The Renaissance at a Glance: The Panoramic View of Florence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
Since its inauguration in 1869, hardly anyone who travels to Florence will miss a visit to the Piazzale Michelangelo to enjoy the panoramic view of the city. But there is more than meets the eye. In this chapter it is argued that around 1800 the panorama of Florence started to grow into an iconic view, in line with the formative role that historians began to assign to the fifteenth-century Republic of Florence in Europe's early cultural development; an idea that culminated in Burckhardt's characterization of Florence as the cradle of modern man. Bearing this idea in mind, this chapter investigates how the panorama, at a glace, captures the Tuscan city in its almost unaltered early Renaissance state and how it slowly grew into a popular image that conjures up Florence's historical achievements in a nutshell.
Keywords: Florence, Piazzale Michelangelo, William Roscoe, Louis Gauffier, Lord Byron, Stendhal, Jacob Burckhardt
Around 1865, the Italian urban designer Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901) began constructing the southern ring way around Florence. The so-called viale dei Colli runs on the former old city walls that Poggi was commissioned to demolish to meet the needs of the then-expanding modern city. Winding through the southern hills, the scenic road is brought to a climax in the Piazzale Michelangelo, the wide terrace with a monument in the middle, containing bronze copies of the famous marble sculptures which Michelangelo had made during his Florentine period. From there a beautiful panoramic view unfolds. One can see at a glance the Tuscan city along the Arno river practically in its Renaissance state as the Medici family had left it a long time ago. Actually, even now the later nineteenth-century urban sprawl seems almost invisible, or appears no more than a blur around the historic inner city at the most. Since its inauguration in 1869, hardly anyone who travels to Florence will miss a visit to the Piazzale to enjoy the splendid view on the city. In this chapter, the panoramic view of Florence is studied as an iconic site, that is, a privileged point of reference within the collective remembrance of a specific historical period, in this case the Renaissance. By investigating the way the city was depicted by different artists, it is argued that the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpretation of Renaissance Florence played a key role in raising the panoramic view of the city to an iconic status.
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- The Construction and Dynamics of Cultural Icons , pp. 83 - 110Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021