Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The Forked Road to Modernity: Ambiguities of the Renaissance Facade
- 2 Domestic Architecture and Boccaccian Drama: Court and City in Florentine Culture
- 3 Between Opacity and Rhetoric: The Facade in Trecento Florence
- 4 The Facade in Question: Brunelleschi
- 5 The Bones of Grammar and the Rhetoric of Flesh
- 6 Setting and Subject: The City of Presences and the Street as Stage
- 7 Bramante and the Emblematic Facade
- 8 Facades on Parade: Architecture between Court and City
- 9 From Street to Territory: Projections of the Urban Facade
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
7 - Bramante and the Emblematic Facade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The Forked Road to Modernity: Ambiguities of the Renaissance Facade
- 2 Domestic Architecture and Boccaccian Drama: Court and City in Florentine Culture
- 3 Between Opacity and Rhetoric: The Facade in Trecento Florence
- 4 The Facade in Question: Brunelleschi
- 5 The Bones of Grammar and the Rhetoric of Flesh
- 6 Setting and Subject: The City of Presences and the Street as Stage
- 7 Bramante and the Emblematic Facade
- 8 Facades on Parade: Architecture between Court and City
- 9 From Street to Territory: Projections of the Urban Facade
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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). 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). 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. 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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Italian Renaissance Palace FaçadeStructures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense, pp. 133 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002