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.

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. 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. 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).

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.

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.

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.

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. 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). 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.

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. 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.

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. 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). 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.

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).

This book is deliberately and literally superficial, “stopping at the surface, the fold, the skin.” 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.

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. 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.

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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.

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).

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

How can we explain this discrepancy between what we read and what we see? 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.

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. 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.

In practice, Brunelleschi's austere conception of architecture could not satisfy the growing interest in private self-representation, not least through residential construction. 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. 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.