Chapter 6. The Palace and the Street: Private Identities and Public Spaces

Nevola, Fabrizio

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Chapter 6. The Palace and the Street: Private Identities and Public Spaces

Fabrizio Nevola

Street Life in Renaissance Italy

So wrote Andrea Palladio of the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza in his treatise on architecture, the Quattro libri (1570), effectively claiming the primary authorship for...

Author

Fabrizio Nevola

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.227-264

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00290.6

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22187

Chapter subject tags:Architecture, Renaissance--ItalyUrban ecology (Sociology)Urbino (Italy)Venice (Italy)Palaces--ItalyCity and town life--ItalyPalladio, Andrea, 1508-1580Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472Public spaces--Italy

Chapter 6. The Palace and the Street: Private Identities and Public Spaces

The following designs are of a building in Vicenza belonging to Count Ottavio de’ Thiene, once belonging to Count Marc’Antonio, who began it. The house is situated near the square in the centre of the city, and so I thought it a good idea to put some shops in the part facing that square because the architect must also take into account what is useful for the patron [fabricatore], which he can do comfortably when the site is large enough. Each shop has a mezzanine [mezato] above it for the use of the shopkeepers, and above are the rooms for the master. This house forms a block; that is, it is surrounded by four streets. The main entrance, or as we may call it the master gate, has a loggia in front and is on the busiest street of the city. The great hall will be above and will project flush with the loggia. There are two other entrances at the sides with columns in the middle, which have been placed there not so much for ornament as to make the room above stable and to make the breadth proportional to its height. From these entrances one enters the courtyard [cortile], surrounded on the inside with loggias of piers [pilastro], which are rusticated on the ground floor and Composite on the first floor. In the corners are octagonal rooms, which work out very well not only because of their shape but also because of the different uses to which they can be adapted. The rooms of this building that are now finished were decorated with superb stucco work by Master Alessandro Vittoria and Master Bartolomeo Ridolfi and the paintings by Master Anselmo Canera and Master Bernardino India, both from Verona, who are second to none in our time. The cellars and similar places are underground because the building is in the highest part of the city where there is no danger that water will be a nuisance.1Palladio, 1997, p. 88.

So wrote Andrea Palladio of the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza in his treatise on architecture, the Quattro libri (1570), effectively claiming the primary authorship for a building erected for the richest and most politically ambitious family in the city. In fact, the design was almost certainly initiated by the prestigious and highly sought-after court architect of the dukes of Mantua, Giulio Romano, who visited Vicenza in 1542; Palladio took up the lead role of controlling architect on the site only after Giulio’s death in 1546.2Burns, 2008, pp. 40–43, with extensive earlier bibliography. Much has been written about the palace design, and its disputed authorship has been the subject of comment since the early seventeenth century, when Inigo Jones annotated his copy of the Quattro libri to that effect (1613–14; fig. 136); however, less attention has been paid to what Palladio himself actually wrote about the building.3Ibid., p. 42; Anderson, 2017.

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Description: Plan and elevation of the Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza by Palladio, Andrea

136. Andrea Palladio, plan and elevation of the Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza, woodcut from I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1601), Book II, p. 13, with annotations by Inigo Jones, 1613–14, on his own copy of the book, Worcester College, Oxford.

Palaces and the urban ecosystem

Turning, then, to Palladio’s text, we can observe what most commentators have highlighted – namely, that no mention is made of Giulio Romano, in spite of the fact that a number of lesser-known figures are listed as being involved in the interior decoration of the palace. More remarkable, however, is the fact that so much of the text focuses on issues relating to the palace’s location; Palladio dwells on its central location near Vicenza’s main square, facing onto its ‘busiest street’, while also commenting that he was able to accommodate cellars in the design on account of the fact that the site is raised and thus less prone to flooding. The palace was never completed to the published design: only the north-east corner was constructed to plan, while the rest of the huge palace incorporated earlier residential properties erected by Ludovico Thiene to create a unified property block, bounded on four sides by streets. Again, the text refers only to the property block ‘surrounded by four streets’, while the accompanying plan implies its unified completion. The grand ‘master gate’ and loggia that were to face onto the main street – today’s corso Palladio – were never constructed, although text and plan show them pushing into the street, thus also projecting the great hall on the piano nobile (‘first floor’), and with it the Thiene family’s identity, into the public realm. Giving visual expression to the status and ambition of the family was, after all, a primary function for most palaces. And yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the short descriptive text in the Quattro libri is the fact that almost a third of it describes plans to furnish the Palazzo Thiene with shops along its principal façade. Palladio observes that the architect should take into account what will be useful for his client, implicitly recognising the material benefit of rental income that might be derived from shop ownership in an area of prime commercial real estate at the centre of the city, on its most bustling thoroughfare and close to the main business district around the main square and market.

Palladio’s comments throughout the text link the palace inextricably to its wider context in the city, rather than focusing on it as a monolithic structure defined exclusively by architectural features in a fashionably imported new style. By discussing the palace in relation to the network of streets defining its edges, its proximity to the main piazza, its position in relation to the water table, and its potential to generate income through shops, Palladio describes a palace that is integrated with the city. This proximity to streets – and especially the main street, with which even the most important interior space of the home, the sala (‘great hall’), was in direct visual contact – suggests that we should think about the palace as part of a wider urban ecosystem. How was elite residential architecture implicated in the wider public sphere, and might we propose that such buildings, in turn, sustained their own localised ecosystems, which participated in the wider and more complex system of the city as a whole?

Writing forty years ago, Stanford Anderson discussed the complex overlapping socio-physical environment of the street:

Streets are integral parts of our movement and communication networks; they are places where many of our conflicts or resolutions between public and private claims are played out; they are the arenas where the boundaries of the conventional and aberrant behaviour are frequently redrawn.4Anderson, 1978, p. 1.

He was writing about the present (at least, the present of 1978), though his comments have obvious resonance and value for considering conditions in the past. Anderson went on to suggest that ‘architects aggrandize themselves by conceiving their works to be powerfully deterministic of social behaviour’, and posited a rival ‘ecological approach to people and the physical environment’, where architecture is only one of numerous factors that affect the way people interact in and with the urban environment.5Ibid. The approach is informed by urban analysis and by the idea of the city as ecosystem, freeing the built object from the skewed priorities of scholarly analysis, which privileges the monument, the style, the authorial hand over the meaning, function, agency of significant structures. In the Foreword to the new edition of the seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities (1992), Jane Jacobs wrote:

Cities are in a sense natural ecosystems too – for us. They are not disposable [. . .] It is urgent that human beings understand as much as we can about city ecology – starting at any point in city process. The humble, vital services performed by grace of good city streets and neighbourhoods are probably as good a starting point as any.6Jacobs, 1961, repr. 1992, p. xviii.

Jacobs’ comment looks at the wider ‘system’ of the city, but her approach is fine-grained and works from the street up, house by house, block by block. It encourages the reader to look at the interactions between people and their residential environs.7For the rigid system of causal relations between urban morphology and social patterns proposed by the Chicago School of urban sociology, see Stevenson, 2013, pp. 10–12, 21–3. Again, to borrow a very general definition of these spaces from contemporary urban theory, the approach here proposed is concerned with the ‘life between buildings’ that is at the heart of the work of Jan Gehl, whose urban-planning practice has reinvigorated numerous contemporary cities through the promotion of mixed use (by contrast with the consumer-led developments that have tended to prevail in recent decades). Although Gehl’s representation of the changing form of urban living has a short-range historical perspective, we can use it to explore how, in the pre-modern period, a great deal of ‘essential activity’ took place in public space. His aim, to disrupt the assumption that human behaviour and actions in the public realm are most closely shaped by buildings,8Gehl, 1987, pp. 15ff. is directly applicable to the early modern Italian city, where it subverts the dominant approach of architectural historians, whose attention has mainly been directed at monumental buildings, and much less at the wider ecosystems that they supported.

In this chapter, the focus of inquiry into the street shifts to a consideration of the early modern Italian palazzo, in order to consider how the exteriors of these magnificent residential structures articulated quite complex relationships between the public realm and the domestic interior. Since the focus of this study is the street, the discussion will concentrate on façade elements, albeit that a number of scholars have recently challenged the validity of previously held assumptions about a neat divide between public and private in the exterior/interior distinction of these domestic structures.9Discussed further below; key contributions to this argument are Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2; Kent, 1987. We shall review the palace façade as a permeable surface that mediates and articulates this more nuanced relationship between the palace interior and the city street. In so doing, we shall open up these façades to a novel reading, according to which architectural elements and features are shown to have a social function and significance that enable and give visual expression to activities both inside the home and on the street, and also between these two realms.

The palace provides a good starting point for the interdisciplinary and comparative analysis of built form: a discrete unit of urban living (of variable scale), which developed to become prevalent among the elites of most cities from at least the fifteenth century.10For the vast literature on the palace, which informs this chapter, see Burroughs, 2002; Clarke, 2003. We know a good deal about the stylistic features and models that emerged and evolved to give all’antica forms to these houses, for which architects provided sophisticated, innovative and sometimes even repetitive solutions. However, while there has been some discussion of the social world of the Renaissance palace – for example, in the debate over whether Florentine palaces represented a nuclear or kinship model of familial residential association – it is surprising that the palace as architectural typology has so rarely been discussed collectively or comparatively in relation to its urban context.11This debate originated in the contrasting theories of Goldthwaite, 1968, and Kent, 1971.

This is all the more surprising as so many authors of architectural treatises do exactly that. The comments of Francesco di Giorgio, Sebastiano Serlio and other authors regarding residential architecture are by no means restricted to stylistic considerations: a common theme of social stratification and zoning of professions and socio-economic groups can be identified.12Ackerman and Rosenfeld, 1989. While it has been shown that this theme offers an idealised conception of city layout more than the reality of the heterogeneous mix of housing that was the norm, it is also true that architectural treatises make numerous comments that are more obviously derived from observed conditions. Thus, recommendations can be found for the use of porticoes (Palladio), balconies (Serlio), windows (Francesco di Giorgio) and benches and loggias (Alberti), and the creation of urban garden spaces in lawyers’ palaces for clients to use (Palladio), meeting rooms and offices at mezzascala (‘mezzanine landing’) level where merchants can meet clients (Alberti), and ground-floor armouries and theatre spaces in the homes of cardinals (Cortesi), to name but a few.13Palladio, 1997; Serlio, 2005: Alberti, 1991; see Martini, 1967: Weil-Garris Brandt and D’Amico, 1980. What all these examples have in common is that they describe transitional spaces between the domestic (familial) sphere and the activities of everyday life that were predominantly transacted in the public spaces of the city streets and squares. In addition to these, all treatise writers mention – with varying degrees of insistence – the shops (botteghe or apotheche) that frequently lined the ground floors of elite residential buildings.

Features such as these satisfied the multiple requirements of palace resident – patrons, and were, of course, adapted to their particular needs and the conditioning factors of local contexts. To illustrate this wider point, we might consider the Palazzo Caprini in Rome, as Palladio knew it through a drawing that he almost certainly owned, so as to identify a series of elements that encode the building’s social functions and meanings (fig. 137).14Discussed most recently in Beltramini and Burns 2008, p. 79 (Guido Beltramini), with no firm attribution. Palazzo Caprini was designed by Bramante in the first decade of the 1500s for two brothers employed in the papal court: Adriano was an apostolic protonotary and secretary to Cardinal Capuano, while Aurelio was in charge of the papal mint. It stood on a prominent site on the new papal street through the Borgo (the via Alessandrina), facing onto the grand set piece of piazza Scossacavalli.15Bruschi, 1969, pp. 1040–46: Bruschi, 1989. Its design was enormously influential for the subsequent development of the palace type, and remains the benchmark against which the palace designs of Raphael – a resident of the palace in 1517–20 – are measured.16Frommel, Ray and Tafuri, 1984. The significance of the palace in the traditional narrative of the history of architecture has conditioned the ways in which this (now demolished) building has been discussed in the scholarship.

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Description: Palazzo Caprini, Rome by Unknown

137. Unknown draughtsman, drawing of Palazzo Caprini, Rome, 16th century, pen and ink, Royal Institute of British Architects, London.

Although incomplete, the drawing shows that the building had two similar façades, which addressed both the new piazza Scossacavalli and via Alessandrina, the most prominent new papal street in the Borgo, a processional axis leading directly from the bridge at the Castel Sant’Angelo to the square in front of St Peter’s basilica. Location was key to the success of the building for its patrons and designer, as it filled an enviable site, adjacent to the properties of other high-ranking members of the curia.17See Chapter 2, with bibliography. The orientation of the palace suggests that the façade shown on the unfinished side of the drawing fronted the street and the other faced towards the piazza, and we can observe how Bramante has marked this significant corner by the innovative grouping of the paired applied Doric order that marks the piano nobile.18Bruschi, 1969, p. 1041, with supporting evidence from a print of the Palazzo Caprini façade on the via Alessandrina (1549) by the engraver and cartographer Antoine Lafréry (see fig. 30). For the significance of the use of the orders in the palace, see Ackerman, 1983, p. 33; Clarke, 2003, pp. 187–94, observes that such stonework had no ‘rustic’ connotations in the 15th century. This upper floor is also distinguished by elegant aedicular windows that appear from the shading to be cut all the way to floor level so that, with their protective stone balustrades, they function as balconies, a feature probably reserved to the piazza façade only. Above these windows, and below the Doric frieze, coats of arms are prominently displayed. The ground floor – unadorned by a columnar order but instead defined by strongly cut stonework, with voussoirs framing the openings – is clearly marked by shops on both the piazza and street façades.19The presence of shops along via Alessandrina is again confirmed in the Lafréry print, see Bruschi, 1969; d’Amelio, 2008.

Setting aside the classical references of the architect’s design, the elements picked out in the comments above underline the means by which the palace communicated with its surrounding social and physical environment. As is explored in detail in the discussion that follows, these elements disrupt the simple demarcation of boundaries between owner–patrons inside the palace and the wider public on the street: shops raise interesting questions regarding the permeability of ownership and control of the palace as a monolithic unit, while windows and balconies remind us that palaces were places to look out from as much as façades to be observed and admired. While coats of arms ‘advertised’ ownership, the architectural accenting of the corner is a visual reminder of the power of building’s edges and of street corners in marking urban topographies. At the Palazzo Caprini, these and other factors converge because of the building’s prominent location, so that urban placement becomes perhaps the most significant conditioning influence upon architectural design.20For a developed argument on site as a dominant conditioning factor for the design of palaces, see Nevola, 2011b. As Palladio’s comments regarding the Palazzo Thiene suggest, we can observe that palaces were designed for their environment, and that they structured and supported quite varied social encounters and relationships. It is for this reason that this chapter proposes the model of the palace as an ecosystem.

Palaces and the street: Corners, loggias and benches

The Italian palazzo as a residential typology equated family status with prominently placed, large-scale classicising architecture. As David Friedman has conclusively shown, through the fifteenth century and across the peninsula elite urban housing became increasingly focused on the development of large and uniformly styled palaces, whose main façades projected towards primary city thoroughfares.21Friedman, 1992. While Florence and Venice may provide the best-known instances of the residential ‘building boom’ that transformed the urban centres of early modern Italy, it is fair to say that the Renaissance palace type was instrumental in reshaping most cities from the mid-fifteenth century, marking them permanently with the invasive presence of architecture on a monumental scale, which occupied ever increasing tracts of centrally located real estate.22For the first use of the term ‘building boom’ in the context of palace architecture in Renaissance Italy, see Goldthwaite, 1972; see also Calabi, 2001. What has been described by Friedman as the symbiotic relationship between streets and palace façades has tended to be discussed primarily in visual and design terms, interpreting the street as affording the essential context for the palace façade to be viewed and to develop ‘expressive form’.23See Chapter 2. Friedman, 1992, pp. 69, 93; Friedman’s excellent article errs towards architectural determinism in juxtaposing medieval social practices assembled on the street (primarily trade) to the uniquely aesthetic priorities of the Renaissance façade. Much less attention has been paid to the wider significance of that symbiosis, defined by the more complex social interactions and interdependence between these residential domestic environments and the public spaces of the city.

This is surprising, especially in the light of the recent growth of scholarly attention to the domestic interior.24A vast and growing literature has developed, following Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 2006; see Corry, Howard and Laven, 2017, again with a focus on interiors. While it is now possible to view both internal architectural features (rooms, courtyards, gardens, etc.) and the increasingly elaborate movable goods with which they were filled as articulating the complexity of life for men, women and children within the Renaissance house, no such attention has been paid to the exterior of these buildings. It would, therefore, be all too easy to view the widespread development of the palazzo as having a negative impact on the built environment, as the palace type transformed streets, increasingly turning central neighbourhoods into canyons, bounded on both sides by the proud, stone-built façades of impenetrable private residences. And yet this was clearly not the case, as most central districts and city streets retained quite a varied social mix, and the palaces themselves supported a range of social interactions. In most cases there is little surviving documentary evidence to allow us to reassemble the detail of such interactions for any one building, though we can nevertheless trace the uses, social meanings and lived experiences that were encoded in the design elements that combined to create the palace façade.

Leon Battista Alberti cautioned patrons to ensure that they spent more lavishly on the ‘parts [of the palace] that are particularly public or are intended principally to welcome guests, such as the façade’, and there can be little doubt that the façade was the principal setting for the display of family identity, expressed most obviously through the prominent placement of large sculpted heraldic shields and other emblems.25Alberti, 1991, p. 292 (Book IX, ch. 1). Throughout Italy during the fifteenth century, it became increasingly common for palace patrons to display family arms on the fronts of their homes, where they could best be seen from a distance and from multiple directions, with the consequence that greater attention was also given to the subtle positioning of buildings in relation to the surrounding street environment. Just as the Palazzo Boni-Antinori on via dei Tornabuoni in Florence is carefully angled to make the façade and centrally placed coat of arms visible to viewers from the distant piazza Santa Trinita, so too Ca’ Foscari in Venice fills a curve on the Grand Canal so that the emblazoned arms of Doge Francesco Foscari is visible to water traffic travelling in both directions (fig. 138).26Friedman, 1992, p. 102; for the Antinori palace, see Rubin and Wright, 1999, pp. 68–9. Similar careful positioning to maximise visibility can be identified across the peninsula in buildings such as the Palazzo Spannocchi and Chigi-Marescotti in Siena, and the Zecca and Cancelleria palaces in Rome.27For further discussion of designed alignments, see Nevola, 2007, p. 123. For the Zecca façade in relation to processional routes, see Fagiolo and Madonna, 1997. This careful adjustment of the alignment of façades to make the most of sight-lines along streets was widely adopted, and the strategy acknowledges the fact that palaces were not simply monumental objects in static environments, but rather their design catered to the kinaesthetic experience of viewers on the move.

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Description: Ca’ Foscari by Bono, Bartolomeo

138. Ca’ Foscari, Grand Canal, Venice.

So, for example, the central piazza ensemble around Palazzo Piccolomini in the small papal town of Pienza is best understood in the light of visitors moving along its main street, each step revealing new details; rather than attempting a grand set piece of centralised urban design, Pienza adopts the strategy advocated by Alberti for the design of small towns, using a sinuous main street to create a varied and changing vista, so that ‘at every step visitors meet yet another façade’.28Alberti, 1991, p. 106 (Book IV, ch. 5). See Smith, 1992, pp. 98–129, for a reading of Alberti in relation to the rhetorical concept of varietas, in direct opposition to Heydenreich, 1996, p. 50, which sees Pienza as an ‘ideal city’ with centralised design. At Pienza this results in a sequence of Piccolomini displays, with the coat of arms appearing multiple times on the palace exterior, and then even more grandly as the centrepiece of the cathedral façade. A similar strategy was adopted by the architects who developed the city front of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, whose distinctive L-shaped façade (facciata ad ali) opens up gradually to reveal a piazza, the cathedral and the main entrance to the palace (fig. 139).29Westfall, 1978. The solid mass of the residential palace intentionally blocks and controls the view of the piazza from the street approach, so that the multiple grand, stone-framed openings of the principal façade, emblazoned with Federico da Montefeltro’s heraldic devices and proudly inscribed with his monogram FE DUX (Federicus Dux), are revealed by stages.

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Description: The approach from the south to the Palazzo Ducale (left) and the cathedral of Santa...

139. The approach from the south to the Palazzo Ducale (left) and the cathedral of Santa Maria (right), Urbino.

This ubiquitous presence of family coats of arms – especially notable in those cities where one family dominated local affairs – was common throughout the peninsula. Thus the humanist scholar Filippo Beroaldo was able to make an effective comparison between invasive creeping wall plants (herba parietaria) and the omnipresence of the Bentivoglio arms (a saw), which appeared on the exterior of public and private buildings throughout Bologna during the period of their supremacy.30Clarke, 1999, p. 398 (quoting F. Beroaldo, Suetonius cum commentario, Bologna, 1493, fol. a2v). These have all but vanished, as a result of the zealous campaign promoted by Pope Julius II from 1506 to have them all removed, following his reconquest of the city and the resulting deposition of the Bentivoglio.31Ibid.; see also Rospocher, 2015, pp. 181–5. The policy closely resembled one pursued in Rome against the arms of the pope’s predecessor Alexander VI Borgia, scars of which can still be found on the façades of various buildings. Likewise, following the conquest of Ravenna by papal forces in 1509, the lion of St Mark that stood on the city’s main square was first emasculated then removed from the square and sent to the papal legate in Bologna, where its wings were broken off and the mutilated sculpture was put on display chained to the city hall, a potent symbol of the triumph over Venice (see fig. 48).32Rospocher, 2015, pp. 182–3. Such competitive erasure and substitution underlines the significance of symbols in marking out territories of ownership or spatial influence.

It is all too easy for the modern viewer to take for granted the sculpted heraldry emblazoned on palaces throughout the fabric of Italian cities, and thus overlook them; it is evident, however, that these were essential features reserved for positions where they might have the greatest visual impact.33For a similar point regarding the pervasive presence of IHS monograms, see Origo, 1962, p. 3. It is almost certainly for this reason that so many are placed on the corners of buildings, raised well above the street, often level with the string course that marks the residential first floor (piano nobile). On palaces that filled sizeable property blocks, bounded on more than one side by a street, they could thus be seen from more than one direction, while at the same time marking the corner with firm familial associations. In this way, family palaces came also to mark the city’s topography, directly influencing the way people described their movement, as street corners and crossroads came to be associated with their powerful local residents.

A clear indication of the way in which navigation of the city was expressed through reference to family associations with local neighbourhoods is offered by Luca Landucci, whose diaries are so informative about the construction of the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. He noted: ‘On 27 June 1490, I Luca Landucci opened my new shop here, opposite the said palace of the Strozzi; and I set up the sign of Stars. And I left that old shop on the corner, which belongs to the Rucellai. And this new one belongs to the Popoleschi.’34Landucci, 1985, p. 59. Here, interestingly, ownership and clan associations overlap. Three families are mentioned: the Rucellai, owners and local worthies where Landucci’s last shop was, the Strozzi his new neighbours and the Popoleschi, the owners of his new shop. While his diary earlier noted the construction of the massive Palazzo Strozzi foundations as being in the vicinity of the canto de’ Tornaquinci (May 1490), as the building progressed it acquired its own identity; by November 1500, huge torch braziers had been installed on each corner of the palace at a cost 100 gold florins each, literally highlighting its location in the city day and night.35Ibid., p. 217; the Strozzi torch braziers were remarked on by Vasari, who reported, in his life of Cronaca, that they had been made by Niccolò Grosso Caparra (Vasari, 1966– , vol. 4, p. 239). For tabernacle lighting, see Bargellini, 1971, pp. 18–19; Conti, 1928, vol. 2, p. 10. Landucci’s comments give a sense of how a palace acquired its own identity, and expressed it visually in a neighbourhood – in this instance, carving out and claiming spatial dominance over rival neighbouring family clans.

The process by which street corners articulated family pre-eminence in areas of the city is especially well documented in Florence, where street corners have a name – canto – which was frequently associated with the leading family resident in the environs, who marked the corner with their arms; good surviving examples are the canto degli Alberti (fig. 140) and canto dei Pazzi.36Ciabani, 1984; Kent, 1987, pp. 59–60; Strocchia, 2006, pp. 71–4, 496; see also Chapter 4. It was around locations such as these corners that residents of the palaces met and chatted with neighbours and local residents; town criers selected these canti to announce their news, and naturally gossip was also exchanged.37Ciabani, 1984; Kent, 1987, pp. 59–60; Milner, 2013. This convergence of sociability and architectural marking singles out the palace street corner as a significant site in the urban landscape, and provides a further reason why corners in particular attracted decoration with coats of arms. Palaces extended their symbolic ownership over adjoining urban space and streets through the bold display of family arms on stone shields, ironwork such as torch braziers or rings to tether horses to, and architectural detailing such as bold, rusticated stone quoining, but also more ephemeral marking such as flags and other heraldic displays.

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Description: Canto degli Alberti by Unknown

140. Canto degli Alberti, Florence.

This marking out of space – and consequently the demarcation of areas for sociability outside the palace but under its influence – was by no means a uniquely Florentine phenomenon. So, for example, in many of the brick-built cities of the Po valley, palace architects reserved the use of more expensive stone to their corners. In Ferrara, these embellishments stand out particularly, in the form of the elegant candlestick pilasters that adorn the numerous new palaces built as part of the ambitious Addizione Erculea (from 1492), commanded by Duke Ercole I.38Tuohy, 1996, pp. 128ff. In the grandest palaces, elaborately decorated strips of white Istrian marble mark the corners, deeply carved with all’antica foliage or simpler fluted pilasters topped by Corinthianesque capitals, in sharp contrast to the expanses of brickwork that make up much of the built façades (fig. 141). In some instances, stone quoining – sometimes canted to create a defensive edge to the building – or simple stone string courses were also employed, again breaking the tyranny of terracotta. While these strategies were employed for the grandest houses along the main arteries of the new district, simpler stone strips were used widely to mark the corners of secondary streets, affording some dignity even to blocks of two-storey row-housing. In other instances, such as the house identified as the home of the court poet Ludovico Ariosto, a cheaper solution to classicising decorative detailing was achieved using moulded brickwork that imitates sculpted stone, perhaps originally intended to be covered with a plaster skim (fig. 142).39For a discussion of the house, see Folin, 2016.

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Description: Intersection of via degli Angeli (corso Ercole I d’Este) and via dei Prioni,...

141. Intersection of via degli Angeli (corso Ercole I d’Este) and via dei Prioni, Ferrara, with Palazzo Prosperi-Sacrati (foreground) and Palazzo dei Diamanti (beyond), both built in the 1490s.

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Description: Ludovico Ariosto’s house by Girolamo da Carpi

142. Ludovico Ariosto’s house, from 1527, contrada Mirasole (via Ludovico Ariosto), Ferrara.

Such practices were widespread in many cities of the Po valley. In Mantua they took on quite a distinctive variation, as these stone corner pilasters were often marked with inscriptions that recorded the foundation date of a building, and sometimes connected this to the reigning Gonzaga duke. One such example is the palace of the Arrivabene brothers, built from 1481. Here, the street-corner pilaster bears inscriptions recording its foundation date and an unusual motif of a snake entwined with a staff, perhaps Hermes’ caduceus or the Asclepian rod.40A nephew of the owners, Giacomo, was a medical doctor, which could account for the Asclepian symbol, though this cannot be confirmed: see Chambers, 1984, p. 416. The palace patrons, Giovanni and Giovan Pietro, were highly educated humanists and members of the Gonzaga court, where Giovanni was chancellor; their high status can be discerned from facts such as that the palace may have been designed by the Gonzaga architect Luca Fancelli and that they were granted special permissions to have an oratory inside their home.41Ibid., pp. 398–9, 415–16. Notably, it is the principal corner where the palace meets the crossroads that is visually most heavily accented; an imposing tower fills the corner, below which the family arms were originally emblazoned – only the ribbons and bracket survive on the façade today (see fig. 15) – with the stone marker most visible at street level.

If the street corner made visible the public dimension of the palace as a hub in the network of neighbourhood sociability, thus extending the patron’s reach into the public realm of the street, the benches that often lined the front of a palace façade provided the essential furniture for those gatherings. These benches are usually explained as an expression of the magnificentia of patrons, who generously offered a public amenity as an expression of their munificence.42Clarke, 2003, p. 173; Fraser Jenkins, 1970. And yet they were also key sites for the exchange of political gossip, in which the palace owners themselves were very much implicated.43Elet, 2002, pp. 456–9; Kent, 1987, p. 60; Schiaparelli, 1908, p. 39. So much was this the case, in fact, that the very word for ‘bench’ – panca – was widely adopted in a negative form to describe time-wasting gossip-mongers who sat around on benches all day (pancaccieri).44Kent, 1987, p. 60, largely followed by Elet, 2002, p. 451; see also Kent, 1994, p. 202. An amusing incident in this connection is reported by the Anonimo Magliabecchiano – a sixteenth-century diarist who appears to have known many artists; he reports an argument between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, which allegedly took place at the pancaccia of the Spini palace in Florence, by Ponte Santa Trinita (perhaps in 1503).45Translated from Pedretti, 1957, p. 17. For the Anonimo’s identity, see Wierda, 2009. The story goes that a group of gentlemen (huomini da bene) were talking over a passage from Dante when Leonardo walked by; they shouted out to him to recite the passage for them. Coincidentally Michelangelo was walking by too, so Leonardo bounced the request on to his rival, who replied: ‘Why don’t you recite it? After all, you made a drawing of a horse, intending to cast it in bronze, and you couldn’t, and so you walked away from it out of shame!’ Michelangelo – who turned on his heel and walked off – was, of course, referring to the equestrian monument project that had won the Duke of Milan’s favour for Leonardo but was never accomplished; he was implying that, by the same measure, his rival was incapable of reciting the passage from Dante himself.

The incident sounds somewhat spurious, resembling the colourful stories about artists for which Vasari is famous, but it nonetheless gives us a good sense of how the pancaccie attracted largely male gatherings to these public venues.46For Vasari and stories, see Barolsky, 1999; Barolsky, 2015. Similarly, in Niccolò Machiavelli’s satirical play La mandragola (published in 1524), the middleman, Ligurio, searches through Florence for Callimaco, and makes it clear to the audience that he has looked for him everywhere: ‘I have been to his house, the piazza [della Signoria], the market, and the pancone [bench] of the Spini [family], and the loggia of the Tornaquinci [family], and haven’t found him.’47Machiavelli, 1964, p. 9 (Book IV, ch. 2). Beyond the main piazzas of the city, it was around the benches attached to private homes that men passed the time. In spite of various negative comments about the sort of exchange of gossip that took place around city benches, palaces built well into the sixteenth century included them, and instances of their survival can be found lining streets in numerous Italian cities, as well in depictions of them. To name one of many examples, a late-fifteenth-century painting by Jacopo del Sellaio, Christ with the Instruments of the Passion, shows some interesting details through the background window; in the middle ground Christ can be seen eating with the two disciples who failed to recognise him on the road to Emmaus, while in the background a partial street scene can be viewed through a further window frame (fig. 143).48For the proposal that this may have been painted for the confraternity of Gesù Pellegrino, see Land, 2011. It is not clear whether Jacopo intended this to be a view of Emmaus, though the donkey and unusual landscape features may have been meant to portray faraway lands; that aside, residential palaces with benches lining their walls are in evidence, with two men standing in conversation at the street corner, and one who may be a beggar approaching two other men seated on the bench.

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Description: Christ with the Instruments of the Passion, detail by Sellaio, Jacopo del

143. Supper at Emmaus and street scene, detail from Jacopo del Sellaio, Christ with the Instruments of the Passion, c. 1483–5, tempera on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama.

Outside the Palazzo Medici, on the via Larga in Florence, the additional seating in the form of benches lining the outer wall of the palace was almost certainly provided for the many citizens waiting to be allowed entry to the building; it seems likely that benches served a similar function outside the residences of other powerful citizens (see figs 113–17).49Preyer, 1998. In Siena, for instance, the massive new Palazzo Piccolomini, built for Pope Pius II’s nephews and the brothers of Pope Pius III (completed around 1510), included a large bench along the side closest to the family’s grand all’antica loggia (see fig. 76).50Nevola, 2007, pp. 74–8. The combination is a telling one, as it makes a visual connection – lost, for the most part, in many surviving examples – between the palace and the more formal covered gathering space of the loggia. As is well known, the original arrangement of the Palazzo Medici in via Larga, Florence, included a loggia on the south corner (closest to the city centre), topped by a massive Medici escutcheon on the first storey (which is still in place).51Hyman, 1977, p. 163 The loggia was walled up in the sixteenth century, and Michelangelo’s ‘kneeling windows’ were installed, but the benches that wrap around two sides of the palace should be understood as providing external waiting areas for those wishing to gain access to the loggia; the display of so much waiting space was, in itself, a way of advertising a patron’s power to draw clients in large numbers – a visible projection of his influence.52Kent, 1987, p. 61; Preyer, 1998, pp. 360–61, followed by Elet, 2002, pp. 456, 458.

Unlike the Piccolomini loggia in Siena, or that of the Rucellai, also in Florence, the Medici loggia was not a free-standing building, but rather formed part of the palace itself.53For the Rucellai loggia, see Kent, 1972. It probably followed a form, prevalent in the city, of loggias placed on the corners of family palaces – as was the case, for example, with the Loggia degli Alberti on the corner of borgo Santa Croce, and the loggia of the Palazzo Spini on piazza Santa Trinita.54Murphy, 1997, p. 140. The background of a well-known scene depicting this piazza, in Ghirlandaio’s Sassetti chapel in the nearby Santa Trinita church, shows that the loggia had been closed up by the late fifteenth century, but its location is still clearly legible from different stonework that fills the two corner bays of the palace. Across the road from the Spini was the Gianfigliazzi enclave, and here, too, we know that there was originally a loggia on the ground floor, close to the bridge; although no visual trace of it survives, the presence of a bench known as the Pancone de’ Raugei by the Ponte a Santa Trinita and close to the Gianfigliazzi houses reinforces the likelihood that the loggia was there as well.55Ibid., p. 141; Preyer, 2004, p. 93 n. 50, questions the location but proposes no alternative. For the Pancone de’ Raugei, see Lippi, 1731, p. 203. Loggias such as these are known to have fulfilled formal functions in the celebration of family rites of passage, offering a means of showcasing gatherings on occasions such as betrothals, weddings and funerals. But we can assume that their more everyday use was as an informal meeting place where men gathered to chat or play games of chance on the benches provided.

The diarist Benedetto Dei listed seventeen private family loggias in Florence, while Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini explains that in Siena the right of a family to own a loggia denoted their noble status.56Dei, 1984; Romby, 1976, p. 58. For the use of family loggias in medieval Siena, see Piccinni, 1983, pp. 230–34; for the loggia and Piccolomini’s views on it, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 74–80, 86. Certainly, loggias were a way that families extended their status and visual influence on the public stage of the city’s streets. In Rome, where a policy of removing porticoes was actively pursued by Pope Sixtus IV and his successors as a way of expressing papal authority and taming that of the local nobility, family loggias remained a powerful signifier for the romani cives.57Cafà, 2010, pp. 440ff. For loggias as a feature of medieval elite housing, see Broise and Maire Vigueur, 1983; Robbins, 1994. Famously, when the Massimo clan came to rebuild their palace facing the via Papalis, following damage inflicted on their properties during the Sack of Rome (1527), Pietro Massimo required that the architect Baldassarre Peruzzi should retain a loggia on its principal façade.58From a considerable literature, see Cafà, 2007. In cities like Florence, Siena and even Rome, loggias tended to be self-contained structures attached to particular buildings within family enclaves, but elsewhere in Italy they might form part of a more continuous arcade system of the kind prevalent in numerous urban centres, as has been shown for Bologna and other cities north of the Apennines in Chapters 1 and 4. The survival of these essential, identity-affirming features of elite residences can be traced to the classicising designs of Palladio and his imitators along the strada Maggiore (corso Palladio) in Vicenza, where numerous porticoes underpin the palaces of the principal families (fig. 144). Such was originally the intention for the Palazzo Thiene, and the same feature affords monumental definition to the Palazzo Chiericati at the street’s eastern end, facing what was an urban port on the Bacchiglione river.59Beltramini, 2008, p. 92, notes the urban significance of the portico and compares with the unexecuted plans for Palazzo Thiene.

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Description: Loggias along the strada Maggiore (now corso Palladio), with Palazzo Braschi...

144. Loggias along the strada Maggiore (now corso Palladio), Vicenza, with Palazzo Braschi, 15th century (foreground).

An interesting variant of the family loggia is the seggio, an architectural feature that was widespread in Naples and the southern Italian Regno, which usually took the distinctive form of an open arcaded space, often filling a street-corner site and addressing a small square or widening in the street;60Lenzo, 2014a; Lenzo, 2014b. the space usually backed onto a closed room used for meetings and storage for archives. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to these shared architectural forms, indicating that as many as 120 such buildings are documented in Naples and its kingdom, of which fewer than half survive in some form to the present day.61Lenzo, 2014b, p. 159. While specific families were associated with these loggias, what is distinctive about the seggi is that they appear to have served as sites where groups of families gathered.62For the close association of the Carafa with the Seggio di Nido, see de Divitiis, 2007. In Naples, where there were five noble seggi (and one for non-noble popolo families), they were distributed around the city so that families gathered at their local district seggio; in smaller towns, these district distinctions did not apply. When viewed on a seventeenth-century map, the three central seggi of Naples (Nido, Montagna and Capuana) can all be seen to command street-corner locations associated with quite contained neighbourhood regions (fig. 145).

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Description: Fidelissimae urbis neapolitanae cum omnibus viis accurata et nova delineatio aedita...

145. The central seggi of Naples (left to right), Nido, Montagna and Capuana, detail from Alessandro Baratta, Fidelissimae urbis neapolitanae cum omnibus viis accurata et nova delineatio aedita in lucem ab Alexandro Baratta, 1629, etching, Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo, Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples (manipulated by Fulvio Lenzo).

As such, then, although the seggio was not, strictly speaking, a family loggia, it resembled the family loggias of northern Italy in serving as a semi-private yet visible site for socialising. As one anonymous Venetian visitor commented in 1444, noblemen in Naples spent all day in the seggi, ‘from Mass in the morning until the time of breakfast, after breakfast until lunchtime, and after lunch until dinner’.63Ibid., p. 161, quoted from Senatore, 1997, pp. 3–19. The Sedile di Dominova in Sorrento survives to this day in its original form: a centrally planned stone structure topped by a dome, with two open arcades, it fills a corner on what was historically the city’s main street (fig. 146).64Pane, 1955, p. 101; Fulvio Lenzo, ‘Sorrento, sedile di Dominova’, in Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage, online at http://db.histantartsi.eu/web/rest/Edificio/135, 2012 (accessed 15 February 2019), which focuses especially on the collection of antiquities and spolia that were often gathered together for display at the seggi sites. The tiled dome is somewhat later in date. The late-fifteenth-century sedile was one of two meeting points – the other was the Seggio di Porta – for Sorrento’s principal families and was clearly designed to create an impressive frame for their gatherings.65Lenzo, 2014b, pp. 160–62. Interestingly, a fifteenth-century document reports that after the funerals of female members of any family associated with the seggio, all male relatives were required to relocate from the church to the loggia, where they would publicly receive condolences.66Ibid., p. 161; transcribed in full at http://db.histantartsi.eu/web/rest/Edificio/135 (accessed 26 June 2020). This small detail underlines the degree to which these multi-purpose, semi-public shared family loggias performed important functions in urban rituals and rites of passage, just as they facilitated the everyday transactions of male sociability in cities and towns throughout southern Italy.

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Description: Sedile di Dominova by Unknown

146. Sedile di Dominova, late 15th century, via San Cesareo, Sorrento.

The view from above: Windows, balconies and the street

The Istorietta amorosa fra Leonora de’ Bardi e Ippolito Bondelmonti is a novella, attributed to the polymath Leon Battista Alberti, which tells of two young lovers from rival families in Florence.67Alberti, 1973 (accessed 10 March 2016). The story is part of a group of tales telling of love between rival families, which contributed to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet story; these include Masuccio Salernitano’s Mariotto and Giannozza (novella 33) and Luigi da Porto’s Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (Venice, 1530). The two cross glances and fall in love at first sight while they are attending the festivities of San Giovanni (24 June), held on the public space between the cathedral and the baptistery.68For San Giovanni festivities, see Trexler, 1980, pp. 240ff. Unable to meet again publicly, like Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, they hatch a plan to elude the insurmountable hurdle of family opposition through a meeting arranged by a helpful abbess. On the feast day of the Birth of the Virgin (early in September) when many girls visited the nunnery at Monticelli, outside the city walls, Leonora is again able to leave her home, and meets Ippolito secretly there, where they pledge their love for each other as husband and wife. They fix a subsequent meeting:

you should know [Leonora explains to Ippolito] that I have a room of my own, which has a window facing towards the street. And since there is no other solution for our love, you will come on Friday night at the fifth hour with a rope ladder to the foot of my window, and you will attach the ladder to a cord you will find hanging from the window, and I will pull up the end of the ladder and attach it to the iron fitting of my window. You can then come safely up the ladder to my room, and stay here secretly for two or three days without anyone finding out.69Alberti, 1973.

Predictably enough, things do not turn out according to plan, and Ippolito is spotted with his ladder in the vicinity of the Bardi house by a night watchman out on his patrol; not wishing to reveal his actual intentions, in order to protect Leonora’s honour, he allows himself to be arrested as a common thief planning a night-time robbery. Waiting by her window, Leonora grows increasingly worried by her lover’s late arrival, while he is marched off to the Bargello, to be tried the next day at first light. In the morning the bells of justice ring out, a sure sign that Ippolito has been condemned to death; he makes a final request, to be allowed to walk past the Bardi house on his way out to the gallows. Leonora is naturally filled with terror and grief:

And she frequently went to her window and all the while she could hear the trumpet, which is sounded every time someone is taken to the gallows, a sound that to her was a like a dagger straight to her heart. And so she went again to her window, and saw the banner of the giustizia, and as she saw it so her feelings were overwhelmed with great anguish and she fell back as if she were dead. She soon came round, and again went to the window, and there she saw Ippolito approaching all dressed in black, a noose around his neck and with two executioners holding him. He turned his eyes up to the window, and when he saw Leonora their eyes met.70Ibid.

At this point all reserve – and the conventions that kept a high-born girl from leaving her house alone – are set aside; Leonora rushes down the stairs and out of the door into the street, where she throws herself upon the city guard leading the sombre procession, revealing their story in a desperate bid to save Ippolito. This is a story with a happy ending: the two appear before the city’s highest officials and Leonora explains how family rivalry has prevented them from publicly declaring their marriage; in turn their fathers are summoned and peace is agreed between their families, sealed by the wedding celebrations.

The Istorietta amorosa lends itself to a careful analysis of the architectural and urban setting as well as the ritual and social context that moves the narrative along; aside from the clan-conflict trope of impossible love, much of the story revolves around how the two lovers negotiate spatial and social conventions that govern their gender roles.71For the wider context of stories as historical sources, see Martines, 1994; Martines, 2001, pp. 199–231. Although the firm demarcation of pre-marital female space to the domestic sphere has been nuanced in recent scholarship, it was hard architectural surfaces that kept apart Ippolito, on the street, and Leonora, in the family home; feast days emerge as key occasions, when these firm boundaries might be circumvented.72Randolph, 1997. Likewise, the night-time setting of the lovers’ failed plan enables us to consider how city authorities sought to uphold the boundaries between public and private space through careful policing and control, threatened as they unquestionably were by nocturnal crime.73For more severe punishment for criminal offences committed at night, see Dean, 2007, pp. 172–3; for night-time and violence, see Ekirch, 2005, pp. 61–90. In turn, of course, the tolling bell of the palace of justice (the Bargello) rang out over the entire city, penetrating the walls of Leonora’s home in such a way that she guessed Ippolito’s fate well before he came into sight.74For the ringing out of the Bargello bell for those going to the gallows, see Atkinson, 2016b, pp. 106–7; for the ritual, see Terpstra, 2008b. The spatial barrier imposed by the palace exterior – no impediment to the sound of the bells – is the primary obstacle that the lovers in this story have to overcome.

Alberti’s story is set in Florence, but similar stories of lovers from rival clans abound in late medieval and early modern popular literature of this sort. Siena was the setting for Masuccio Salernitano’s story of Mariotto and Giannozza, for instance, while what is probably the direct source for Shakespeare’s play, a story by the Vicentine nobleman Luigi da Porto, was set in Verona.75Luigi da Porto, 1530: Patrizi, 1986. While Romeo and Juliet’s romance revolves around a balcony scene, the more ubiquitous window is the architectural device around which so much of the narrative turns in Alberti’s short story. Windows, indeed, emerge as essential to much vernacular prose narrative in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron, providing the necessary means for characters to circumvent a crucial design requirement of any house – to resist penetration by unwanted guests, be they lovers, suitors or, indeed, common thieves.76For the development of the vernacular novella during the Quattrocento, see Brand and Pertile, 1996, 154–8.

But the window is more than a narrative device: it is an architectural element that structures the relationship between the residential domestic sphere and the public space of the street, and in so doing it also shapes the gendered role of actors on the city stage. Windows obviously provide essential amenity to the interior, bringing in light and ventilation, as Alberti observed (Book I, ch. 12); they tended to be ordered symmetrically on palace façades, with ground-floor windows considerably smaller than those above to provide a cooler environment for the summer months, and raised off the ground to resist entry.77Alberti, 1991, pp. 28 (Book I, ch. 12), p. 119 (Book V, ch. 10): Howard, 2001, pp. 131–2. The potential risk of burglary posed by windows, even on higher floors, meant that they were often grated, as can be observed in numerous paintings, and in usage that survives to the present day. At the same time, windows were also a significant element in the decoration of palace exteriors, and might be used to proclaim the ownership of the building through the application of heraldic devices, symbols and even inscriptions to their stone frames.78Clarke, 2003, pp. 22ff. However, it is the content of the frame – the filling of these grand stone openings with physical presence – that is most notable and has been largely overlooked in discussions of the palace type: to be charged with significance, these architectural features needed to be populated.

In paintings, as in the novellas, windows are pre-eminently associated with women; during the fifteenth century the window frame became a favoured pictorial device in female portraits, and much recent interpretation of these has tended to describe the sitters as the passive objects of a male gaze.79The text that opened up this approach is Simons, 1988; see also Musacchio, 2008, pp. 74–7. Such a view is, in part, predicated on the understanding of a relatively rigid division between the public space of the street and the private space of the home, and the transfer of this model to pictorial forms, where women framed in windows are put on display to be observed by men. As we have seen, an increasing body of scholarship has tended to erode this polarised contrast between public and private space, and has therefore somewhat problematised the designation of female and male spaces as being predominantly inside and outside the home respectively. While acknowledging the gendered nature of ‘window-frame’ portraits, Adrian Randolph has recently sought to adjust the interpretation of such paintings to suggest that they might be understood as ‘performative thresholds through which women can be seen as agents’.80Randolph, 2014, pp. 69–102, esp. p. 93. By placing themselves within the frames of those windows, women actively managed the process of mediation between the public and domestic sphere.

In discussing the symbolic significance of windows, it is easy to forget that they were actual apertures that pierced the walls of houses, and set the occupants on the inside in direct relation to urban life outside the house. The risks posed by this site of encounter were not lost on the patriarchal Giannozzo, a protagonist of Leon Battista Alberti’s dialogues in the Libri della famiglia (written 1433–41), who bossily tells his wife: ‘You’d be well advised not to spend all day sitting lazily with your elbows on the windowsill, as some idling girls do, who hold their embroidery to hand as an excuse, without ever doing any of it.’81Alberti, 1972. For a reading of Giannozzo Alberti as parodic of patriarchal misogynism, see Najemy, 2002. His comments chime with similar advice to women by various commentators, who warned women of the risks of being looked at from the street, and cautioned them against wasting time gazing out.82Randolph, 2014, pp. 92–3. From as early as the painted scenes of Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, the window casement can be understood as a signifier of decorous behaviour, though it is equally important (and perhaps more realistic) to balance this view with its counterpart – that of the window as a privileged site from which to view the street. Elizabeth and Thomas Cohen have, for instance, demonstrated for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome that windows, and predominantly the women who looked out from them, were key generators of neighbourhood policing and its vernacular counterpart, gossip.83Cohen, 1992; Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2, p. 68. Moreover, in referring to needlework, Giannozzo provides a clue to one of the main reasons why women of all social groups almost certainly did sit by windows; the embroidery created by elites and the widespread involvement among lower social groups in working yarn required women to get close to the light source that windows provided.84Ajmar-Wollheim, 2006; Cavallo, 2006. The incidence of window seats created in the wall space around window recesses suggests that both vernacular and elite residential buildings were designed to encourage such activities; furthermore, internal steps up to larger casements facilitated access to window openings, again underlining how these were used. While Giannozzo’s comments imply his disapproval of women sitting at windows, because they might be seen from the street, the waxed cloth and slatted shutters that were the usual means of closing windows meant that women could be invisible to passers-by as they looked out from above.85On inpannate (waxed or greased cloth) and wooden shutters used to close windows, as opposed to expensive glass, see Cavallo and Storey, 2013, p. 92; Musacchio, 2008, pp. 74–5. Whether sewing or simply sitting, the users of windows enjoyed a vantage point over the street, the architecture itself providing an opportunity to view ordinary and exceptional events unfold outside the home.

Windows, of course, exist in all residential building types, but architectural examination alone does not yield much information about how they were occupied. Besides the portrait type mentioned above, Giovanni Mansueti’s Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio provides valuable visual evidence of women at windows (fig. 147).86My thanks to Michael Diers for bringing the painting to my attention at the international conference ‘Imaging the Public Square’ at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, 22–4 October 2015. It could, indeed, be described as a compendium of the multiplicity of ways in which women might appear in windows. The occasion for their presence is by no means an everyday occurrence but, rather, a miraculous event that had taken place during a funeral procession for a member of the Confraternity of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista outside the church of San Lio in Venice in 1474.87Fortini Brown, 1988, pp. 152–6. As the procession makes its way across the campo, filled with mostly male participants and bystanders, the artist has depicted the entire space of the piazza compressed, with the front of the parish church visible to the right. Houses and palaces of varying size and grandeur are tightly packed into the scene, with almost seventy windows facing into the small square, many of them adorned with tapestries and hangings to dignify the special event. From these many windows, it is for the most part women who observe the scene below.

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Description: Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio by Mansueti, Giovanni di...

147. Giovanni Mansueti, Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio (Venice), 1494, oil on canvas, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

In identifying female spectators as being raised above the proceedings taking place on the street, Mansueti’s painting is by no means unique, and other examples where windows and balconies are occupied by women watching a variety of secular and religious rituals and festivities are discussed below. Nevertheless, the image of Campo San Lio gives a clear sense that, as the Cohens have so evocatively put it, ‘if the neighbourhood was an amphitheatre, its bleachers [stands] were the doorways, and above all the upstairs windows.’88Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2, p. 68. A few intrepid youths have climbed onto the rooftops to gain a better view, but the majority of the onlookers who are not on the campo are framed in windows of a variety of shapes and types. Facing the viewer in the background, numerous windows open to the square and frame one or more women; at least one looks out carrying a baby, while an older woman at an upper window (right of centre) appears to lean out in order to try to catch a pet monkey. On the left side of the image, Mansueti has rendered a sequence of façades using quite accentuated foreshortening; here we see numerous figures leaning out of their houses the better to watch the procession. More interestingly, given the oblique viewing angle, we can see how the shutters on some windows are hinged from above, as the women spectators push them outwards using an attached pole; it seems plausible that this arrangement would have concealed the viewer quite effectively from the street. Furthermore (again on the left side), we can see different arrangements of iron grilles, some set flush into the stone window frames, while others project outwards from the wall surface, so that the viewers’ faces can just be seen peeping out.

While Mansueti’s painting is certainly not representative of all architectural window types, it does give some idea of how animated this threshold between public and domestic spaces could be. More everyday relations conducted at the window can be identified in the background of Masolino’s fresco in the Brancacci chapel, showing St Peter healing a cripple: here, in addition to laundry airing on windowsills and a number of suspended baskets (which are perhaps birdcages or storage for foodstuffs), we can see two top-floor neighbours in animated conversation.89Eckstein, 2014, pp. 109ff. Likewise, in Filippino Lippi’s Nerli altarpiece in the family’s chapel at Santo Spirito, also in Florence, the background reveals a touching family scene in which the patron, Tanai Nerli, takes his leave from his young daughter, while his wife or another female member of the family looks on, leaning out of the window above (fig. 148).90Bridgeman, 1988. The inclusion of the scene was an opportunity to commemorate Tanai’s important ambassadorial mission of 1494, but it is nonetheless significant that, in spite of the sort of injunctions cited above, in a painting destined for the family’s commemorative chapel, women are shown both on the street outside the family home and at the window.

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Description: Madonna and Child with Saints, detail by Lippi, Filippino

148. Street scene in Florence, detail from Filippino Lippi, Madonna and Child with Saints (Nerli Altarpiece), 1494, oil on wood, Santo Spirito, Florence.

More elaborate and theatrical than windows, balconies performed many comparable functions, while admitting more light to the interior and allowing their users considerably greater access to and interaction with the façade of the home. Not unlike the family loggias discussed earlier, their adoption varied considerably from one region to another, and they were certainly most widely used in Venice, where large glazed balcony windows also served to draw light into the portego, a deep central room, which was rarely lit from any other source.91Cowan, 2011; Fortini Brown, 2004, pp. 71–6; Howard, 2002, pp. 96–7. Visibility on and from the balcony was a key factor in their design, so they tended to be positioned symmetrically on the façade, at the level of the piano nobile, where they could provide a focus, accentuated by decorative stonework and family emblems. Alexander Cowan has drawn attention to balconies in Venice as a space most frequently occupied by women – much in the same way as we have seen for windows – commenting that their architectural form and relation to the street meant that ‘every balcony was a personal stage’.92Cowan, 2011, p. 734. Such vantage points, raised up above the life of the street, offered privileged sites for observation, the circulation of gossip, and the formation or loss of reputation (fama) for both men and women from across the social spectrum.93For fama in relation to gossip and its circulation in public space, see Horodowich, 2005.

The architectural theorist Sebastiano Serlio knew Venice well and commented on the value of balconies as places to enjoy clean air and view the many spectacles that animated urban life along the city’s waterways, while he also considered that they greatly increased the beauty of the façades themselves.94Serlio, 1618–19, Book IV, fol. 154v. In turn, of course, the widespread use of balconies throughout the city and especially along the Grand Canal contributed to the collective process of civic participation in ceremonial events, as well-dressed spectators crowding the windows and balconies of grand palaces unquestionably added to the splendour of such events.95For urban rituals in Venice, see Muir, 1981; see also Fortini Brown, 1990. Serlio’s remarks appear in the descriptive text accompanying a woodcut illustration of a palace façade design for Venice (signalled by the water lapping around the bottom of the building), in which he significantly employs the motif of the serliana (or Palladian) window, a three-bay type with a central arched opening flanked by two smaller bays, each topped by an architrave (fig. 149).96For the Tempio di Gennazzano, see Bruschi, 1969, passim, incl. pp. 108–51; see also Wilinski, 1965. A plan of the balcony is also included on the page; it shows the serliana window flush to the façade wall, while the balcony rests on the projecting rusticated stonework that frames the central portal below. In light of Serlio’s laudatory description of the balcony, his design came to enjoy connotations of celebration. The form was to have considerable success in Venice and the Veneto – particularly as a result of its adoption by Palladio – though it originated in Rome, where allusions to the rhythm of the apertures of the triumphal arch would have been even more apparent. Thus, for example, Raphael and his assistants employed it in a scene of the fresco cycle in the Vatican stanze for the balcony from which Pope Leo IV is shown blessing the nearby residential district (the Borgo) and miraculously extinguishing the fire that was raging there. Raised up on a rusticated base inscribed with his name, the pope stands framed by the arch, surrounded by cardinals and courtiers, his outstretched arm extending his blessing out of the building to the imploring citizens below, and the city beyond.

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Description: Palazzo del Banco di Santo Spirito, or Zecca Vecchia by Sangallo, Antonio da, the...

149. Palazzo del Banco di Santo Spirito, or Zecca Vecchia, Rome, c. 1524.

The balcony here performs an honorific function, so that the subject standing in the arched opening is framed by the architecture and becomes the central focus of the building as a whole. The fresco is a valuable reminder of the purpose of a number of comparable examples built in early-sixteenth-century Rome, such as the corner window facing St Peter’s on the palazzo of Jacopo da Brescia (c. 1515), or the grand blind serliana design of the Zecca (the papal mint; fig. 150).97Tafuri, 1992, pp. 109ff. These designs provided a permanent architectural response to the ephemeral displays created for papal processions through the city.98Fagiolo and Madonna, 1997. In turn, the celebratory form of both the window design and the way it addressed viewers on the street served as a visual synecdoche of the palace’s owner–patron, whose identity could be further reinforced by the prominent display of family arms. The prow-like corner of the Palazzo della Cancelleria projects towards both the Campo dei Fiori and the via Peregrinorum, and is marked by the arms of both its owner, Raffaele Riario (also commemorated in the prominent inscription), and his uncle Pope Julius II, while a balcony is placed to one side, overlooking this key ceremonial and commercial area (see fig. 80).99Nevola, 2011b, pp. 159–60. Here, it might be argued, the inscription and coats of arms proclaim the identity of the patron, while the balcony enables and implies their physical presence and control of the site.

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Description: Design for a palace on a canal by Serlio, Sebastiano

150. Sebastiano Serlio, design for a palace on a canal, woodcut from Book IV of Tutte le opere di architettura (Venice, 1619), fol. 155, Getty Research Institute, Getty Center, Los Angeles.

The positioning of balconies, like that of coats of arms, tended to be arranged to ensure maximum visibility in relation to the surrounding city fabric. For example, the Palazzo Farnese has a centrally placed balcony–window, crowned by huge papal arms and framed with free-standing verde antico columns, which overlooks the homonymous piazza, creating a powerful visual axis through to the Campo dei Fiori and via Peregrinorum beyond.100Frommel, 1986, pp. 61–3; Spezzaferro, 1980. In summer 1537 a window of the palace was used to stage the hanging and subsequent display of the corpse of the city’s standard-bearer (banderaro), ordered by Pope Paul III’s son, Pier Luigi Farnese.101Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 169–71. This very public display was described by the Mantuan ambassador, who reported that it took place while Pier Luigi was dining in the same room; here, then, the window served as the interface between the interior life of the palace and the public life on the street, with the result that ‘soldiers and everyone were so very frightened that they were obedient and kept their heads down’.102Ibid., p. 178 (Fabrizio Pellegrini to Federico Gonzaga). In imitating strategies for public punishment more often employed at institutional sites of government, this incident offers an insight into the political meanings that could be derived from such raised private platforms owing to the attention they commanded from the public space of streets and squares.

The raised performative platform provided by piano nobile windows, balconies and loggias structured hierarchical and gendered relations between the street and the residents of houses throughout Italy. As we observe these decorated openings, often framed by classicising stonework, which would have been embellished on special occasions with ephemeral displays of tapestries and carpets, it is important to keep in mind that they were designed to be occupied. Balconies such as those on the Cancelleria (Rome), the Palazzo Prosperi-Sacrati on the new main street of Ferrara and the Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza were all designed to be seen, but also to be seen from. This point is well illustrated in the Tournament at Brescia, a scene originally part of a fresco cycle in the Palazzo Calini in that city, painted by Floriano Ferramola around 1511 (fig. 151).103The scene does not offer a totally accurate depiction of the piazza, but evidently evokes that recently developed space; Hemsoll, 1988. The scene depicts a tournament held on Brescia’s main square, perhaps on the occasion of a Calini marriage; a grand classical arch frames the piazza beyond, and lavishly dressed figures fill the foreground, men on the right and women on the left. High up above them on a balcony that runs over the archway, a group of men and women observe, while two others are neatly framed in a two-light window to one side.

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Description: Tournament at Brescia by Ferramola, Floriano

151. Floriano Ferramola, Tournament at Brescia, c. 1511, fresco, originally in Palazzo Calini, Brescia, transferred to canvas, now in Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Seen through the arch, the piazza is occupied by the wooden tilt that separates the two opponents in the joust, while viewers fill all available spaces with a raised vantage point. Closing off the piazza at the further end are the recently completed loggetta and clock-tower, with men perching precariously on the roof of the loggetta, while women observe from the projecting balconies of the tower. In the background, the fortified Broletto also doubles as a makeshift viewing platform, with spectators standing between the crenellations, while the windows of the building on the right side of the scene are occupied by female viewers. Although undoubtedly a grand set piece of all’antica urban design, the piazza Grande and the civic and private buildings that surround it are brought to life by social interactions: a grand family celebration, a jousting scene, men and women populating the architecture, which has been embellished by the temporary display of tapestries adorning the windowsills. While ostensibly the subject of the scene is a joust, it is nonetheless evident that the spectators are equally a focus of attention, and it is a function of the buildings to enhance their visibility.104For women at windows as ‘living ornaments [. . .] who looked out [. . .] from their windows, doorways, balconies’, see Musacchio, 2008, pp. 76–7.

The porous boundaries between public and private space

Much of the foregoing discussion has underlined the degree to which the residential palazzo was architecturally, socially and spatially imbricated with the street or public square that it addressed.105Friedman, 1992, and bibliography cited above. Emblazoned exterior walls of palaces were bearers of meaning, but did not uniquely signify familial identity or all’antica revival; rather, they formed a constantly porous boundary, conveying multiple meanings and functions in the give and take between the public space of streets, the wider public realm and the familial interior spaces of the home.106Cohen, 2001–2; Dennis, 2008–9. As has been shown, the window was loaded with symbolic meanings as a ‘performative threshold’ with gendered connotations associated with how women looked out from and were seen in these frames, raised up above the street level. As Daniel Jütte has argued, the front door of the home was equally inscribed with symbolic meanings: as the threshold between the domestic space of the home and the public space of the street, the ‘front door of a pre-modern house was the stage on which the status of the dweller played out in both positive and negative ways’.107Jütte, 2015, p. 70.

Just as the term ‘façade’ derived from the Italian for face (faccia), providing a direct anthropomorphic linkage between the built form of the home and the carefully designed identity of its owner, so by the same analogy its main doorway (the mouth) was the principal opening, granting entry to the less easily accessed interior. The doorway was usually made on a giant scale and was marked architecturally by elaborate stonework frames, while the door itself was fashioned from high-quality wood, often embellished with metalwork bosses, with elaborate locks and bolts that could seal the building from inside. Doorways were regularly emblazoned with coats of arms, and sometimes with inscriptions, which clearly marked ownership and family ties. As such, the door was the fulcrum around which the identity formation of the Renaissance palazzo revolved. Consequently, it was precisely the palace door that might be subject to shaming rituals or night-time attacks, which sought to defame the palace owner by defacing the door.108For ‘house scorning’, see Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 94–5. It is known, for instance, that the door of Palazzo Medici was spattered with blood while the palace was under construction, and palace doors and windows (as well as residences more widely) might be vandalised – and building materials stolen – during times of civic unrest.109Ginzburg, 1987. Following the death of Pope Sixtus IV in 1484, Stefano Infessura reported on damage and the theft of the doors from the palace of the counts Girolami, who were allies of the pope.110Jütte, 2015, p. 69, citing Infessura, 1890, p. 161.

More visceral and violent were the reprisals against the body of Jacopo de’ Pazzi, following the failed conspiracy against the Medici in April 1478, as reported by the diarist Luca Landucci.111Landucci, 1985, p. 21; see also Jütte, 2015, p. 145. Following his execution, Jacopo’s body was disinterred, mocked and dismembered as it was dragged around the city by the hangman’s rope still attached to his neck; when the crowd reached Palazzo Pazzi, ‘they came to the main door of his house, where they attached the noose to the doorbell, and they hoisted him up saying: “knock on the door”.’112Ibid. Pazzi’s violated body was brought to the proud palace that had represented him and his family in the city; an incidental detail indicates that palaces might have bells mounted outside the main door to signal the presence of visitors, and here Jacopo needs to seek recognition by knocking at the door of his own home, which perhaps also suggests the degree to which he was no longer recognisable. In fact, just as Pazzi’s physical body was subject to public violence to appease the attack on the Medici, so too was the palace itself; the Pazzi arms were removed from the façade, as well as from numerous other public locations, and their name was erased from public documents. A similar ritual was followed in 1543, when Giuliano Buonaccorsi, who had attempted to murder Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, was executed and his lifeless body was dragged shamefully around the city by the noose until it came to his house, where the cadaver was made to knock on his own door, so that his sister would come to answer it.113Bertelli, 2001, p. 241; Jütte, 2015, p. 145; Plaisance, 2008, p. 115.

Beyond the door stood the palace interior, access to which was more heavily regulated and often mediated by quite elaborate ritual and ceremonial conventions.114Preyer, 1998; for the elaborate ceremonials that governed movement in and through 17th-century palaces in Rome, see Waddy, 1990. Nonetheless, varying degrees of access to the space of ground-floor courtyards suggest that – at least at some times of the day – the palace was more open to the street than might at first be assumed. The benches that lined so many palace exteriors survive as a design element that clearly articulated spatial relations between the interior space, part of which at least had quite public functions, and the public sphere. The act of waiting to gain access to the palace on the part of potentially large numbers of people is a further indication of how porous boundaries were in the social practices associated with gaining access to residential palaces; benches on the outside of the building and waiting rooms or benches under covered interior loggias are widely recorded.115Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2; Preyer, 1998, pp. 359–61. Architectural treatises offer a number of further suggestions about this porosity, especially with reference to the residences of professionals who practised from home – such as lawyers, bankers and merchants – and who therefore needed to receive people in ways appropriate to their walks of life. It has been suggested that various permutations of ground-floor or mezzascala offices – the latter halfway up the first flight of stairs, as the name suggests – might be used for meetings that would not have been appropriate for the far more exclusive studiolo, to which access was usually highly restricted.116Preyer, 2006. That access to the home and its enclosure could be part of wider professional and networking needs is further attested, for instance, by the specialised development by Genoese merchants in the sixteenth century of enclosed gardens attached to palaces, as a competitive display aimed at impressing and securing business agreements with outside clients. 117Hanke, 2010; the Genoese palace gardens were a market-led equivalent of the Roman cardinals’ sculpture collections, for which see Wren Christian, 2010. This practice would seem to echo the suggestion in Andrea Palladio’s treatise that lawyers would be well advised to have pleasant gardens, ‘in which clients can spend time without becoming bored’.118Palladio, 1997 (Book II, ch. 3), a point followed at greater length by Scamozzi, 1615, p. 254.

As we established in Chapter 4, it is along the ground-floor exterior of palaces that the greatest degree of porosity can often be identified, in the form of shops that occupied significant portions of a building’s footprint, especially in those areas of the city where trade flourished. Thus, for example, Palazzo Caprini in Rome (discussed at the beginning of this chapter) was among the earliest palaces built along the new via Alessandrina, which formed the final approach to St Peter’s and the Vatican complex; it was constructed for the Bishop of Viterbo, Adriano Caprini, to a design by Donato Bramante and completed around 1510.119Bruschi, 1969, pp. 1040–6; Bruschi, 1989; Tafuri, 1984a. The palace was lined with shops on the façades onto both the newly opened piazza Scossacavalli and the via Alessandrina, and the architect distinguished between the grander residential floor and the street level of the palace by employing a rusticated base and introducing the classical orders only on the piano nobile.120Ackerman, 1983, p. 33; Bruschi, 1969, p. 604; see also Clarke, 2003, pp. 187–94, who argues that such stonework had no ‘rustic’ connotations in the 15th century. This highly innovative solution enabled its prelate patron to mark a distinction between his upper-floor residence and the ground-floor shops. Furthermore, as can be seen in a near-contemporary drawing, the ground floor was designed with a mezzanine, providing shop tenants with the necessary storage and residential spaces over the shop, while isolating these from the palace above (see fig. 137).121Bruschi, 1969, p. 1043.

In the decade or so that followed the construction of Palazzo Caprini, its model was widely imitated and interpreted in Rome by Raphael and his followers, most often in the streets of the Borgo and the Rione Ponte commercial and banking districts.122These were areas typified by dense commercial activity. The streets of the Vatican Borgo served the varied needs of residents and pilgrim visitors, and the Rione Ponte area was the focus of predominantly Tuscan merchants and bankers; see, for example, Lee, 1994, pp. 326–9. Scholars have noted the significance of the individual locations of these palaces to explain the presence of shops in their design, although none appears to have recognised the extent to which design followed function, as sites imposed specific requirements on patrons.123A rare exception is Conforti, 2008, p. 133 (not developed further); see also Welch, 2005, pp. 134–7. Owners and developers were very much alive to the income-generating potential of shops in well-placed palaces, as the example of Cardinal Francesco Soderini’s real-estate investments in the Borgo reveals.124Lowe, 1991, pp. 264–8, where an annual rental income per shop of 20 carlini is reported. Soderini’s property in the Borgo filled a large insula, with both ground-floor shops and a number of apartments providing a steady rental income. Much the same can be said of Giulio Alberini’s palace in via de’ Banchi, near piazza di Ponte, designed by Raphael around 1515 soon after street widening was carried out in the area (1512; fig. 152).125Pagliara, 1984. For the urban reordering of the area, see Tafuri, 1984b; Tafuri, 1992, pp. 109–113; see also Burroughs, 1982. Acquisition documents indicate that, for Alberini, a Roman nobleman active in property speculation inside and outside the city, the rental income from the botteghe was crucial to the financial success of the project, and it has even been suggested that construction of the entire ground floor was completed first, in order that the shops might start generating rent before the rest of the palace was finished.126Pagliara, 1984, pp. 171, 179–81; this construction method, which allowed for the immediate rental of ground-floor shops before completion of the rest of the building, was also used for the Palazzo Todeschini Piccolomini in Siena.

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Description: Palazzo Alberini (later Palazzo Cicciaporci), via de' Banchi, Rome by Lafréry,...

152. Antoine Lafréry, ‘Palazzo Alberini’ (later Palazzo Cicciaporci), via de’ Banchi, Rome, engraving from Speculum Romanae magnificentiae (Rome, 1574?), pl. 120, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome.

While this is not the place to survey all the palaces built in the city between the commencement of the Palazzo della Cancelleria (late 1480s) and the Sack of Rome (1527), it seems clear that, where a palace was adjacent (at the front or back) to a major route, shops were likely to appear in that façade (see fig. 79).127For the overlap of the housing of the elite local nobility with these streets, see Cafà, 2010. Moreover, even such seeming puzzles as the shops in Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Stati-Maccarani, built on the minor square of Sant’Eustachio, can be explained by the fact that this was one of a number of intersections in the Campo Marzio district, which emerged as a site for markets and was densely packed with shops.128For Sant’Eustachio as a site of commercial activity and the headquarters of the Dogana di Terra, see Modigliani, 1998, p. 122. For the palace, see Frommel, 1998b, who notes the inclusion of shops without further comment. A later view by Giuseppe Vasi (fig. 153) gives some indication of the situation: the commercial vocation of the area is revealed by the ground-floor shops of the palazzetto of Tizio Chermandio da Spoleto, which also had a painted façade onto the neighbouring piazza.129For the decoration of this palace, see Acidini Luchinat, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 110–12, who notes that Tizio’s relative Valerio was a merchant in the Dogana, p. 133 n. 51. Much the same can be said of the palaces along the via del Portico d’Ottavia and piazza Giudea, where late-fifteenth-century buildings such as the Palazzo Santa Croce and the house of Lorenzo Manilio (see fig. 112) were filled with shops that served the regular markets and other commercial activities of the fish-market area.130For the markets at Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 161–76; see also Vaquero Piñeiro, 2008. For the house of Lorenzo Manilio, see Clarke, 2003, pp. 229–30; Tucci, 2001, pp. 23–33, 103–117, reports that Manilio used one of the shops for his own business activities.

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Description: Piazza di Sant’Eustachio, Rome by Vasi, Giuseppe

153. Giuseppe Vasi, ‘Piazza di Sant’Eustachio’, Rome, engraving from Delle magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna, vol. VI (Rome, 1761), pl. 113, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome. Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Cenci-Stati-Maccarani, with its ground-floor shops (centre left), faces the church of Sant’Eustachio across the square, and the palazetto of Tizio Chermandio da Spoleto fills the left corner.

While a general shift in elite housing design tended to exclude shops from the ground floors of palaces by the latter part of the sixteenth century, more pragmatic considerations prevailed well into the mid-1500s, as Palladio’s comments regarding the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, suggest. Furthermore, even though newer buildings might not contain shops, the majority of existing housing stock – elite and otherwise – did, giving rise to the prevalence of mixed-use urban environments. Somewhat remarkably, when we explore these shops in any detail, it emerges that the key ground-floor fabric of magnificent residential palaces was regularly leased to third parties, and might even be sold off, or ceded as part of dowries or testamentary bequests. While the documentary evidence is difficult to assemble, it is evident that some citizens developed property portfolios numbering multiple botteghe, which might be located in numerous houses, palaces and institutions. Conversely, families would inevitably find themselves accommodating the botteghe of numerous artisans and retailers, and it is naturally tempting to speculate what ties between them – other than the payment of rent – may have developed.

A strong clientelistic model is known to have been prevalent in the magnate residential enclaves of a number of medieval Italian cities, where the castellare (‘urban castle’) operated very much as an ‘ecosystem’, around which family members, clients and dependants clustered.131For Siena, see English, 1984; Nevola, 2007, pp. 49–51; see also Herlihy, 1969; Lansing, 1991, pp. 84–8. In Siena buildings such as the Castellare degli Ugurgeri or Palazzo Tolomei were more than just homes for the scions of elite families: they served as physical and symbolic foci for entire kinship groups. In addition to family members, as the Ugurgeri example effectively illustrates, these fortified residential enclaves also afforded protection to an extended network of relatives and retainers. In the case of the Tolomei, ‘testamentary fragmentation’ had by 1318 allegedly divided the palace into 182 parts, while by the mid-fifteenth century it was ‘taxed all in one piece’, with the family distributed in various buildings in the immediate environs.132Nevola, 2007, p. 160, with documents; see also Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 131, 135. For ancestral property as expressive of links to the clan, see Piccinni, 1983. The palace was thus collectively owned by the Tolomei clan as a whole, and represented it in the city. While this may be a somewhat extreme case, variants of the kinship model of property was often the norm: families were associated with particular areas in the city and often with one or more landmark buildings, while living in properties that clustered around these main sites to create family enclaves.133For Florence, see Kent, 1971.

It is helpful to think of this clientelistic and distributed model of property ownership and the articulation of family identities when considering the management strategies employed for the administration of ground-floor commercial spaces that formed an integral part of a family palace. The castellare model of mutual protection can be understood as analogous with a system that became more widespread by the fifteenth century, in which overlapping professional interests were given physical and spatial expression at street level in the palace itself, articulated through the complex mosaic of ownership and tenancy of shops and ancillary non-residential properties. Interestingly, it has been shown that, as early as the fourteenth century in Siena, the same Ugurgeri family, whose fortified residential enclave still survives, were major property owners in their neighbourhood, and that in addition to housing they controlled extensive portions of the high-rental commercial property on the eastern side of the nearby piazza del Campo.134Balestracci, 1984; Tuliani, 2002, n. 13. Like other magnate families with strong architectural identifying markers and local and international business interests (like the Tolomei, Malavolti and Sansedoni), their influence in the city thus extended in a capillary way to touch everyday commercial life. It has been suggested that this involvement in local real estate had a monetised value in the high rents assured for this central area.135Tuliani, 2002; for the statement that the majority of fondachi were magnate-owned in the 14th century, see Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 137–41. Furthermore, and perhaps even more significantly, it was also by such means that magnate families offered patronage and exerted influence on guilds and their members, controlling as they did the city’s prime commercial properties and access to them by guild members.

Such factors emerge clearly from the well-documented example of the Palazzo Sansedoni, a fourteenth-century palace with a double façade, facing on one side towards the piazza del Campo and on the other towards the main street, the strada Romana (fig. 154). The original project drawing, as well as seventeenth-century drawings connected with the redevelopment of the area by the Chigi-Zondadari, testify to a design accommodating numerous shops on the three sides of the palace.136For what follows, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 126–8; see also Balestracci, 2004. Tax returns from 1453 indicate a partial division of the palace among different members of the family, who also owned a number of the shops that wrapped around it on the strada Romana, chiasso dei Pollaiaoli and piazza del Campo; this is confirmed in a division document of 1489 recording an agreement between Bartolomeo and Pietro Sansedoni for the creation of two apartments (abituri) in the palace, each of which was in turn divided into two parts.137Piccinni, 1983, p. 230 n. 27, citing ASS, Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala, 1186, fols 324–9 (September 1489); see also Gabrielli, 2004. For what follows, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 126–8. In 1453 Guccia di Nanni di Goro Sansedoni reported income from at least one linen shop (pannilino), while Tofo di Checco registered leases to a draper, a silk merchant and a linen merchant, among others.138ASS, Lira, 144, fols 339, 360. What is rather more surprising is that a number of the botteghe were owned by individuals not related to the Sansedoni, indicating a practice of alienating shops from lineage property holdings: in 1481 Francesca, widow of Francesco del Cotone, owned various shops under the palace, on both the Banchi di Sotto and the Campo sides.139ASS, Lira, 185, fol. 65. All the shops were regularly let, and, perhaps in view of the high rents commanded by commercial property in the area, the trades exercised from beneath the Palazzo Sansedoni were orientated towards luxury retail, thus coinciding quite effectively with the increasingly prescriptive zoning legislation for the area. Location, in this case, would seem to have ensured a level of decorum for the activities exercised below the Sansedoni family residence.

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Description: Palazzo Sansedoni (left) and Palazzo Chigi-Zondadari on piazza del Campo by Unknown;...

154. Palazzo Sansedoni (left) and Palazzo Chigi-Zondadari on piazza del Campo, Siena.

The concentration of cloth-related trades around the Campo is again documented in the tax return of Meo di Bindoccio, who worked as a ligrittiere (a cloth merchant who sold cloth by the length – that is, in relatively small quantities) on the Campo, where he also lived.140ASS, Lira, 144, fol. 273. He owned three and a half other shops on the Campo, of which his sons Giovanni and Cristoforo had taken over one, and another was let to his competitors in the same trade.141Ibid. Immediately behind the Campo, on the central node of the croce del Travaglio, it was above all banks and goldsmiths who seem to have clustered, as the remarkable case of Pietro di Bartolo Montanini suggests. Pietro lived in a house with eleven rent-producing shops beneath it, four of which were let out as banks and four to goldsmiths, as well as one to a furrier.142Ibid., fol. 335; for the zoning of this area for luxury trades, see Nevola, 2006a, pp. 68–70. The neighbouring palace of the Tricerchi was also purpose built to accommodate shops, although it has not been possible to identify the tenants, who nevertheless paid high rents, suggesting luxury activities that could support the overheads.

Cases such as these indicate a rationale for patterns of letting: elite owners opted to lease high-rent ground-floor property to professions that would not compromise the residence through such nuisances as noise, smell or dirt. Instances such as that of Meo di Bindoccio (the ligrittiere) seem to indicate a patronage network within a specific profession, and indeed the cloth merchants’ guild headquarters was immediately adjacent to the Palazzo Sansedoni. The fact that the Sansedoni also had links with the silk mercers’ guild is attested by a sixteenth-century inscription locating that guild’s headquarters on an extant site spanning the chiasso dei Pollaiuoli between Palazzo Sansedoni and the eighteenth-century Palazzo Chigi-Zondadari; there were also long-standing links between the Ugurgeri and Sansedoni and the guild headquarters of the shoemakers in chiasso Buio.143Balestracci, 2004, p. 141; Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 119–20, 138–40; Quast, 2000, p. 461, with visual documentation from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Indeed, the Sansedoni co-owned property in this guild precinct with the Ugurgeri, as was re-attested in 1491, when reconstruction of the site to facilitate its commercial use saw the Sansedoni forced to include the Ugurgeri coat of arms in the redeveloped site.144First noted in Balestracci, 2004, pp. 141, 149. To establish firm links between property-owning families and the guilds and shopkeeping guild members who might be their tenants requires detailed further research of notarial and rental accounts, though it certainly seems plausible to propose such connections, articulated around the architectural fabric of their palaces.

Ties of family and patronage bound together neighbourhoods in similar ways in other cities, as has been shown for Genoa, Florence and Rome.145For Genoa, for instance, see Heers, 1977; Owen Hughes, 1975. For Florence, see Kent, 1971. For Rome, see Broise and Maire Vigueur, 1983. Flexible and expansive urban castles or enclaves enabled multiple family members to cluster in readily identifiable areas, which acquired greater visibility with the emergence of the typology of the family palace from the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth.146Ajello Mahler, 2012, pp. 85 ff.; Ajello Mahler, 2019. In Rome, what have been described as ‘archipelagos of properties’ emerged, while both subjective decision-making and the legislative framework of rental agreements enabled landholding families to control who lived in their neighbourhoods, creating networks of allegiances at urban scale.147Ajello Mahler, 2012, pp. 89ff. This certainly appears to have been the case in Rome, where, for instance, in the first half of the fifteenth century, Gentile Orsini’s properties adjacent to the Campo dei Fiori combined a baronial residence with multiple income-generating properties, many of them shops facing towards this prime commercial area.148Ibid., pp. 147–52. While retaining the distinct character of a family enclave – in part also shaped by the fact that the site occupied the ancient Theatre of Pompey – the complex property included numerous shops created from what had formerly been a slaughterhouse, as well as a self-contained unit let as a cardinal’s palace. Although a number of architectural improvements were made to the vast property block in the centuries that followed, the family continued to be associated with it, while deriving income from rental well into the seventeenth century.149Ibid., pp. 304–5.

In such patterns, it is possible to identify relationships of interdependence between property owners and the network of tenants who might gather around them. While it is all too easy to assume the unified ownership of these monumental residences, and the palace as a monolith, the reality was, in fact, much more complex. Citizens could develop property portfolios numbering multiple botteghe that might be located in various houses, palaces and institutions, while the ground floors of their homes were frequently divided up into shops rented out for income to a range of trades and professions. We might describe the sort of connections that developed around the Palazzo Sansedoni or the Orisini property at Campo dei Fiori as giving rise to ‘clientage clustering’, whereby ties of common interest contributed to assembling particular trades around a palace’s multiple façades. Here, then, we can see the castellare model of mutual protection, supplanted by a system in which overlapping professional interests had a physical and spatial expression at street level in the palace itself.150These family systems resemble those of institutions (discussed in Chapter 4) of multiple rental residential and commercial property units, such as the Universitá Vecchia in Perugia and the Loggia Vasariana at Arezzo. In this way, family palaces extended their reach well beyond the bounds of their stern façades to influence wider swathes of urban public space and the buildings around them.151A similar point is made in Robbins, 1994, pp. 170–71, in considering properties belonging to the Alberteschi and Mattei (extant on the piazza in Piscinula) and properties in Anguillara with a loggia or portico on the street; see also Broise and Maire Vigueur, 1983, pp. 152–3.

‘First life, then spaces, then buildings’: A palace on a street

The opening section of Part 2 examined the fresco representation of the Palazzo Pontano in Perugia, and considered the ways in which the family residence acted as a focal point in the neighbourhood. The fresco captures a discrete urban area, and our discussion of this served to illustrate how Kevin Lynch’s categories of urban imageability might usefully apply to an analysis of urban spaces in the past; the subsequent chapters have moved from the wide-frame view of paths and edges, via the nodal sites at street corners, to conclude with an exploration of one example of architectural typologies, which assumed a monumental quality in the streetscape. As has been suggested, even at the scale of single buildings, architecture should be interpreted within a social context, and the building typology of the palazzo is best understood through the social interactions that it mediated.

This final section considers one example in the light of the observation made by the contemporary urban designer Jan Gehl: ‘First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.’152Gehl, 1987, p. 23. Gehl challenged the hierarchies imposed by the architectural profession that privilege built form over environmental and social context, and in a similar way it is worthwhile to move beyond an approach to architectural history that focuses on the formal qualities of individual buildings to seek a wider understanding of how those forms are shaped by the spaces they occupy and the life around them. As this chapter has suggested, multiple features that constitute the design of the Renaissance palazzo are inscribed with both general and specific meanings: some of these features may be contingent on very localised conditions, while others apply to all exemplars. While this chapter has focused on the palazzo as a typology, which was given monumental definition during the period under review, it is of course equally true that such an approach might be applied to all building typologies, from churches to town halls, from hospitals to fortifications.

So, then, taking the example of the Palazzo Spannocchi in Siena, we can consider the residential arrangements of one elite family, and review how the choices adopted for that building were uniquely conditioned by the space it occupied and the life that played out around it (see fig. 77). The palace was built during the 1470s for the prominent locally born banker Ambrogio Spannocchi, and the project was designed and overseen by the Florentine architect Giuliano da Maiano.153For additional details, see Nevola, 2005b; Nevola 2007, pp. 116–19. Spannocchi had returned to Siena following a long and successful career in Rome, Naples and Valencia – where he had served as banker to popes and kings – and set out to establish a residence on a well-placed and prominent city-centre site, not far from where his relatives lived. In this respect the palace is unusual in having been built ex novo on a site that did not previously belong to his family; it was secured at some considerable cost following a complex campaign of real-estate investments, which created a site extending along the city’s main street, the strada Romana.

By January 1476 the palace was largely complete and another Sienese banker, Piero Turamini, wrote about it to the Florentine Benedetto Dei:

Ambrogio Spannocchi has built a notable palace with a marvellous façade on the strada Romana, next to the Palazzo Salimbeni. It has been designed by a Florentine, and work on it is still under way. It is considered a beautiful thing and is said to have cost him more than 15,000 florins.154Von Fabriczy, 1903, from ASF, Conventi Soppressi, Badia di Firenze, Familiarum, VI, no. 317 [nuovo], fol. 245v; Pietro Turamini was a wealthy banker, see ASS, Lira, 57, fol. 23v (1453), and heirs in ASS, Lira, 185, fol. 143 (1481).

This short account highlights a number of key factors in the design of the building – first among them the façade on the strada Romana, but also the great cost of the project and the decision to hire a Florentine architect. The palace may have been a stone’s throw from some of Ambrogio’s relatives in the nearby district of San Donato, but its location was undoubtedly driven more by a desire for visibility along the grandest residential and commercial street in the city than by proximity to family members. The site was in part secured by targeting the properties of the discredited Salimbeni family, a long-established Sienese clan whose leading role in an unsuccessful coup of 1403 had led to a significant decline in their fortunes, and laid them open to the full-scale hostile acquisition campaign mounted by Spannocchi.155Nevola, 2005b. Indeed, it would seem that his desire to secure the site was so strong that he may have received support from the city authorities in concluding a forced sale by the Salimbeni; the jurist Mariano Sozzini recorded the transaction in his consilia, noting that it set a precedent to support patrons of new palaces by facilitating the compulsory purchase of suitable sites, much as was made possible in Rome by new legislation brought in from 1480.156Sozzini, 1571, nos 105, 149. For eminent domain, see Chapter 1; see also Ceen, 1986, pp. 29–30. In fact, the construction of the new palace satisfied the needs of both the private patron to secure a prominent central site, and the city authorities, who were actively pursuing a policy of urban improvement of the buildings lining the strada Romana.157Discussed in Chapter 4.

So, then, the palace site was prestigious, and securing it was a further expression of the patron’s power, while the choice of a Florentine architect – Giuliano da Maiano – can be understood as articulating Spannocchi’s cosmopolitan career, especially given the fact that Giuliano had worked extensively in Naples.158Nevola, 2005b, p. 153; Quinterio, 1989. Although Florentine, this palace style – which adopted such features as channelled ashlar façade stonework, round-arched two-light windows, classicising details for the cornice and symmetrical design centred on a courtyard – had, by the 1470s, become widely adopted by wealthy patrons across Italy, promoted in part by the professional mobility of architects like Giuliano.159For examples of how Giuliano spread this palace style across Italy, see Lamberini, Lotti and Lunardi, 1994; Quinterio, 1996. Ambrogio’s credentials as papal banker were referenced by use of the arms of Pius II Piccolomini over the main doorway, while his own Spannocchi escutcheons were emblazoned on the highly visible corners (where ribbons survive), and the family device of ears of corn appear in roundels within the window designs (fig. 155). High above the street an extraordinary figurative cornice displays the portrait heads of the Roman emperors surrounding the centrally placed bust of Ambrogio Spannocchi himself (fig. 156).160See, most recently, Carl, 2008. The building’s exterior thus pronounces clearly to a viewer on the street the owner’s Roman credentials and professional connections, while the decorative cornice favours classicising taste over humility.161Carl connects the Spannocchi emperor frieze with the lost façade of the Medici bank in Milan, which similarly employed portrait busts of emperors; ibid.

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Description: Elevation and section through the façade of Giuliano da Maiano’s Palazzo...

155. Drawing of the elevation and section through the façade of Giuliano da Maiano’s Palazzo Spannocchi, 1470s, strada Romana (Banchi di Sopra), Siena, from C. von Stegmann and H. von Geymüller, The Architecture of the Renaissance in Tuscany (New York, 1924).

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Description: Heads of the Roman emperors, and Ambrogio Spannocchi (second from left) by Unknown

156. Heads of the Roman emperors, and Ambrogio Spannocchi (second from left) on the cornice of Palazzo Spannocchi, Banchi di Sopra, Siena.

In August 1475 Cardinal Giacomo Ammannati Piccolomini wrote to his friend Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, describing the ‘Ambrosianae domus’ as being ‘wide, large and magnificent [. . .] Its outer appearance is that of a royal palace; the interior is richly appointed and so spacious that it is in no way different from a royal palace.’162Ammannati Piccolomini, 1506, fol. 301v (14 August 1475), misunderstood as a letter from Gonzaga in Quinterio, 1996, p. 255 n. 17, and Von Fabriczy, 1903; see now Ammannati Piccolomini, 1997, p. 1989. Also reported in Ugurgieri Azzolini, 1649, p. 323. Considerable speculation has surrounded the interior appointment of the palace and various secular images produced by the so-called Master of the Story of Griselda; see, most recently, Syson, 2005. Ammannati was clearly very impressed by the palace and its location; indeed, his personal experience of the building directly influenced his appreciation of it, as he had been a guest there as a spectator for a horse-race (the palio) that passed directly below the piano nobile windows, along the strada Romana. An eighteenth-century engraving provides a good impression of the palace and the animated street running along its façade, albeit the frenzied pace of the palio run along the main street (alla lunga, as opposed to around the Campo) is here replaced by sedate carriages and pedestrians (fig. 157).163For the palio alla lunga, see Heywood, 1904, pp. 98–105. For the routes in 14th- to 16th-century usage, see Balestracci, Barzanti and Piccinni, 1978, p. 9. Nevertheless, the palace’s commanding presence on the street is evident, and the façade is populated with people leaning from the windows, conversing on the raised balcony to the left of the building and seated on the bench by the main door.164Further on this enclosed piazza, see Nevola, 2005b. By this time, the four shops that flanked the main entrance had been closed up, but originally these provided income to the owners and reaffirmed visually how their fortunes were grounded in trade and banking.165ASS, Lira, 221, fol. 231 (1488) for the tax return of Ambrogio Spannocchi’s heirs, accounting for these shops.

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Description: Palazzo Spannocchi by De Vegni, Leonardo Massimiliano; Rust, Vincenzo

157. Pazzini-Carli e Figli, ‘Palazzo Spannocchi’, 1755, engraving, private collection. The Palazzo Spannocchi (right), the Rocca Salimbeni (centre, set back) and Palazzo Tantucci (left) face onto strada Romana.

Ammannati’s comments regarding the richly appointed domestic interior again conform with the lavish residential arrangements that were increasingly common for wealthy urban residents, and recent research has reassembled a number of works that were originally produced for the palace.166Syson, 2005; Syson et al., 2007, pp. 226–27, 230–45. Such collections conform with the highest standards outlined for other cities; Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 2006. That among these was a series of panels depicting the moralising stories of the Magnanimity of Alexander and of Griselda, as well as, perhaps, cycles of famous men and women, suggests that this group of artworks should be connected to the double wedding of Ambrogio’s sons, Giulio and Antonio, in January 1494.167Reported by Allegretti, 1733, col. 840; see also ASS, Spannocchi, A12, fols 22, 44. Giulio di Ambrogio married Giovanna Mellini, while his brother, Antonio, married Alessandra di Neri Placidi. For biographical details of Antonio, see Syson et al., 2007, p. 226. This event is reported in chronicles as having been especially lavish, a display that was evidently prepared not only for local onlookers, but also for the guests who accompanied the wedding party from Rome to escort Giulio’s bride, Giovanna Mellini, and for guests who included such dignitaries as the Duke of Saxony and Iacopo Appiano, Lord of Piombino, as well as the Sienese elite.168For a detailed account, see ASS, Spannocchi, A12, fols 22, 44; see also Ugurgieri Azzolini, 1649, p. 323–4. Parading into the city from the southern gate (Porta San Marco), in the company of a number of Roman patricians and twelve knights with golden spurs, Giovanna first made a two-day rest in a patrician house to prepare for the celebrations, before proceeding to the central croce del Travaglio, where she met her sister-in-law to be, Alessandra di Neri Placidi, before the two brides travelled the last stretch of the route to the Palazzo Spannocchi.169Ugurgieri Azzolini, 1649, p. 324. A magnificent triumphal arch ‘such as those made by the ancient Romans’ had been erected by the palace entrance, adorned with four Roman heroes proudly displaying the arms of the couples. The wedding ceremony and a sumptuous reception followed in the palace, which had been decked out in silks and tapestries; silverware to the value of 60,000 scudi was on display at a banquet where hare, pheasant, peacock and other delicacies were served.

Although evidently not set in a cold winter cityscape, it is a grand ceremony along these lines that seems to be evoked in a spalliera panel, The Magnanimity of Alexander, originally from the Spannocchi palace, and probably commissioned on the occasion of the wedding (fig. 158).170For these panels, see Syson, 2005. Clearly visible above the entrance to the festive tent displaying Alexander’s spoils of war are the crossed Spannocchi–Piccolomini arms, while the servants’ livery also clearly references the colours of the family arms in their bright-hued hose.171Syson et al., 2007, p. 231: white (standing for silver), blue and a flash of gold on one leg (Piccolomini) and red on the other (Spannocchi). Furthermore, the scene evokes the splendid wedding ceremony through the prepared table, the stepped credenza (‘sideboard’) on which are displayed valuable plates, and the chests inside the tent, adorned with costly vessels and other table furnishings, reminiscent of the silverware described in the accounts. Remarkably, a number of ceramic plates with crossed Spannocchi–Piccolomini arms survive in museum collections, and attest to the sort of tableware that might have been used by the household on such occasions.172For example, a deep dish in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, inv. no. WA2004.217, and another in the British Museum, London, inv. no. 1857,0804.32, both late 15th century. A number of the same motifs – including the wedding banquet and the Spannocchi livery – reappear in the contemporary three-panel series The Story of the Patient Griselda by the so-called Master of the Story of Griselda (now in the National Gallery, London).173Syson et al., 2007, pp. 226–7.

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Description: The Magnanimity of Alexander the Great by Ghirlandaio, Domenico

158. Workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Magnanimity of Alexander the Great, 1492–3, tempera on panel, painted for the Spannocchi family of Siena, Longleat House, Wiltshire.

Clearly, the double wedding of 17 January 1494 was an important day in the life of the Spannocchi and their palace, as indeed was the palio viewed by Cardinal Ammannati from one of the palace windows twenty years earlier. Occasions such as these heightened the visual spectacle of such monumental residential architecture, although it is equally important to note that its very presence was a constant reminder of the status and wealth of the individuals who built it. The use of imported stone, a non-Sienese architect and the cornice frieze consciously evocative of classical Rome all pointed to the cosmopolitan connections of the banking family. As the comments above have suggested, the display of the family’s prestige was a primary function of the palace, though features such as the ground-floor shops were a relatively prosaic reminder of the fact that their fortunes were built on commerce. Above all, the strada Romana location ensured that all the effort and resources expended on the palace would be seen by the largest possible audience of visitors and travellers along that street on a daily basis.

This evident focus on visibility is reinforced in one last feature of the Palazzo Spannocchi – the space that opens up on its northern side (today piazza Salimbeni), filling the corner between the palace and the Rocca Salimbeni (see fig. 157). While the present-day appearance of the piazza is the result of nineteenth-century remodelling, its origins can be traced back to a series of purchases made by Ambrogio Spannocchi, following the completion of the palace.174Marini, 1988; Nevola, 2005b, pp. 151–3, includes a plan of the site of the new piazza. The plan, cut short by his death in 1478, was to create an open piazza along the north side of the palace, and set back from the main street, through purchase of the site and the clearing of existing buildings. Despite complications, again the Spannocchi found support for their project from the public authorities, and in April 1480 Ambrogio’s sons were granted ‘the perpetual use of the piazza, or loggia, and garden which had once belonged to the Salimbeni, located next to the aforementioned public street [strada Romana] and the Salimbeni palace [. . .] on which they may erect vaults and columns’.175ASS, Spoglio Balìa, C18, fol. 47 (26 April 1480). A wall was built in 1527: ASS, Spannocchi, A1 bis, fols. 10, 23, 24. In this way the Spannocchi created a private piazza, made up predominantly of private land but opening onto the public space of the street, which accentuated the visibility of the palace and created a setting for family events.176The Spannocchi piazza thus precedes by almost fifty years the better-known private piazza of the Strozzi, planned from the 1480s, but executed in the 1530s; Elam, 1985; Elam 1986.

It is not clear whether the ‘columns and vaults’ recorded in the document were erected, though we do know that in 1540 additional work was undertaken to further define the space by creating a walled garden; it is this more enclosed arrangement that is shown in the eighteenth-century view of the area.177For documents regarding remodelling of the site, see ASS, Spannocchi, A1 bis, fols 10, 24, and esp. 23 (7 August 1540). It is tempting to see the final panel of the story of Griselda, in which an open arcaded loggia frames a banquet scene, as evoking the sort of public display that might have been accommodated on the Spannocchi piazza, to create a resonance between the story and actual events. It was not uncommon for the lavish ceremonies associated with family rites of passage to inform directly, or by allusion, the decoration of domestic furnishings, such as cassoni (‘marriage chests’) and spalliera panels (‘bench backs’).178For cassoni and family rites of passage, see, for instance, Campbell, 2009; Musacchio, 2008; Randolph, 2014, pp. 139–68. The piazza – an open space adjacent to the palace – amplified the visual impact of the family residence, and created a setting on a grand scale for ephemeral events of family significance. The fact that the communicative power of individual buildings could be magnified through such choreographed dialogue with planned urban spaces is the subject of the final part of this book.

1 Palladio, 1997, p. 88. »

2 Burns, 2008, pp. 40–43, with extensive earlier bibliography. »

3 Ibid., p. 42; Anderson, 2017. »

4 Anderson, 1978, p. 1. »

5 Ibid. »

6 Jacobs, 1961, repr. 1992, p. xviii. »

7 For the rigid system of causal relations between urban morphology and social patterns proposed by the Chicago School of urban sociology, see Stevenson, 2013, pp. 10–12, 21–3. »

8 Gehl, 1987, pp. 15ff. »

9 Discussed further below; key contributions to this argument are Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2; Kent, 1987. »

10 For the vast literature on the palace, which informs this chapter, see Burroughs, 2002; Clarke, 2003. »

11 This debate originated in the contrasting theories of Goldthwaite, 1968, and Kent, 1971. »

12 Ackerman and Rosenfeld, 1989. »

13 Palladio, 1997; Serlio, 2005: Alberti, 1991; see Martini, 1967: Weil-Garris Brandt and D’Amico, 1980. »

14 Discussed most recently in Beltramini and Burns 2008, p. 79 (Guido Beltramini), with no firm attribution. »

15 Bruschi, 1969, pp. 1040–46: Bruschi, 1989. »

16 Frommel, Ray and Tafuri, 1984. »

17 See Chapter 2, with bibliography. »

18 Bruschi, 1969, p. 1041, with supporting evidence from a print of the Palazzo Caprini façade on the via Alessandrina (1549) by the engraver and cartographer Antoine Lafréry (see fig. 30). For the significance of the use of the orders in the palace, see Ackerman, 1983, p. 33; Clarke, 2003, pp. 187–94, observes that such stonework had no ‘rustic’ connotations in the 15th century. »

19 The presence of shops along via Alessandrina is again confirmed in the Lafréry print, see Bruschi, 1969; d’Amelio, 2008. »

20 For a developed argument on site as a dominant conditioning factor for the design of palaces, see Nevola, 2011b. »

21 Friedman, 1992. »

22 For the first use of the term ‘building boom’ in the context of palace architecture in Renaissance Italy, see Goldthwaite, 1972; see also Calabi, 2001. »

23 See Chapter 2. Friedman, 1992, pp. 69, 93; Friedman’s excellent article errs towards architectural determinism in juxtaposing medieval social practices assembled on the street (primarily trade) to the uniquely aesthetic priorities of the Renaissance façade. »

24 A vast and growing literature has developed, following Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 2006; see Corry, Howard and Laven, 2017, again with a focus on interiors. »

25 Alberti, 1991, p. 292 (Book IX, ch. 1). »

26 Friedman, 1992, p. 102; for the Antinori palace, see Rubin and Wright, 1999, pp. 68–9. »

27 For further discussion of designed alignments, see Nevola, 2007, p. 123. For the Zecca façade in relation to processional routes, see Fagiolo and Madonna, 1997. »

28 Alberti, 1991, p. 106 (Book IV, ch. 5). See Smith, 1992, pp. 98–129, for a reading of Alberti in relation to the rhetorical concept of varietas, in direct opposition to Heydenreich, 1996, p. 50, which sees Pienza as an ‘ideal city’ with centralised design. »

29 Westfall, 1978. »

30 Clarke, 1999, p. 398 (quoting F. Beroaldo, Suetonius cum commentario, Bologna, 1493, fol. a2v). »

31 Ibid.; see also Rospocher, 2015, pp. 181–5. »

32 Rospocher, 2015, pp. 182–3. »

33 For a similar point regarding the pervasive presence of IHS monograms, see Origo, 1962, p. 3. »

34 Landucci, 1985, p. 59. »

35 Ibid., p. 217; the Strozzi torch braziers were remarked on by Vasari, who reported, in his life of Cronaca, that they had been made by Niccolò Grosso Caparra (Vasari, 1966– , vol. 4, p. 239). For tabernacle lighting, see Bargellini, 1971, pp. 18–19; Conti, 1928, vol. 2, p. 10. »

36 Ciabani, 1984; Kent, 1987, pp. 59–60; Strocchia, 2006, pp. 71–4, 496; see also Chapter 4. »

37 Ciabani, 1984; Kent, 1987, pp. 59–60; Milner, 2013. »

38 Tuohy, 1996, pp. 128ff. »

39 For a discussion of the house, see Folin, 2016. »

40 A nephew of the owners, Giacomo, was a medical doctor, which could account for the Asclepian symbol, though this cannot be confirmed: see Chambers, 1984, p. 416. »

41 Ibid., pp. 398–9, 415–16. »

42 Clarke, 2003, p. 173; Fraser Jenkins, 1970. »

43 Elet, 2002, pp. 456–9; Kent, 1987, p. 60; Schiaparelli, 1908, p. 39. »

44 Kent, 1987, p. 60, largely followed by Elet, 2002, p. 451; see also Kent, 1994, p. 202. »

45 Translated from Pedretti, 1957, p. 17. For the Anonimo’s identity, see Wierda, 2009. »

46 For Vasari and stories, see Barolsky, 1999; Barolsky, 2015. »

47 Machiavelli, 1964, p. 9 (Book IV, ch. 2). »

48 For the proposal that this may have been painted for the confraternity of Gesù Pellegrino, see Land, 2011. »

49 Preyer, 1998. »

50 Nevola, 2007, pp. 74–8. »

51 Hyman, 1977, p. 163 »

52 Kent, 1987, p. 61; Preyer, 1998, pp. 360–61, followed by Elet, 2002, pp. 456, 458. »

53 For the Rucellai loggia, see Kent, 1972. »

54 Murphy, 1997, p. 140. »

55 Ibid., p. 141; Preyer, 2004, p. 93 n. 50, questions the location but proposes no alternative. For the Pancone de’ Raugei, see Lippi, 1731, p. 203. »

56 Dei, 1984; Romby, 1976, p. 58. For the use of family loggias in medieval Siena, see Piccinni, 1983, pp. 230–34; for the loggia and Piccolomini’s views on it, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 74–80, 86. »

57 Cafà, 2010, pp. 440ff. For loggias as a feature of medieval elite housing, see Broise and Maire Vigueur, 1983; Robbins, 1994. »

58 From a considerable literature, see Cafà, 2007. »

59 Beltramini, 2008, p. 92, notes the urban significance of the portico and compares with the unexecuted plans for Palazzo Thiene. »

60 Lenzo, 2014a; Lenzo, 2014b. »

61 Lenzo, 2014b, p. 159. »

62 For the close association of the Carafa with the Seggio di Nido, see de Divitiis, 2007. »

63 Ibid., p. 161, quoted from Senatore, 1997, pp. 3–19. »

64 Pane, 1955, p. 101; Fulvio Lenzo, ‘Sorrento, sedile di Dominova’, in Historical Memory, Antiquarian Culture, Artistic Patronage, online at http://db.histantartsi.eu/web/rest/Edificio/135, 2012 (accessed 15 February 2019), which focuses especially on the collection of antiquities and spolia that were often gathered together for display at the seggi sites. The tiled dome is somewhat later in date. »

65 Lenzo, 2014b, pp. 160–62. »

66 Ibid., p. 161; transcribed in full at http://db.histantartsi.eu/web/rest/Edificio/135 (accessed 26 June 2020). »

67 Alberti, 1973 (accessed 10 March 2016). The story is part of a group of tales telling of love between rival families, which contributed to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet story; these include Masuccio Salernitano’s Mariotto and Giannozza (novella 33) and Luigi da Porto’s Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (Venice, 1530). »

68 For San Giovanni festivities, see Trexler, 1980, pp. 240ff. »

69 Alberti, 1973. »

70 Ibid. »

71 For the wider context of stories as historical sources, see Martines, 1994; Martines, 2001, pp. 199–231. »

72 Randolph, 1997. »

73 For more severe punishment for criminal offences committed at night, see Dean, 2007, pp. 172–3; for night-time and violence, see Ekirch, 2005, pp. 61–90. »

74 For the ringing out of the Bargello bell for those going to the gallows, see Atkinson, 2016b, pp. 106–7; for the ritual, see Terpstra, 2008b. »

75 Luigi da Porto, 1530: Patrizi, 1986. »

76 For the development of the vernacular novella during the Quattrocento, see Brand and Pertile, 1996, 154–8. »

77 Alberti, 1991, pp. 28 (Book I, ch. 12), p. 119 (Book V, ch. 10): Howard, 2001, pp. 131–2. »

78 Clarke, 2003, pp. 22ff. »

79 The text that opened up this approach is Simons, 1988; see also Musacchio, 2008, pp. 74–7. »

80 Randolph, 2014, pp. 69–102, esp. p. 93. »

81 Alberti, 1972. For a reading of Giannozzo Alberti as parodic of patriarchal misogynism, see Najemy, 2002. »

82 Randolph, 2014, pp. 92–3. »

83 Cohen, 1992; Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2, p. 68. »

84 Ajmar-Wollheim, 2006; Cavallo, 2006. »

85 On inpannate (waxed or greased cloth) and wooden shutters used to close windows, as opposed to expensive glass, see Cavallo and Storey, 2013, p. 92; Musacchio, 2008, pp. 74–5. »

86 My thanks to Michael Diers for bringing the painting to my attention at the international conference ‘Imaging the Public Square’ at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, 22–4 October 2015. »

87 Fortini Brown, 1988, pp. 152–6. »

88 Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2, p. 68. »

89 Eckstein, 2014, pp. 109ff. »

90 Bridgeman, 1988. »

91 Cowan, 2011; Fortini Brown, 2004, pp. 71–6; Howard, 2002, pp. 96–7. »

92 Cowan, 2011, p. 734. »

93 For fama in relation to gossip and its circulation in public space, see Horodowich, 2005. »

94 Serlio, 1618–19, Book IV, fol. 154v. »

95 For urban rituals in Venice, see Muir, 1981; see also Fortini Brown, 1990. »

96 For the Tempio di Gennazzano, see Bruschi, 1969, passim, incl. pp. 108–51; see also Wilinski, 1965. »

97 Tafuri, 1992, pp. 109ff. »

98 Fagiolo and Madonna, 1997. »

99 Nevola, 2011b, pp. 159–60. »

100 Frommel, 1986, pp. 61–3; Spezzaferro, 1980. »

101 Rebecchini, 2013, pp. 169–71. »

102 Ibid., p. 178 (Fabrizio Pellegrini to Federico Gonzaga). »

103 The scene does not offer a totally accurate depiction of the piazza, but evidently evokes that recently developed space; Hemsoll, 1988. »

104 For women at windows as ‘living ornaments [. . .] who looked out [. . .] from their windows, doorways, balconies’, see Musacchio, 2008, pp. 76–7. »

105 Friedman, 1992, and bibliography cited above. »

106 Cohen, 2001–2; Dennis, 2008–9. »

107 Jütte, 2015, p. 70. »

108 For ‘house scorning’, see Cohen and Cohen, 2001, pp. 94–5. »

109 Ginzburg, 1987. »

110 Jütte, 2015, p. 69, citing Infessura, 1890, p. 161. »

111 Landucci, 1985, p. 21; see also Jütte, 2015, p. 145. »

112 Ibid. »

113 Bertelli, 2001, p. 241; Jütte, 2015, p. 145; Plaisance, 2008, p. 115. »

114 Preyer, 1998; for the elaborate ceremonials that governed movement in and through 17th-century palaces in Rome, see Waddy, 1990. »

115 Cohen and Cohen, 2001–2; Preyer, 1998, pp. 359–61. »

116 Preyer, 2006. »

117 Hanke, 2010; the Genoese palace gardens were a market-led equivalent of the Roman cardinals’ sculpture collections, for which see Wren Christian, 2010. »

118 Palladio, 1997 (Book II, ch. 3), a point followed at greater length by Scamozzi, 1615, p. 254. »

119 Bruschi, 1969, pp. 1040–6; Bruschi, 1989; Tafuri, 1984a. »

120 Ackerman, 1983, p. 33; Bruschi, 1969, p. 604; see also Clarke, 2003, pp. 187–94, who argues that such stonework had no ‘rustic’ connotations in the 15th century. »

121 Bruschi, 1969, p. 1043. »

122 These were areas typified by dense commercial activity. The streets of the Vatican Borgo served the varied needs of residents and pilgrim visitors, and the Rione Ponte area was the focus of predominantly Tuscan merchants and bankers; see, for example, Lee, 1994, pp. 326–9. »

123 A rare exception is Conforti, 2008, p. 133 (not developed further); see also Welch, 2005, pp. 134–7. »

124 Lowe, 1991, pp. 264–8, where an annual rental income per shop of 20 carlini is reported. »

125 Pagliara, 1984. For the urban reordering of the area, see Tafuri, 1984b; Tafuri, 1992, pp. 109–113; see also Burroughs, 1982. »

126 Pagliara, 1984, pp. 171, 179–81; this construction method, which allowed for the immediate rental of ground-floor shops before completion of the rest of the building, was also used for the Palazzo Todeschini Piccolomini in Siena. »

127 For the overlap of the housing of the elite local nobility with these streets, see Cafà, 2010. »

128 For Sant’Eustachio as a site of commercial activity and the headquarters of the Dogana di Terra, see Modigliani, 1998, p. 122. For the palace, see Frommel, 1998b, who notes the inclusion of shops without further comment. »

129 For the decoration of this palace, see Acidini Luchinat, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 110–12, who notes that Tizio’s relative Valerio was a merchant in the Dogana, p. 133 n. 51. »

130 For the markets at Sant’Angelo in Pescheria, see Modigliani, 1998, pp. 161–76; see also Vaquero Piñeiro, 2008. For the house of Lorenzo Manilio, see Clarke, 2003, pp. 229–30; Tucci, 2001, pp. 23–33, 103–117, reports that Manilio used one of the shops for his own business activities. »

131 For Siena, see English, 1984; Nevola, 2007, pp. 49–51; see also Herlihy, 1969; Lansing, 1991, pp. 84–8. »

132 Nevola, 2007, p. 160, with documents; see also Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 131, 135. For ancestral property as expressive of links to the clan, see Piccinni, 1983. »

133 For Florence, see Kent, 1971. »

134 Balestracci, 1984; Tuliani, 2002, n. 13. »

135 Tuliani, 2002; for the statement that the majority of fondachi were magnate-owned in the 14th century, see Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 137–41. »

136 For what follows, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 126–8; see also Balestracci, 2004. »

137 Piccinni, 1983, p. 230 n. 27, citing ASS, Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala, 1186, fols 324–9 (September 1489); see also Gabrielli, 2004. For what follows, see Nevola, 2007, pp. 126–8. »

138 ASS, Lira, 144, fols 339, 360. »

139 ASS, Lira, 185, fol. 65. »

140 ASS, Lira, 144, fol. 273. »

141 Ibid. »

142 Ibid., fol. 335; for the zoning of this area for luxury trades, see Nevola, 2006a, pp. 68–70. »

143 Balestracci, 2004, p. 141; Balestracci and Piccinni, 1977, pp. 119–20, 138–40; Quast, 2000, p. 461, with visual documentation from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. »

144 First noted in Balestracci, 2004, pp. 141, 149. »

145 For Genoa, for instance, see Heers, 1977; Owen Hughes, 1975. For Florence, see Kent, 1971. For Rome, see Broise and Maire Vigueur, 1983. »

146 Ajello Mahler, 2012, pp. 85 ff.; Ajello Mahler, 2019. »

147 Ajello Mahler, 2012, pp. 89ff. »

148 Ibid., pp. 147–52. »

149 Ibid., pp. 304–5. »

150 These family systems resemble those of institutions (discussed in Chapter 4) of multiple rental residential and commercial property units, such as the Universitá Vecchia in Perugia and the Loggia Vasariana at Arezzo. »

151 A similar point is made in Robbins, 1994, pp. 170–71, in considering properties belonging to the Alberteschi and Mattei (extant on the piazza in Piscinula) and properties in Anguillara with a loggia or portico on the street; see also Broise and Maire Vigueur, 1983, pp. 152–3. »

152 Gehl, 1987, p. 23. »

153 For additional details, see Nevola, 2005b; Nevola 2007, pp. 116–19. »

154 Von Fabriczy, 1903, from ASF, Conventi Soppressi, Badia di Firenze, Familiarum, VI, no. 317 [nuovo], fol. 245v; Pietro Turamini was a wealthy banker, see ASS, Lira, 57, fol. 23v (1453), and heirs in ASS, Lira, 185, fol. 143 (1481). »

155 Nevola, 2005b. »

156 Sozzini, 1571, nos 105, 149. For eminent domain, see Chapter 1; see also Ceen, 1986, pp. 29–30. »

157 Discussed in Chapter 4. »

158 Nevola, 2005b, p. 153; Quinterio, 1989. »

159 For examples of how Giuliano spread this palace style across Italy, see Lamberini, Lotti and Lunardi, 1994; Quinterio, 1996. »

160 See, most recently, Carl, 2008. »

161 Carl connects the Spannocchi emperor frieze with the lost façade of the Medici bank in Milan, which similarly employed portrait busts of emperors; ibid. »

162 Ammannati Piccolomini, 1506, fol. 301v (14 August 1475), misunderstood as a letter from Gonzaga in Quinterio, 1996, p. 255 n. 17, and Von Fabriczy, 1903; see now Ammannati Piccolomini, 1997, p. 1989. Also reported in Ugurgieri Azzolini, 1649, p. 323. Considerable speculation has surrounded the interior appointment of the palace and various secular images produced by the so-called Master of the Story of Griselda; see, most recently, Syson, 2005. »

163 For the palio alla lunga, see Heywood, 1904, pp. 98–105. For the routes in 14th- to 16th-century usage, see Balestracci, Barzanti and Piccinni, 1978, p. 9. »

164 Further on this enclosed piazza, see Nevola, 2005b. »

165 ASS, Lira, 221, fol. 231 (1488) for the tax return of Ambrogio Spannocchi’s heirs, accounting for these shops. »

166 Syson, 2005; Syson et al., 2007, pp. 226–27, 230–45. Such collections conform with the highest standards outlined for other cities; Ajmar-Wollheim and Dennis, 2006. »

167 Reported by Allegretti, 1733, col. 840; see also ASS, Spannocchi, A12, fols 22, 44. Giulio di Ambrogio married Giovanna Mellini, while his brother, Antonio, married Alessandra di Neri Placidi. For biographical details of Antonio, see Syson et al., 2007, p. 226. »

168 For a detailed account, see ASS, Spannocchi, A12, fols 22, 44; see also Ugurgieri Azzolini, 1649, p. 323–4. »

169 Ugurgieri Azzolini, 1649, p. 324. »

170 For these panels, see Syson, 2005. »

171 Syson et al., 2007, p. 231: white (standing for silver), blue and a flash of gold on one leg (Piccolomini) and red on the other (Spannocchi). »

172 For example, a deep dish in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, inv. no. WA2004.217, and another in the British Museum, London, inv. no. 1857,0804.32, both late 15th century. »

173 Syson et al., 2007, pp. 226–7. »

174 Marini, 1988; Nevola, 2005b, pp. 151–3, includes a plan of the site of the new piazza. »

175 ASS, Spoglio Balìa, C18, fol. 47 (26 April 1480). A wall was built in 1527: ASS, Spannocchi, A1 bis, fols. 10, 23, 24. »

176 The Spannocchi piazza thus precedes by almost fifty years the better-known private piazza of the Strozzi, planned from the 1480s, but executed in the 1530s; Elam, 1985; Elam 1986. »

177 For documents regarding remodelling of the site, see ASS, Spannocchi, A1 bis, fols 10, 24, and esp. 23 (7 August 1540). »

178 For cassoni and family rites of passage, see, for instance, Campbell, 2009; Musacchio, 2008; Randolph, 2014, pp. 139–68. »

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