Download architectural classicism and florence as a new republican rome

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE AND ROMAN CLASSICISM: REPUBLICAN
CITY STATES AND PRINCELY EMPIRES
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
[email protected]
(This essay was written in 1997 and has been revised periodically since then. The section A Banker’s
Chapel in a Franciscan Cloister dates from 2010.)
Brunelleschi is credited for inventing a new language of "Renaissance" architecture based
loosely on the classical Roman architecture he studied in Rome. While true enough, this
does not explain why a new "Roman" style of architecture appealed to elites in fifteenthcentury Italy and why it gradually replaced late Gothic architecture. As always with
questions of changing artistic style, the answer lies with broad economic, political, social
and cultural changes. New architectural forms arise to give material expression to new
values and social ideals. To some extent, these values must already be in place for new
artistic forms to resonate meaningfully with their audiences. On the other hand, the new
"Roman" or Renaissance architecture did not just passively reflect new humanist ideas.
By remaking the material fabric of the city, the new architecture helped define new social
ideals. And by imposing them on the city in large, permanent structures, the new
architecture ended up redefining "reality" on a grand scale.
Florence as a Roman Republic
In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, civic humanism took hold in Florence thanks
to the election to the office of chancellor of a series of leading civic humanists such as
Salutati and Bruni. Each used his high office to patronize the new humanist curriculum,
attack defenders of traditional monastic values, transform official urban culture, and
mentor a generation of younger Florentine humanists.
Since Florence was one of the few city states left in Italy preserving republican political
freedoms in the face of courtly “tyrannies” and monarchies, Florentine humanists
developed an extensive comparison between ancient republican Rome (ca. 300 BC to 20
AD) and modern Florence. They even invented a humanist history whereby Florence was
originally founded in the Roman republican period. In this way, they attributed
everything good about modern Florence to its supposed historical roots in republican
Rome. This included the justice of its political system, the impressiveness of its buildings
and its literary culture, the moral character of its citizens (moderation, simplicity,
austerity, temperance, and public service), the prosperity of its hard-working merchants,
and the strength of its armies. Drawing on ancient historians, Florentine humanists
updated the many contrasts in classical writing between the virtues of a republican Rome
and the vices which befell Rome under the later imperial period (ca. 50 AD-313 AD)
when Rome was often ruled by corrupt and tyrannical emperors. Borrowing this Roman
republican rhetoric, Florentine humanists contrasted the virtues of a modern, republican
Florence to the vices of modern princely city-states, above all the threatening princely
regime of the Visconti family in Milan.
By the early fifteenth century, an intensely "Roman" humanist civic culture circulated
through a wide range of Florentine codes, ritual practices, and cultural forms including
laws, festivals, processions, speeches, sermons, historical, moral and political writing,
and works of art. One of the most striking literary expressions of this Florentine civic
humanism was Bruni's Panegyric on Florence (c. 1404). In typical civic humanist
fashion, Bruni claimed Florence was founded in the Roman republican era and preserved
that republican spirit vigorously into the fifteenth-century. For Bruni, the city's republican
institutions underlay its political justice, civic virtue, social order, and triumphant military
power over contemporary Italian tyrannies, especially the court of Milan. In the passage
below, Bruni moves from politics to history, language, and material culture such as
architecture. For Florentine elites like Chancellor Bruni, cultural forms made visible the
city's superior "Roman" freedoms, virtues, and strength. Conversely, Bruni linked
cultural flowering (architecture and literature) to political freedoms as if the
strengthening of Florentine republican values had inspired a similar rebirth of humanist
art and culture. Here was the beginning of a Renaissance mythology of cultural revival
and rebirth (renaissance) which fifteenth-century Florentine humanists, artists, and
patrons later developed into a more elaborate socio-political discourse on the Golden
Age.
What, therefore, was the stock of these Florentines? Who were their
progenitors? By what mortals was this outstanding city founded? Recognize, men
of Florence, recognize your race and your forebears. Consider that you are, of all
races, the most renowned. ... But your founder is the Roman people - the lord and
conqueror of the entire world. Immortal God, you have conferred so many good
things on this one city so that everything - no matter where it happens or for what
purpose it was ordained - seems to redound for Florence's benefit.
For the fact that the Florentine race arose from the Roman people is of utmost
importance. What nation in the entire world was ever more distinguished, more
powerful, more outstanding in every sort of excellence than the Roman people?
Their deeds are so illustrious that the greatest feats done by other men seems like
child's play when compared to the deeds of the Romans. Their dominion was
equal to the entire world, and they governed with the greatest competence for
many centuries, so that from a single city comes more examples of virtue than all
other nations have been able to produce until now. In Rome there have been
innumerable men so outstanding in every kind of virtue that no other nation on
earth has been equal to it. ... Indeed, if you are seeking nobility in a founder you
will never find any people nobler in the entire world than the Roman people; if
you are seeking wealth, none more opulent; if you want grandeur and
magnificence, none more outstanding and glorious; if you seek extent of
dominion, there was no people on this side of the ocean that had not been
subdued and brought under Rome's power by force of arms. Therefore, to you,
also, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right dominion over the entire world
and possession of your parental legacy. From this it follows that all wars that are
waged by the Florentine people are most just, and this people can never lack
justice in its wars since it necessarily wages war for the defense or recovery of its
own territory. Indeed, these are the sorts of just wars that are permitted by all
laws and legal systems. Now, if the glory, nobility, virtue, grandeur, and
magnificence of the parents can also make the sons outstanding, no people in the
entire world can be as worthy of dignity as are the Florentines, for they are born
from such parents who surpass by a long way all mortals in every sort of glory. ...
Accordingly, this very noble Roman colony was established at the very moment
when the dominion of the Roman people flourished greatly and when very
powerful kings and warlike nations were being conquered by the skill of Roman
arms and by virtue. ... Moreover, the Caesars, the Antonines, the Tiberiuses, the
Neros [corrupt emperors from the later imperial period] - these plagues and
destroyers of the Roman Republic - had not yet deprived the people of their
liberty. Rather, still growing there was that sacred and untrampled freedom that,
soon after the founding of the colony of Florence, was to be stolen by those vilest
of thieves. For this reason I think something has been true and is true in this city
more than in any other; the men of Florence especially enjoy perfect freedom and
are the greatest enemies of tyrants. So I believe that from its very founding
Florence conceived such a hatred for the destroyers of the Roman state and
underminers of the Roman Republic that it has never forgotten to this very day. If
any trace of or even the names of those corrupters of Rome have survived to the
present, they are hated and scorned in Florence.
Now this interest in republicanism is not new to the Florentine people, nor did
it begin (as some people think) only a short time since. Rather, this struggle
against tyranny was begun a long time ago when certain evil men [emperors]
undertook the worst crime of all - the destruction of the liberty, honor, and dignity
of the Roman people. At that time, fired by a desire for freedom, the Florentines
adopted their penchant for fighting and their zeal for the republican side and this
attitude has persisted down to the present day. ...
Since Florence had as its founders those who were obeyed everywhere by
everyone and dominated by their skill and military prowess, and since it was
founded when a free and unconquered Roman people flourished in power,
nobility, virtues, and genius, it cannot be doubted at all that this one city only
stands out in its beauty, architecture, and appropriateness of site (as we have
seen), but that Florence also greatly excels beyond all other cities in the dignity
and nobility of its origin.
O incredible magnificence and excellence of Florence! O Roman people and
race of Romulus! Who would not now esteem the name of Florence with great
honor on account of the excellence of its spirit and the vast dimensions of its
deeds? What greater thing, what more outstanding feat could this city
accomplish, or in what way could it better prove that the virtue of its forebears
was still alive than by liberating the whole of Italy, by its own efforts and
resources, from the threat of servitude? As a result of this feat, Florence daily
receives congratulations, praises, and thanks from all nations. But all these
accomplishments have been credited by Florence to the will of Almighty God.
Always possessing a certain modesty, Florence has preferred to credit its deeds to
divine intervention rather than claim them on account of its own virtue.
Consequently, Florence has never become inflated in its successes, nor have its
victories been accompanied by retribution against those states that Florence
could, by right, have hated. ...
As Florence is admirable in foreign affairs, so it has outstanding civil
institutions and laws. Nowhere else do you find such internal order, such
neatness, and such harmonious cooperation. ... There is nothing here that is ill
proportioned, everything occupies its proper place, which is not only clearly
defined but also in right relation to all other elements. Here are outstanding
officials, outstanding magistrates, an outstanding judiciary, and outstanding
social classes. These parts are so distinct so as to serve the supreme power of
Florence, just as the Roman tribunes used to serve the empire.
Now, first of all, great care is taken so that justice is held most sacred in the
city, for without justice there can be no city. Next there is provision for freedom,
without which this great people would not even consider that life was worth
living. These two principles are joined (almost as a stamp or goal) to all the
institutions and statutes that the Florentine government has created. ...
Now what shall I say of the persuasiveness of their speech and the elegance of
their discourse? Indeed, in this category the Florentines are the unquestioned
leaders. All of Italy believes that this city alone possesses the clearest and purist
speech. All who wish to speak well and correctly follow the example of the
Florentine manner of speech, for this city possesses men who are so expert in
their use of the common vernacular language that all others seem like children
compared to them. The study of literature - and I don't mean simply mercantile
and vile writings but that which is especially worthy of free men - which always
flourishes among every great people, grows in this city in full vigor. 1
Bruni's text is a classic of Renaissance burgher civic humanism and its selective use of
classical culture to define, justify, and celebrate new, modern values. Though written
fifteen years before Brunelleschi's innovations in Renaissance architecture (1419-),
Bruni's speech shows how Florentine elites had already projected a Roman republican
civic pride onto the city's late Gothic architecture. Once we comprehend the centrality of
"ancient Roman" republican values to early fifteenth-century Florentine identity, it is
easy to see why the new, conspicuously Roman architectural language of Brunelleschi
caught on so rapidly. Prepared by the widespread circulation of new values in texts,
speeches, laws, and other forms of culture, a "Roman" architectural language was
irresistible once it appeared.
Through the patronage of Brunelleschi's new "Roman" or Renaissance architecture,
Florentine institutions, officials, and ambitious patrons such as the Medici and Pazzi
could proclaim a new civic humanist identity for the city and for themselves as leading
"citizens". Through a new architecture, Florence could grandly announce its "Roman"
republican freedoms, military power, divine favor, political and moral virtues, and
cultural superiority.
Brunelleschi’s Orphanage and Two Churches: San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito
With an ongoing building boom in both private and public architecture in the fifteenth
century, it didn't take long for the new "Roman" manner to catch on and transform the
city. This transformation included a town square - the first of its kind since antiquity which Brunelleschi designed in 1419 around a city orphanage and an important church.
Here, Brunelleschi gave the city its first "Roman" civic space where citizens could
proudly experience their republican freedoms and virtues. With financing from the
Medici patriarch at that time, Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, Brunelleschi also built the
church of San Lorenzo in the new "Roman" manner between 1421-28 (finished in 1469).
While it was unprecedented for a private burgher family to pay for the rebuilding of a
large parish church, the Medici had amassed tremendous wealth as the leading banking
family in Italy and major players in the Florentine textile industry. Giovanni di Bicci de
Medici agreed to fund the church for a variety of reasons. It was his parish church and he
could command the preeminent burial place for himself and his family directly below the
dome in the old sacristy, a separate, smaller building off the north transept. As a gift to
God, the church of San Lorenzo would ensure salvation for his family. St. Laurence, to
whom the church was dedicated, was also one of the Medici family patron saints. The gift
ensured his special intercession for the Medici family’s salvation. As a parish church
serving a large neighborhood in Florence, San Lorenzo allowed private wealth to commit
itself grandly to public expenditures and, more particularly, to a Florentine public culture
of the city as a powerful, godly republic. Here is how one Florentine humanist described
it in his biography of Cosimo de’ Medici, the eldest son of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici
and the man who took over the project of San Lorenzo at his father’s death in 142x . The
patronage described here also mentions other churches and monasteries built by Cosimo
de’ Medici including the Dominican monastery of San Marco and the Badia church in
nearby Fiesole.
Now Cosimo, having applied himself to the temporal affairs of the state, the
conduct of which was bound to leave him with certain matters on his conscience –
as is the case with all those who are fain to govern states and to take the leading
place – awoke to a sense of his condition, and was anxious that God might pardon
him, and secure to him the possession of his earthly goods. Wherefore he felt he
must needs turn to pious ways, otherwise his riches would be lost to him. He had
prickings of conscience that certain portions of his wealth – where it came from I
cannot say – had not been righteously gained, and to remove this weight from his
shoulders he held conference with Pope Eugenius, who was then in Florence, as
to the load which lay on his conscience. Pope Eugenius had settled the
Observantist [Dominican] Order in San Marco, but, as their lodging there was
inadequate, he remarked to Cosimo that, if hje was bent on unburdening his soul,
he might build a monastery. After he had spent ten thousand without providing all
that was wanted, he after completed the monastery, spending more than forty
thousand florins over the work. … Having completed San Marco he began to
build at Mugello al Bosco a house of the Observant Franciscans, spending more
than fifteen thousand florins over the convent and part of the church … . [
describes a church he built in Jerusalem decorated with his coats of arms] … He
next set about the church [of San Lorenzo] and completed a good part of it before
he died [in 1464]. At the same time he was engaged on the Badia of Fiesole …
[his account] found that there had been spent on the Badia seven thousand
florins, and on San Lorenzo five thousand. … Over the lodgings at San Lorenzo
and part of the church he spent more than sixty thousand ducats, and then came
the Badia … He used all possible haste to complete this, but was always in fear
that his time would be too short. 2
…
I once heard Cosimo say that the great mistake of his life was that he did not
begin to spend his wealth ten years earlier; because, knowing well the disposition
of his fellow citizens, he was sure that, in the lapse of fifty years, no memory
would remain of his personality or of his house [family] save the few buildings he
might have built. “
Whereas the late medieval banker, Enrico Scrovegni, used his suspect money by funding
private buildings in the city of Padua, the dominance of a republican humanist culture in
early fifteenth-century Florence impelled Florentine bankers like the Medici to fund
public works and civic embellishment in line with ancient Roman republican ideals. To
put it another way, civic humanism in a burgher republic gave wealthy commercial elites
another way to launder suspect money, grandly support the public good (from which they
benefited), and announce their own wealth in a conspicuous manner which was beyond
reproach. To make this explicit, the Medici had Brunelleschi decorate the ceiling of San
Lorenzo with the Medici coat of arms, five balls, and got church officials to agree to
exclude all other coats of arms from the main parts of the church
For Michelozzo’s large, sumptuously decorated, and expensive tabernacle (carved
canopy of honor over the altar) in the church of the Annunciata (1448), Cosimo de’
Medici, went so far as to spell out the cost with a remarkable inscription in Italian for all
literate viewers to see: "The marble alone cost 4,000 florins" ("Costo fior. 4 mila el
marmo solo") 3 Here we see a mercantile, burgher mentality, measuring out the patron’s
wealth and piety as if marking a line in an account book. The same mentality appeared in
Cosimo’s biography which generally noted the exact cost of every religious commission.
Around 1430, Brunelleschi was commissioned to build another parish church in the new
republican Roman style. The church of Santo Spirito, built only after his death in the
1450s, offers a beautiful example of early Renaissance architectural austerity, simplicity,
and open, geometrical spaces planted firmly on the ground. In these new “Roman”
churches, we see how private and monastic patrons imported a new Roman republican
style into religious architecture, transforming church culture. Brunelleschi’s later Pazzi
Chapel (1440-61) only confirmed the dignity and gravity of the new "Roman" manner for
church buildings in Florence. It is, perhaps, the greatest jewel of early Renaissance
Florentine architecture, with roots in the sacristy he designed for San. Lorenzo
Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel, Cloister of San Croce, Florence, 1429-c. 1461
The Pazzi was one of the three wealthiest banking families in Florence, along with the
Medici and the Strozzi. Andrea Pazzi (1372-1445) began by running the Medici bank in
Rome before amassing greater wealth as banker to the papacy and to the René I, King of
Naples, who knighted him in 1442. After the chapter house in the cloister of San Croce
burned down in 1423, Pazzi offered to fund a new chapter house in exchange for burial
rights for his family in the crypt below. (See the next footnote for the chronology of the
construction process. 4)
Whether seen as a chapter house for the monks of San Croce or as a private chapel, the
Pazzi Chapel embodied the intense competition between mercantile families in the new
commercial centers and especially in the republics where there were fewer political
constraints from above. Determined to keep up with Cosimo de’ Medici who had funded
the church of San Lorenzo and the extensive renovations at San Marco, Andrea de’ Pazzi
hired Brunelleschi to design a large private chapel alongside the Franciscan church of S.
Croce. After Cosimo hired Michelozzo to build a new Medici Palace in the Renaissance
style, Andrea’s son, Jacopo, commissioned his own lavish palace in 1458-9 (finished by
1475) which was loosely modeled on the new Medici Palace. He also used the same
architect to redo one of his villas to compete with new Medici villas.
After the death of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1464, Jacopo de’ Pazzi misjudged the weakness
of the Medici by signing up with a conspiracy organized by his nephew, Franceso de’
Pazzi, and the papal bankers, the Salviati, to assassinate the two Medici brothers who
headed the family: Giuliano and Lorenzo. They enlisted the pope’s tacit support by
planning to install his nephew as ruler of Florence and all Tuscany. And they enlisted the
help of the King of Naples and of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, who
promised to station 600 troops outside Florence (as a coded document discovered only in
2004 had revealed). Using large loans from the Pazzi, Sixtus IV bought control of Imola,
an important hilltop town not far from Florence (Imola) and rewarded them with a
significant share of papal banking revenues and new commercial monopolies important
to the Florentine economy. He also placed his nephew in charge of Imola in preparation
for the planned coup and made one of the chief plotters, Francesco Salviati, archbishop of
Pisa (then under Florentine control). The assassins which included a priest struck during
High Mass in the Duomo on April 26, 1478 before a crowd of 10,000 citizens. They
killing Giuliano by stabbing him nineteen times but the badly wounded Lorenzo escaped
into the sacristy and locked the door. The assassins rushed the town hall to kill the
magistrates but were trapped in a room with secret locks. Lorenzo de’ Medici rallied his
allies and executed a bloody vengeance. Francesco de’ Pazzi and Francesco Salviati,
Archbishop of Pisa, were hung from the town hall, along with a dozen other conspirators.
Jacopo de’ Pazzi, then an elderly man in his seventies, was hurled from a tall window
onto the stone pavement where he suffered terrible injuries., He was then stripped,
beaten, and dragged naked by a mob through the cobblestones until he died. His body
was then mutilated and he was thrown into the Arno. Those Pazzi who were spared were
exiled from the city and their property confiscated, their names and coats of arms
expunged from all buildings. In the aftermath, Lorenzo de’ Medici cemented his grip on
Florence and exercised complete control over the republic from behind the scenes.
This fierce rivalry between leading families sheds light on the competition to build evermore lavish palaces and chapels in fifteenth-century Florence. Although simple and
unadorned in style in line with its Franciscan setting and with the burgher Stoic values
popular in republican Florence, the Pazzi Chapel was also a large, free-standing private
chapel displaying the wealth and prestige of the Pazzi family in competition with the
patronage of rival families.
A Banker’s Chapel in a Franciscan Cloister
The location of the Pazzi Chapel is also noteworthy, appearing in the middle of the old
cloister of the Franciscan monastic church of San Croce, built in the previous century.
Although the Franciscan order turned away from traditional medieval monastic retreat in
favor of urban preaching and pastoral care, the early Franciscan devotion to extreme
poverty fueled a continuing suspicion of the dangerous, worldly spaces of the modern
commercial metropolis. After all, Francis had been the son of a wealthy merchant and
had dramatically repudiated his own mercantile background by stripping off his fancy
clothes in the town square of Assisi.
Seventy-five years after his death, Francis’s “first rule” of poverty was declared heresy
by the pope (i.e., a crime punishable by death). With the popularity of the new order
attracting large bequests from wealthy nobles and burghers, the way was cleared for the
order to become one of the richest in Europe. Interestingly, Francis himself received from
a powerful count the mountain top retreat of La Verna on Mt. Penna, soon followed by a
new private chapel where the miracle of the stigmatization took place. By the early
fourteenth century, the reluctance to build Franciscan monasteries inside city walls
collapsed as the Franciscans assumed a new pragmatism and as commercial and
aristocratic elites donated valuable tracts of urban land and real estate. In the fourteenth
century, the Dominicans and Franciscans built large churches in numerous cities across
Europe. The case of San Croce is more complicated as the Franciscans had already built a
small church on this site, just outside the city walls, in 1252. By 1294, when town
officials decided to fund a larger Franciscan monastery, the city had expanded and the
site was now within city walls. It was here in the adjoining cloister of San Croce that
Andrea de’ Pazzi decided to build a new chapter house provided it could also serve as a
private chapel, burial ground, and monument to the Pazzi name.
Burial on sacred ground was always a high priority for rulers, nobles, and wealthy
burghers in the Middle Ages. The more important the church, the more appealing the
location as a burial ground. Monastic churches were particularly appealing because the
deceased could endow private masses and prayers for their salvation recited by hundreds
of monks in perpetuity. (Andrea Pazzi opted for burial in San Croce in the end.) Monastic
compounds also attracted the patronage of bankers and merchants as a way to launder the
ill-gotten proceeds of money-lending which was still illegal under church law (though
permitted by a hundred loopholes). For the same reason, bankers and merchants (and
nobles) often took monastic vows at the end of life, sometimes a few days before death,
to improve their chances for salvation. It is worth noting that the major sponsor of the
Dominican monastery of San Marco was Cosimo de’ Medici who maintained his own
personal cell there for periodic spiritual retreat. Nothing says more about the productive
interaction between monastic culture and burgher commercial wealth than the existence
of a banker’s private cell (twice as large as those used by real monks) or the willingness
of the Franciscan compound of San Croce to let one of the city’s richest bankers built a
private chapel in the middle of their cloister, a traditional monastic space for spiritual
retreat, seclusion, and prayer.
The location of the Pazzi Chapel is even more strange and interesting when we see it as
grand, expensive, and conspicuously classicizing monument to one of the city’s richest
and most powerful citizens. Here was yet another private chapel whose expensive but
aesthetically “simple” forms both monumentalized the piety of a wealthy banking family
and "laundered" their mercantile wealth by spending it in the service of God. By
patronizing the radically new architectural style of Brunelleschi, the family harnessed the
innovation of contemporary artists to their own program of self-promotion. In a city of
intense commercial, political, and familial competition, the Pazzi Chapel was built to
stand out against the surrounding late Gothic structures including the late Gothic church
of Santa Croce next door.
To find a secularizing, “Roman” republican monument to banking wealth in the midst of
a cloister of a Franciscan monastic compound tied to a saint who threw aside all
mercantile wealth for complete poverty is to be reminded that church, court and burgher
culture in the Renaissance were not confined to separate spheres. It was their productive
interaction which made Renaissance culture so varied and innovative and which makes
its historical study so fascinating today.
The Classicism and Republican Rome in Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel
In his two Roman republican churches and in the Pazzi Chapel, Brunelleschi rejected the
late medieval spiritual language of Gothic architecture with its pointed arches, vertical
orientation toward a higher, celestial reality walls, its solid walls dematerialized with
luminous, stained glass windows, and its rich surface ornamentation which added to the
otherworldly splendor and disembodied lightness. His churches and Pazzi Chapel
introduced a new severity and simplicity of geometrical ornamentation which emphasized
the physical structure of the building as a solid, earthbound body. Vertical elements were
carefully balanced off with strong horizontals, emphasizing the terrestrial nature of the
building. This sense of physical structure and earthbound solidity directly paralleled
similar qualities in the painted and sculpted figures of Renaissance artists such as
Masaccio and Donatello. Whereas late Gothic buildings featured a dematerializing ornate
surface decoration and a vertical orientation culminating in pointed arches, the Pazzi
Chapel stands in the human world as a weighty "body" whose architectural members
display their own structural logic.
Brunelleschi's spaces in the Pazzi were highly symmetrical, measured into simple
geometries which repeated basic structural shapes in larger and smaller forms. Like
Masaccio and Piero, Brunelleschi’s spaces disclosed a divine proportions and sacred
geometrical order. The idea that God was synonymous with reason, that Christian
dogmas were like mathematical axioms was typical of the humanistic Italian Renaissance
aesthetic with its confidence in human nature. And by repeating larger three dimensional
forms in smaller two-dimensional patterns on the walls, the Pazzi Chapel continually
scaled itself down to the human dimensions of ordinary worshippers, or rather, ordinary
citizens of a proud republic. Here one thinks of fifteenth-century architectural drawings
overlaying the perfect church plan with the perfectly geometrical human body - both
showed the divine proportion and symmetry Renaissance writers insisted was a crucial
feature of all aesthetic and physical beauty. There was also a political dimension in the
small-scale humanity of early Renaissance architecture in Florence. In contrast to
Renaissance courtly architecture with its intimidating Roman grandeur worthy of great
princes and empires, fifteenth-century Florentine churches, chapels, and private palaces
employed a small-scale Roman architectural language affirming the dignity of individual
citizens and the republican horizontal rhetoric of ordinary citizens as equals before the
law.
The idea that geometry was sacred was not new to the Renaissance. Medieval
architecture, aesthetics, theology and science routinely spoke of divine reason and a
sacred mathematics. What was new in Renaissance architecture (and aesthetics) was the
new simplicity of this mathematical proportion, its connections to the natural, bodily
world and to the human form in particular, and its appearance in a Roman republican
architectural language which set itself firmly on the ground as a weighty, dignified, sober
"civic" architecture. In contrast, the sacred mathematics of the late Gothic period had a
distinctly mystical or otherworldly quality about it. It was uninterested in taking on
human scale, earthbound, rational structural forms, classical historical references, and
contemporary civic meaning.
With the above discussion of Florentine "republican" values in mind, the remarkable
severity of the Pazzi Chapel takes on its full "Roman" political meaning within fifteenthcentury Florentine culture. After all, the chapel was commissioned by a wealthy
Florentine mercantile family eager to display on a fairly large and expensive scale its
Roman republican simplicity and civic dignity. Remember the second part of the
inscription on the pedestal to Donatello's David a few years earlier.
"Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues. Behold the neck of
pride severed by the hand of humility"
Like the first "Roman" church in Florence, Brunelleschi's San Lorenzo, the unusual
starkness of the Pazzi Chapel shows how an aesthetic of tremendous simplicity combined
with monumental gravity had become increasingly important within a republican
Florence by the 1430s and 40s. In this new political and social climate, late Gothic
sumptuous decoration and the courtly International Style resembled what burgher
humanists decried as an immoral luxuriousness tied to corrupt courts and tyrants of the
ancient or modern world. These were the qualities Bruni projected onto the worst Roman
emperors and their modern equivalents, the powerful foreign courts or "tyrannies" which
threatened Florence and its republican freedoms in the later fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries.
Installed in the material fabric of Florence with large, grand buildings commissioned by
the city's wealthiest, most powerful families, the new "Roman" republican manner set a
powerful, authoritative, even intimidating cultural example for all new buildings
thereafter. Within two decades, a generation of younger Italian architects jumped on the
"Roman" humanist bandwagon encouraged by the lavish patronage of Florence's
wealthiest, highly competitive families such as the Strozzi, Medici, and Pazzi.
Private Palaces and the Roman Republican Style: Michelozzo’s Medici Palace,
Florence, 1440-60
In the 1440s, the architect Michelozzo designed a Florentine palace in the "Roman"
manner for the Medici family. After that, the Roman" manner spread quickly into private
architecture in Florence and elsewhere.
The exterior of the Medici Palace is divided up into three stories with a series of
classically ornamented windows along the upper two floors. The lower story was
rusticated, that is, built from stones whose outer surface was left roughly cut. Stone
benches project at the street level where visitors could wait (and be kept waiting). The
Medici coat of arms - five balls - appears at the top of each window and in the metal rings
for tying horses.
Rustic and Civilized: Architecture as Inner Nobility and Burgher Social Climbing
Rustication was a common exterior in ancient Roman and medieval architecture, as seen
on the Palazzo Vecchio, the old town hall in Florence. In all such earlier architecture,
rustication appeared over the entire exterior, never on one story as in Michelozzo's
Medici Palace. Its restricted appearance on the lower story suggests a new architectural
self-consciousness in fifteenth-century Italy and a deliberate use of architectural forms as
a coded aesthetic language. It also suggests a Florentine audience capable of reading the
language of architectural forms and the way architecture worked in the highly urbanized
world of Renaissance Italy as a public language of civic identity.
The rusticated facade served at least two purposes. One was defensive. In an age when
the wealthiest families needed secure, fortress-like homes to protect themselves against
the private armies of rival families and the mobs of the poor which were periodically
roused against targeted families, private residences were solid, fortress-like structures,
especially at the street level. The greater the wealth, the more-fortress-like was the
building to protect that wealth. By rusticating the first story of the Medici Palace,
Michelozzo made it look rock solid on the more vulnerable street level.
The selective rustication of the first story also expressed social values. It is significant
that the Italian term for the second story with its residential quarters is piano nobile or
noble floor. By relegating medieval rustication to the lower floor, the Medici claimed for
themselves the inner nobility prized by burger humanists (and quickly taken up by
Renaissance nobles as well). This inner nobility was especially appealing to bankers and
businessmen as a way of offsetting the stigma attached to economic pursuits. At the same
time Cosimo de’ Medici was happy to follow fourteenth and fifteenth century custom in
dividing much of the first story of his palace into shops rented out to artisans. As
elsewhere in late medieval Italy, many palaces combined private residential quarters with
commercial space.
Despite this lucrative tolerance of small-scale commerce, late medieval and renaissance
discussions of the relative nobility of the various occupations always distinguished
between a lower, base world of petty retail with its proverbial dishonesty and private
greed and a higher, more honorable world of grand finance and long-distance trade with
its larger civic benefits. I used the phrase “relative nobility” because all banking and
commerce was traditionally relegated by aristocrats to the base and demeaning world of
work. In courtly society, all economic pursuit was seen as a degrading enslavement to
greed. Following a long-standing Western idea going back to classical writers such as
Aristotle (Politics, ch. 1), inherited wealth “freed” aristocrats to pursue the higher world
of politics and philosophy. In the real world of late Medieval and Renaissance court life,
this meant government and refined leisure. This is the original meaning of the term
“liberal” arts – they liberated the human psyche from the base economic passions tied to
work and all economic necessity.
Of course all of this was the convenient, self-serving social ideology of aristocratic
privilege which helped confirm the “innate” superiority of nobles to all those below them
on the social ladder. It was especially appealing to the great mass of aristocrats with
neither land nor wealth who were most threatened by the “arrogant” urban commercial
elites who had seized power in republican city-states like Florence and expelled the
aristocracy from their traditional monopoly of political power.
Despite the wealthy burgher challenge to court power, bankers and merchants were far
more interested in buying into the prevailing social hierarchies than in overthrowing
them. While they brought a new set of practical values and worldly wisdom tied to
business and finance, they also aped their superiors in a wide array of habits and tastes
including grand, palace-sized homes. On the other hand, traditional burgher republican
values which governed Florentine society until the 1480s prevented Cosimo de’ Medici
from indulging outwardly in any form of architectural splendor or ornate decoration,
especially in a private residence. (Churches were a different matter.) Here his burgher,
republican ethos – which frequently contrasted burgher morality, austerity, simplicity,
hard work, civic obligation, and conjugal fidelity to “courtly” luxury, pride, greed, lust,
and selfishness - was well served by the rustication of the lower floor with its simple,
unadorned, natural look.
All this shed light on the exterior and interior of the Medici Palace. Since big financiers
like the Medici were eager to distinguish themselves from the sordid world of petty
commerce as "honorable" merchants with noble virtues, lofty civic concerns, and
intellectual aspirations to humanist culture, the rusticated lower story of their new palace
signaled the lower, rougher, less civilized world of petty retail vs. the higher, civilized
world of Cosimo de' Medici spelled out in the classical arches and moldings of the upper,
residential floors, the piano nobile. Here one thinks of a passage from Bruni's Panegyric
to Florence – a treatise rich in proud tributes to the magnificent architecture and
civilization of Florence - where he attributes to his hometown a lofty interest in a
literature and high culture far from all sordid economic concerns.
The study of literature - and I don't mean simply mercantile and vile writings but
that which is especially worthy of free men - which always flourishes among every
great people, grows in this city in full vigor . . . 5
The most interesting thing about the architectural language used in the Medici Palace was
the way it changed when one entered the private space of the courtyard and the personal
apartments on the upper floors. In this shift, we see the republican ideal of a modest
public face – free of ostentation and wealth – vs. private spaces where wealthy burghers
were more willing and able to display wealth and sophistication. This wealth is even
more apparent in the more private living quarters of the piano nobile where Cosimo
maintained a private chapel as was the custom of the great nobles. In 145x, Cosimo
commissioned Fra Filippo Lippi’s Mystic Nativity as an altarpiece and in 1459, Benozzo
Gozzoli completely covered the walls of this chapel with sumptuous frescoes depicting
The Procession of the Magi featuring numerous portraits of the Medici family and their
retinue in stately equestrian processions recalling their participation in the annual
Florentine civic festival of the Procession of the Magi on the Feast Day of the Epiphany.
Housebound with illness for the last five years of his life (1459-1464), Cosimo spent
many hours in his chapel, transforming it into a private spiritual retreat with masses
celebrated daily by his in-house priest. 6 Yet even as he contemplated his own mortality,
he could also admire the splendor of his family and the future glory promised by his sons
who were all depicted in Gozzoli’s lavish frescoes.
Inside the Medici Palace, Michelozzo paid homage to Brunelleschi with a beautiful
square courtyard defined on each side by three arcades set on strong but slender columns.
In the center of this simple, "Roman republican" space, the Medici displayed a prized
work of modern sculpture with strong civic connotations, Donatello's David. As a
classicizing nude, Donatello’s sculpture worked to display Cosimo's humanistic tastes,
aesthetic sophistication, and innovation. His willingness to patronize a surprising nudity
in religious art also quietly advertised his power to bend the rules of Christian propriety.
In the frieze running around the courtyard just above the arcade, Cosimo de' Medici
mounted reliefs of the Medici coats of arms interspersed with carved representations of
his prized collection of ancient gems and cameos. Privileged guests could admire the real
gems upstairs in Cosimo's quarters. These little sculptures can be seen as early examples
of art reproduction. In advertising Cosimo’s sophisticated humanist collecting, they
allowed him to claim the aesthetic cultivation traditionally reserved for high nobles and
rulers as a distinctive badge of identity. With its walls completely covered in frescoes, the
private chapel upstairs was also a kind of art gallery legitimized by Christian devotional
imagery. It was no accident that the centerpiece of this sumptuously decorated chapel was
Fra Filippo Lippi’s Nativity which located the birth of Christ in a rocky monastic
wilderness featuring St. Bernard as a visionary onlooker. In this way, Cosimo could move
in his devotions from courtly and mercantile splendor to the traditional monastic retreat
of the austere wilderness, only to recoup courtly splendor in the Paradise gardens painted
by Gozzoli on either side. Here was a private chapel where a rich banker could have his
cake and eat it too.
The striking focus on classical art in Michelozzo’s courtyard also allowed Cosimo to
separate himself from traditional courtly patrons with their chivalric imagery and to carve
out a new, more intellectual humanist identity tied to antiquity. Indeed, it was no accident
that the classical style in architecture, painting, and sculpture was first taken up in
Renaissance Italy by bankers and burghers, a group which lacked the venerable lineage
and family histories of court society and which cultivated a more practical, flexible,
cosmopolitan set of skills geared to maximizing opportunities and advancement in a
shifting, unpredictable world. 7 It is these reproductions of classical art in the courtyard of
the Medici Palace which underscore the “pagan” qualities of Donatello’s nude sculpture –
the David – the centerpiece of this Medici “museum”. The reproduction of Cosimo’s
ancient carvings also invited comparisons between classical and modern sculpture which
highlighted similarities while underscoring Donatello’s originality.
As a monumental public language familiar to urban elites, architecture trumpeted the
virtues of republican Florence to the courtly city states in Italy and to any Florentine
nobles looking to overthrow the republican government. Despite Bruni's reassuring view
of a triumphant Florence with an unbroken republican tradition stretching back to ancient
Rome, the Florentine republic of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century was fragile and
continually threatened by external and internal threats, shifting factions, civil violence,
assassinations, overthrows and purges with the Medici, in particular, exiled a number of
times. By the early sixteenth-century, republican forces were badly weakened and the city
finally succumbed to autocratic governments for the next two and a half centuries.
Courtly Regimes and the Architectural Language of Roman Empire: Alberti’s San
Andrea in Mantua, designed 1470**
The other great architect of the mid-fifteenth century working in Florence and in
Northern Italy, was the great humanist and polymath, Alberti. He designed "Roman"
palaces in Florence like the Palazzo Rucellai (1455, Turner, p. 85) and in Rimini and
gave the new style a solid theoretical foundation by writing the first humanist treatises on
architecture, painting, and sculpture. He also wrote one of the two most important
Renaissance treatises on humanist "family values" and marriage.
Late in his career, Alberti developed a more sculptural, muscular, masculine,
intimidating, grandly "Roman" architectural manner for princely patrons in Northern Italy
as seen in his church of Sant'Andrea in Mantua. Modelled after the ancient Roman
Roman Basilica of Maxentius, this monastic church was commissioned by Lodovico
Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua to house an important relic of Christ’s blood which
attracted thousands of pilgrims each year. Although originally a monastic church under
the jurisdiction of the local Benedictine abbot, Ludovico had the new church transferred
to his son, Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, as part of a power play intended to control the
revenues of pilgrims and to assert complete authority over the city. No wonder the façade
featured a Roman triumphal church, looking out toward nearby court buildings. The new
church grandly announced Gonzaga imperial pretensions in Northern Italy in a manner
disproportionate to their real power. Inside, Sant’Andrea offered a series of gigantic,
intimidating spaces defined by huge Roman barrel vaults and a highly ornate Roman
ornament and coffering covering every inch of the walls, vaults, and dome.
Compare this to the flatness of Brunelleschi's buildings and to Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai
in republican Florence which looks a little like an architectural drawing transferred to
stone. Needless to say, courtly patrons looked back to their own version of classical
antiquity. For the most part, they avoided republican Rome and found spiritual and
historical kinship with the later Rome of the imperial period. They also admired the later
Hellenic period of the world-conquering of Alexander the Great. As noted in the general
discussion of "Court Humanism," Renaissance courtly elites fashioned a distinctive
imperial Renaissance culture in which the arts aggrandized and deified powerful heroes,
rulers, and dynasties.
The Spread of the New Renaissance Architecture in Italy Through 1480
Because architecture was such an expensive, grand and politically charged medium, it set
an example not just for other building but also for the smaller media. Thus Renaissance
architecture had a larger impact on the gradual shift from late Gothic forms to a new
Renaissance aesthetic in all the arts. On the other hand, Renaissance architectural forms
circulated with the help of smaller, more portable art objects such as paintings, tapestries,
manuscript illuminations, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and above all, the new media of
prints (ca. 1440-). By the 1470s, thousands of Renaissance-style buildings circulated in
paintings, ceramics, and prints at a time when only a few dozen Renaissance buildings
were actually constructed. As we have seen, one such early painted example came in
Masaccio's Holy Trinity of 1428.
Piero School, Ideal City, ca. 1475
Whether republican-burgher or princely-imperial, the new Renaissance architecture
which emerged in fifteenth-century was closely tied to the intense civic consciousness of
the Italian city-states. In their larger civic dimension, each Renaissance building offered
itself as an exemplary building for the rest of the city. Each implied the possibility of a
whole city rebuilt in the new style. And in some centers, the new style went beyond a
single structure to reshape a larger civic space. One example was Brunelleschi's
Foundling Hospital which redefined one side of an important town square in Florence.
Monumental church facades set in large piazzas such as Alberti's San. Andrea also
redefined larger civic spaces.
The most striking expression of Renaissance architecture's larger civic value were
paintings depicting ideal cities. Three such paintings come down to us, all executed in
Urbino during the 1470s and 1480s in the reign of Federico da Montefeltro. In their
measured, perspectival art and humanist architectural space, they show close ties to the
art of Piero della Francesca. All three paintings define the perfect city in the grand,
Roman architectural terms of court humanism favored in Urbino. As utopian images of
the princely city state, these paintings imagine cities featuring large churches, grand civic
buildings, and splendid palaces. The tangled streets of medieval cities give way to
perfectly planned blocks and streets laid out in geometrical grids and fixed in one-point
perspectives. Here mathematical order expressed humanist political, social, moral, and
religious orders. One painting even borrows two ancient Roman monuments for its image
of the princely utopia: the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, set symmetrically
amidst the grand palaces worthy of great rulers.
Though the urban politics is courtly rather than republican, it is all the more striking as an
expression of the profoundly urban identity of the Italian nobility in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Elsewhere in Europe, the nobility was more attached to medieval
feudal values which made nature and the rural manor or castle their prime residence.
Only in the early sixteenth-century did the Northern nobles gradually adopt the urban
culture and architectural forms typical of Italy after 1400.
By the 1470s, an imperial "Roman" Renaissance culture was well established in all of the
major courts in Italy. Each court strove to impress its rivals by hiring the best
Renaissance architects, artists, humanists, and poets. The relative proximity of these
courts and urban centers to each other, their intense political and cultural rivalries, and
the frequency of strategic intermarriages only accelerated the spread of the new
Renaissance aesthetic. In turn, artists such as Donatello, Alberti, and Leonardo who
began working in republics like Florence were happy to work for Italian and foreign court
centers in exchange for social prestige, fame, and lucrative patronage.
As with all cultural shifts, the rapid spread of Renaissance humanism and artistic culture,
whether civic or courtly, was also a matter of fashionable novelty. Its new concepts of
"civilized" behavior and thinking offered courtly and ambitious burgher elites a new
language of elegance, sophistication, private leisure, conversation, and material display.
A Renaissance manner was increasingly de rigeur in public and private commissions
ranging from townhouses, villas, churches, the decoration of private chapels, and the
semi-public world of interior decoration, private collecting, books, and garden design.
As humanism swept the field in educational matters, it also became increasingly
fashionable intellectually. As always in matters cultural and intellectual, fashion, novelty,
and social pretensions greatly accelerated the change once it took hold. While we cannot
dismiss serious cultural changes as mere fashion, neither should we discount the
importance of novelty in an age which celebrated human creativity and produced a
modern sense of historical consciousness.
1
2
The Vespasiano Memoirs, pp. 218-222. This discussion of Medici patronage depends heavily on E. H.
Gombrich’s important article, “The Early Medici as Patrons of Art”, published in 1960 and reprinted in his
collection, Norm and Form. Most of the text cited here was cited in Gombrich. For more on architectural
spending, see Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social
History, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
3
See Gombrich, op. cit.
Although some scholars date Brunelleschi’s involvement as early as 1423-4, Pazzi officially assumed the
commission in 1429 when he purchased city bonds with the interest promised to the new chapel. Delayed
by funding problems, construction didn’t begin until after 1433 when part of the cloister arcade was
demolished to make room for the new building. Although the main walls were probably finished by 1443 (a
date inscribed on one wall), construction remained slow due to insufficient funds and the death of the
patron in 1445. He was buried in San Croce and his eldest son, Antonio, managed the project for three
years until his death in 1458. At this point, the youngest of Andrea’s three sons, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, saw the
construction through to its conclusion. The main dome was only completed in 1459 (as indicated by an
inscribed date) while the porch dome was finished in 1461. The porch was added to the original design at
some later stage with some scholars giving it to a pupil while others attributing it to Brunelleschi. See
Ludwig Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1400-1600, Penguin Books, 1974, pp. 1213; Harold Meek, “Brunelleschi,” Grove Dictionary of Art, 1996, vol. 5, pp. 18-19; Howard Saalman, “The
Authorship of the Pazzi Chapel,” Art Bulletin, 1964, pp. 388-394.
4
5
Lionardo Bruni, Panegyric to the City of Florence, trans. Benjamin Kohl, in Benjamin Kohl and Ronald
Witt, eds., The Earthly Republic. Italian Humanists on Government and Society, University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1978, (1991 ed., p. 174
6
Kent, op. cit., p. 306
This wisdom of practical experience carried the day in court culture as well, though it remained rooted in
the burgher civic humanism of mercantile society. One of its most sustained defenses was mounted for
would-be court patrons by the Florentine civic humanist, historian, political philosopher, and city
chancellor, Machiavelli, in his famous essay, The Prince.
7