Endowments of family chapels, often as burial sites, went back to the end of the thirteenth century.433 Evidence from testamentary bequests suggests that they became more numerous after the Black Death, and particularly after the 1363 plague, and by the early fifteenth century sometimes involved sizeable investments: compared with the average 200-florin bequest for fourteenth-century chapels throughout central Italy, after 1400 some Florentines were leaving as much as 500 or 1,000 florins for chapels in which they sought longterm patronage rights. Spending for chapel decorations also increased. Some fourteenth-century bequests for large narrative cycles reached 250-300 florins, but more common and smaller devotional paintings, usually for chapels but sometimes for domestic use, were much less expensive. Following the plagues, more testators wanted images of themselves included in the paintings they commissioned. After about 1400, bequests for art became larger, if not necessarily more numerous, than those of a generation earlier: the average bequest for all artworks (including paintings) increased fourfold, from 70 to 270 florins, as commissions became more imposing and more conspicuously linked to family commemoration.434
Plate 7 Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, altarpiece by Orcagna (Andrea di Cione) and frescoes by Nardo di Cione, mid-1350s (Studio Fotografico Quattrone, Florence)
Neighborhood churches were a focus of competition to enhance family prestige by endowing and decorating chapels. By the mid-fourteenth century, the Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella had chapels endowed by the Rucellai, Bardi, Guidalotti, and Strozzi, while patronage rights in the choir behind the main altar were claimed by the Ricci and Tornaquinci.435 In the 1350s Tommaso Strozzi commissioned for the elevated chapel in the left transept (see Plate 7) the magnificent altarpiece by Orcagna in which Christ gives the keys to Peter and the laws to Thomas Aquinas. On the surrounding walls Orcagna’s brother Nardo di Cione painted images of the Last Judgment, Hell, and Paradise, in which a man and a woman, possibly (but not clearly identified as) the donor and his wife, are twice depicted being welcomed among the blessed. Strozzi probably intended to honor Aquinas, the Dominican theologian (d. 1274) canonized in 1323 whose name he shared, but any representation of Aquinas certainly required the approval of the Dominicans. Sums were also left for the decoration of sacristies, chapter-houses (meeting rooms), and cloisters in which it was not possible to establish patronage rights as in chapels. In 1355 Buonamico di Lapo Guidalotti left money to the Dominican friars for “ornamenting and painting” the chapter-house (now called the Spanish chapel), which Andrea Bonaiuti decorated a decade later with monumental frescoes including the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, an elaborate representation of the history of philosophy and theology and Aquinas’s doctrinal victories over heresiarchs like Arius and Averroes. Even more obviously than the Strozzi altarpiece, this was the result of an iconographical program devised by one or more Dominican theologians and motivated by pride in their new saint. In 1348 Turino Baldesi left over 300 florins to Santa Maria Novella for the depiction (executed by Paolo Uccello almost a century later in the Chiostro Verde) of the “entire” Old Testament “from beginning to end,” with program and precise location left up to the Dominican preacher and theologian Jacopo Passavanti.436 In all these examples, the works brought the patrons glory as well as greater assurance of salvation, but it was the Dominicans who decided what got painted where.
Santa Croce, the Franciscan basilica on the other side of town, was perhaps the city’s most crowded site of family commemoration. The Peruzzi, Baroncelli, Cavalcanti, Tolosini, Cerchi, Velluti, Castellani, Rinuccini, Ricasoli, Alberti, Machiavelli, and several other families all had chapels here, and at least two branches of the Bardi had a total of four. An entire chapter in the early history of Florentine wall painting took place in these chapels between 1310 and 1330. Giotto or his assistants painted the (now largely lost) scenes from the life of the Virgin in the Tolosini chapel to the left of the choir, and Giotto himself painted most of the scenes of the life of Francis in the chapel founded by the banker Ridolfo de’ Bardi to the right of the choir and the lives of John the Evangelist and the Baptist in the Peruzzi chapel next to the Bardi chapel. In the 1330s Taddeo Gaddi decorated the sumptuous Baroncelli chapel at the southern end of the transept with stories of the life of the Virgin, while at its northern end Maso di Banco painted the life of St. Sylvester in the Bardi di Vernio chapel. Around 1380-90 Agnolo Gaddi painted the legend of the True Cross (for which Santa Croce was named) in the choir, where the Alberti had patronage rights. Whatever influence patrons had in the production of these works was contained within the doctrinal requirements of the order. As with the Orcagna altarpiece and the chapter-house frescoes at Santa Maria Novella, the history, theology, and representational traditions of the order dominated the choice, placement, and interpretation of themes and protagonists. The Franciscan order was deeply divided between the Spirituals, with their insistence on the literal observance of the rule of poverty, and the Conventuals, who accepted a nominal poverty by which they used, but did not legally own, buildings, books, and other goods. Francis’s memory and image were contested terrain, and the disputes culminated, in the very years in which Giotto was painting the Bardi chapel, in papal condemnation of the Spirituals’ doctrine of apostolic poverty. A great merchant family like the Bardi would not in any event have wished to promote the uncompromising views of the Spirituals, for whom salvation depended on renunciation of all wealth and material goods, and the Francis of the Bardi chapel is indeed the obedient son of the church described in Bonaventure’s official biography.437 Fourteenth-century painters were no doubt selected for their skills and styles, but these in turn were shaped by the nature of the commissions and the religious ideologies behind them. Powerful families spent considerable sums to build and decorate chapels, but in the fourteenth century the paintings they commissioned said more about the religious orders than about the families.
Salvation and family commemoration remained the overriding motives, but fifteenth-century patrons were more involved in, and exerted more influence over, what they paid for. Among the first of these new patrons was the immensely wealthy Palla Strozzi. From at least the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the Strozzi held patronage rights in a chapel in the church of Santa Trinita, as did the Gianfigliazzi, Davizzi, Bartolini-Salimbeni, Ardinghelli, Scali, Spini, Davanzati, and, among so many elite names, the Compagni, in whose chapel Dino is buried. But one chapel was evidently not enough for the Strozzi. Fulfilling the terms of a bequest made decades earlier by his father Nofri for a new sacristy with adjoining chapel, Palla assumed direct control of the project after Nofri’s death in 1418, hired his own builders, and introduced significant modifications. He is a good example of a private patron who already had considerable experience in artistic matters from his participation in civic and corporate projects. He had served on the Calimala committee that supervised Ghiberti’s first set of baptistery doors and later sought the sculptor’s advice on various projects (paying him for “several designs and services”), possibly including the Santa Trinita sacristy. Strozzi was also on the committee that decided the placement in the baptistery of Donatello’s and Michelozzo’s tomb for Pope Cossa, John XXIII. As a private patron his most notable commission was to the painter Gentile da Fabriano in 1423 for the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi) for the Santa Trinita sacristy. Palla, who was the first of the really big fifteenth-century spenders, included the “building and decoration” of the chapel and sacristy among the expenses, together with his father’s funeral, various dowries, and business losses, that cost him the huge sum of 30,000 florins between 1418 and 1422.438
Across the river, in the Carmelite church of Santa Maria del Carmine, some chapels were endowed by the district’s popular confraternities, others by elite families (Soderini, Brancacci, Serragli), by the emerging Lanfredini, and by families of the popolo (Ferrucci, Tinghi).439 In 1465 the Del Pugliese, a family of new wealth and rising status, took over a transept chapel.440 Most famous among the Carmine’s chapels is the one partially decorated by Masaccio and endowed by the Brancacci. In 1367 Piero Brancacci left money for a family chapel whose construction was begun by his son Antonio in the 1380s. In 1389 another family member bequeathed funds for its decoration, but only in the 1420s did Masaccio and Masolino begin painting scenes from the life of the apostle Peter, patron saint of the chapel’s founder. By this time Felice Brancacci, from a different branch of the family, had inherited the chapel rights, but it is unknown whether he or others chose the painters. In his 1430 testament Felice stipulated that, if his son died without an heir, all members of the Brancacci clan would inherit the chapel, and in a revised testament of 1432 he obligated his heirs to complete its decoration should he die before doing so. As it happened, Felice, exiled after the Medici victory of 1434, never had the chance, and the chapel was completed only in the 1480s when Filippino Lippi painted the sections left unfinished by Masaccio and Masolino.441
The main site of chapel patronage for the Oltrarno’s elite families was Santo Spirito, whose new church was designed by Brunelleschi and built between the 1430s and 1490s. Control of building and chapel allocation was shared by the Augustinian friars, the citizen overseers of the opera, and the commune, which actually owned the church and provided much of the financing. Chapel assignment reflected the Oltrarno political and social hierarchy. Traditionally powerful Santo Spirito families that had had chapels in the old church received the prestigious new ones behind the main altar and in the transept: the Frescobaldi got three, the Corbinelli four, the Biliotti, Capponi, and newly prominent Nasi at least one each. Luca Pitti was made an operaio and given a chapel in 1458 without having to pay for its rights (presumably because of his central role in rescuing the regime that year). Families of lower status received nave chapels. More than in other Florentine churches, chapel decoration in Santo Spirito adhered to a general plan, which required altarpieces and stained-glass windows rather than wall paintings.442
San Lorenzo is in a category all its own because it was the Medici parish church and the first major site of their patronage. In the old church, torn down beginning in the 1420s and replaced according to a design by Brunelleschi, chaplaincies had been founded by moderately prominent families (Anchioni, Marignolli, later the Rondinelli and Ginori) and by artisans, notaries, and priests. Chaplaincies usually involved not the building of actual chapels but the appointment of a priest-chaplain to say masses for the soul of the testator. In 1336-7, for example, Chele di Aldobrandino bequeathed property outside the walls whose revenue was to pay for daily masses for the souls of Chele and his family at some altar in San Lorenzo that the prior and chapter were to make available.443 Given the relatively small size of the old church and the existence by 1422 of nineteen chaplaincies, it is likely that some altars were sites of two or more.444 Most were suppressed with the founding of the new and larger church, whose more numerous chapels were reallocated to the district’s elite families. Operai appointed for three years in 1416 included members of the Rondinelli, Della Stufa, Guasconi, Dietisalvi-Neroni, and Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, who served again in 1423 and 1426, as did his sons Lorenzo and Cosimo in 1432 and 1433. Giovanni asserted patronage rights in the new church in both a transept chapel and the old sacristy and quickly completed their construction. Work on San Lorenzo slowed in the 1430s, no doubt because of political turbulence and perhaps a lack of funds, and when it resumed around 1440 a meeting of leading members of the gonfalone and parish decided to transfer patronage rights over the choir to Cosimo in return for his assumption of the costs of the church’s construction. It was unprecedented for an individual to assume financial responsibility for the building of an entire, and very large, church. Patronage on such a colossal scale brought with it great influence, and Cosimo was behind major changes in the roster of chapel patrons, as some families were pushed out and Medici allies (like the Dietisalvi-Neroni) and political clients (like the Cambini) invited in. Cosimo also determined that he himself would be buried in a floor tomb at the center of the crossing before the main altar. Patronage, piety, and political self-aggrandizement could not have been more completely fused.
The range of Cosimo’s patronage was unlike anything even the wealthiest patrons had hitherto attempted, or dared attempt.445 He (and his brother Lorenzo, since they commissioned jointly) extended their patronage to nearly every famous artist in the city, to artistic media and types of projects previously supported only by institutional patrons, to a long list of churches far beyond their neighborhood in and outside the city, and to several religious orders, plastering the Medici palle and images of their growing gaggle of patron saints anywhere and everywhere they could and associating the family with important sites in the city’s processional, religious, and civic life. For example, ancient patronage rights over their former parish church of San Tommaso gave them a special interest in St. Thomas. Cosimo rebuilt the church and influenced the government to institute an officially supported ritual observance in the saint’s honor. A generation later Piero was instrumental in having Donatello’s St. Louis of Toulouse removed from the niche at Orsanmichele that faced onto the processional route of via Calzaiuoli to make room for Andrea del Verrocchio’s bronze Doubting Thomas and Christ, thus identifying the prestigious site with the family’s political power and patronage.446 Bronze had been restricted to civic projects because of its immense cost, and Medici use of it conveyed their political pretensions and advertised their great wealth. Cosimo and Lorenzo had already commissioned the bronze reliquary chest from Ghiberti for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli (a private commission for a public place). More grandiose were the bronze doors they asked Donatello to design for the San Lorenzo sacristy in which their parents’ quasi-regal tomb of marble, porphyry, and bronze was placed. Beyond San Lorenzo, Cosimo’s architectural projects included the rebuilding or renovation of several ecclesiastical institutions: San Marco, where he installed the Observant Dominicans and built the library that housed the great collection of manuscripts donated by Niccolo Niccoli; the Observant Franciscan convent of Bosco ai Frati in the Mugello near the family’s country estates; the Badia in Fiesole; and a novitiate chapel at Santa Croce. Along the way he commissioned tabernacles by Michelozzo at San Miniato and Santissima Annunziata, large altarpieces and frescoes by Fra Angelico, paintings by Filippo Lippi, and a long list of other works that only seem “lesser” by comparison with the magnitude of the larger projects.447
Political messages in Medici-commissioned art became bolder. In the 1450s Cosimo had Benozzo Gozzoli paint the Procession of the Magi in the chapel of the family palace, with portraits of himself, his son Piero, and a representation (not an actual portrait) of the young Lorenzo di Piero, all with the Magi on their way to adore the child Christ. Although patrons had previously included images of themselves as participants in, or witnesses to, sacred dramas, never before had an entire family integrated itself so explicitly into sacred history. Dynastic implications are evident in the parallel between the three generations of kings and three generations of Medici, and in the presence of the Medici symbols on the caparison of the horse of the youngest king, Caspar, whose feast day coincides with Lorenzo’s birthday (January 1).448 Whether Cosimo commissioned or acquired Donatello’s bronze David, he placed it prominently in the private/public courtyard of his palace. David had already begun the transition from prophet and precursor of Christ to a symbol of fortitude in defense of the patria. Years earlier Donatello had carved a marble David to go atop one of the buttresses of the north tribune of the cathedral, and the commune purchased it from the Cathedral Opera in 1416 and moved it to the palace of the priors. Cosimo’s appropriation of David was an audacious statement of his and his family’s self-identification with the civic virtues with which the biblical hero was associated; and the placement in Palazzo Medici established in effect a rival site of these virtues. But David was also a king, and the unprecedented youth of the Medici David also alludes, under the guise of civic virtue, to Lorenzo and the family’s dynastic ambitions.449
Medici patronage, continued by Lorenzo with the same ubiquity if not magnitude,450 set a standard that could never be matched by other families, and their political dominance may have dissuaded potential competitors from even trying. Compared to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there was a dearth of chapel decoration for several decades after the consolidation of the Medici regime. Other families may have been cautious about advertising their prestige too loudly, perhaps fearing that it might be seen as an attempt to rival the Medici. Certainly families not in good Medici graces shied away from patronage that conveyed public self-fashioning. But families or individuals seeking such favor used art to flatter the Medici. In the early 1470s, the exchange broker Guasparre Dal Lama, a (perhaps would-be) Medici client of modest social status, built a chapel in Santa Maria Novella and commissioned Botticelli to paint the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Uffizi) as its altarpiece. He used the painting to show off his ties to the Medici by having himself and several of them included in the picture, once again, if not in actual portraits, as types reflecting traditional Medici identification with the Magi.451 Dal Lama had no family behind him, and the painting was a gesture of homage with no overtones of competition. Similarly, Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici bank, commissioned a fresco cycle at Santa Trinita, whose ostensible content is the life of St. Francis, but which is also a commemoration of his dependence on the Medici. In 1479 Sassetti negotiated the transfer of rights in the chapel at the north end of the transept from the
Plate 8 Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita, frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio, early 1480s (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Petriboni-Fastelli family to his own and engaged Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint frescoes that were finished by 1485 (see Plate 8). The patron, his family, his Medici boss, and several in-laws are all prominently represented, especially on the altar wall, which first commands the visitor’s attention. On the lowest level, surrounding the altarpiece, are portraits of the kneeling donors, Francesco and his wife Nera Corsi. No doubt because the death of their eldest son some years earlier had been followed by the birth of another who was given, in good Florentine tradition, the same name, Sassetti replaced Ghirlandaio’s suggested depiction in the middle register of a story normally included in Francis cycles with the less common episode of St. Francis Resuscitating the Roman Notary’s Son, set, not in Rome, but in the piazza outside Santa Trinita, where the miracle is witnessed by Sassetti’s daughters and his prominent neighbors, including Neri Capponi, whose grandson married one of the daughters. Above it is depicted the Confirmation of the Rule by Pope Honorius III, set, once again, not in Rome but in Florence in the piazza of the priors, with the loggia and palace in the background and, in the foreground on the right, portraits of Sassetti, his son Federigo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Antonio Pucci, whose son married another of Sassetti’s daughters, and on the left Sassetti’s other sons, all welcoming the arrival of Lorenzo’s children with their teachers (including the poet Poliziano) from a lower level.452 Sassetti was a “new man” who had risen with the fortunes of the Medici bank (ironically precarious at the very moment he had the chapel decorated) to become its general manager for thirty years. The first Sassetti prior, and the only one before 1500, was his brother Bartolomeo in 1453. Francesco’s only major office was a term on the Sixteen in 1483. A creature of the Medici and utterly dependent on them, he never lost their trust and favor. The frescoes celebrate his ties to the Medici, implicitly expressing the hope, through the depiction of his and Lorenzo’s children, that the link would persist into future generations. The family represented is limited to Francesco’s wife, sons, daughters, and, through the latter, his powerful in-laws.
Equally Medicean, but far more prestigious and ancient than the Sassetti, the Tornabuoni had patronage rights to the choir at Santa Maria Novella that went back to a thirteenth-century Tornaquinci who donated the land on which the original Dominican church was built. Giovanni Tornabuoni was manager of the Medici bank’s Rome branch, but his link to the family was not limited to business; his sister Lucrezia was Piero’s wife and Lorenzo’s mother. After some uncertainty owing to an old Sassetti claim to the high altar, in 1486 the Dominicans gave Tornabuoni and his entire consorteria full rights over both the choir and the altar. Indeed, he had already signed a contract with
Ghirlandaio for the depiction of scenes from the life of the Virgin (to whom Santa Maria Novella is dedicated) and that of John the Baptist (his patron saint) “as an act of piety and love of God, to the exaltation of his house and family and the enhancement of the said church and chapel.” In addition to specifying scenes and stories and their location, the contract also stipulated that Ghirlandaio “shall begin to paint one or other of the above-mentioned stories and paintings only after first doing a drawing of the said story which he must show to Giovanni; and the [painter] may afterwards start this story, but painting and embellishing it with any additions and in whatever form and manner the said Giovanni may have declared.”453 Quite unlike fourteenth-century fresco cycles that reflect the founders, saints, and ideals of the religious orders that approved them more than the patrons who paid for them, the paintings in the Tornabuoni chapel had their patron’s approval in every detail. But they are also different from those in the Sassetti chapel at Santa Trinita. Whereas the latter showcase the ties of a parvenu to the city’s most powerful family, the Tornabuoni frescoes are a lavish representation and commemoration of an extended kin-group without overt reference to the Medici. The Annunciation to Zacharias, in which the angel foretells the birth of the Baptist, is set in a space at once classical, civic, and sacred and is witnessed by many identifiable family members, including Giovanni himself and the elders of the consorteria’s other three branches (Tornaquinci, Popoleschi, and Giachinotti).454 Even if the Medici are not directly present, however, such family commemoration would not have been possible without Giovanni Tornabuoni’s many links to them.
Wealthy patrons who had the favor of the Medici could indulge some self-fashioning as long as competition was not overt. No doubt because of his family’s long association with Santa Maria Novella, where many Strozzi were buried, in 1486 Filippo Strozzi bought from the Boni family the rights to the chapel to the right of the choir and made it his private burial place, in which he commissioned a sculpted tomb from Benedetto da Maiano and frescoes by Filippino Lippi of the lives of St. Philip and John the Evangelist, in which the Raising of Drusiana may have been intended as an allegory of his own return from the metaphorical death of exile. The contrast with the first Strozzi chapel, even across the obvious continuity of family burial traditions and chapel patronage, is illuminating. Although in the earlier one the donor and his family are apparently honored, it is Orcagna’s severe, lawgiving Christ and the intimidating density of souls in the realms of the afterlife that dominate. In
Filippo’s chapel he himself is the center of attention in a visual fusion of the liturgical and the funereal surrounded by paintings whose subject matter he chose and stipulated in a contract with the painter.455 Such self-glorification was not possible without Lorenzo’s at least tacit permission.
Palace building was the ultimate in conspicuous consumption and advertisement of a patron’s status and means, an immensely expensive and highly visible item of material culture. Older palaces, like Palazzo Spini in piazza Santa Trinita or the Mozzi palace at the Oltrarno end of the Rubaconte bridge (today’s Ponte alle Grazie), were imposing urban fortresses intended as much for defense as prestige. Some, like the Peruzzi palaces near Santa Croce, faced inward around ancient family enclaves. Beginning in the fourteenth century, palaces were increasingly built facing major streets with more attention to decorative and structural features that set one apart from another, but they were still part of the continuous urban fabric, often with rented ground-floor commercial spaces. Fifteenth-century private palaces transformed entire neighborhoods. They were larger and occupied more ground area, and, wherever possible, their owners bought and cleared surrounding spaces to allow them to be seen from a greater distance and thus to dominate a piazza or street. Ground-floor shops disappeared, and now the lower levels sported imposing rustication, consisting of large rough-hewn blocks of stone, and often included stone benches for the many clients that every great builder and political patron hoped to see conspicuously congregating and waiting for a chance to see him.456
The new trend was inaugurated around 1410-20 by Niccolo da Uzzano who built a large palace with a rusticated facade in via de’ Bardi. But it was Cosimo de’ Medici who set the standard for all subsequent palace-building with a grand family townhouse that marked an epoch in elite domestic architecture (see Plate 5). According to a perhaps apocryphal story reported by Giorgio Vasari, Cosimo expressed a desire for a new palace to Brunelleschi, who produced a model for a freestanding structure that would have faced, and perhaps overwhelmed, the piazza of San Lorenzo. Vasari claims that, when Cosimo decided against it “because it seemed too sumptuous and grand, and to avoid envy more than expense,” an angry Brunelleschi smashed his model and Cosimo later regretted that he did not accept it. Traditionally attributed to Michelozzo, the palace that Cosimo had built between the mid-1440s and mid-1450s combines Tuscan Romanesque elements with antique
Plate 9 Palazzo Rucellai, facade by Leon Battista Alberti, 1450s (Scala/Art Resouce, NY)
Features. But its rusticated facade and biforate windows certainly alluded to the palace of the priors and to an appropriation or sharing of the public authority that inhered in that quasi-sacred civic building (as the bronze David also did). Located at the point where the via Larga bends slightly to the right, Palazzo Medici presents itself in oblique and elongated view from the piazza of the baptistery and cathedral, thus creating a visual and symbolic link between the city’s spiritual center and the home of its most powerful citizen and family.457
In palace-building Medici grandeur generated emulation, if not in specific architectural and design features, certainly in proclaiming the “magnificence,” or virtuous liberality, of their builders and the pride of families within their ancestral neighborhoods.458 Benedetto Dei listed twenty palace projects in his lifetime (among thirty-three major building projects),459 and between the mid-1440s, when Cosimo began building, and the mid-1460s, at least ten palaces were constructed. It was almost as if others had been waiting for Cosimo to take the lead and not risk upstaging him. Giovanni Rucellai assembled several properties in the family’s traditional site and built a palace on the Vigna Nuova, with its exquisite facade designed by Alberti (see Plate 9) and a loggia across the street.460 Members of both elite families, including the Pazzi, Dietisalvi-Neroni, and Gianfigliazzi, and relatively newer families like the Spinelli,461 Boni (today Palazzo Antinori), Gondi, Nasi (today Palazzo Torrigiani), and Del Pugliese462 joined the fashionable ranks of palace-builders. Most palaces were more modest than Palazzo Medici, but Luca Pitti’s palace across the river rivaled it (although the original structure was not nearly the size of the building subsequently enlarged as the residence of the grand dukes of Tuscany and the king of Italy). By far the largest and most ambitious of the palaces, “more grandiose than that of [the Medici],” as one foreign observer suggested, was the Strozzi palace begun by Filippo in 1489 (see Plate 10). Whereas the “average” upper-class palazzo cost between 1,500 and 2,500 florins, Filippo and his heirs spent an astounding 40,000 florins on a palace that lacked ground floor shops or any commercial space. Although equivalent in height to a modern ten-storey building, it consists of only three floors and a dozen (albeit large) rooms intended for just the immediate families of two brothers.463
Palaces represented investment in family immortality and personal fame. Filippo Strozzi died in 1491 before his great palace was completed and thus never had the opportunity to express the sentiments he would no doubt have felt over this immense monument to his and his family’s memory. But other great Florentine builders did express such feelings. Giovanni Rucellai was not the only Florentine to write in his ricordanze that “there are two principal things men do in this world: the first is to procreate, the second to build.” Yet some conservative impulse in Rucellai toward modesty in spending, signaled by his reminder to himself in the very next sentence that “St. Bernard says one must build more out of necessity than desire, because building makes desire grow stronger rather than weaker,” needed to be overcome for him to praise his own building without reservation. Perhaps he was reflecting some of the
American
Plate 10 Palazzo Strozzi, begun 1489 (Alinari/Art Resource, NY)
Plate 11 Santa Maria Novella, facade by Leon Battista Alberti, completed by 1470 (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
Old moralistic condemnation of conspicuous building, expressed a century earlier by Giovanni Villani (12.94) who remarked that, although the innumerable country villas surrounding the city were a magnificent sight, their builders committed a serious error and sin in spending so uncontrollably and were considered insane for doing so. In one such mood Rucellai advised his sons to be “wise about spending,” to avoid excess, and to practice thrift and prudent management. Big spenders, he warned, are ultimately avaricious because they can never acquire enough wealth by means fair or foul to satisfy their desires. Underscoring the distinction between “necessary” and “voluntary” expenditures, he advised waiting and reflecting before indulging in the latter to see if the “desire would pass in the meantime.” But in other moods Rucellai overcame such scruples. As he reviewed his extensive building, “done for the honor of God, the honor of the city, and the memory of me,” he said he agreed with the “common saying, which is true,” that “making and spending money are among the great pleasures men take in this world,” adding that it would be difficult to say “which is greater.” “For fifty years I have done nothing but make and spend money; I have taken the greatest and sweetest pleasure in doing so, and I think the greater sweetness has been in spending than in earning.” Much of that spending was for artworks and buildings, and in him we see, for the first time, the self-conscious collector of works known by the names and reputations of those who made them. Rucellai notes with satisfaction in the Zibaldone that “we have in our house many works of sculpture, painting, and intarsia by the best masters that have existed for a long time, not only in Florence but in Italy,” and he gives their names: Domenico Veneziano, Filippo Lippi, Giuliano da Maiano, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Maso Finiguerra, Verrocchio, Vittorio Ghiberti, Andrea del Castagno, Paolo Uccello, and Desiderio da Settignano. It is a remarkable list, and indicative of his awareness of the leading artists of the age. But when it came to building, Rucellai made himself the author, perhaps not surprisingly given his comparison of building and procreation. Besides the family palace, his main projects included the family burial chapel in the nearby parish church of San Pancrazio, with the marble replica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the glorious facade of Santa Maria Novella. Although both were designed by Leon Battista Alberti, the great architect’s name is absent, not only on the works themselves, but even in Rucellai’s voluminous Zibaldone. Instead, both the sepulchre and the facade prominently feature the Rucellai arms and the name of Giovanni himself. The facade’s inscription of his name and the year 1470 proclaims that he, not Alberti, not the friars, not the church, was its maker464 (Plate 11).
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