Architecture in Florence in the 17th and 18th Century - Introduction
Jacob Burckhardt defined Florence as the rusticated stone city, and Venice as the clad city, thus succinctly summarizing the specific features of fifteenth century architecture in two different and contrasting cultural realities. And yet, those cultures shared the tension of a revolt against the architectural style that in Venice was reduced to marble cladding, a precious frame, and in the Florentine rustications an elegant graduation of the pattern of the stones that reproduced the hierarchy of values from the Doric (or Etruscan) to the Corinthian as in the Palazzo Medici. Or it transposed the plastic strength of the giant order to the walls, powerful and continuous on several stories, as in the curtain of the Pitti Palace.
If in Florence, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, architectural experimentation took place mainly within the tectonics of the order and chromatics defined by Brunelleschi, this does not mean that research aimed at contesting the value of the order, did not gain strength: it was suppressed or reduced to fine cladding, an ornamental cornice or overhead panel so as to render the boundaries between the two cultures even more uncertain, boundaries, which, with reference to the fifteenth century could still be clearly defined, as Burckhartd had done.
The possibilities of variations in the Brunelleschian order had been indicated by Michelangelo, Vasari and Buontalenti during the sixteenth century in a process of critical revision aimed at finding release from fifteenth century syntactic rigor. It went as far as Buontalenti's revolutions, of architectural details transformed into monsters, and the petrification of textile paraments in projects such as the façade of the church of Santa Trinita (1593-94).
In seventeenth-eighteenth century Florentine architecture columns and entablatures con-served their traditional proportions, but their relationship with the wall became complex, partly due to Michelangelo's formula for the Laurentian library that had relaunched the debate over the column's position in relation to the wall. The tympanum was fragmented and multiplied; Buontalenti's invention of the broken and overturned was often reproduced, selected as the emblem of a cultural break and replicated in other regions of Italy, and in particular in perspective painting.
A principle detail of Florentine architecture was Brunelleschi's corbel which, however, was to undergo significant changes and deformations. Fifteenth and sixteenth century themes also developed in relation to Roman experiences that marked Florentine architecture up to the mid-eighteenth century without however cleanly surpassing and breaking away from Brunelleschi's heritage.
Architects such as Lodovico Cigoli, Matteo Nigetti and Pier Francesco Silvani either worked in Rome or were interested in Roman culture. Some leading figures on the Roman architectural scene such as Pietro da Cortona and Carlo and Francesco Fontana were involved in the design and construction of Florentine buildings. It is within this context of artistic relationships that we can place the creation of the Accademia Medicea in Rome, by Cosimo III in 1673. Ercole Ferrata and Ciro Ferri taught there, and until it was prematurely closed in 1686 it was an important step in the training of Florentine artists.
It was here that Giovan Battista Foggini and Carlo Marcellini, two of the leading figures on the Florentine artistic and architectural scene between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studied. Nor should we overlook the changes in the tastes of the patron's such as Alessandro Capponi or Bandino Panciatichi, that derived from their involvement in pontifical politics, or the many requests for advice from Paolo Falconieri, dilettante architect and "Gentleman in Waiting" to the Grand Duke in Rome, by Florentine families that were remodeling their residences according to Roman trends. In the mid eighteenth century, Ignazio Pellegrini and Zanobi Del Rosso were still looking towards Rome, and it was with them that the developments in Florentine architecture influenced by Bernini or Borromini came to their conclusion.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century in both the city's architecture and design, we see the development of Brunelleschi's heritage that had become complex and stripped of its initial syntactic rigor. Cigoli, who from 1604 was in Rome, working on - among other projects - the completion of St. Peter's, designed the main chapel of the church of Santa Felicita perhaps as early as 1596-97, which was completed by Gherardo Silvani in 1623. The order forms a pattern in Florentine pietra serena on a white plaster base. The Brunelleschi-style corbel was transformed into a vertical structure with a prismatic base resting on the pulvin.
Between 1601 and 1604 Giovanni Battista Caccini, having completed the loggia with Corinthian columns and pietra serena arches against the Santissima Annunziata complex, where the central arch had been designed by Antonio da Sangallo and frescoed by Pontormo, finished the design of the piazza that now had porticoes on three sides, starting from Brunelleschi's work on the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Caccini even reproduced the details of Brunelleschi's language such as the conclusion of the corner pillars derived from the transepts of the churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. He augmented its plastic accents by multiplying the pilaster strips and the typical corbel which, instead of being in line with the columns to suggest a continuity of support between them and the entablature, was shifted to the extrados of the keystone due to the excessive distance required between the entablature and the columns to save Pontormo's fresco.
Notwithstanding the similarity with Brunelleschi's use of color and his fundamental linguistic elements, the work clearly expressed the loss of the intellectual and allusive strength of Brunelleschi's architecture in the need to set the arches, on the wall side on pilaster strips and not on corbels suspended in the abstract empty spaces of the wall, as in the loggia of the Ospedale, and of deforming the corbel vertically so that it could rest on the keystone and not be suspended in space as Brunelleschi had done.
Gherardo Silvani's work assured continuity with fifteenth-sixteenth century architecture, traversing the era of linguistic experimentalism without substantially deviating from a Buontalenti-style revolution, declined in taste and lost in the fundamental anxiety of recreating an already broken syntactic rigor In many palaces and church interiors, Silvani developed Brunelleschi's chromatics and architectural order, along with the courtly style of Raphael's designs. His son, Pier Francesco, would continue to use fifteenth century style architectural structures such as in the church of San Marco (1678) where he radically modified Michelozzo's plans, insofar as he was interested in varying aspects of Roman architecture.
A radical transformation in the concept of interior wall coverings also took place. They were enriched by fine fabric drapings, and elaborate stucco work cornices and paintings with architectural backgrounds. In some of cases, the paintings played a fundamental role in defining the interior (the Guadagni, Corsini, Capponi, Riccardi, and other palaces). In the churches, and mainly in the chapels the taste for color and similar perspective illusions (details and aerial views) also developed, breaking into the Olympic might of the Brunelleschian spaces. The works of the perspective painters, that augmented starting from the early seventeenth century, became decisive in qualifying space. The protagonists of these forms of decorating walls to define space, were painters who studied perspective applied to architecture in Giulio Parigi's atelier, such as Giovanni da San Giovanni and Baccio del Bilani, along with artists from Bologna, specifically Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli. Baldassare Franceschini, known as Volterrano was the dominant figure in the mid-seventeenth century; then in the 'eighties, Luca Giordano in Florence identified the further lines for development.
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