of Elias’s work, foregrounding the court as an agent of modernization and its failure, see E. Brambilla, “Modello e metodo nella Società di corte di Norbert Elias,” in D. Romagnoli, ed., La Città e la corte: buone e cattive maniere tra Medioevo ed età moderna, Milan: Guerini, 1991, pp. 141–184. On Urbino, in particular, see Pieruzzi, “Lavorare a corte”; A. Tönnesmann, “La palais ducal d’Urbino: humanisme et realité sociale,” in J. Guillaume, ed., Architecture et vie sociale à la Renaissance: l’organisation intérieure des grandes demeures à la fin du moyen age et à la Renaissance. Paris: Picard, 1994, pp. 137–154. For courtly interiors in general, see C.M. Rosenberg, “Courtly decorations and the decorum of interior space,” in G. Papagno and A. Quondam, eds., La Corte e lo spazio: Ferrara estense, Roma: Bulzoni, 1982, 2:29–44; L. Satkowski, “The Palazzo Pitti: planning and use in the grand-ducal era,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42 (1983): 336–349.


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11. On the provision of processional routes through the palace as crucial in the planning of the layout of the building, see C. Cieri Via, “Ipotesi di un percorso funzionale e simbolico nel palazzo ducale di Urbino attraverso le immagini,” in Baiardi, Chittolini, and Floriani, Federico di Montefeltro: lo stato, le arti, la cultura, 2:47–64. Cieri Via argues that the sparing nature of the palace’s decoration, apparent already to Bernardino Baldi in the late sixteenth century, deliberately enhanced the palace’s triumphal function. 12. See the note “Variety/varietas” in Alberti, On the art of building, ed. Rykwert, p. 426; Smith, Architecture in the culture of early humanism, pp. 69–71. In general, Smith sees variety as a determining aspect of early Renaissance formal invention, though with particular selfawareness in Alberti. 13. W. Prinz, “Simboli ed immagini di pace e di guerra nei portali del rinascimento: la Porta della Guerra nel palazzo di Federico da Montelfeltro,” in Baiardi, Chittolini, and Floriani, Federico di Montefeltro: lo stato, le arti, la cultura, 2:65–71. See also Pernis and Adams, Eagle and elephant, p. 103, who suggest that the doorcase, with its symbols of Federico’s prowess and status, “surrounds and symbolically protects” imagery related to the duchess’s roles and virtues. 14. Pieruzzi, “Lavorare a corte,” pp. 228f., especially 229, n.13. For the elucidation of the sequence of spaces in the duke’s apartment on the basis of the palace ordinances see Tönnesmann, “Palais ducal,” pp. 141–144. 15. Bernardino Baldi’s late sixteenth-century description of the palace is hardly reliable for the lifetime of Federico; B. Baldi, “Descrizione del Palazzo Ducale d’Urbino (1590),” in Memorie concernenti la città d’Urbino, Bologna: Forni, 1978, pp. 39–78. On Baldi’s account of the functions of the rooms in the ducal apartment, see M.L. Polichetti, Il Palazzo di Federico da Montefeltro: restauri e ricerche, Urbino: Quattro venti, 1985, p. 199. 16. The visual association of encyclopedic learning and political power, both imagined as vested in the person of the prince, is a theme of the De cardinalatu (1510) of Paolo Cortesi, who recommends encyclopedic decor (in the form of a mappamundi) in an antichamber; see J. Gillies, “Posed spaces: framing in the age of the world picture,” in P. Duro, ed., The rhetoric of the frame: Essays on the boundaries of the artwork, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 24–43. 17. L. Cheles, The Studiolo of Urbino: An iconographic investigation, University Park: Penn State Press, 1986, pp. 23f., 91; see also Pieruzzi, “Lavorare a corte” p. 229, n.13; C.H. Clough, “Art as power in the decoration of the study of an Italian Renaissance prince: the case of Federico da Montefeltro,” Artibus et Historiae 16 (1995): 22f.,40. On the diplomatic function of a “private” space or object, though in relation to English practice, see P. Fumerton, Cultural aesthetics: Renaissance literature and the practice of social ornament, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 67–77. P. Thornton, The Italian Renaissance interior, 1400–1600, New York: Abrams, 1991, pp. 297–300, discusses Italian practice. 18. On the date of the panels see Trionfi Honorati, “Prospettive architettoniche,” p. 42f., with comment (p. 44) on the lack of scholarly attention given to the marquetry panels of the doors. This is true of R. Krautheimer, “The panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin reconsidered,” in Millon and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, pp. 248–253. However, Krautheimer associates the painted panels closely with the marquetry ones, and dates the former by means of the latter. 19. This is the door from the Sala degli Angeli into the Audience Room; Rotondi, Fig. 181. 20. This door leads into the Audience Room from the loggia overlooking the courtyard (Rotondi, Fig. 155). For the “Tempietto” as a study see Clough, “Art as power,” p. 24. The term “studio” was used of this room, as also of the studiolo, by Bernardino Baldi. 21. The fifth pair is in the duchess’s apartment, between the bedroom and the reception room; see Rotondi, Fig. 291. On the perspective doors see Trionfi Honorati, “Prospettive architettoniche a tarsia,” pp. 48f. See also Krautheimer, “The panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin

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22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.


reconsidered,” pp. 248–253. Technically, the panels, in Krautheimer’s view (p. 252) “stand by themselves among their contemporaries.” On triumphalism at Urbino, see Cieri Via, “Ipotesi di un percorso,” pp. 50f., and Pernis and Adams, Eagle and elephant, pp. 101–105. For the motto (MELIUS TE VINCI VERA DICENTEM QUAM VINCERE MENTIENTEM), see Rotondi, Fig. 157; it is associated with a wheel motif of unclear significance. These doors precede the portal of Apollo and Marsyas on the duke’s route to the Throne Room. The figures have been variously attributed, notably to Botticelli or his circle; M. Ferretti, “I maestri della prospettiva,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, parte terza. Situazioni, momenti, indagini, vol. 4. Forme e modelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1982, p. 519, n.12; M. Trionfi Honorati, “Apollo e Pallade; prospettiva,” catalog entry no.43, in Piero e Urbino, pp. 236f. I have come across no analyses of the doors as a unit; Trionfi Honorati stresses the complete disjunction of the upper and lower zones (p. 236), which of course is true in purely formal terms. On the Tempietto see Clough, “Art as power,” p. 24. Y. Bonnefoy, ed., Roman and European mythologies, ed. W. Doniger, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 137. The combination of the two deities in association with magnificent and semiotically suggestive fictive architecture recurs in the native Urbinate Raphael’s School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura, in which they appear in the form of niched statues. For an interpretation of their symbolism, see I.D. Rowland, “The intellectual background of the School of Athens: Tracing divine wisdom in the Rome of Julius II,” in M. Hall, ed., Raphael’s School of Athens, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 153. Battista Sforza was especially cultured, and competent in both Latin and Greek; as such she was an appropriate “Minerva.” See Pernis and Adams, Eagle and elephant, pp. 50f. Onians, Bearers of meaning, p. 308, associates the idea that a building might represent its owner (i.e., in terms of character) with the much later work of Serlio. The evidence from Urbino suggests that Serlio’s certainly clear articulation of the idea followed a long development, which had as much to do with chivalric taste as with the emulation of antiquity. On the idea of the emblematic or composite portrait see Russell, Emblematic structures, pp. 206f. Russell cites later material, but the principle can surely be followed back further. Martin Warnke, on the other hand, notes the “finely meshed net of cross-references between body and landscape” in Piero’s double portrait of the duke and duchess (see following note); M. Warnke, “Individuality as argument: Piero della Francesca’s portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino,” in Mann and Syson, The image of the individual, p. 85. Against the familiar assumption that the double portrait was permanently displayed in the duke’s audience room, C. Bertelli, Piero della Francesca, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 220, argues that the painting was a true diptych, which the duke took with him on journeys. Such devotion to the duchess’s memory surely also found an echo in the decoration of his apartment. The door with triumph scenes (involving not carri but complex fountains) is that between the Sala degli Angeli and the loggias; see Rotondi, Ducal palace, Figs. 178–180. For the memorial function, and hence date, of the painting, and implications for the date, see C. Gilbert, Change in Piero della Francesca, Locust Valley, New York: J. J. Augustin, 1968, pp. 29f., 88–104. Warnke, “Individuality as argument” pp. 81–90, argues that the painting was executed, in the late 1470s, specifically for Federico’s son Guidobaldo in the context of instruction on how to be a good prince. One again, the formation of conduct is at issue. For the duke as architect, and building as an act of government see M. Ferretti, “‘Casamenti seu prospective’: le città degli intarsiatori,” in C. De Seta, ed., Imago urbis: dalla città reale alla città ideale, Milan: Ricci, 1986, p. 94. Rotondi, Ducal palace, Fig. 192. The compass is in the upper panel of the right-hand door, facing the Audience Room.


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30. On the tapestries, acquired in 1476 and now lost, see C.H. Clough, “Federico da Montefeltro’s artistic patronage,” in idem, The Duchy of Urbino in the Renaissance, London: Variorum, 1981, pp. 8–10; extant drawings allow a partial reconstruction. Federico’s knowledge of the Trojan war impressed Pope Pius II; O. Raggio, “The liberal arts studiolo from the ducal palace at Gubbio,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 53 (1996): 5–35, esp. 5, citing Pius’s Commentari. Though purchased after the duchess’s death in 1472, the tapestries perhaps evoked her enthusiasm for tapestry weaving (she recruited a corps of weavers to work in the palace). 31. Certainly the Palazzo Medici served as a model for Priam’s palace in Florentine Trojan War imagery. E.H. Gombrich, “Apollonio di Giovanni: a Florentine cassone workshop seen through the eyes of a humanist poet,” in idem, Norm and form: studies in the art of the Renaissance, 1, 3rd ed., London and New York: 1978, p. 14. 32. Rotondi, Ducal palace, Figs. 188–190. For the usual identification with Mars and Hercules see P.L. Bagatin, “Le tarsie a Urbino e nel ducato e gli apporti pierfrancescani,” in Piero e Urbino, p. 350. More probably the figures merely exemplify contrasting styles of ancient military equipment and dress. The doors carry the inscription FC (i.e., pre-1474) and are clearly earlier than the doors of Apollo and Minerva. 33. In contrast Trionfi Honorati, “Prospettive architettoniche,” p. 48, makes the odd claim that there is no street or piazza here, simply two paradigmatic palaces. Still stranger, Krautheimer, “The panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin,” p. 248, describes two palazzine of three bays each (that on the right is four bays wide) flanking a pavement that leads the eye to a triple arch opening on a harbor. More perceptively, indeed, Trionfi Honorati draws attention to the absence of represented, as opposed to implied, open space. 34. On the Throne Room as a space of theater see Polichetti, Il Palazzo di Federico da Monteleltro, p. 199; Rotondi, Ducal palace, p. 95, identifies the Throne Room with the theater mentioned in early sources. 35. The association of the “view from above” with the exercise of power is especially clear in Piero’s double portrait of the duke and Battista and the landscape panel in the studiolo; see Cheles, Studiolo, 76 n.96. 36. Two representations of cities appear in Mantegna’s paintings of 1486, at the earliest; A. Martindale, The triumphs of Caesar by Andrea Mantegna: In the collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Hampton Court, London: H. Miller, 1979, pp. 134,136,138. Mantegna’s sources were assuredly known in Urbino. 37. For “jutting perspective” at Urbino, see Rotondi, Ducal palace, Figs. 181–185, 205, 207, and 209; cf. Raggio, “The liberal arts studiolo,” pp. 17–20, insisting on the connection between the Gubbio panels and the earliest panels of the Sagrestia delle Messe. The motif of the open cupboard is also prominent in the earlier work in Modena of the Lendinara brothers (c.1461–65); Trionfi Honorati, “Prospettive architettoniche,” p. 41; idem, “Prospecttive nelle porte,” p. 233. In some cases, the “cupboard” is in fact the shutters of a window opening onto an urban scene. 38. I have discovered little comment on the procedure in the fifteenth century; J. Elkins, The poetics of perspective, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, p. 130, dismisses it as “unchallenging.” 39. The marquetry decor of the north wall of the Sagrestia delle Messe was executed in the 1430s by Antonio Manetti; M. Haines, The “Sacrestia delle Messe” of the Florentine Cathedral, Florence: Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, 1983, color plate II. Haines, p. 91, observes that the marquetry revetment consititutes “Renaissance facades superimposed on earlier masonry whose massive vaults they were intended to mask, transforming the effect of the room” (italics mine). While Haines, pp. 102–104, connects Alberti with the more carefully designed architectural detailing of the north wall, Ferretti, “‘Casamenti seu prospective’: le città degli intarsiatori,” pp. 76f., emphasizes its Brunelleschian character. This is surely correct.

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40. Trionfi Honorati, “Prospettive architettoniche,” p. 41; idem, “Prospettive nelle porte,” p. 233; in some cases, the “cupboard” is in fact the shutters of a window opening onto an urban scene. The Lendinara brothers ran the leading marquetry workshop of the early Renaissance; B. Ciati, “Cultura e società nel secondo Quattrocento attraverso l’opera ad intarsio di Lorenzo e Cristoforo Lendinara,” in M. Dalai Emiliani, ed., Le prospecttive rinascimentali: codificazioni e trasgressioni, Florence: Giunti, 1980, pp. 201–214. For links between the Lendinara and developments at Urbino, see M. Daly Davis, “Carpaccio and the perspective of regular bodies,” ibid., p. 196. 41. C. Savettieri, “La laus perspectivae di Matteo Colacio e la fortuna critica della tarsia in area Veneta,” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 64 (1998): 11; for Pliny’s terminology in action, see, e.g., The Elder Pliny’s chapters on the history of art, ed. J. Jex-Blake and E. Sellars, Chicago: Argonaut, 1968, p. 129. For all their morphological similarity, the Plinian and Ciceronian term eminere and Alberti’s term prominentia have quite different meanings. Alberti was concerned with a particular type of elevation drawing that preserved dimensional relationships; see C. Thoenes, “Vitruvio, Alberti, Sangallo: la teoria del disegno architettonico nel Rinascimento,” in idem, Sostegno e adornamento, p. 169. Alberti’s dismissal of Pliny (Opere volgari, ed. Grayson, 3:46; “Non come Plinio recitiamo storie, ma di nuovo facciamo un’arte di pittura”) is one of two explicit references to Pliny in the Italian version of the treatise on painting; there are none in the Latin. At De pictura 2.46 (Opere volgari, ed. Grayson, 3: 83; On painting, p. 82), Alberti indeed uses the Plinian term eminere, but with reference to chiaroscuro, not perspective. 42. Colacio opposed the technical, pedagogical rhetoric of Quintilian; Savettieri, “Laus perspectivae,” p. 11. His Ciceronianism was not, as often, a rigid adherence to Ciceronian style. 43. Jex-Blake and Sellars, Elder Pliny’s chapters, p. 126; cf. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2,13,12. Alberti also mentions the story, though without citing Pliny; De pictura 2.40 (On painting, p. 76). A full-length marquetry portrait of Federico, in profile, exists in the studiolo. 44. Clough, “Art as power,” pp. 19,30. 45. On the centric ray, see Alberti, De pictura, I.8 (Opere volgari, 3:23: “ut merito dux radiorum ac princeps dici debeat”; cf. On painting, p. 44). More generally, S.Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, New York: Basic Books, 1975, p. 86, notes that fifteenth-century artists saw “a moral dimension in the concept of a centric ray and visual axis.” It is noteworthy that Alberti dedicated the Latin version of his treatise, not to Brunelleschi (as in the case of the Italian version), but to a prince, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua. 46. A conspicuous case is Bramante’s Belvedere courtyard, designed, like a perspectival picture, in relation to a specific location, the window of the pope’s study; see A. Bruschi, Bramante, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, pp. 98f. 47. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, II.1 (ed. Rykwert, p. 34), referring to the “lewd” allurements of painting. 48. For the idea of Renaissance perspective as a cluster of diverse practices and conceptions, see Elkins, Poetics of perspective. 49. As emphasized by M. Kemp, introduction to Alberti, On painting, ed. Grayson, p. 21. 50. For an excellent discussion of the variant accounts of the two panels, see L. Brion-Guerry, “Le ‘De artificiali perspectiva’ de Jean Pélérin (Viator) et le problème de ses origines. Un essai de mise au point,” in Filippo Brunelleschi, la sua opera e il suo tempo, 1: 279–307, esp. 292–298; M. Kemp, The science of art: Optical themes in western art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 9–15. 51. Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, p. 24 with nn.181,182. In his biography of Brunelleschi, Manetti’s account of the project in the Palazzo della Signoria immediately precedes that of the perspective panels, implying some connection between the two accomplishments, to neither of which he assigns a date; Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, pp. 54–60.


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52. H. Damisch, The origin of perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 95,149. Elkins, Poetics of perspective, p. 15, claims that no Renaissance artist or theorist of perspective thought of space first and objects second, rather than vice versa; this obscures the contrast between Alberti’s and Brunelleschi’s approaches. 53. As noted by G.C. Argan, Brunelleschi, Milan: Mondadori, 1978, pp. 20f. 54. Damisch, The origin of perspective, pp. 93–95; 153–155. 55. Edgerton, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, p. 147, notes that “Brunelleschi’s experiment also contained the essential rule of two-point or oblique perspective as demonstrated more specifically in the second picture.” Certainly, the early sources stress the effect of oblique perspective in the second panel. 56. For an exhaustive account of oblique perspective, see J. White, The birth and rebirth of pictorial space, 3rd ed., London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987, pp. 28,36,103,121. White emphasizes the importance of the technique in trecento imagery, but reserves his most complete analysis for Roman wall painting, specifically Pompeian Fourth Style imagery, which happens to emphasize the representation of architecture. White does not apply the term to Brunelleschi’s work, however, as if horned perspective had instantly lost credibility with Brunelleschi’s initial experiment. Still, “the extreme disruption of the wall,” noted by White in ancient Roman painting, is conspicuous in the Brunelleschian panels of the Sagrestia delle Messe or in the Urbinate and Modenese panels of similar type, which White ignores. At least one leading scholar of the history of perspective canot accept that Brunelleschi could be so retardataire; D. Gioseffi, Perspectiva artificialis: per la storia della prospetitiva spigolature e appunti, Trieste, 1957, pp. 73–83; idem, “Filippo Brunelleschi e la ‘svolta copernicana’: la formalizzazione ‘geometrica’ della prospettiva: gli inizi della scienza moderna,” in Filippo Brunelleschi: la vita e l’opera, 1: 81–92. See also Edgerton, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, p. 86, for the idea that fifteenth-century painters tended to prefer frontal views, in (conscious?) contrast with practice in the previous century. Finally, Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 100, claims the image of the palace painted in the city prison exemplifies fully oblique, as opposed to scenographic perspective. 57. Brion-Guerry, “Le ‘De artificiali perspectiva’ de Jean Pélérin,” pp. 279–307. 58. Damisch, Origin of perspective, p. 133. 59. On the Trecento character of Brunelleschi’s experiments, except for a certain “scientific consistency,” see Kemp, Science of art, p. 14 and especially p. 345: “what later became known as the vanishing point for lines perpendicular to the picture plane (Alberti’s ‘centric point’) would not have been particularly apparent in Brunelleschi’s time.” On the issue of how much of the vista from the designated viewing point was included in the Baptistery panel, see Damisch, Origin of perspective, pp. 89–93, with Fig. 6. 60. Hart and Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, pp. 86–91. 61. D.F. Zervas, The Parte Guelfa, Brunelleschi and Donatello, Locust Valley, NJ: Augustin, 1987. 62. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, p. 60: “donde si guarda ‘l palagio de’ Signori, in modo che due faccie si veggono intere.” White, Birth and rebirth, p. 118, notes Manetti’s “laboring” of the equivalence in the panel of the northern and western fronts, which he finds pointless unless emphasizing the “extreme oblique setting.” For a refutation of aguments that Brunelleschi’s image was not a view “per angolo” or “per spigolo,” see L. Vagnetti, “La posizione di Filippo Brunelleschi nell’invenzione della prospettiva lineare: precisazioni ed aggiornamenti,” in Brunelleschi: la vita e l’opera, p. 293. 63. M. Trachtenberg, “What Brunelleschi saw: Monument and site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47 (1988): 14–44. 64. Frugoni, A distant city, p. 107. 65. L. Martines, Social world of the Florentine humanists, p. 261. 66. On the armory and militia see Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, pp. 5–7,12,17. On the shaping of the strongly orthogonal southern part of the piazza, see Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, pp. 94f.; the pavement grid, begun earlier, was extended over the whole piazza at this time.

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67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80.

NOTES TO PP. 126–128 The Tetto was not quite parallel with the west facade of the palace; rather it was laid out at a right angle to the Loggia de’ Lanzi, begun slightly before the Ciompi revolt, in 1374. Both Rubinstein, loc. cit., and Trachtenberg, p. 109, connect the closing of the north door to the functional separation of administrative and public spaces in the piazza, without consideration of possible symbolic valences. See Chapter 5. Certain documents were nailed to the wall of the palace. The practice gave its name to the Libro dei Chiodi, a book of records containing the names and penalties of those subject to judgment; M. Shapiro, Dante and the knot of body and soul, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. vii. The incident of cannibalism is reported by N. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962, p. 203. Quoted in G. Ortalli, “La rappresentazione politica e i nuovi confini dell’immagine nel secolo XIII,” in J. Baschet and J.-C. Schmitt, eds., L’Image: fonctions et usages des images dans l’Occident medieval, Paris: Le Léopard d’or, 1996, p. 255. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 100; the Duke of Athens created the Via delle Farine on the north side of the piazza, aligned with the northwest corner of the palace. The following is from Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, p. 18, while taking issue with his characterization of the changes concerned as “modest” and as of essentially aesthetic significance. According to Villani’s chronicle, the Signoria “feciono fare quattro leoni di macigno, e fecionli dorare con gran costo, e fecionli porre in su’ quattro canti del palagio del popolo di Firenze.” The passage is quoted in Rubinstein, Palazzo Vecchio, p. 17, n.124, noting that the lions remained in place until removed by Ferdinand III. Villani’s emphasis on the “corners of the palace” is not maintained by Rubinstein, who stresses instead the position of the lions under the gallery, i.e., the projecting machicolations. Francesco Guicciardini articulated the familiar idea of the political order of fifteenth-century Florence, under Medici domination, as a mere “show” or “image”; see A. Brown, “Lorenzo and Guicciardini,” in M. Mallett and N. Mann, eds., Lorenzo the Magnificent: culture and politics, London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1996, p. 294. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the eye, p. 256. Cosimo I moved into the palace in 1540; see Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio, p. 112. T. Weddingen, “A virtue of necessity: Michelangelo’s David, difficilissime facile,” Daidalos 59 (1996): 85, notes that Vasari’s artistic achievement was paralleled by Cosimo’s in terms of government. For a good contextualization of Vasari’s activity see L. Satkowski, Giorgio Vasari: architect and courtier, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 7–12,45–59. J. Shearman, Only connect: Art and the spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp 46–50. Bush, “Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus and Florentine traditions,” pp. 181f.; on the changing political associations of statuary planned or executed for the piazza see K. Weil-Garris, “On pedestals: Michelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus and the sculpture of the Piazza della Signoria,” in W. Wallace, ed., Michelangelo: Selected scholarship in English, New York and London: Garland, 1995, 1: 323–362. Piero di Cosimo recommended following Michelangelo’s opinion, though no one evidently knew what it was; S. Levine, “The location of Michelangelo’s David: the meeting of January 25, 1504,” in Wallace, Michelangelo: select scholarship in English, 1: 303; R.N. Parks, “The placement of Michelangelo’s David: a review of the documents,” Art Bulletin 17 (1975): 563. See also C. Seymour, “Homo magnus et albus: the quattrocento background for Michelangelo’s David of 1501–4,” in Stil und Uberlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes, Band l. Michelangelo, Berlin, 1967, pp 103–105, arguing that Michelangelo wanted the statue set up in the central bay of the loggia, and, for a review of the literature, K. Schwedes, Historia in statua: zur Eloquenz plastischer Bildwerke Michelangelos im Umfeld des Christus


81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

91.

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von Santa Maria sopra Minerva zu Rom, Berlin and New York: Peter Lang, 1998, p. 110, n.264. Antonio del Pollaiuolo “Il Cronaca,” the cathedral architect, who in 1504 designed the pedestal for the David, perhaps exerted influence; C.Elam, ad voc, Cronaca, Dictionary of art, London: Macmillan, 1996, pp. 187f. On Michelangelo’s Hercules project, see Poeschke, Die Skulptur der Renaissance in Italien, 2:115. Botticelli envisaged the David paired with a Judith in front of the cathedral: Levine, “The location of Michelangelo’s David,” p. 295, n.16. As Levine notes, Giuliano da Sangallo also expressed support for a site at the cathedral; this surely removes him from consideration as Michelangelo’s mouthpiece and emphasizes the apolitical or even anti-political dimension of his other proposal, a site in the Loggia della Signoria, as discussed later. Poeschke, Die Skulptur der Renaissance in Italien, 2:116. The first speaker at the meeting of 1504 recommended the replacement of the Judith by the David; Levine, “The location of Michelangelo’s David,” pp. 296f. Vasari, Vita di Michelangelo, ed. Barocchi, 1: 20 (the phrase appears in both editions). Poeschke, Die Skulptur der Renaissance in Italien, 2: 86, claims that Vasari coined the phrase, which recurs in Vasari’s biography of Baccio Bandinelli; Vasari, Vita di Michelangelo, 1: 252; E. Balas, “Michelangelo’s Victory; its role and significance,” in W. Wallace, ed., Michelangelo: Selected scholarship in English, New York: Garland, 1995, 3:467. This suggests, however, a connection with the commission of 1508 for the pendant Hercules. Poeschke, like Parks, “The placement of Michelangelo’s David,” pp. 563f., contrasts the statue’s meaning when intended for the cathedral, and a political meaning ascribed to it following the change of location. This presumes that Michelangelo, on starting work on the David, accepted the destination of the statue as fixed by what, a generation later, surely seemed an outmoded program. As argued by C. de Tolnay, The art and thought of Michelangelo, New York, 1964, pp. 6–11, the newly commissioned David had from the beginning specific moral and political connotations, which installation in front of the portal of the palace only intensified. For the Marzocco site, see Levine, “The location of Michelangelo’s David,” p. 302. For the view that Donatello’s Judith was of ill omen; ibid., pp. 296ff. On the talismanic aspect of public statuary see the remarks of the goldsmith, Andrea Riccio; Levine, p. 302 with n.40. It is perhaps significant that the architectural language of the loggia is religious in derivation, being modeled on and perhaps alluding to the nave arcade of the cathedral. The architecture of the Palazzo della Signoria, in contrast, is markedly secular. For the vote count and the initial ruling of the Signoria relative to the site, see Parks, “The placement of Michelangelo’s David,” p. 562, n.10. Weil-Garris Brandt, “On pedestals,” pp. 337f., on the stripped—down classicism and “silence” of the David pedestal. Poeschke, Michelangelo und seine Zeit, p. 87, comments on the low pedestal. For the scholarly debate about the status of the David, as free-standing or closely integrated with the palace, see Schwedes, Historia in statua, p. 111f., n.264. In the nineteenth century the David was moved forward of its original position (Weil-Garris Brandt, “On pedestals,” p 333), detaching it from its original “emblematic function,” in Levine’s phrase (“Location of Michelangelo’s David,” p. 294), though Levine’s view of the nature of that function cannot withstand the critique of Parks and Poeschke. In both editions, Vasari, Vita di Michelangelo, ed. Barocchi, p. 22, asserts the David’s superiority over an apparently carefully chosen group of statues in Rome, beginning with the Marforio, famous as a counterpart of Pasquino and companion in his critiques of authority. These perhaps had a particular political edge in view of the statue’s location, until the late sixteenth century, in the Forum, at the foot of the Campidoglio; U. Gnoli, Topografia e toponomastica di Roma medioevale e moderna, Foligno: Edizioni dell’Arquata, 1984, pp. 154f.; P.P. Bober and R.O. Rubinstein, Renaissance artists and antique sculpture: A handbook of sources, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 64, n.64.

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92. See Michelangelo’s letter of December 1525 in G. Poggio, P. Barocchi, and R. Ristori, eds., Il carteggio di Michelangelo, Florence: Sansoni, 1973, 3: 190. Pope Clement VII had expressed the desire for a colossal statue to stand at the rear of the Palazzo Medici, toward the Piazza S. Lorenzo. 93. M. Miglio, “Il leone e la lupa: dal simbolo al pasticcio alla francese,” Studi romani 30 (1982): 177–186. 94. I intend to return elsewhere to the question of the sources and meaning of the architectural and sculptural ornament of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. For now see my articles “The building’s face and the Herculean paradigm: agendas and agency in Roman Renaissance architecture,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 23 (1993): 7–30; and “Michelangelo at the Campidoglio: Artistic identity, patronage, and manufacture,” Artibus et Historiae 28 (1993): 85–111. 95. S.E. Reiss, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici as a patron of art, 1513–1523, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1992. I am grateful to Dr. Reiss for a copy of her dissertation.

Chapter 7. Bramante and the Emblematic Facade 1. F.W. Kent, “‘Più superba de quella de Lorenzo’: courtly and family interest in the building of Filippo Strozzi’s palace,” Renaissance Quarterly 30 (1977): 311–323; C. Vasic Vatovec, “Palazzo Strozzi,” in G. Morolli, C.A. Luchinat, and L. Marchetti, eds., L’Architettura di Lorenzo il Magnifico, Florence: Silvana, 1992, pp. 172–176. 2. As pointed out by Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 200–202. 3. A particular type of unitary, plastered facade with corner quoining and arched windows was predominant throughout the sixteenth century; it evolved to meet the requirement of patrons wishing for dignity without ostentation, as noted by Ginori Lisci, Palaces, 2: 735–736. Preyer, Palazzo Corsi-Horne, pp. 58–61, argues that the type originated in the late fifteenth century, but she focuses on a particular constellation of formal features, rather than the idea of such a facade. 4. Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 205–209. 5. R.B. Litchfield, Emergence of a bureaucracy: the Florentine patricians, 1530–1790, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Whatever its ideological resonances at any time, the absence of textural or architectonic differentiation within a facade allowed a particular focus on the facade’s setting. A striking example is the mid-fifteenth-century Palazzo Pitti, with assertive but regular rustication carried over all three floors. Located at a distance from the public street toward which it faces, it introduces a new visual and spatial relationship of palace and street, if not of palace and city. The particular importance of the design consists of the combination of two new features: facade uniformity and topographical separation. 6. Vasari records criticism of the facade in the second edition of the Vite, Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 46f. A crowd mocked the facade as resembling a church rather than a house, and decorated it with garlands in a parody of the decoration of churches on feast days. Baccio d’Angelo, the architect, worked almost exclusively in Florence, though he probably had made a study trip to Rome and, as Lingohr, p. 59, stresses, worked on the ephemeral architecture for Leo X’s famous entry into Florence of 1515 alongside many architects who certainly possessed extensive knowledge of ancient architecture. 7. Westfall, In this most perfect paradise, pp. 63–84. On the wider environment, see H. Broise and J.-C. Maire Vigueur, “Strutture famigliari, spazio domestico e architettura civile a Roma alla fine del medioevo,” in Storia dell’arte italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1983, 3.5: 99–160; Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 29–31. 8. On the Calcarario or contrada dei calcari, see U. Gnoli; Topografia e toponomastica di Roma medioevale e moderna, Foligno: Edizioni dell’Arquata, 1984, pp. 44f. By the seventeenth century, the limekilns had become picturesque; D.A. Levine, “The Roman limekilns of the


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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

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Bamboccianti,” Art Bulletin 70 (1988): 569–589. On responses to modern Rome, see P. Brezzi, “Tra condanne e esaltazioni: i giudizi sulla città e l’idea di Roma nel Quattrocento e nel Cinquecento,” in Fagiolo, Roma e l’antico, pp. 11–22. For Romans as “vaccai,” see V. De Caprio, “‘Sub tante diruta mole’: il fascino delle rovine di Roma nel ‘400 e ‘500,” in idem, ed., Poesia e poetica delle rovine di Roma: momenti e problemi, Rome: Istituto nazionale di studi romani, 1987, p. 25; cf. A. Mazzocca, “Petrarch, Poggio and Biondo: Humanism’s foremost interpreters of Roman ruins,” in A. Scaglione, ed., Francis Petrarch, six centuries later: A symposium, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975, pp. 454–363: P. Brezzi, “Roma medioevale: la realtà e l’idea,” Studi romani, 30: 1 (1982): 16–30. In art, Roman cow handlers first caught the attention of Romantic or even orientalist artists; L. Eitner, “Gericault’s first lithograph: a hitherto unrecognized first state of the Bouchers de Rome,” Apollo (November 1998): 33–36. Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 196–199. Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 28–30, 83–86, 95–97. Notably the magistracy with responsibility for the physical environment; O. Verdi, “Da ufficiali capitolini a commissari apostolici: i Maestri delle Strade e degli Edifici a Roma tra XIII e XVI secolo,” in L. Spezzaferro and M.E. Tittoni, eds., Il Campidoglio e Sisto V, Rome: Carte segrete, 1991, pp. 54–62. L. Nussdorfer, “The Vacant See: Ritual and protest in early modern Rome,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 173–190. B. Schimmelpfennig, “Der Papst als Territorialherr im 15 Jahrhundert,” in F. Seibt and W. Eberhart, eds., Europa 1500: Integrationsprozesse im Widerstreit, Stuttgart, 1987, pp. 84–95. C. Burroughs, “Spaces of arbitration and the organization of space in late-medieval Italian cities,” in B. Hanawalt and M. Kobialka, eds., Medieval practices of space, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 64–199. S. Valtieri, “Il Palazzo del Cardinale Raffaele Riario a Roma (la Cancelleria): le fasi costruttive, le funzioni, il ‘programma,” in Il palazzo del principe, il palazzo del cardinale, il palazzo del mercante nel rinascimento, Rome: Gangemi, 1988, pp. 33–56, convincingly dates construction between the late 1480s to 1514 (i.e., later than usually assumed). M.D. Davis, “Opus isodomum at the Palazzo della Cancelleria: Vitruvian studies and archaeological and antiquarian interests at the court of Raffaele Riario,” in S. Danesi Squarzina, ed., Roma centro ideale della cultura dell’Antico nei secoli XV e XVI, pp. 447–449; Valtieri, Palazzo del cardinale, p. 53, n.30. Frommel, “Il palazzo della Cancelleria, in Valtieri, ed., Il palazzo dal rinascimento a oggi. In Italia, nel regno di Napoli, in Calabria, Rome: Gangemi, 1989, p. 31. Frommel goes on to argue for the importance of major ecclesiastical facades for the conception of the Cancelleria facade, suggesting that the distinction of sacred and secular here effectively disappears. He was Fra Mariano da Firenze, whose account is dated 1517; Frommel, “Palazzo della Cancelleria,” p. 32: “in palatio inclusae nullum vestigium ab extra videtur ecclesiae.” The term vestigium (literally “footprint”) recalls C.S. Peirce’s identification of a type of sign, the “index,” that – like smoke or indeed a footprint – results from a physical process independent of human volition or even action (see the Introduction). For a related contemporary distinction between two kinds of representation, one produced by an imprint, the other by mimesis, see G. Savarese, “Egidio da Viterbo e Virgilio,” in L. Fortini, ed., Un’ idea di Roma: società, arte e cultura tra umanesimo e rinascimento, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1993, p. 123; Z.G. Baranski, “Dante’s signs: an introduction to medieval semiotics and Dante,” in J.C. Barnes and C. O Cuilleanain, eds., Dante and the middle ages: Literary and historical essays, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995, pp. 139–141. Frommel, “Palazzo della Cancelleria,” p. 30, notes an early representation showing crenellations, but discounts any relationship with previous Roman palace architecture. In his view (pp. 33f.), the corner towers of the Cancelleria imitate those of the ducal palace at Mantua.

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23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

NOTES TO PP. 137–140 Inconsistently, he insists that the palace architecture can be wholly derived from ancient sources. This tower and adjacent rooms probably belonged to an earlier structure; S. Valtieri, “Palazzo del Cardinale,” pp. 35–38. Günther, Studium der antiken Architektur, p. 47, assigns all three of Bramante’s early major Roman commissions – S. Maria della Pace, Tempietto, and Palazzo Caprini – to c.1500. Both the latter designs seem to me more developed than that for the cortile. On Carafa’s patronage and career, see G.L. Geiger, Filippino Lippi’s Carafa Chapel: Renaissance art in Rome, Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1986. A. Bruschi, Bramante, rev. ed., Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1998, pp. 113–118; the orders are the Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite. The Doric proper is missing, but imprecision lingered about the distinction of the Tuscan and Doric orders. Possibly, Bramante considered the Tuscan order, here relatively inconspicuous, as a site-appropriate, simplified inflection of the Doric order to which he gave unprecedented prominence and formal elaboration at the Tempietto and elsewhere. Günther, Studium der antiken Architektur, p. 52, claims that the Composite was introduced only in the 1520s, but it is hard to see how to describe the pilaster order on the upper floor except as Composite. For the association of the orders with different deities (Vitruvius, De architectura, 1,2,5), see the discussion in a later section. Günther, Studium der antiken Architektur, p. 48, contrasting Bramante with contemporary architects, notably il Cronaca, interested in the direct recourse to classical models. Recent scholarship has tended to an early dating of the Palazzo Caprini; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2: 85; Bruschi, Bramante, pp. 253ff.; L. Patetta, catalog entry in Millon and Lampugnani, Architecture of the Renaissance, p. 504, n.123. Günther, Das Studium der antiken Architektur, p. 47, pushes the inception of work on the Palazzo Caprini back as early as 1500, i.e., contemporary with that on the Cortile della Pace and, more controversially, the Tempietto. F. Borsi, Bramante, Milan: Electa, 1989, pp. 322f., accepts the early dating of the house, but thinks the facade remained unresolved until 1510. This does not take account of the fact that, to an unusual degree, the architecture was the facade. On the date of the Palazzo Castellesi, see A. Bruschi, “II contributo di Bramante alla definizione del palazzo rinascimentale romano,” in Valtieri, II palazzo dal rinascimento a oggi, p. 56. The palace was not yet habitable in 1504, and in 1505 Castellesi transferred it to his patron, the king of England, to serve as an embassy. An early design (perhaps by Bramante) for the Palazzo Castellesi facade may have envisaged only two stories, matching the height requirement set by Alexander VI’s bull establishing the Via Alessandrina; Bruschi, Bramante architetto, p. 854; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1: 94, 2:213ff., noting that a mandate of Pope Alexander was required to make possible the alienation of the building site, hitherto owned by the Chapter of St. Peter’s. The point is made, e.g., by Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2: 86. The only known drawing of the plan was made by Mascherino after the palace had already been altered. On the representations of the house, see Bruschi, Bramante architetto, pp. 1043f. On the drawing once owned by Palladio, later in the collection of Lord Burlington, see in particular D. Lewis, The drawings of Andrea Palladio, Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1982, no.28, p. 52; J. Lever and M. Richardson, eds., The architect as artist, New York: Rizzoli, 1984, p. 34; Burroughs, “Building’s face,” p. 17. The emphasis of Bruschi, Bramante architetto, p. 597, on the homogeneity and unity of the design is exaggerated, and misses the point of the internal disjunctions, though certainly these are resolved, as pointed out later. On this palace see Chapter 8.


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32. Bruschi, Bramante architetto, p. 849. Cardinal Soderini’s request is dated July 12, 1510; the design therefore was done after that for the Caprini, presumably involving a conscious response to it. 33. U. Eco, A theory of semiotics, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 178f. Eco’s discussion is generally highly indebted to the classic formulation of C.S. Peirce (see the Introduction), but he finds the tripartite distinction of sign-types ultimately untenable, even though “they can undoubtedly be used for normal purposes.” 34. There is a good account of this debate in W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, text, ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 75–94. See also Eco, Theory of semiotics, pp. 204–210; N. Bryson, Vision and painting: The logic of the gaze, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983, pp. 1–12. 35. Bruschi, Bramante, p. 255, describes it as a picture of itself. In general, Bramante’s design belongs in a context of sharpening class division during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; see M. Weisser, Crime and punishment in early modern Europe, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, pp. 69–105. 36. In sixteenth-century terms, “representation” is imitation, and according to the influential Aristotelian doctrine, imitation is itself “natural.” See D’Amico, Renaissance humanism, p. 130, referring to Paolo Cortesi’s theory of imitation. 37. For a general account of the ideological function of “natural signs” in culture, see M. Krieger, “The semiotic desire for the natural: poetic uses and abuses,” in R. Carroll, ed., The states of ‘theory’: History, art, and critical discourse, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 222. Devices or “hieroglyphs” were of course also sometimes regarded as natural signs, because they participated in the essence of the things they represented; see D.S. Russell, Emblematic structures in Renaissance French culture, Toronto: University Toronto Press, p. 117. 38. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 18 (trans. A.M. Codevilla, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 65f.). 39. For the modern hypothesis concerning continuity between the ancient insula and the medieval townhouse, see especially A. Boethius, “The domestic architecture of the imperial age and its importance for medieval town planning,” in idem, The Golden House of Nero: some aspects of Roman architecture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960, pp. 129–88. 40. Vasari gives this information in both editions; see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:82. Vasari says the whole facade was of gesso and brick, but the paradox of feigned stone would be far greater in the case of rustication than that of obviously worked stone. 41. Camillo Leonardi’s Speculum lapidum came out in 1502, the last year of Alexander’s pontificate, and was dedicated to Alexander’s son, Cesare Borgia; it emerged from the same cultural milieu as Bramante’s design. Leonardi himself, a peripatetic astrologer and physician, was active in Rome under Sixtus IV; see C. De Bellis, “Astri, gemme e arti medico-magiche nello Speculum lapidum di Camillo Leonardi,” in G.F. Formichetti, ed., II Mago, il cosmo, il teatro degli astri: saggi sulla letteratura esoterica del Rinascimento, Roma: Bulzoni, 1985, pp. 67–114. 42. Setting the Palazzo Caprini firmly within a Julian matrix, Onians, Bearers of meaning, pp. 240f., does not insist on a single meaning, “Julian” or otherwise, but rather stresses eloquently (p. 245) the stimulus given in Bramante’s architecture to an active response on the part of a viewer. Bruschi, Bramante, p. 255, assigns the palace a key position in the emergence of “mannerism.” As noted earlier, the palace design almost certainly antedated Julius’s accession in 1503. 43. The windows are clearly indicated on the London drawing. 44. P.N. Pagliara, “La casa romana nella trattatistica vitruviana,” Controspazio 4 (1972): 24; “II palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila di Raffaello ricostruito in base ai documenti: Classicismo o Maniera,” ibid., 5 (1973): 87, n.90.

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45. For the idea of the selvatico as defined by the early sixteenth-century courtly society as outside it yet necessary to its self-definition, see P. Burke, The fortunes of the courtier: The European reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, University Park: Penn State Press, 1996, p. 29; R. Bartra, The artificial savage: Modern myths of the wild man. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 2. 46. Aristotle, Physics, 193a and b, clearly distinguishes the products of nature and the those of art; e.g, in the case of a wooden bedstead that, planted in the ground, puts up tree shoots, not more bedstead; M. Maas, “Stumping the sun: Toward a post-metaphorics,” in H.J. Silverman, ed., Cultural semiosis: Tracing the signifer, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 219. For the doctrine in the Renaissance, see H. Mikkeli, An Aristotelian response to Renaissance humanism: Jacopo Zabarella on the nature of arts and sciences, Helsinki, 1992, pp. 108f. More prevalent, however, was the Platonist conception of life (i.e., internally produced motion), or at least liveliness, within an artwork; Summers, Michelangelo’s theory of art, p. 343. 47. See Chapter 8 on spatial and social segregation in the period. 48. Alberti, De re aedificatoria, VII.27 (see also the discussion in Chapter 5). The rhetorical sources of Alberti’s thinking are discussed by Smith, Architecture of humanism, pp. 178–180, though without reference to the ideological investments. 49. Alberti De re aedificatoria V.1 (ed. Orlandi, I:332–339; ed. Rykwert, pp. 117–119). I have discussed Alberti’s account of sociopolitical divisions elsewhere; see Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 171–184. 50. C. Burroughs, “The altar and the city: Botticelli’s ‘mannerism’ and the reform of sacred art,” Artibus et Historiae 18 (1997): 9–40. 51. “Device” (French devise) is derived from the Latin term dividere and its cognates in Romance languages. The basic schema acquired various metaphorical shading, as in Paolo Giovio’s (1555) famous distinction between the soul (motto) and body (image) of the impresa, though other theorists accepted figures that lacked the motto, or even argued that the text was redundant. See C. Dumont, Francesco Salviati au Palais Sacchetti de Rome et la décoration murale italienne (1520–1560), Rome: Institut Suisse de Rome, 1973, p. 221. Later discussions of the etymology of “devise” relate the division in question to the distinguishing function of the device itself, qua sign, rather than to its internal division; D. Russell, The emblem and device in France, Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985, p. 24. 52. R. Wittkower, “Hieroglyphics in the early Renaissance,” in idem, Allegory and the migration of symbols, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977, pp. 114–128; D. L. Drysdall, “Préhistoire de l’emblème: commentaires et emplois du terme avant Alciati,” Nouvelle revue du seizième siecle 6 (1988): 29–44; C. Dempsey, “Renaissance hieroglyphic studies and Gentile Bellini’s “Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria,” in I. Merkel and A. Debus, eds., Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual history and the occult in early modern Europe, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 342–365; K. Lippincott, “The genesis and significance of the fifteenth-century Italian impresa,” in S. Anglo, ed., Chivalry in the Renaissance, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1990, pp. 49–84; D.J.D. Boulton, “Insignia of power: The use of heraldic and paraheraldic devices by Italian princes, c.1350–c.1500,” in C. Rosenberg, ed., Art and politics in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, 1300–1500, South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1990, pp. 103–127; M. Pastoureau, “Aux origines de l’emblème: la crise de l’heraldique européenne aux XIV–XVe siècles,” in M.T. Jones-Davies, ed., Emblèmes et devises au temps de la Renaissance, Paris: J. Touzot, 1981, pp. 129–136. 53. On the connection between Roman classicism and conduct literature see P. Portoghesi, Rome of the Renaissance, London: Phaedon, 1971, p. 384. The crucial text legislating the criteria for the definition of a sign as an impresa is the Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose of Paolo Giovio, written in the early 1550s, and first published, in Rome, in 1555; T.C. Price Zimmerman, Paolo Giovio: the historian and the crisis of sixteenth-century Italy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 247–249. Giovio’s years in the Roman court overlapped with those of Castiglione and Della Casa, the two leading authors of conduct books.


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54. K. Weil-Garris and J. D’Amico, eds., The Renaissance cardinal’s ideal palace: A chapter from Cortesi’s De cardinalatu, Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante and the American Academy in Rome, 1980, pp. 86–89 (“De ornamento domus”). J. D’Amico, Renaissance humanism in papal Rome: Humanists and churchmen on the eve of the Reformation, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, pp. 227–237, connects the treatise too exclusively with the literature of religious reform. 55. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Ideal palace, pp. 96f. (aenigmata sharpen the wit and cultivate the mind). Cortesi uses the word “emblem” only of the ornament on silver vessels (ibid., p. 82f.). 56. Vasari (1550) is the source for the proposed inscription at the Vatican; he also claims that Julius II, in rejecting Bramante’s suggestion, accused him of plagiaristic imitation of a hieroglyphic inscription in Viterbo designed by another architect; see G. Vasari, Le vite, ed G. Milanesi, Florence: Sansoni, 1878–85, 4:158–159. According to E. Bentivoglio, “Bramante e il geroglifico di Viterbo,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 16 (1972): 167–174, the extant fragment of the piece in question postdates Bramante, while Julius’s brusque response to Bramante’s proposal targeted the probable involvement in the project of the noted forger Annius of Viterbo (my italics), humanist consultant on the Egyptophilic frescoes in the apartment of Pope Alexander VI, Julius’s hated predecessor. E.H. Gombrich, “Hypnerotomachiana, 1: Bramante and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,” in idem, Symbolic images: studies in the art of the Renaissance, 2, London: Phaidon, 1978, pp. 102ff., connects the trivial matter of the inscription with Bramante’s controversial proposal, also rejected by Julius, to move the axis of the basilica to line up with the obelisk in its original position. The obelisk was to serve as itself a kind of hieroglyph. 57. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2: 84. 58. Another native of northern Lazio (Corneto) was the noted intellectual and diplomat Adriano Castellesi, whose probable patronage of Bramante was noted above; G. Fragnito, “Adriano Castellesi,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 21 (1978), p. 670. His philosophical pursuits encompassed an interest in the famous Tabula Cebetis, an ancient pictorial allegory attributed to a friend of Socrates and a key stimulus and model for Renaissance emblematics; see S. Sider, “‘Interwoven with poems and picture’: a proto-emblematic Latin translation of the Tabula Cebetis,” in B.F. Scholz et al., eds., The European emblem, Leiden: Brill, 1990, pp. 5–12. 59. A long tradition, e.g., in scholastic thought, held that the goal of the artificer was not to create anything truly new, but rather to “put together things disjoined, or to disjoin those put together.” See W.R. Newman, “Alchemical and Baconian views on the art/nature division,” in A.G. Debus and M.T. Walton, eds., Reading the book of nature: the other side of the scientific revolution, Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998, pp. 84–86. 60. The eponymous exponent of the chronicle style was the leading Florentine architect known as il Cronaca; see C. Jobst’s note in Millon and Lampugnani, Architecture from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, p. 436. 61. In the choir of S. Maria del Popolo, Bramante orchestrated statuary, stained glass, architecture, and mosaic to create a unified effect; Bruschi, Bramante, pp. 238–245, esp. 243; E. Bentivoglio and S. Valtieri, S. Maria del Popolo a Roma, Rome: Bardi, 1976, pp. 27–44. 62. See, in general, N. Dolev, “‘Such shaping fantasies’: the found object in the thought and practice of the late Renaissance,” in Norms and variations in art: essays in honor of Moshe Barasch, Jerusalem, 1983, pp. 104–128; T.D. and V.R. Kaufmann, “The sanctification of nature; observations on the origins of trompe-l’oeil in Netherlandish book painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” in T.D. Kaufmann, The mastery of nature: aspects of art, science, and humanism in the Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 11–48; the authors discuss the insertion of realistic/illusionistic elements into typographic space. On the combination of “artifical” and “natural” elements in a judicial context see later. 63. Drysdall, “Préhistoire de l’emblème,” pp. 31–32; H. Miedema, “The term ‘Emblema’ in Alciati,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 31 (1968): 239. On Marsilio Ficino’s

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64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

NOTES TO P. 147 philosophical reflection on the theme of grafting, see, B. Copenhaver, “Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus, and the question of a philosophy of magic in the Renaissance,” in Merkel and Debus, Hermeticism and the Renaissance, pp. 87,99, n.55. On the specifically postmedieval exploitation of conflicting sign-systems in the light of Derrida’s explicit association of “writing” and grafting, see R. Cavell, “Representing writing: The emblem as (hiero)glyph,” in B.F. Scholz, M. Bath, and D. Weston, eds., The European emblem: Selected papers from the Glasgow conference 11–14 August, 1987, Brill: Leiden, 1990, pp. 167–169. Drysdall, “Préhistoire de l’emblème,” p. 44, gives an example in a publication of 1516. The image of grafting obviously resonates with the famous Medicean motif of a tree stump putting forth new shoots; G. Ladner, “Vegetation symbolism and the concept of Renaissance,” in Images and ideas in the middle ages, Rome: Edizioni di storiae letteratura 1983, p. 731, n.9. For patristic use of the metaphor of grafting, see P. Brown, The body and society: Men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 124. A related, very popular, vegetative emblem is that of the vine trained on the pollarded elm tree; E. Wind, Pagan mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed., London: Faber, 1968, p. 112, uses it to exemplify “natural models” for emblems involving the exploitation of the connection of husbandry and natural magic. For the distinction between decor ad consuetudinem and naturalis decor see Vitruvius, De architectura, 1.2 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 40). Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Ideal palace, p. 86f. (“artificio concinna magis quam marmorum copia sumptuosa domus”). Ultimately this derives from Aristotle’s position, in overt opposition to Platonist doctrine, that art is inferior to nature: see G.A. Ferrari, “L’Officina di Aristotile: natura e tecnica nel II libro della Fisica,” Rivista critica della storia della filosofia 32 (1977): 154–156; A.J. Close, “Philosophical theories of art and nature in classical antiquity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971): 180. Cortesi surely also knew of the distinction, in legal theory, between natural and artificial proofs, of which the latter must be invented, the former merely used. This is also Aristotelian; G.A. Kennedy, ed., Aristotle on rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 37,108ff. For a fifteenth-century translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric accessible to Cortesi, see Kennedy, p. 308. Serlio, Book IV fol.11v (Sebastiano Serlio on architecture, ed. Hart and Hicks, p. 270); “The ancient Romans thought it good to mix Rustic not only with Doric, but also Ionic and even Corinthian. Therefore it would not be faulty to have a mixture of Rustic with one other style, symbolizing by this partly the work of Nature and partly the work of human skill.” The passage has been much discussed, but see especially Ackerman, “The Tuscan/Rustic order: a study in the metaphorical language of architecture,” in idem, Distance points, p. 521. As noted by Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1:95. Mikkeli, Aristotelian response, p. 108, with further citations. G. Morolli, “L’opera rustica nella teoria del ‘500,” in M. Fagiolo, ed., Natura e artificio: l’ordine rustico, le fontane, gli autonomi nella cultura del manierismo europeo, Rome: Officina, 1979, pp. 58,80–81. A. Belluzzi, “L’opera rustica nel primo ‘500,” ibid., p. 103, discusses the Palazzo Caprini in particular. B. A. Uspenskij, “The semiotic study of cultures,” in J. Van der Eng and M. Grygar, eds., Structure of texts and semiotics of culture, The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973, pp. 2–5: “By virtue of the fact that culture lives not only by the opposition of the outer and inner spheres but also by moving from one sphere to the other, it does not only struggle against the outer ‘chaos’ but has need of it as well; it does not only destroy it but continually creates it.” Further, “from the position of an outsider, culture will represent not an immobile, synchronically balanced mechanism, but a dichotomous system, the ‘work’ of which will be realized as the aggression of regularity against the sphere of the unregulated and, in the opposite direction, as the intrusion of the unregulated into the sphere of organization.”


73.

74.

75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

81.

82.

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Uspenskij refers primarily to the relations between different cultures (which may exist within the same society), and explicitly refers to architecture. On the widespread idea of “living stone” see J.C. Plumpe, “Vivum saxum, vivi lapides: The concept of living stone in classical and Christian antiquity,” Traditio 1 (1943): 1–14; H. Bredekamp, “Die Erde als Lebewesen,” Kritische Berichte 9 (1981): 5–37. M. Maas, “Stumping the sun: toward a post-metaphorics,” in H.J. Silverman, ed., Cultural semiosis: Tracing the signifer, London: Routledge, 1998, p. 219. The Odyssey was certainly well known in the Renaissance; according to Cristoforo Landino, L.B. Alberti likened himself to Odysseus as a restless traveler among different places; G. Morolli, “Nel cuore del palazzo; la città ideale. Alberti e la prospettiva architettonica di Urbino,” in Dal Poggetto, Piero e Urbino, p. 220. Landino’s Alberti compares Federico’s hospitality at Urbino to that of Alcinous at the court of the Phaeacians. Vitruvius, De architectura, 9,1,2 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 414). For Leonardo’s part in the design of a frankly gothic version of the theme, see Kemp, “Wrought by no artist’s hand,” p. 181, discussing the sculpture of the chapel in Amboise, probable site of Leonardo’s tomb. Whatever its origin, the idea of nature as artist was widespread in the later middle ages; see M. Modersohn, “‘Hic loquitur Natura’ – Ein Renaissancemotiv im Spätmittelalter,” Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 10 (1991): 91–102. Onians, Bearers of meaning, p. 225. Interestingly, there seems to be no precedent for Bramante’s tree-trunk column in antiquity; certainly the motif is not mentioned in J. Rykwert, The dancing column: On order in architecture, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996. In his encyclopedic study, however, Rykwert, pp. 156,290, discusses “artificial trees” as column-prototypes in early cultures. L. Barkan, “Rome’s other population.” Raritan 11 (1991): 66–81, considers the interplay of contemporary society and the world of the statues and other artifacts of the ancient city. L.O. Fradenburg, City, marriage, tournament: Arts of rule in late medieval Scotland, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, p. 235. For suggestive applications of Bakhtin’s notions to an early modern physical environment, see P. Stallybrass, “Patriarchal territories: the body enclosed,” in M. Ferguson, ed., Rewriting the Renaissance: The discourses of sexual difference in early modern Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1986, pp. 124f.; J.G. Harris, “This is not a pipe: water supply, incontinent sources, and the leaking body politic,” in R. Burt and J.M. Archer, eds., Enclosure acts: Sexuality, property, and culture in early modern England, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 209f. G. Lascault, “Les Formes monstrueuses et leur utilisation symbolique,” in M.-T. JonesDavies, ed., Monstres et prodiges au temps de la Renaissance, Paris: Touzot, 1980, pp. 129–138; C. Bec, “Le ‘500 ou le reveil des monstres,” in M. Chiabò and F. Doglio, eds., Diavoli e monstri in scena, Rome: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascientale, 1988, pp. 253–265. As pointed out in a later section, Bramante subtly orders the stonework of the Palazzo Caprini in such a way as to mitigate its “monstrous” hybridity. I have found no earlier textual example of this idea before Michel de Montaigne; see his Journal de voyage, ed. F Garavani, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1983, p. 202: “On n’y cherche point d’autre fondement aux maisons, que des vieilles maisons ou vôutes … mais sur les brisures mêmes des vieux bâtiments, comme la fortune les a logés, en se dissipant, ils ont planté le pied de leur palais nouveaux.” See also M.-M. Martinet, Le voyage d’Italie dans les littératures européennes, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996, p. 43. The Porta Maggiore, perhaps the best preserved of the Claudian rusticated monuments, is especially interesting as it employs rustication to surround and visually reinforce the passageways through it, but also to support the vast inscription above. Thus the binary arrangement rustication/order (or art/nature) of the Palazzo Caprini type, perhaps already present at the temple of Claudius, here appears as rustication/text and/or even, given the

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84. 85.

86.

NOTES TO PP. 150–153 presence of aediculae in the foundation zone, image/word. On the importance of the Porta Maggiore for Renaissance architects see Daly, “Opus isodomum,” pp. 442,446. In Renaissance, as opposed to medieval, discourse the familiar analogies between the world of nature and that of human conduct (the art of self-government), are not given or “natural”; D. Norbrook, “Rhetoric, ideology, and the Elizabethan world picture,” in P. Mack, ed., Renaissance rhetoric, London: St. Martins Press, 1994, pp. 142f. Notably Onians, Bearers of meaning, pp. 235f. T.J. Reiss, The discourse of modernism, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 100, explores the idea of an “occulted dominant discourse practice,” i.e., a potentially revolutionary discourse that is nevertheless accommodated, at least for a while, within an existing cultural nexus, and that eventually gives rise to a “modeling theory.” Reiss cites an example from the period in question, Machiavelli’s introduction of “new analytic elements,” that became crucial in the emergence of new ideological frameworks. S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Chapter 8. Facades on Parade 1. E. Forssman, Palladios Lehrgebäude: Studien über den Zusammenhang von Architektur und Architekturtheorie bei Andrea Palladio, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1965, pp. 36f., 86f. 2. There is no modern edition of this often-mentioned text. It is included in a sixteenthcentury collection of Roman urbanistic ordinances: A. Bardus, Facultates magistratus curatorum viarum…, Rome, 1565, S.NN.QQ. For other documents regarding the Via Alessandrina street, see H. Günther, “Die Strassenplanung unter den Medici-Päpsten in Rom (1513–1534),” Jahrbuch des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte 1(1985): 287–293. 3. In December 1499, the old route was blocked “ita ut omnes [the cardinals and the major figures of the papal court] cogerentur per novam equitare;” J. Burchardus, Diarium sive rerum urbanarum commentarii (1483–1506), ed. L. Thuasne, Paris: Leroux, 1883, 2: 601. 4. U. Gnoli, Facciate graffite e dipinte in Roma, Arezzo: Casa Vasari, 1938, p. 4; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1:13, 2:50, 178. Julius II’s neglect of the street can presumably be ascribed to his notorious antipathy for Alexander. 5. For an earlier, comparable process, with a similar outcome, see R. Schofield, “Ludovico il Moro’s piazzas: New sources and observations,” Annali di architettura 4/5 (1992/93): 161. 6. For a pioneering exploration of the question, see J.S. Ackerman and M.N. Rosenfeld, “Social stratification in Renaissance urban planning,” in R. Weissman and S. Zimmerman, eds., Urban life in the Renaissance, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989, pp. 21–49. 7. The Via Maggio in Florence became an aristocratic enclave associated with the princely court at the Palazzo Pitti; G.L. Maffei, “Lettura della carta del Buonsignori: le trasformazioni urbanistiche edilizie tra il 1333 e il 1584,” in idem, ed., La Casa fiorentina nella storia della città dalle origini all’ottocento, Venice: Marsilio, 1990, p. 60. 8. The ten palaces were constructed, with very diverse facades, between 1558 and 1591; Gorse, “A classical stage for the old nobility,” pp. 301–327. On Rubens’s book, first published in Antwerp in 1622, see Gorse, pp. 301–303, n.5. 9. G. Bellavitis and G.D. Romanelli, Venezia: la città nella storia d’Italia, Rome: Laterza, 1985, pp. 58,61; E. Arslan, Gothic architecture in Venice, London: Phaidon, 1971, pp. 20–22. For the fifteenth-century conception of the canal as a “street” lined by palaces, see E. Concina, A history of Venetian architecture, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 105. 10. In general, see E. Crouzet Pavan, “La ville et ses villes possibles: sur les experiences sociales et symboliques du fait urbain,” ibid., pp. 670–673, observing a complex coexistence, into the late fifteenth century, of traditional and modern attitudes to space in Italian cities. On Florence, see S. Raveggi, “Gli aristocratici in città: considerazioni sul caso di


11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

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Firenze,” in Maire-Vigueur, D’une ville à l’autre, pp. 69–86, and, with particular emphasis on the medieval evidence, Orgera, De aedificiis, p. 18. Orgera, De aedificiis, pp. 51f. V. Franchetti Pardo, “Gli spazi del quotidiano: I’abitazione privata,” in S. Bertelli and G. Calvi, eds., Rituale, cerimonia, etichetta nelle corti italiane, Milan: Bompiani, 1985, pp. 112–116, discusses the somewhat fluid use of terminology from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, noting a sharp distinction between palazzo and casa emerging only in the period of Leo X. Gorse, “A classical stage for the old nobility,” p. 313, argues that the total ensemble of the Strada Nuova retained significant aspects of the older pattern of aristocratic alberghi. L. Dorez, La cour du pape Paul III: d’après les registres de la Trésorerie secrète, Paris: Leroux, 1932, 1:32f., calling this settlement pattern “pèle-mèle, à la Romaine.” On the Canale di Ponte, see C. Burroughs, “Below the angel: An urbanistic project in the Rome of Pope Nicholas V,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1982): 94–124. On Sixtus IV, see F. Benzi, Sisto IV renovator urbis: architettura a Roma 1471–1484, Rome: Officina, 1990; on the distinctive character of Sixtus’s interventions, see J.S. Ackerman, “The planning of Renaissance Rome,” in P. Ramsay, ed., Rome in the Renaissance: the city and the myth, Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1982, pp. 3–18. On Riario see Frommel, “Palazzo della Cancelleria,” pp. 38–41. Riario himself saw to the improvement of the Via de’ Pellegrini; ibid., p. 39. A. Ceen, The Quartiere dei Banchi: Urban planning in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century, New York and London: Garland, 1986, p. 44; E. Guidoni, La città dal medio evo al Rinascimento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1981, pp. 234–237. Guidoni’s view of the paradigmatic importance of the Via Alessandrina for the Via Giulia is disputed by M. Tafuri, “‘Roma instaurata.’ Strategie urbane e pontificie nella Roma del primo ‘500,” in C.L. Frommel, S. Ray, and M. Tafuri, eds., Raffaello architetto, Electa: Milan, 1984, p. 101, n.48. T. Magnuson, Studies in Roman quattrocento architecture, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1958, 65–97; Westfall, In this most perfect paradise, pp. 110–113; Burroughs, From signs to design, pp. 203–205. Bruschi, Bramante architetto, p. 1042. F. Clementi, II carnevale romano nelle cronache contemporanee dalle origini al secolo XVIII, rev. ed., Città di Castello: Lapi, 1930, pp. 92f; L. von Pastor, History of the popes, St. Louis: Herder, 6:166f. On metae in general, see P. Jacks, “A sacred meta for pilgrims in the Holy Year, 1575,” Architectura 19 (1989): 137–165. On the Meta Romuli, see J.M. Huskinson, “The Crucifixion of St. Peter: A fifteenth-century topographical problem,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 145–161; P. Fehl, “Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St. Peter: notes on the identification of the locale of the action,” Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 327–343. Burchardus, Diarium, 2:306,310–312. The young men ran on December 26, after dinner; on the following evening the Jews’ race took place but was declared invalid, and was run again on December 28. The races of buffaloes and horses were run over the next two evenings, and the betrothal of Lucrezia herself, on the evening of December 30, was followed by the chivalric mock siege of a wooden castle erected on St. Peter’s square. On the Jews’ race in carnival see D. Freedberg, “Cassiano on the Jewish races,” in J. Montagu, ed., Cassiano dal Pozzo’s paper museum, Milan: Olivetti, 1992, 2: 41–56. Clementi, Carnevale romano, 1:63. There was precedent for this, especially under Alexander; see Clementi, Carnevale romano, pp. 88f.,99. Races in Borgo are documented in 1481, 1486, and 1499. Burchardus, Diarium, 2:601. L. Lawner, Lives of the courtesans: portraits of the Renaissance, New York: Rizzoli, 1987, p. 105; R.C. Trexler, “Correre la terra: Collective insults in the late Middle Ages,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome. Moyen Age – temps modernes 96 (1984): 885f.

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26. A chaotic massacre of bulls and pigs traditionally took place during Carnival at Testaccio, far from the center of Rome, close to the other major meta of Rome, the Pyramid of Cestius; Lawner, Lives of the courtesans, p. 12; A. Vos, “Testaccio: change and continuity in urban space and rituals,” in H. De Mare and A. Vos. eds., Urban rituals in Italy and the Netherlands, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993, pp. 58–89. This suggests that Alexander exploited a certain parallelism between the two sites. On Julius’s bullfights, see Clementi, Carnevale romano, p. 103; R.A. Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezioni romane di antichità, vol. 1, ed. L.M. Campeggi, Roma: Quasar, 1990, p. 145; Dorez, La cour du pape Paul III, 1:216 n.5. There was a traditional connection between prostitutes’ races and bull baiting; Lawner, p. 12. 27. V. De Caprio, “Roma,” in A. Asor Rosa, et al., eds., Letteratura italiana, storia e geografia, 2: L’età moderna, Turin: Einaudi, 1988, 1:450. 28. A. Bruschi, “II contributo di Bramante alla definizione del palazzo rinascimentale romano,” in S. Valtieri, ed., II palazzo dal rinascimento a oggi. In Italia, nel regno di Napoli, in Calabria, Rome: Gangemi, 1989, p. 56, claims the Borgo was already an area of consistent upper-class settlement by the end of the fifteenth century, though Caprini, a man of little eminence, had a house on a prime site (ibid., p. 63) and Domenico Della Rovere carved out a piazza in front of his palace. 29. E. Howe, The hospital of S. Spirito and Sixtus IV, New York: Garland, 1978. 30. I. Insolera, Roma, immagini e realtà dal X al XX secolo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1980, pp. 89–90, noting that the size of a household is not a reliable indicator of palace size, since personnel might be scattered through a neighborhood. 31. Magnuson, Quattrocento urbanism, pp. 332–337; K. Weil-Garris and J.D’Amico, eds., The Renaissance cardinal’s ideal palace: A chapter from Cortesi’s De cardinalatu, Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante and the American Academy in Rome, 1980, p. 112. 32. M.G. Aurigemma, “II palazzo cardinalizio di Domenico della Rovere,” in Danesi Squarzina, Roma centro ideale della cultura dell’Antico, pp. 160–168; Magnuson, Studies in Roman quattrocento architecture, p. 333, noting that the tower was orginally less prominent than it is now. 33. As noted by Magnuson, Studies in Roman quattrocento architecture, p. 333, certain other palaces have the doubled attic story (e.g., the Palazzo Della Rovere at SS. Apostoli), but without drawing attention to it. 34. P. Tomei, “Case in serie nell’edilizia romana del ‘400 al ‘700,”Palladio ns 2 (1938): 85f., surmised that it was built as a rank of rowhouses. Subsequent improvement plans (Bramante was asked for a design) came to nothing; A. Antinori, “Baldassare Peruzzi e le case Soderini in Borgo,” Palladio 19 (1997): 39–52. On the patron see K.J.P Lowe, Church and politics in Renaissance Italy: The life and career of Cardinal Francesco Soderini, 1453–1524, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 35. On the date see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1:14; 2:213 n. 72. 36. On the palace see Bruschi, Bramante architetto, 849–854; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:207–215; Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 86f., 111. On Castellesi’s career see G. Fragnito, ad voc., Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 21 (1978): 665–670. 37. Frommel Römischer Palastbau, 2:212, citing Albertini’s guide to Rome of 1509. 38. Bruschi, Bramante architetto, p. 850. 39. In general, the progress of work was slow, perhaps because of a change of architect. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:214, attributes the courtyard and rear wings to Bramante, dating his intervention to the first years of Julius II’s pontificate. Bruschi, “Il contributo di Bramante,” pp. 59,68, argues that a first design for the facade, of two stories only, was also drafted by Bramante, with a powerful Doric portal in the center (the present design is too close to the Cancelleria to admit Bramante’s authorship). If so, Bramante’s conception of the Palazzo Castellesi was remarkably Vitruvian in type.


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40. On the issue, see Bruschi, Bramante architetto, p. 854; idem, “Il contributo di Bramante,” p. 59. 41. Castellesi wanted “quod domus esset in insula”; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:213. The alley created by Castellesi is today the Via della Inferriata. 42. The palace identified by Cortesi as that of Cardinal Alidosi is his sole example of a brick palace decorated with a surface of incised plaster (tectorium scalpturatum), i.e., sgraffito; Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 86f.; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2: 211–213. Alidosi, made cardinal in 1505, was Julius II’s treasurer and remained in the pope’s inner circle until his murder, generally applauded by the Roman court, by Francesco Della Rovere; C. Shaw, Julius II: The warrior pope, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pp. 166,178,187. 43. Bruschi, Bramante architetto, pp. 625–634; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:263f.; Tafuri, “‘Roma instaurata.’ Strategie urbane e politiche pontificie nella Roma del primo ‘500,” p. 94. 44. For the debate between Tafuri and Guidoni on the relationship of the Vie Alessandrina and Giulia see earlier. 45. Weil-Garris and Amico, eds., Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 86–89 (“De ornamento domus”). For Cortesi’s polemics against Poliziano, see T.M Greene, The light in Troy: Imitation and discovery in Renaissance poetry, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 147–155. 46. See the section “De ornamento domus” in Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 86–89. 47. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Ideal palace, pp. 86f. 48. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 86–89, on the range of types of exterior ornamentation in use. 49. In the domain of architecture, see H. Günther, “Anfänge der modernen Dorica,” in J. Guillaume, ed., L’emploi des ordres à la Renaissance, Paris: Picard, 1992, p. 110; Payne, Architectural treatise, pp. 55–58. For the related issue of alternative registers of speech available to educated Italians, entailing a marked degree of linguistic self-consciousness, see P. Burke, “Languages and anti-languages in early modern Italy,” in idem, Historical anthropology of early modern Italy, pp. 79–85. 50. C. Pericoli Ridolfini, La Casa romana con facciate graffite e dipinte, Rome: Amici dei musei di Roma, 1960, p. 85. 51. On Cortesi’s use of the term symmetria see Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, p. 102, n.28. 52. Possibly Cortesi knew of Bernardino Della Volpaia’s comparison of the facade of the Cancelleria with the rear wall of the Forum Augustum (Codex Coner, fol.46), perhaps as part of the design process for the former, as suggested by Valtieri, “Palazzo del cardinale,” p. 34. In each case, Della Volpaia emphasizes the overall rustication and the division of the facade into three tiers, though those of the ancient building are far squatter than in the palace, and lack apertures. On Della Volpaia’s role at the Cancelleria see T. Buddensieg, “Bernardino della Volpaia, der Autor des Kodex Coner,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 15 (1975): 89ff. 53. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 88f. 54. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, p. 112, n.89. 55. Weil-Garris and D’Amico, Cardinal’s ideal palace, pp. 70–73. 56. As noted by J. Schultz, “Maps as metaphors: mural map cycles of the Italian Renaissance,” in D. Woodward, ed., Art and cartography: Six historical essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 99. See also J. Gillies, “Posed spaces: framing in the age of the world picture,” in P. Duro, ed., The rhetoric of the frame: Essays on the boundaries of the artwork, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 32. 57. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:50. 58. Tafuri, “Roma instaurata,” pp. 263f.

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59. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1984; H. Burns, “Raffaello e ‘quell’antiqua architectura,’” in Frommel and Tafuri, Raffaello architetto, pp. 381–404; P.N. Pagliara, “La casa romana nella trattatistica vitruviana,” Controspazio 4 (1972): 23–37; and idem, “Due palazzo romani di Raffaello: Palazzo Alberini e Palazzo Branconio,” in C.L. Frommel and M. Winner, eds., Raffaello a Roma: il convegno del 1983, Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1986, pp. 331–432. 60. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:52, noting subtle modulations of the facade bays on the Via Alessandrina making the facade appear wider to an observer approaching from St. Peters. 61. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:50. 62. M. Bôiteux, “Carnaval annexé. Essai de lecture d’une fête romaine,” Annales ESC 32 (1977): 360. 63. C.L. Frommel, “Scenografia teatrale,” in Frommel, Ray, and Tafuri, Raffaello architetto, pp. 225–227; also Frommel’s catalog entries in Raffaello architetto, pp. 226–228, and Giulio Romano – architect, p. 145. For more general discussions see A. d’ D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, Rome: Bardi Editore, 1966 (1891), 2:102,262; F. Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento: Roma 1450–1550, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983; and G. Pochat, Theater und Bildende Kunst im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance in Italien, Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstatt, 1990. 64. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:13–22; idem, “Raffaello e la sua carriera architettonica,” in Frommel and Tafuri, Raffaello architetto, pp. 33f.; P.N. Pagliara, “Il palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila di Raffaello ricostruito in base ai documenti: Classicismo o Maniera?” Controspazio 5 (1973): 68–93; idem, “Palazzo Branconio,” in Frommel, Ray, and Tafuri, Raffaello architetto, pp. 197–204; and “Due palazzo romani di Raffaello,” in Frommel and Winner, Raffaello a Roma, pp. 331–432. 65. Burns, “‘Raffaello e ‘quell’antiqua architectura,’” in Raffaello architetto, p. 387. The idea of the Palazzo Branconio as a critique of the Palazzo Caprini goes back to W. Lotz, “Mannerism in architecture: changing aspects,” in The Renaissance and mannerism (Acts of the 20th International Congress of the History of Art), Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1963, 2:239,246. 66. Commenting on these, C. Dumont, Francesco Salviati au Palais Sacchetti de Rome et la décoration murale italienne 1520–1560, Rome: Institut Suisse de Rome, 1973, pp. 39–42, emphasizes (exaggerates?) the link between the Branconio facade and the fashion for painted facades. 67. Raphael had already used superimposed orders in a more emphatic dyadic contrast on the street facade of the Chigi stables of c.1513; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2: 168f. 68. The complex organization of the facade is well analyzed by Pagliara, “Due palazzi romani di Raffaello,” p. 340. 69. The combination of media was characteristic of certain conspicuous projects of the period, notably Bramante’s choir of S. Maria del Popolo; Bruschi, Bramante architetto, pp. 911–921. For Raphael’s “multimedia” emulation of Bramante’s work in the same church, see A.M. Odenthal, “Zur architektonishen Planung der Cappella Chigi bei S. Maria del Popolo,” in Raffaello a Roma, pp. 305–308; E. Bentivoglio, “La cappella Chigi,” ibid., pp. 309–314. The idea of a hybrid language, e.g., as formulated by Castiglione, had currency in the contemporary debate about style in the milieu in which the Palazzo Branconio was designed; P. Larivaille, “Rome 1525: La cortigiana de l’Aretin,” in La fête et l’écriture: théatre de cour, cour-théatre en Espagne et en Italie, 1450–1530, Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1987, p. 339. 70. Painted portrait medallions appear on facades, e.g., at the Casa del Curato, off the Via Flaminia; R. Kultzen, review of Pericoli Ridolfini, La Casa romana con facciate graffite e dipinte, in Kunstchronik 14 (1961): 65. 71. Burns, “Raffaello e ‘quell’antiqua architectura,’” pp. 387f.; J. Shearman, “Doppio ritratto di Raffaello,” in Raffaello architetto, p. 107f.


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72. H. Burns “Raffaello e ‘quell’antiqua architectura,’” p. 397. On Branconio as a numismatist see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:18. 73. On the fashion for hat badges in general see D.S. Russell, The emblem and device in France, Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1985, p. 23; J. Jacquiot, “Du renouveau des allégoires antiques au revers de médailles a l’époque de la Renaissance,” in Mélanges sur la littérature de la Renaissance à la mémoire de V.-L. Saulnier, Geneva: Droz, 1984, pp. 31–38. In Rome, the making of such “medaglie,” as they are identified in documents, was a specialty of the noted bronze caster Cristoforo Caradosso, best known for his medallion showing an early design for St. Peter’s and a portrait of Bramante; L. Syson, note on Caradosso, in S.K. Scher, ed., The currency of fame: Portrait medals of the Renaissance, New York: Abrams, 1994, p. 114, with n.6. 74. Jacquiot, “Du renouveau des allégoires antiques,” pp. 31–38. 75. Pericoli Ridolfini, La Casa romana con facciate graffite e dipinte, pp. 86f.; K. HerrmannFiore, “La retorica romana delle facciate dipinte da Polidoro,” in M. Gagiolo and M.-L. Madonna, eds., Rafaello e l’Europa, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1990, p. 272, suggesting that Battiferro, who came from Urbino, got the design from his friend and compatriot, Raphael. According to Vasari, Vite, ed. Milanesi, 4:490, the Battiferri house was opposite the Palazzo Accolti, the neighbor of the Palazzo Branconio. 76. Vasari, Vite, ed. Milanesi, 4:490. 77. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:20. 78. Pochat, Theater und bildende Kunst, pp. 246ff., notes the use of the façade motif by both Genga and Falconetto in a theatrical context. 79. Pagliara, “Palazzo Branconio,” in Frommel, Ray, and Tafuri, Raffaello architetto, pp. 197–204; and “Due palazzo romani di Raffaello,” pp. 331–432; Burns, “Raffaello e ‘quell’antiqua architectura,’” pp. 387f.; Tönnesmann, Palazzo Gondi in Florenz, pp. 63f.,69. 80. The crucial issue is the reasonable expectation, on a “Trajanic facade,” of the visual celebration of the emperor himself as a crucial aspect of the design. Such a conclusion is precluded by the logic of the ornamental fields of the Branconio facade: of the six portrait medallions, whomever they were meant to represent, no single one is given greater prominence than the others. Further, the portraits in the medallions, as shown in extant representations of the facade, are evidently not of emperors; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:21, suggests they are papal portraits! 81. For a representative discussion, see C.L. Frommel, “Papal policy: The planning of Rome during the Renaissance,” in R.I. Rotberg and T.K. Rabb, eds. Art and history: Images and their meanings, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–66. See also many of the contributions to Frommel, ed. Raffaello architetto, especially Manfredo Tafuri’s essay. 82. As emphasized by P.N. Pagliara, “Il Borgo Vaticano: problemi di topografia e problemi di storia dell’architettura,” Controspazio 5 (1973): 62–93. 83. Tafuri, “Roma instaurata,” p. 101, n.48. 84. Some idea of the lost facade decorations of sixteenth-century Rome can be gained from descriptions written in the early seventeenth century by the physician Giulio Mancini; in particular, he was well acquainted with the Borgo district, where by 1614 at latest he was employed at the hospital of S. Spirito in the Borgo. See G. Mancini, Viaggio per Roma per vedere le pitture che si trovano in essa, ed. L. Schudt, Leipzig, 1923; Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, ed. A. Marucchi, 2 vols., Rome 1956 (the second volume contains commentary by L. Salerno); C. Whitcombe, “Two Avvisi, Caravaggio and Giulio Mancini,” Source 12 (1993): 22–29. 85. For the “relational aspect of power [at court] … expressed in continual competition,” see J. Duindam, Myths of power: Norbert Elias and the early modern European court, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994, p. 195.

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86. A. Biondi, Introduction, in idem., ed., Eresia e riforma nell’Italia del cinquecento, Florence and Chicago: Sansoni and the Newberry Library, 1974, pp 7–19; on libertinism see Tafuri, “Giulio Romano: language, mentality, patrons,” pp. 11–16. 87. P. Rubin, “Raphael and the rhetoric of art,” in P. Mack, ed., Renaissance rhetoric, London: St. Martins Press, 1994, pp. 165–182; idem, Giorgio Vasari: art and history, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, pp. 358f. 88. See, e.g., Rubin, Giorgio Vasari, pp. 394–396, on Vasari’s response to Raphael’s portrait of Leo X. 89. Writers on hieroglyphics from the late fifteenth century stress the popularity of devices wherever they might be both conspicuous and appropriate. In his translation of Horapollo, published in 1517, Filippo Fasanini’s introduction specifies the display of emblems on the walls of houses; H. Miedema, “The term emblema in Alciati,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Journals 31 (1968): 249; D.L.Drysdall, “Filippo Fasanini and his ‘Explanations of Sacred Writing’ (text and translation),” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983): 134f. On early writings on emblems in general see Drysdall, “Préhistoire de l’emblème: commentaires et emplois du terme avant Alciati,” Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 6 (1988): 29–44. Alciati himself expected artists and decorators to use his material; D. Sulzer, “Zu einer Geschichte der Emblemtheorien,” Euphorion 64 (1970): 41. 90. On metaphoric or moral portraiture on medallions, see Russell, Emblem and device in France, pp. 24,30–34,63; P.M. Daly, Literature in the light of the emblem: structural parallels between the emblem and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Toronto, 1979, pp. 25f. 91. Notably the Palazzi Baldassini and Farnese. 92. P. Pecchiai, Roma nel Cinquecento, Bologna: Cappelli, 1948, p. 517. The contrast of facades perhaps predated Peruzzi’s intervention, for one of the pre-1527 palaces of the Massimi was known as the “palazzo istoriato” for an elaborately decorated facade facing the Piazza de’ Massimi, not the Via del Papa; see A. Proia and P. Romano, Roma nel cinquecento. Parione, Rome: Tipografia agostiniana, 1933, p. 38f. 93. In Florence too, Lingohr, Florentiner Palastbau, pp. 205–218f., notes a contrast between architectural solidarity, with republican connotations, in patrician houses, and diversity in palace architecture associated with a princely regime. 94. S. Macioce, “In margine all’attività di Polidoro, pittore di facciate,” in M. Fagiolo and M.L. Madonna, eds., Baldassarre Peruzzi, pittura scena e architettura nel Cinquecento, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987, p. 649: “a Roma le case con facciate dipinte si concentrano specialmente attorno a Via Giulia e a Piazza Navona; fu in questa zona della città … che si installavano i vari immigrati provenienti dal Nord e proprio in queste strade gli edifici si rivestivano di decorazioni a chiaroscuro e a graffito, perdendo l’antico aspetto medioevale.” R. Kultzen, “Bemerkungen zum Thema Fassadenmalerei in Rom,” in J.A. Schmoll Eisenwerth, M. Restle, and H. Weiermann, eds., Festschrift Leopold Düssler, Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1972, pp. 266f., observes that even the celebrated Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino worked primarily on the houses of gentlemen rather than the great nobles and prelates. Some of them were Roman; their facades sometimes evoke a patriotic “sympathy for the Roman republic”; Kultzen, p. 269. 95. As claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration, by L. Garella, S. Filippi, M. Valenti, and G. Delfini, Fabbriche romane del primo ‘500; cinque secoli di restauro, Rome: Pantheon, 1984, p. 300. B.M. Apollonj-Ghetti, “Il prospetto del palazzo romano del primo ‘500,” in G. Giovannoni et al., eds., Atti del lo Congresso di Storia dell’Architettura, R, Florence: Sansoni, 1938, pp. 240f., calls the type simply the “Roman schema.” 96. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, pp. 322–355; Garella and Marchetti, Fabbriche romane, pp. 333–356; and Frommel, “The Roman works of Giulio,” in Tafuri, Giulio Romano – architect, pp. 77–83. Cristoforo Stati, builder of the Palazzo Stati, was conservatore in 1536 and 1548, and maestro di strada in 1545.


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97. Long attributed to Raphael himself, this is now generally considered too derivative; see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:57f. Bernardino Caffarelli, builder of the palace, held office as conservatore in 1527 and 1538. 98. Another possible case is the palace of the Eroli da Narni in the Piazza de’ Caprettari, between 1514 and 1538; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:228. 99. On Giulio’s Palazzo Maccarani, pilaster strips create an effect of overall gridding. 100. Vitruvius, De architectura I.2 (ed. Fensterbach, p. 41) associates the Doric order with Hercules. 101. C.L. Frommel, “Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne,” in Fagiolo and Madonna, Baldassare Peruzzi. Pittura, scena e architettura nel Cinquecento, p. 249, suggests that the upper part of the facade is conceived, not unambiguously, as Ionic. In a characteristic emphasis on formal values, Frommel sees the building as a return to classical order. 102. According to Frommel, “Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne,” p. 245, the portico merely reinstates a distinguishing feature of the earlier palace, in the formal language of porticoes at the Farnesina and Villa Madama. This disregards crucial differences of context and function, not to speak of appearance, between the examples cited. It assumes, further, that Pietro Massimi’s architectural connoisseurship outweighed his sense of family and social position. 103. The palace was prominent in the 1536 entry of Charles V, whose troops had sacked Rome, marking the point where the emperor’s cortege turned off the Via del Papa toward the Campo de’ Fiori; Proia and Romano, Roma nel cinquecento. Parione, p. 155, n.33. 104. These were painted by Daniele da Volterra in a frieze in the salone d’ingresso; Hercules appears in the opening image as the founder of the family. See H. Wurm, Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965, pp. 265f. 105. The identification of Cacus as a centaur is not in Virgil or Ovid, but in Dante, Inferno, 25.25–34 (The Divine Comedy, ed. C. Singleton [Princeton, 1970], vol. 1, pt. 1, 259–261, and Commentary vol. 1, pt. 1, 431–435). It follows directly on an allusion to the followers of the Roman rebel Catiline (Singleton, Commentary, 1.1.429–430), setting the mythical conflict of Cacus and Hercules in the context of apostasy from legitimate political authority, an idea that may recur in Renaissance imagery. An ancient helmet adorned with a centaur caught the eye of Renaissance draftsmen; C. Hülsen and H. Egger, eds., Die römischen Skizzenbücher von Marten van Heemskerck im königlichen Kupferstichkabinbett zu Berlin, Soest: Davaco, 1975, 1: 14; this also perhaps inspired the scene on the Massimi helmet. 106. J.C. Winter, The myth of Hercules at Rome, New York: Macmillan, 1910, pp. 171–273. 107. The destruction of the temple under Sixtus IV is described by Pomponio Leto; R. Weiss, The Renaissance discovery of classical antiquity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, p. 102. 108. H. Burns, “Baldassare Peruzzi and sixteenth-century architectural theory,” in J. Guillaume, ed., Les Traités d’architecture de la Renaissance, Paris: Picard, 1988, pp. 210f., with n.13. For an image at Caprarola of the temple under construction, see L. Partridge, “The Sala d’Ercole in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola,” Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 469, 473, Figs. 5, 18. The section of entablature in the foreground recalls the fragment of cornice drawn by Ligorio, as suggested by Burns, p. 210. 109. Bruschi, Bramante, p. 130, mentions the Herculean connotations of the circular Tempietto, but not of the Doric order. 110. P.P. Bober and R.O. Rubinstein, Renaissance artists and antique sculpture: A handbook of sources, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 164. Pliny, Historia naturalis, 34,33, notes that during triumphs the statue was adorned with special robes. 111. M. Miglio, “Il leone e la lupa: dal simbolo al pasticcio alla francese,” Studi romani 30 (1982): 177–186. See also Chapter 9. 112. For examples listed in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s catalog of 1549, see P.P. Bober, “Census of antique works of art,” in Renaissance and Mannerism: Studies in western art. Acts of the 20th International Congress of the History of Art, Princeton, 1963, 2:87f. Tommaso Cavalieri

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113.

114.

115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

NOTES TO PP. 173–174 owned a relief of Hercules and the centaur; E. Steinmann and H. Pogatscher, “Dokumente und Forschungen zu Michelangelo,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 29 (1906): 503. A relief with Hercules and Mercury stood in front of the Porcari family palace; Lanciani, Storia degli Scavi, 1:116. A relief of Hercules and the lion on a sarcophagus was reused, perhaps in the sixteenth century, in the tomb of Giovanni Alberini (d. 1470) in S. Maria sopra Minerva; S. Maddalò, “Il monumento funebre tra persistenze medioevali e recupero dell’antico,” in M. Miglio, ed., Il Sacco di Roma del 1527 e l’immaginario collettivo, Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1986, pp. 429–452, esp. 430–434. It is also relevant that the figure of Pasquino was identified, and in 1510 costumed, as Hercules; G. Dickinson, Du Bellay in Rome, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960, p. 155. Hercules appeared early in Rome as a protector of princely gardens. Julius II set a statue of Hercules (at least the emperor Commodus as Hercules), to guard the entrance of the Vatican statue garden, while allusions to Hercules as symbol of the golden age were intensified under Leo; C. Stinger, Rome in the Renaissance, rev. ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 273; P.P. Bober and R.O. Rubinstein, Renaissance artists and antique sculpture: A handbook of sources, London: H. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 166, n.131. Paul III had the statue moved to a newly created niche in the east wall of the Belvedere court between the Apollo Belvedere and the “Cleopatra.” The use by the Farnese and d’Este of Hercules imagery is too well known to require illustration. Angelo’s palace was begun c. 1533/34 to the designs of Mangone; see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 1:139. Frommel notes the clear emphasis on the piano nobile, though achieved through spatial organization rather than ornament. Angelo was a man of some standing in Rome; in 1535, for instance, just as his palace was under construction, he served as conservatore; G. Pietramellara, ed., Il libro d’oro del Campidoglio, Bologna: Forni, 1973, p. 196. His famous colossal statue of “Pyrrhus,” with elephant heads on a breastplate, was displayed on the facade of his mansion, known as the “palazzo di Pirro”: Proia and Romano, Roma nel Cinquecento: Parione, pp. 38f. The statue, now in the Capitoline collections, actually represents Mars. Pietro’s father, Domenico, certainly was a bovattiere; Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:241. On the family’s diverse business interests in the late fifteenth century, see A. Modigliani, “‘Li nobili huomini di Roma’: comportamenti economici e scelte professionali,” in S. Gensini, ed., Roma capitale (1447–1527), Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1994, p. 361. The Massimi role in the pastoral economy persisted into the seventeenth century; L. Nussdorfer, Civic politics in the Rome of Urban VIII, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 100. P. Partner, Renaissance Rome, 1500–1559, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, p. 89. For involvement in pastoralism in the context of a single family’s economic activity and investments, see A. Modigliani, “Le fonti del reddito,” in I Porcari: storia di una famiglia romana tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1994, pp. 371–444. The influential charlatan Annius of Viterbo asserted that the word “Hercules” was derived from an Egyptian word meaning “covered with skin”; A. Grafton, Defenders of the text: The traditions of scholarship in an age of science, 1450–1800, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 88. This may be relevant to the “skin” motif of the Massimi facade. J. Delumeau, Vita economica e sociale di Roma nel Cinquecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1979, p. 98. Pastor, History of the popes, 12:588; A. Martini, S. Maria della Quercia (Le chiese di Roma illustrate, 67) Rome, 1961, pp. 19f.,27,35f.; C. Pinzi, Storia della città di Viterbo, Sala Bolognese: Forni, 1990, 4: 300. E. Rodocanachi, Les corporations ouvrières de Rome depuis la chute de I’empire romain, Paris: Picard, 1894, 2:158. For the bove passante of the Capodiferro, see L. Neppi, Palazzo Spada, Rome: Editalia, 1975, p. 10. Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:252.


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123. For the attribution to Giulio, see Frommel, “The Roman works of Giulio,” in Tafuri, Giulio Romano, p. 63. 124. For his association with the Ciampolini family, whose collection of antiques was sold to Giulio Romano and Giovanfrancesco Penni, see Frommel, Römischer Palastbau, 2:252. Missini was a witness to the transaction.

Chapter 9. From Street to Territory 1. According to Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, pp. 155–156, the Conservatori facade denies its character as facade through the suggestion of a (proto-modernist!) integrative skeletal system. Recently, A. Morrogh, “The palace of the Roman People: Michelangelo at the Palazzo dei Conservatori,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 29 (1994): 129–185, has argued that the front of the palace is not a facade at all, in the sense of a screen, but rather is closely integrated in both structural and symbolic terms with the interior and its functions. 2. According to Morrogh, “Palace of the Roman People,” the palace was designed all as a piece (i.e., including the facade) shortly before or even synchronous with the building’s construction; see also B. Contardi, “Il progetto di Michelangelo,” in M.E. Tittoni, ed., Il Palazzo dei Conservatori e il Palazzo Nuovo in Campidoglio: momenti di storia urbana di Roma, Ospedaletto (Pisa): Pacini, 1996, pp. 51–62. 3. The ramp appears in the map of Rome of Leonardo Bufalini of 1551; A. Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1962, 1: 168f. On the cartographer, see C. Palagiano, “Leonardo Bufalini,” Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 14 (1972): 798f. On the growing importance of the conservatori, as well as their palace, in relation to the Senator, the main judicial magistrate, see M. Franceschini, “I Conservatori della Camera Urbis: storia di un’istituzione,” in Tittoni, II Palazzo dei Conservatori, pp. 19–24. 4. P. Pecchiai, II Campidoglio nel Cinquecento sulla scorta dei documenti, Rome: Ruffolo, 1950, pp. 36ff.; Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, p. 308. 5. Notably the anonymous view in the Louvre, dated by Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, p. 12, to 1554–60. It certainly considerably predates the construction of the Palazzo dei Conservatori. 6. Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, p. 155. 7. For Michelangelo’s citizenship, conferred without ceremony, see F. Gregorovius, History of the city of Rome in the Middle Ages, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1877, 2:333. On his friendship with Cavalieri see C.L. Frommel, Michelangelo und Tommaso de’Cavalieri. Mit der Ubertragung von Francesco Diaccetos Panegirico all’Amore, Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini Presse, 1979. There has been much discussion of the sexual nature of the relationship, but it was surely political as much as personal. Cavalieri’s own distinguished career in municipal politics began, as soon as he became eligible, in 1539, with the office of ward boss (caporione) of the Rione S. Eustachio; Frommel, pp. 75f. 8. The bust seems connected to the assassination of the vicious Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici, in 1537. Poeschke, Michelangelo and his world, p. 118, rejects Vasari’s statement that the bust was based on an antique engraved gem in the possession of Giuliano Cesarini. This is to disregard Cesarini’s significance: as gonfaloniere of Rome, he was a key figure in the city’s ritual, cultural, and political life. He was a Colonna (Ghibelline) sympathizer, and attended Charles V’s coronation in Bologna in 1530; Clementi, Carnevale romano, 1:212. His wedding was a highpoint of Roman Renaissance culture; Pochat, Theater und bildende Kunst, pp. 291–301. Vasari points, then, to the statue’s Roman context and associations. 9. L. von Pastor, The history of the popes from the close of the middle ages, St. Louis: Herder, 1950, 11: 328–343. 10. Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, p. 174; H. Thies, Michelangelo: Das Kapitol, Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1982, pp. 101f.

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11. Burroughs, “Michelangelo at the Campidoglio.” The office of the butchers’ guild was to one side of the main entrance. 12. Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance artists and antique sculpture, p. 64, n.64. 13. H. Siebenhüner, Das Kapitol in Rom: Idee und Gestalt. Munich: Kösel, 1954. pp. 104f., suggests that Vasari’s comparison of the Marforio and the David (see Chapter 7) preserves Michelangelo’s opinion. At its original location in the Forum, close to the church of S. Adriano, the statue was an important point of topographical orientation; U. Gnoli, Topografia e toponomastica di Roma medioevale e moderna, Foligno: Edizioni dell’Arquata, 1984, p. 154. This was an important site of the sale of animals; M. Dattoli, “Appunti per la storia di S. Adriano nell’età moderna,” Archivio della Società romana per storia patria 43 (1920): 341, citing a reference of 1536 to the “frontespitium ecclesiae s. Adriani … ubi venduntur animalia.” Marforio was associated with activities central to the economic sector dominated by the bovattieri. On the dogana di bestiame, see also M. Hoff, Vom Forum Romanum zum Campo Vaccino. Studien zur Darstellung des Forum Romanum im 16 und 17 Jahrhundert, Berlin: Express Edition, 1987, p 60. 14. On the sculpture collection on the Campidoglio see now M.E. Tittoni, “La formazione delle collezioni capitolini di antichità fra cultura e politica,” in G. Muratore, ed., II Campidoglio all’epoca di Raffaello, Milan: Electa, 1984, pp. 23–26; C. Thoenes, “‘Sic Romae’: Stauenstiftung und Marc Aurel,” in V. von Flemming and S. Schütze, eds., Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner, Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996, pp. 86–99, arguing that this was less an expression of papal authority than usually presumed. The protection of specific works on the Campidoglio was a municipal responsibility; M. Franceschini, “La magistratura capitolina e la tutela delle antichità di Roma nel XVI secolo,” Archivio della Società romana per storia patria 109 (1986): 141–150. W. Liebewein, “Antikes Bildrecht in Michelangelos ‘Area capitolina,’” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Instituts in Rom 28 (1984): 1–32, argues for the survival of the ancient right of asylum attached to certain statues. 15. Early views of the area show the retaining wall interrupted or enlivened only by the niche. S. Ensoli Vittozzi and C. Parisi Presicce, “Il rimpiego dell’antico sul colle capitolino sotto il pontificato di Sisto V,” in L. Spezzaferro and M.E. Tittoni, eds., II Campidoglio e Sisto V, Rome: Carte segrete, 1991, p. 114, suggest Michelangelo from the beginning foresaw a stageset version of the front of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on this side of the piazza. 16. A drawing of c.1554–60 shows this statue placed on a low base in front of, but not in, the niche, and dwarfed by the latter, clearly the statue does not fit the niche in shape or scale. See Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, p. 142; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance artists and antique sculpture, p. 219, n.185. It is possible, however, that the lion and horse group, apparently much admired by Michelangelo, was to be part of a larger installation. For the view that the group was destined for the niche, see Ensoli Vittozzi and Parisi Presicce, “Il rimpiego dell’antico sul colle capitolino,” pp. 89f. The statue was later moved into the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (ibid., p. 114), where it was drawn by Stefano Della Bella; C. Parisi Presicce, “Il Campidoglio come memoria: dall’exemplar di Michelangelo alla creazione del museo,” in Tittoni, Palazzo dei Conservatori, p. 105, Fig. 10. Previously located on the steps of the Palazzo Senatorio, it had served as a pillory, to which certain offenders were attached; Gnoli, Topografia e toponomastica di Roma, p. 96; Siebenhüner, Kapitol in Rom, p. 27. 17. Burroughs, “The building’s face and the Herculean paradigm.” On the Capitoline Hercules see now M. Winner, “Der eherne Hercules Victor auf dem Kapitol,” in A. Beyer, V. Lampugnani, and G. Schweikhart, eds., Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg, Alfter: VDG, 1993, pp. 629–642. If placed in the niche, it would have formed a pendant – or rival – for the statue of Hercules as Commodus set up in 1536 in a new niche (!) in the Belvedere courtyard; H.H. Brummer, The statue court in the Vatican Belvedere, Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1970, p. 133; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance artists and antique sculpture, p. 166, n.131.


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18. The identification of Jupiter with the Christian deity was especially common among Roman intellectuals before the Sack; see K. Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist narratives of the sack of Rome, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 97f. 19. S. Ebert-Schifferer, “Ripandas kapitolinischer Freskenzyklus und die Selbstdarstellung der Konservatoren um 1500,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 23/24 (1988): 75–218. On the cosmological associations of the oval pavement, see Ackerman, Architecture of Michelangelo, pp. 166–170. 20. A key site is Cosimo I’s villa at Castello near Florence, begun in the late 1530s; G. Gobbi, La villa fiorentina: elementi storici e critici; per una lettura, Florence: UNIEDIT, 1980, p. 75; E.B. MacDougall, “Ars hortulorum: sixteenth-century garden iconography and literary theory in Italy,” in D. Coffin, ed., The Italian garden, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1971, p. 46; C. Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance garden: From the conventions of planting, design, and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century central Italy, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990, pp. 167–190. 21. Such a view exists in fresco, dated soon after 1538, in the Sala delle Aquile in the Palazzo dei Conservatori itself; C. Pietrangeli, “Gli ambienti di rappresentanza del Palazzo dei Conservatori in Campidoglio: la Sala delle Aquile,” Capitolium 41 (1966): 90–95. 22. E. Re, “Maestri di Strada,” Archivio della Società romana di storia patria 43 (1920): 83. In 1538 Angelo was surely also implicated in the improvement of the Via del Corso, which led past his family’s houses; R. Lanciani, “La via del Corso dirizzata e abbellita nel 1538 da Paolo III,” Bullettino della Società Archeologica Comunale 30 (1902): 240. 23. For the date of the Del Bufalo garden, see D. Coffin, Gardens and gardening in papal Rome, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 78. The statue of Hercules was in the possession of the Del Bufalo family by the end of the fifteenth century; H. Wrede, Der Antikengarten der del Bufalo bei der Fontana Trevi, Mainz: von Zabern, 1982, p. 14. 24. Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance garden, pp. 215–242. 25. D. Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962, pp. 78–80; C. Lamb, Die Villa d’Este in Tivoli. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gartenkunst, Munich: Prestel, 1966, p. 95; M. Fagiolo, “Il significato dell’acqua e la dialettica del giardino: Pirro Ligorio e la filosofia della villa cinquecentesca,” in idem, Natura e artificio, pp. 182, 185. 26. On the program of the villa see Lamb, Villa d’Este, pp. 98; Coffin, Villa d’Este, pp. 78–97. 27. Lazzaro, Italian Renaissance garden, pp. 142, 226f. 28. On Palladio’s early engagement with the Caprini facade, see B. Boucher, Andrea Palladio: The architect in his time, rev ed., New York: Abbeville, 1998, pp. 38, 50f. At the Palazzo da Porto Festa, notably, keystones within the rusticated ground floor carry masks of hirsute, wild-looking men, while elegant figures loll on the window pediments of the piano nobile; see the woodcut elevation in A. Palladio, Quattro libri dell’architettura, II.8 (The four books on architecture, ed. and trans. R. Schofield and R. Tavernor, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997, p. 85). The Conservatori facade is echoed at the Palazzo Valmarana; Boucher, p. 237. 29. Palladio, Quattro libri, II. 16 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 147). 30. Palladio, Quattro libri, II. 18 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 94); cf. R. Assunto, “La Rotonda e il paesaggio: architettura nella natura e architettura della natura,” in idem et al., Andrea Palladio: la Rotonda, 2nd ed., Milan: Electa, 1990, pp. 9–17. On Renaissance interest in Pliny’s villa descriptions, see P. Du Prey, The villas of Pliny from antiquity to posterity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 62f. 31. For a similar emphasis on a working landscape, see Palladio’s description of the site of the projected acropolitan Villa Trissino at Meledo, overlooking an “assai frequentata strada”: Quattro libri II. 15 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 158); L.Puppi, Andrea Palladio, Milan: Electa, 1977, pp. 385–388. 32. Palladio, Quattro libri II. 14 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 94); “above the large rooms … there is a place in which to walk around the hall”). On the “iconography” of the villa see W.

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33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39.


Prinz, Schloss Chambord und die Villa Rotonda in Vicenza: Studien zur Ikonologie, Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1980, pp. 71–81. On acropolitan architecture, see Puppi, Andrea Palladio, p. 38; Lewis, Drawings of Andrea Palladio, pp. 129–150. Obvious cases are projects for a Villa Trissino at Meledo and a Villa Cornaro at Quinto. With an important, if implicit, emphasis on relational meaning, V. Sgarbi, “Una lettura della Villa Trissino a Meledo di Andrea Palladio,” Storia dell’Arte 38/40 (1980): 263–267, notes the diverse values of identical architectural elements at different acropolitan villas. Palladio, Quattro libri II. 14 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 48). According to Palladio, Quattro libri II.48 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 126), this was the site of a castle associated with the notorious tyrant Ezzelino da Romano (d.1259). On Ezzelino’s castle building, carried out “to impress his name on human memory,” see M. Warnke, Political landscape: The art history of nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 40. The high basement of the villa, functional in an area subject to flooding, contributes to the castellated effect, as did the original rustication of the wall surfaces, noted by Boucher, Andrea Palladio, p. 128. A. Rinaldi, “Tra locus e testo: Villa Badoer nei Quattro Libri di Andrea Palladio,” Quasar 1 (1989): 23–30, emphasizes the ambiguity of the villa’s relationship to the past, which it both conceals yet draws upon; he also stresses the echoes of Palestrina. On the use of wooden architraves with the Tuscan order, see Palladio, Quattro libri I.15 (ed. Schofield and Tavernor, p. 20). If the Tuscan colonnades evoke the working countryside, the main porch is flanked by frescoed pergolas, suggesting the passage into an elegant garden; see Boucher, Andrea Palladio, pp. 126f., and Fig 96, noting Palladio’s approval of the frescoes at the villa. On the Tuscan order in general, see J.S. Ackerman, “The Tuscan/Rustic order: a study in the metaphorical language of architecture,” in idem, Distance points: Essays in theory and Renaissance art and architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 495–545. Vitruvius, De architectura VII.5 (ed. Fensterbusch, p. 332), includes shepherds among things made by nature in a famous passage on mural paintings; “pinguntur enim portus, promunturia, litora, flumina, fontes, euripi, fana, luci, montes, pecora, pastores ceteraque, quae sunt eorum similibus rationibus ab rerum natura procreata” (italics mine). On the association of satyrs and shepherds in contemporary landscape prints, see M.A. Chiari Moretto Wiel, Incisioni da Tiziano: catalogo del fondo grafico del Museo Correr, Venice: La Stamperia di Venezia, 1982, pp. 65f., 132 nos. 28, 137; M. Catelli Isola, Immagini da Tiziano: stampe dal sec. XVI al sec. XIX, Rome: De Luca, 1976, pp. 47f., n.51. Mythological frescoes in the great hall of Palladio’s Villa Badoer associate images of Diana and a satyr and Diana and shepherds; L. Puppi, The Villa Badoer at Fratta Polesine. Corpus Palladianum, 7, University Park: Penn State Press, 1975, Figs. 63, 64. On the nexus of satyr and peasant in pastoral literature, see J. Tylus, “Colonizing peasants: The rape of the Sabines and Renaissance pastoral,” Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 113–138. G.G. Zorzi, Le ville e i teatri di Andrea Palladio, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1969, p. 172. The phrase occurs in a poem addressed to Daniele Barbaro, with rather dyspeptic comment on the latter’s new villa, designed by Palladio: “I saw you that day in a finely decked-out house, and me, I live in a tumble-down shed, not much better than a cowman’s hut, built in the way the swallows build their bit of nest. They fly down to the river and the barn to get straw and mud, and we collect sticks and clay, and without uncle Andrea [i.e., Palladio], who did such a good job of the illustrations in that fine Vitrulius of yours (“quel bel Svetrulio”), we build huts and nests with hands or beaks instead of tools, and Nature is the architect. But really, for God’s sake, what’s the difference between you and me, or between a palace and a hovel” (my translation from Zorzi’s paraphrase of the dialect original). Architectural historians have largely ignored Maganza’s poetry; even Puppi, Andrea Palladio, p. 31, while quoting fragments of the poem on the Villa Barbaro, reassembles them in such a way as to distort the original meaning. On birds’ nests as a model for architecture, see J. Rykwert, On Adam’s


40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

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house in paradise: The idea of the primitive hut in architectural history, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972, pp. 105–110. C. Semenzato, The Rotonda of Andrea Palladio. Corpus Palladianum, 1, University Park: Penn State Press, 1968, pp. 22–24, emphasizes devices both of separation and unification deployed by Palladio, including the similitude between the shape of the building and that of the “natural,” but in fact carefully terraced, landscape around it. D. Cosgrove, The Palladian landscape: Geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth-century Italy, University Park: Penn State Press, 1993, pp. 132f., cites an inventory made of the Villa Rotonda and its estate in 1589; cf. A. Ranzolin, “Terra, coltura e ambiente,” in Assunto, Andrea Palladio: la Rotonda, p. 22; Semenzato, The Rotonda, Figs. 1,3. A sixteenth-century survey document shows regular lines of pollarded trees with vines on a property in the immediate vicinity of the Almerico estate; see L. Puppi, ed., Andrea Palladio. Il testo, l’immagine, la città: bibliografia e iconografia palladiane, cartografia vicentiana, Palladio accademico olimpico, Milano: Electa, 1980, pp. 137f., n.168. Serlio, On architecture, ed. Hart and Hicks, pp 90f., explicitly notes the presence of both satyrs and shepherds in the satyric dramas. The emphatic geometry in Serlio’s representation contrasts sharply with other, roughly contemporary versions; see A. Petrioli Toffanin, catalog entry in Millon and Lampugnani, Architecture of the Renaissance, p. 523, n.168. E. Forssman, “Dal sito da eleggersi per le fabbriche di villa: interpretazioni di un testo palladiano,” Bollettino CISA 11 (1969): 149–162; L. Puppi, “Palladio e l’ambiente naturale e storico,” ibid., 14 (1972): 225–234. On the “conscious integration of architecture and landscape” in Palladio’s thinking, see Cosgrove, Palladian landscape, p. 104. Palladio could not always follow principle, sometimes attending “non tanto alla natura dei siti, quanto alla volontà dei padroni”; R. Pane, Andrea Palladio, Turin: Einaudi, 1961, pp. 82f. Palladio, Quattro libri III. 1 (“et si come nella Città si aggionge bellezza alle vie con le belle fabriche; cosi di fuori si accresce ornamento a quelle con gli arbori”); cf., Forssman, “Dal sito da eleggersi,” pp. 158f. The frescoed figure of Ceres over the entrance of the Villa Emo is exemplary; see Puppi, Andrea Palladio, p. 433. At the chapel at Maser, the stucco festoons that link the column capitals in the porch give a suitably rustic air to a miniature Pantheon, while perhaps evoking the vines festooning the pollarded trees in the fertile countryside overlooked by the chapel and the nearby Villa Barbaro; see Puppi, p. 434; Burns, Andrea Palladio, pp. 244f.; J.S. Ackerman, Palladio: The architect and society, New York: Penguin Books, 1966, pp. 137f. On the dual aspect of the chapel see T.A. Marder, “La dedica e la funzione del tempietto di Palladio a Maser,” Bollettino del Centro internazionale di studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 23 (1981): 241–246. On Palestrina and Tivoli, see Lewis, Drawings of Andrea Palladio, pp. 141–150; P. Fancelli, Palladio e Praeneste: archeologia, modelli, progettazione, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974, pp. 49–83. For the reconstructions by Palladio and others of the theater at Verona, on a steep hillside above the Adige river; Lewis, pp. 142f., n.82; G. Tosi, entry in P. Marini, ed., Palladio e Verona; catalogo della mostra, 2nd ed., Verona: Neri Pozza, 1980, pp. 34–49. As at Palestrina, a medieval castle occupied the apex; here Palladio imagined a tholos temple. Zorzi, Le ville, p. 172, quoted earlier. D. Spurr, The rhetoric of empire: Colonial discourse in journalism, travel writing, and imperial administration, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993, p. 7, notes: “in the face of what may appear as a vast cultural and geographical blankness, colonization is a form of selfinscription onto the lives of a people who are conceived of as an extension of the landscape. Members of a colonizing class will insist on their radical difference from the colonized as a way of legitimizing their own position in the colonial community. But at the same time they will insist, paradoxically, on the colonized people’s essential identity with them – both as preparation for the domestication of the colonized and as a moral and philosophical precondition for the civilizing mission” (my italics).

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50. For complaints in contemporary treatises on estate management about recalcitrant peasants and similar difficulties, see J.S. Ackerman, The villa, form and ideology of country houses, Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 118f. 51. The mask has been largely ignored, but see Prinz, Schloss Chambord und die Villa Rotonda, p. 80. The idea may have come from the Palazzo Della Valle in Rome, with its celebrated sculpture collection including a mascherone centered in the palace courtyard; E. Filippi, Maarten van Heemskerck: inventio urbis, Milano: Berenice, 1990, no.50, p. 108. 52. Watson, Achille Bocchi, p. 143 and Fig. 17: at the corner of Bocchi’s palace, Eros, conjoined with Hermes and Athena, bridles a “monster” associated with the rusticated basement. This architectural emblem carries the motto “sic monstra domantur.” 53. B. Guthmüller, “Ovidübersetzungen und mythologische Malerei: Bemerkungen zur Sala dei Giganti Giulio Romanos,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 21 (1977): 35–68. 54. C. Burroughs, “Palladio and Fortune: Notes on the meaning and sources of the Villa Rotonda,” Architectura 18 (1988): 59–91. 55. M. Horster, “Brunelleschi und Alberti, “Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 17 (1973): 65, stresses the importance to Renaissance architects of a type of mausoleum comprising a temple front over a basement zone, the latter serving as tomb chamber. This is the basic idea of the grotto casino. 56. L. Chatelet-Lange, “La grotte de Chilly-Mazarin,” Art de France 1 (1961): 314. See also N. Miller, “Domain of illusion: the grotto in France,” in E.B. MacDougall, ed., Fons sapientiae: Renaissance garden fountains, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1978, p. 194, n.64, and L. Golson, “Serlio, Primaticchio, and the architectural grotto,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 77 (1971): 95–108, listing a number of examples, but in a study confined to French architecture. On the Grotte des Pins, see Rosenfeld, Sebastiano Serlio on domestic architecture, p. 24. An important model was perhaps the Roman temple at the springs of the Clitumnus in Umbria, with a temple front elevated over a high base pierced in front by a large arched opening, which presumably gave access to the waters of the spring. For Palladio’s reconstruction, see Lewis, Drawings of Andrea Palladio, no.22, pp. 44f. 57. An important source may have been the villa of Poggio a Caiano, with its colonnaded temple front and elegant casa di villa surmounting a rustic arcaded basement floor; G. Smith, The Casino of Pius IV, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 27f. For examples of relevant designs by Giulio Romano, see F. Hartt, Giulio Romano, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1958, Fig. 75; M. Tafuri, Ricerca del Rinascimento: principi, città, architetti, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1992, p. 285, Fig. 11. Tafuri notes Giulio’s interest in playing “sul contrasto fra gli effetti materici del livello terreno e la trasparenza della loggia, fra effetti brutalisti e raffinatezza antichizzante”; it’s also a contrast of orders, with Ionic above Doric. See also Tafuri, “Disegni architettonici: progetto di portable con loggia sovrastante,” in E.H. Gombrich, et al., Giulio Romano, Milano: Electa, 1989, p. 496. The motif occurs in major Roman palace designs, as the Palazzo Adimari; C.L. Frommel, “The Roman works of Giulio,” in Tafuri, Giulio Romano – architect, pp. 66,69. On Serlio see Rosenfeld, Sebastiano Serlio on domestic architecture, p. 24. Serlio himself (ed. Hart and Hicks, p. 314) notes the suitability of the association of water and rusticated stone, in reference to a plate of a canal-side palace that sets a serliana over a rusticated base. For a formally and topographically similar palace facade by Palladio, see Puppi, Andrea Palladio, p. 389; H. Burns, “Suggerimenti per I’identificazione di alcuni schizzi e progetti palladiani,” Bollettino CISA 21 (1979): 130–131; Lewis, Drawings of Andrea Palladio, p. 170, n.101. 58. Smith, Casino of Pius IV, p. 17: “early views of the [garden facade] of the Casino of Pius IV show four Pan figures articulating the lower level of the fountain-loggia.” Framed by the herms are three niches, still containing their original statues (Smith, pp. 48f.). The central statue of Cybele (symbolizing, according to Smith, Natura Genetrix) is associated with mosaic figures of the seasons, while further mosaic imagery develops the theme of water and its associated plants and fauna, extending the theme of generation.


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59. I.A. Hanson, Roman theater temples, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959; F. Coarelli, I santuari del Lazio in età repubblicana, Rome: NIS, 1987, pp. 58f. 60. RIBA IX/8; Lewis, Drawings of Andrea Palladio, p. 145, n. 84. 61. For a good account of the history of the site, see J.M. Merz, “Das Fortuna-Heiligtum in Palestrina als Barberini-Villa,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 (1993): 409–450. The cylindrical “Temple of the Sibyl” at Tivoli stood on a promontory above an inextricable melange of artificial and “natural” substructures, a contrast indicated in an early sixteenth-century drawing; M. Luni, catalog entry, in Piero e Urbino, pp. 59–61 no.12. This drawing does not show human occupants; for this we must wait until the eighteenth-century interest in the picturesque possibilities of the “troglodytes” of Tivoli, contrasted with foppish grand tourists on the temple platform. See C. Refice, ed., Tivoli e le sue rovine nelle incisioni del 7 e 800 donate dal Barone Basile Lemmermann al Museo di Villa d’Este, Rome: Deluca, Fig. 12 no.25 (an engraving of c. 1800). 62. For the context of refeudalization and the “exclusive affirmation of the aristocratic class,” see Puppi, Villa Badoer, p. 28; Rinaldi, “Tra locus e testo,” p. 26. 63. The reconstruction of the structures on the slope as a cohesive ensemble was mistaken. On sixteenth-century identifications of the site and their implications, see C. Burroughs, “Palladio and Fortune,” pp. 59–91; T. Carunchio, Origini della villa rinascimentale: la ricerca di una tipologia, Roma: Bulzoni, 1974, pp. 79–90. 64. Pope Julius III Del Monte, formerly Bishop of Palestrina, built or rebuilt a villa (the Villa Giulia) and a family palace (Palazzo Firenze) in the Campo Marzio district below the Pincian hill. A favorite emblem, frequently incorporated in the decoration of Julius’s buildings, was the scene of Fortune and Opportunity (Occasio); Burroughs, “Palladio and Fortune,” pp. 59–91. On the importance of the Palazzo Firenze in the history of architectural meaning, see A. Nova, “Bartolommeo Ammannati e Prospero Fontana a Palazzo Firenze,” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 21 (1983): 74, n.62. For Nova the palace represents the first response in “monumental architecture” to the codification in recent publications of contemporary symbolic culture; this unfortunately excludes architecture from the process of codification. 65. Carunchio, Origini della villa rinascimentale, p. 85. The Latin candidatus is etymologically derived from candidus, “white.” 66. Burroughs, “Palladio and Fortune.” 67. Preliminary work began in 1554; H. Lutz, “Kardinal Ippolito II d’Este (1509–1572): Biographische Skizze eines weltlichen Kirchenfürsten,” in Reformata Reformanda: Festgabe für Hubert Jedin, Münster, 1965, 1: 517; Coffin, Villa d’Este, pp. 87–89. For Ligorio’s excavations at ancient villa sites in the area, see Lamb, Villa d’Este, pp. 87–89. Barbaro dedicated the second edition of his Vitruvius commentary (1567) to the cardinal; in the prologue he praises the villa, stressing the massive earth moving, perhaps all he could see in 1554. For contacts between Ligorio and Palladio, see L. La Follette, “A contribution of Andrea Palladio to the study of Roman thermae,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (1993): 189–198; Boucher, Andrea Palladio, p. 263. 68. Prinz, Schloss Chambord und die Villa Rotonda, p. 76, contrasts the iconography of the Rotonda and the later observatory of Tycho Brahe at Uraniborg: “Uber der Mittelkuppel trägt die Wetterfahne das Bild des Pegasos und spricht damit bildlich aus, was Palladio in der Rotonda architektonisch zu verwirklichen vermochte.” In my view, Palladio elaborated his specifically architectural expressive means in relation to the work, especially, of Ligorio. 69. On Palladio see Forssman, “Dal sito da eleggersi per le fabbriche di villa.” A sixteenthcentury visitor to Tivoli, Uberto Foglietta, noted “una nascosta ragione … di personificare argutamente la natura del suolo tiburtino”; Lamb, Villa d’ Este, p. 94 with n.441. 70. Lewis, Drawings of Andrea Palladio, pp. 129–150. 71. These passages were opened by Scamozzi soon after Palladio’s death and removed in the eighteenth century; Semenzato, The Rotonda, p. 41. On the southwest and southeast sides

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72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

NOTES TO PP. 192–193 arched entrances open under the stairs, providing access to the basement, though not by wagon; Semenzato, p. 24. These were evidently part of the original building. The same was perhaps also true, mutatis mutandis, of palace architecture; for a demonstration of Palladio’s sensitivity to urban sites and willingness to compromise his architectural principles to respond to them, see M. Kubelik, “Kontinuität und Wandel in der Architekturgeschichte,“ in H.C. von Bothmer, K. Güthlein, and R. Kuhn, eds., Festschrift Lorenz Dittmann, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 1994, pp. 269–294. Ackerman, Villa: form and ideology, p. 115. Images of the Fall of the Giants occur in major rooms at the Ville Godi and Foscari (Malcontenta). The flaying of Marsyas is associated with Venetian state iconography; K. Marano, Apoll und Marsyas: ikonologische Studien zu einem Mythos in der italienischen Renaissance, Frankfurt-am-Main and New York: Lang, 1998, pp. 109–119; B. Boucher, The sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991, 1:85, 2:334f. References to the theme appear especially in the Villa Emo, owned by a prominent Venetian as opposed to Venetan family; G.P. Bordignon Favero, La Villa Emo di Fanzolo. Corpus Palladianum, 5, University Park: Penn State Press, 1970, Figs. 63,113. This was roughly contemporary with the Villa Rotonda; A. Tessarolo, “Per la cronologia di villa Emo a Fanzolo,” Annali di architettura 3 (1991): 90–97. Social reformism may inform the unusual, unhierarchical design of the Villa Repeta; Sgarbi, “Una lettura della Villa Trissino,” p. 265, and, more cautiously, Boucher, Andrea Palladio, pp. 130f. See E.W. Said, Culture and imperialism, New York: Knopf, 1993, on Jane Austen’s elision in Mansfield Park of all but passing references to the plantation economy on which the prosperity of the main characters and the grandeur of the house (Mansfield Park itself) depend. The latter’s architectural style is not specified, but most English country houses of the period were Palladian. The returns on the slave trade did not justify it even in the narrowest economic sense; P.D. Curtin, The rise and fall of the plantation complex: Essays in Atlantic history, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. I borrow the term from W.D. Mignolo, The darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, territoriality, and colonization, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Again, I am indebted here to Connors, “Alliance and emnity.” For the larger argument see J. Rykwert, Seduction of place: The city in the twenty-first century, New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

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INDEX

as flesh, 99 as mask, 22 Gothic, 1, 2, 75, 80, 90, 148, 223n80 grammatical, 9, 92, 94 inscriptions in, 28, 96, 205n65 meaning in, 20, 223n80 orders, 116, 137–139, 142 skeletal, 80, 202n36 architectural representation (drawings, models, prints), 4,13, 32, 36, 79, 82, 110–124, 199n8, 212n138 Aretino, Pietro, 4 Aristotle, 16, 99, 147; De partibus animalium, 99; Physics, 250n46; Poetics, 207n89; Politics, 150; Rhetoric, 208n93, 252n67 Arnolfo di Cambio, 80–81 Athens, Duke of, see Walter of Brienne Augustine of Hippo, St., 48, 216n29

Alberti, Catelana degli, 217n10 Alberti, Jacopo Carroccio degli, 222n74 Alberti, Leon Battista, 4, 6 7, 13, 18, 22, 28, 78–79, 95–107, 110, 150, 159, 200n9 Anuli (“Rings”), 27 De iure (“On Law”), 98 De re aedificatoria, 16, 17, 19, 35, 95–100, 144, 221n53, 227n43, 230n8 Della Famiglia, 88, 91, 95, 101, 227n43, 231n17 De pictura/Della Pittura, 95–97, 99, 119–122, 144, 242n41 De sculptura, 99 Grammatichetta (handbook to Tuscan grammar), 98 Alberti family and houses, 56, 71–73, 90, 91, 95, 106, 218n22, 228n47 Alberti, Giannozzo, 91, 101 Alberti, Nicolaio degli, 218n20 Albizzi family, 61 Aldobrandini family, 82 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 261n112 Alessi, Giovanni, 197n19 Alexander VI Borgia, Pope, 151, 154 Angelico, Fra, 196n9 anthropomorphism, 31, 108, 126, 207n82 Apelles, 121 Apollo, 116 architecture and language, 94 and nature, 29, 184–190 and subjectivity, 10, 130–131 as dress/clothing, 4, 7, 99

Bagnaia, Villa Lante, 198n39 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 149 Bandinelli, Baccio, 128 Barbaro, Daniele, 31, 187, 191, 201n22, 213n139, 266n39, 269n67 Bardi family, 86 Bartoli, Maria Teresa, 91 Battiferri, Giovan Antonio, 163 Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 105, 126 Biondo, Flavio, 202n32 Bisticci, Vespasiano di, 114 Black Death, 43–47 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 9, 43–49, 51, 57, 95 283

284 Bologna, Palazzo Bocchi, 188; loggias in, 223n76; University of, 92, 98, 206n72 Bomarzo, Villa Orsini, 40–42 Borgia, Lucrezia, 155 Borgia, Rodrigo, see Alexander VI Borgia, Pope Botticelli, Sandro, 131, 216n33 Bracciolini, Poggio, 33, 209n100 Bramante, Donato, 10, 104, 136–151, 167, 182, 211n129 Branconio, Giovanni Battista, 163 bricolage, 19, 202n35 Brienne, Walter of, 84, 124 Bruschi, Arnaldo, 79 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 9, 35, 77–80, 86, 91–93, 94, 95, 97, 99–100, 122–127 monument to, 77 Bruni, Leonardo, 47, 232n29 Bugiardini, Giuliano, 214n8 Burchiello, 79, 84, 88, 98 Burke, Peter, 32 Busini family, 91, 106 Cacus, 149, 172, 261n105 Caffarelli, Bernardino, 261n97 Capodiferro family, 174 Capponi family, 69 Caprini, Aurelio, 146 Carafa, Oliviero, 137 Castellesi, Adriano, 158, 251n58 Castello, Villa di, 265n20 Castiglione, Baldesar, 110, 165–166, 207n91 Cavalcanti, Guido, 215n18 Cavalieri, Tommaso de’, 176, 263n7 Cellini, Benvenuto, 210n118 Cesarini, Giuliano, 263n8 Charles V, Emperor, Chatelet-Lange, Liliane, 189 chivalry, 14, 27, 47, 49 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 97, 98, 121 Ciceronianism, 158, 242n42 Ciompi, revolt of, 56, 6, 84, 125 Circe (character in Homer’s Odyssey), 33 Clement VII de’Medici, Pope, 131–132 Colacio, Matteo, 121 Colonna family, 190 Colossal order, see giant order Conduct, formalization of, 18, 28, 31, 33, 145, 149 Corbusier, Le (Eduard Jeanneret), 6, 7, 35 Cortesi, Paolo, 145, 147, 158–160 court culture, 18, 33, 35, 76, 82, 110, 165, 238n10

INDEX Cronaca, Il (Simone del Pollaiuolo), 212n131, 251n60 Da Uzzano, Niccolò, 69–71, 106 Damisch, Hubert, 122 Dante Alighieri, 31, 46–47, 51, 58, 79, 81, 207n90, 215n18, 217n4 Davizzi, Francesco, 54, 217n10 Decembrio, Pier Candido, 209n101 De Grazia, Margreta, 33 Del Bufalo, Angelo, 180, 265n22 Della Casa, Giovanni, 33, 213n2 Della Porta, Giacomo, 177–178 Della Rovere, Domenico, 156 Della Volpaia, Bernardo, 257n52 D’Este family, 173 Dina (character in Bible), 44, 214n8 Dinocrates, 30, 196n11 dissection, 31 Dominici, Giovanni, 62 Donatello, 98, 99, 128 Egypt, pyramids, 1, 195n3 Elias, Norbert, 219n30, 238n10 emblems and imprese, 20, 24, 26, 34, 95, 103, 108, 144–146, 166, 205n68, 249n37; as moral portrait, 30 encyclopedism, 206n80 Epicureanism, 213n145 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 30 Etruscan architecture, critique of, 195n3 Ezzelino da Romano, 36 Fano, 201n28 Fanzolo, Villa Emo, 267n45, 270n74 Farnese family, 173 Federico da Montefeltro, 108 Ferrara, 100 Florence Alberti mausoleum at Ponte alle Grazie, 106, 222n74; tower and loggia, 71–73; 90, 106 Baptistery, 60, 79, 80, 122, 210n121 Bargello (Palazzo del Capitano), 65 Black Lion district (lion nero), 85 Bonsignori view, 220n45 Borgo degli Albizzi (formerly San Pier Maggiore), 153 building boom, 85, 133 Casa Davanzati, 68 Cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore, 77, 80, 121 Council of, 95

INDEX Feast of St. John, 51 Loggia della Signoria, 125, 128 Marzocco, 128–130 Muro dei Pisani, 61–62 Ordinances of Justice, 54, 67 Palazzo Alessandri, 59, 61, 69, 88, 221n60 Palazzo Antella, 222n62 Palazzo Antinori, 228n44 Palazzo Barbadori, 226n33 Palazzo Bartolini, 134 Palazzo Busini (now Bardi), 84–91, 105, 226n31, 226n36 Palazzo Canigiani, 220n47, 221n51 Palazzo Cocchi, 221n62 Palazzo Da Uzzano (now Capponi), 69, 84, 88, 106, 220n47, 235n69 Palazzo Davanzati (formely Davizzi), 82, 221n60, 221n62 Palazzo Dei-Guadagni, 212n131 Palazzo Gerini-Neroni, 228n49, 230n4 Palazzo Giandonato, 221n50, 222n64 Palazzo Gianfigliazzi, 222n67 Palazzo Gondi, 88, 133 Palazzo Medici, 15, 35, 69, 78, 82, 85, 88, 91, 94, 104–107, 109, 128, 133, 159, 235n68 Palazzo Morelli, 227n37 Palazzo Pandolfini, 36 Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, 82, 124, 229n56 Palazzo Pazzi, 89, 200n14, 212n136, 221n58, 225n22, 228n44 Palazzo Pitti, 88, 89, 246n5 Palazzo Portinari-Salviati, 88, 221n50 Palazzo Rucellai, 15, 16, 36, 88, 94, 101–104, 137, 159 Palazzo della Signoria (now Palazzo Vecchio), 77, 80, 81, 83, 104, 122–127 Palazzo Strozzi, 36, 88, 133, 211n127 Palazzo Tornabuoni, 88–90, 228n44 Peruzzi family compound, 220n45, 227n41, 228n47 Piazza Santa Croce, 65 Piazza della Signoria, 60, 62, 122 Ponte alle Grazie, 86, 106 reggimento, 82, 83, 91 Rucellai loggia, 102 San Lorenzo, 105–106, 130–132; campanile project, 130 San Marco, 105 Santa Croce, 106 Santa Maria Novella, 107 Santo Spirito, 77, 210n120, 229n56; Pazzi Chapel, 223n2

285

Spedale degli Innocenti (Foundling Hospital), 81 Tetto dei Pisani, 124–125 Torre degli Alberti, 106–107 Torre della Vacca (dei Foraboschi), 55–56, 126 Tower officials, 54, 218n14 Via de’ Benci, 71, 86, 106, 222n74 Via de’ Calzaiuoli, 82, 124, 221n50 Via Maggio, 153, 254n7 walls of city, 71, 86 Fontainebleau, 22; grotte des Pins, 189 Foraboschi family, 55 Fradenburg, Louise, 149 Freedman, Luba, 31 Friedman, David, 9, 64, 65, 67, 88 Frommel, Christoph L., 167 front porch, 3 frontispiece (of printed book), 34 Gaza, Theodore, 100, 233n46 Genoa, 6; Strada Nuova, 5, 6, 18, 153 Ghibellinism, 173 Ghiberti Lorenzo, 79, 98, 99 giant/colossal order, 24–25, 150 giants, 188–189 Giotto di Bondone, 223n80 Giovanni da Prato, 79 Giovio, Paolo, 27, 250n53 Giulio Romano, 189, 209n106, 211n129, 212n137, 213n138, 263n124, 268n57 Goethe, J.S. von, 197n20 Goldthwaite, Richard, 84–85 grafting, 146 grammar, 92 Grendler, Paul, 92 grotesque body, 149 grotto casino, 189 Gubbio, 119 Guicciardini, Francesco, 244n74 heraldry, 13, 14, 18, 20, 27–29, 57, 69, 73, 94–95, 103 Hercules, 30, 128, 149, 171–173, 181; statues of, 173, 180, 264n17, 265n23 hieroglyphs, 145 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 22, 207n84 individualism, 33 Inquisition, Roman, 33 jetties (sporti), 65–67, 88, 96, 221n62, 222n65 Jacobacci, Cristoforo, 153

286

INDEX

John the Baptist, St., 46, 47 Julius II Della Rovere, Pope, 137, 142, 146, 150, 158, 174 Julius III Del Monte, Pope, 269n64 Lapi, Apollonio, 82 Latini, Brunetto, 58, 220n37 Laurana, Luciano, 116 Leo X de’ Medici, Pope, 151, 155, 160–165, 246n6 Leonardo da Vinci, 148, 208n96 libertinism, 7 Ligorio, Pirro, 172, 182, 189, 191, 209n109 Lingohr, Michael, 90 loggias, 3, 16, 90, 102, 106, 136 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 223n81 Lupton, Julia, 44 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 126, 204n53, 254n85 Madonna of the Oak (della Quercia), cult of, 173–174 Maganza, Giovanni Battista, 185, 266n39 Mancini, Giulio, 259n84 Manetti, Antonio; biography of Brunelleschi, 62, 80–81, 86, 91, 122–125 Manetti, Giannozzo, 154, 165, 196n12, 202n36 Mangone, Giovanni, 212n136 Mantua, Palazzo del Te, 188 Manutius, Aldus, 34 Marcus Aurelius, statue of, 178 Maremma, 174 Mariano da Firenze, Fra, 247n19 marquetry, 26, 110, 112, 114–121 Marsyas, 192 Martin V Colonna, Pope, 136 Marzocco, statue, 129 Maser, Villa Barbaro and chapel, 187, 267n45 Massimi family, 172, 262n115 Massimi, Angelo de’, 173 Massimi, Pietro de’, 171, 176 Medici, Cosimo de’, 78, 105–107, 236n75, 237n82 Medici, Cosimo de’, Duke of Tuscany, 127, 265n20 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 35, 50, 101, 122, 133, 210n120, 215n15, 228n44 Meledo, Villa Trissino (project), 265n31, 266n34 memory theater, 42 metamorphosis, 33 Messina (Sicily), 44

Michelangelo Buonarroti, 127–132, 176–177, 182, 263n7 bust of Brutus, 177, 263n8 David, 10, 128–132, 179 Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, 78, 91, 105, 229n54 Miglio, Massimo, 131 Milan, 78, 136; Sala degli Assi, Castello Sforzesco, 148; Sant’ Ambrogio, 148 military technology, 110 Minerva/Pallas Athena, 116, 216n33, 240n24, 268n52 Missini, Giordano, 174 Modena, 121 modernism, 8, 38 monsters, 23, 149, 188, 268n52 Montaigne, Michel de, 253n81 Naples, 44 Narcissus, 97 Nature, conceptions of, 147; statue of, 182 Neoplatonism, 6, 145 Niccoli, Niccolò, 78, 224n5 Nicholas V Parentucelli, Pope, 153–154, 159, 196n12 Nicodemism, 33 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 195n1 Odysseus, 148, 253n74 Ong, Walter, 92 organic models and metaphors, 19, 31, 92, 99–100 Orsini family, 134 Orsini, Vicino, 213n146 Orvieto, 174 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 202n35 Padua, 121, 223n80 Paestum, 197n20 palace street/parade street, 152–3 Palestrina, Temple and oracle of Fortuna Primigenia, 188, 190 Palladio, Andrea, 7, 10, 139, 182–192 Patrimonium s. Petri, province of (Patrimonio), 174 Paul, St., 48 Paul II Barbo, Pope, 155 Paul III Farnese, Pope, 174 Pazzi, Jacopo de’, 89 peacock, 105, 236n75 Peirce, Charles S., 2, 16 Pélérin, Jean (Viator), 123

INDEX Perrault, Claude, 206n76 perspective, 10, 110–124, 162, 187 Peruzzi, Baldassare, 171–172 Peter, St., 155 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 46, 79, 112, 236n75 physiognomy, 32, 108 piano nobile, 65 Pienza, 210n121, 237n2 Piero della Francesca, 110, 116 Pinturicchio, 156 Pitti, Luca, 89, 228n44 plain style, 32, 34, 36, 48, 133, 222n70, 230n5 Plato, 16, 50, 97, 99–100, 233n45; Gorgias, 232n29; Republic, 100; Timaeus, 99 play, culture of, 209n106 Pliny the Elder, 121, 242n41 Pliny the Younger, 40 Poggio a Caiano, Villa, 268n57 Polidoro da Caravaggio, 166 Poliziano, Angelo, 211n124 portraiture, 10, 30, 32, 35, 166 preface, 34–35 Prato, 61 Preyer, Brenda, 58, 88 Priam, king of Troy, 118 Puppi, Lionello, 25 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 31 Raphael, (Raffaele Sanzio), 10, 36–37, 160–165, 167, 199n8 Rhodes, Colossus of, 196n11 Riario, Raffaele, 153, 154, 158 Ridolfi, Luigi, 162 Rimini, Tempio Malatestiano, 18 Roman Law, 98 Romano, Giulio, see Giulio Romano Rome, 116, 134–136 Arch of Constantine, 18 Borgo Leonino, 139, 151–165, 167 banking district, 167 bovattieri guild, 173, 264n13 butchers’ guild and confraternity, 174 calcarario, 246n8 Campidoglio, 25, 131, 173, 176–181; statues on, 264n14 Campo dei Fiori, 137 Campo Marzio, 191 carnival, 155 Casa Crivelli, 202n30 Casa del Curato, 258n70

287 Casino di Pio IV, Vatican, 189 Castel Sant’Angelo, 151 Colosseum, 102, 137, 159, 160 cowhandlers, images of, 247n9 Customs Office (dogana di terra), 170 Forum Augustum, 159 Forum boarium, 172 Forum of Julius Caesar, 143 lion as emblem of Commune of Rome, 131, 173, 180; statue of, 180, 264n16 Marforio, statue known as, 130, 179, 245n91, 264n13 Monte Giordano, 134 “palace of Nerva,” 159 Palazzo Alberini-Cicciaporci, 167, 170 Palazzo Baldassini, 36, 213n140 Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila, 162–165, 212n138 Palazzo Caffarelli; 170 Palazzo Capitolino, 179 Palazzo Caprini (“House of Raphael”), 10, 136–151, 164, 167, 170, 173, 177, 182, 185, 188, 189 Palazzo Castellesi (Giraud-Torlonia), 139, 147, 158–159 Palazzo dei Conservatori, 25, 176–178, 182 Palazzo della Cancelleria, 36, 136–137, 154, 158, 159 Palazzo della Cancelleria Vecchia, 155, 158 Palazzo Della Valle, 268n51 Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere (Alidosi, dei Penitenzieri), 140, 147, 156, 159 Palazzo Farnese, 37, 213n142 Palazzo Firenze, 269n64 Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia, 160–162 Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, 166, 170, 171–173, 176 Palazzo Massimo “di Pirra,” 173 Palazzo Missini-Ossoli, 170, 174–175 Palazzo dei Penitenzieri, see Palazzo Domenico Della Rovere Palazzo Senatorio, 176, 178, 181 Palazzo Soderini, 156–157 Palazzo Stati-Maccarani, 170, 171 Palazzo Venezia, 160 Palazzo Vidoni; see Palazzo Caffarelli Piazza Scossacavalli, Borgo, 158 Pincian Hill, 190–191 Ponte Sant’Angelo, 167 Porta Maggiore, 253n82 Rione Regola, 174 Sack of, 171

288

INDEX

Rome (continued) Sacred Way, 180 San Jacopo in Scossacavalli, 156 Santa Maria in Aracoeli, 179 Santa Maria della Pace, courtyard, 137–139 Santa Maria del Popolo, 146 Santa Maria della Quercia, 174 Santo Spirito in Sassia, church and hospital, 155 sculpture gardens, 118 Septizonium, 101, 202n34 Spanish Steps, 191 speaking statues, 130, 179 Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, 147, 172 Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, 190–191 Temple of Hercules Invictus, 149, 172 Temple of Jupiter on Capitol, 180 Testaccio, 256n26 Trajan’s market, 164 Vatican Palace, 151, 154 Via Alessandrina (Borgo Nuovo), 140, 151–166 Via del Corso, 155, 265n22 Via del Papa, 166, 170 Via Giulia, 158, 160 wolf, symbol of, 131, 173 Rossellino, Bernardo, 210n121 Rowe, Colin, 7 Rucellai, Giovanni, 102, 104, 107 Russell, Daniel, 30 rustication, 58–65, 71, 86, 147, 149, 171, 188, 220n47 Saalman, Howard, 78 Sansovino, Jacopo, 211n129 Salt War, 177 Salutati, Coluccio, 62 Sangallo, Antonio il giovane, 36–38, 166 Sangallo, Giuliano da, 128, 201n29, 210n120 satyrs, 185, 188, 190, 192, 266n38, 267n42 Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, 36, 49, 124, 230n5 Scala, Bartolomeo, 101, 211n125 Serlio, Sebastiano, 13, 19, 20–21, 26–77, 123, 147, 186–187, 189, 203n45, 268n57; Libro extraordinario, 22–24, 28, 33, 204n48 Sforza, Battista (Duchess of Urbino), 112, 116 sgraffito ornament, 13, 65, 68–69, 87, 94, 159, 166 Siena, 73–76; Palazzo Sansedoni, 73–75; Palazzo Pubblico, 75

sign types (icon, index, symbol), 2, 3, 96, 141–142, 247n19 Sinding-Larsen, Staale, 62, 63 Sixtus IV Della Rovere, Pope, 131, 153 Sixtus V Peretti, Pope, 179 skin 1, 19, 92, 212n137, 262n117 slavery, 150 Soderini, Francesco, 156, 162 Spain, 148 speculative grammar, 92 spolia, 19, 25, 146 Stati, Cristoforo, 260n96 St. Petersburg, 150 Strada Novissima, 197n17 Strozzi, Palla, 107 stucco, 142, 163, 164 style, levels of (genera dicendi), 159 sumptuary legislation, 48, 51, 57–58, 217n5 theater culture, 32 Tivoli, Temple of Hercules, 190; Temple “of Sibyl,” 269n61; Villa d’Este, 181–182, 188 Toker, Franklin, 73 Toulmin, Stephen, 150 tower houses, 106 townhouse in Italy, 2, 47 Trachtenberg, Marvin, 62, 67, 124 Trajan, Emperor, 164 transparency, 6, 8, 20, 32, 35, 197n20, 211n129 triumphal arch, 18, 34, 161, 182, 201n28 triumphalism, 19, 28, 109, 118, 150 Trojan War, 118 Tuscan dialect, 79, 98 Uberti family, 55 Uccello, Paolo, 110 Urbino, ducal palace, 9, 90, 108–121, 136, 138, 166 Valla, Lorenzo, 229n62 varietas, 101, 112, 234n51 Vasari, Giorgio, 88, 122–126, 127, 129 Venice, 84, 153; Grand Canal, 153 Venturi, Robert, 6 Verona, Roman theater complex, 188 Viator, see Pelerin, Jean Vicenza, Palazzo da Porta Festa, 265n28; Villa Rotonda, 182–192 Vignola, il (Giacomo Barozzi), 198n30, 203n47, 206n79, 206n81

INDEX Villa Badoer, Fratta Polesine, 183 Villani, Giovanni, 126 Viterbo, 142, 146, 174; Santa Maria della Quercia, 174 Vitruvius Pollio, 9, 20, 28, 30–31, 34, 96, 137–139, 147, 182 on domestic architecture, 17, 22, 37, 100 on the three scaenae, 123 Volterra, 118

Vulcan, 163 Washington, D.C., 150 Weil-Garris Brandt, Kathleen, 20, 130 witchcraft, 33 Wittkower, Rudolf, 6, 7 women’s space, 16, 44–45, 65, 214n9 wunderkammer, 40

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The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense (Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics)

Hegel's Art History and the Critique of Modernity (Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics)

Communities Of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics