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History of Florentine Architecture in the 17th Century - Palazzo Medici and the City

While the Pitti Palace was undergoing continuous transformations reflecting the significant changes in tastes between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the Palazzo Medici in Via Larga (now Via Cavour) took on its current form between the end of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth centuries. The palace, which became the property of the Riccardi family in 1659, was first restored and transformed, probably to plans by Ferdinando Tacca.

Starting in 1669-70 it was enlarged to designs by Pier Maria Baldi, a protégé of Cosimo III who had invited him to study with Bernini and Cortona in 1668. The extension of the façade on Via Larga, that had been started by Baldi in 1685 was completed between 1678 and 1689 according to the logic indicated by Parigi for the Pitti Palace, with an exact reproduction of the hewn stone face, over the entire length of seven windows.

Giovanni Battista Foggini, who took over from Baldi in 1685 completed the work on the building, and also designed the main staircase. The portico of Santissima Annunziata, the expansion of the Pitti Palace, and the Palazzo Medici, express the values of an architectural culture which, in a century of experimentation of languages taken to the limit of dissolution, selected the difficult poetics of renouncing invention and accepting the physical and perspective limits of the city, deciding, like Venice, on growth in continuity marked by imperceptible, yet essential infractions.

In this sense, Florentine architecture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not that of its designers, but rather it was created by the city itself. The scenic and no longer stereometric configuration of the Florentine palazzo reached one of its utmost expressions in the Corsini Palace in Via del Parione. Construction, undertaken by Bartolomeo in 1656 and Filippo Corsini in 1697 involved many architects from Alfonso Parigi the Younger to Ferdinando Tacca, Pier Francesco Silvani, and Anton Maria Ferri. Paolo Falconieri was also consulted. Work on the façade overlooking the Arno was begun in 1690. The layout is characterized by the Unshaped courtyard open towards the river, and was probably influenced by the open courtyard of the Pitti Palace and the Roman models (in addition to the Farnese palace we can consider Borromini's Palazzo Falconieri that faces the Tiber in a similar manner).
The Guadagni country residence can also be related to it.

The wall at the rear of the courtyard is pierced by the arcades of three orders of loggias. A long and narrow balcony ties the wings of the palace and it widens over the courtyard to create a terrace that only partially encloses the courtyard, as in the Pitti Palace. A balustrade with vases and statuary conceals the pitch of the roof and creates a horizontal, picturesque crown for the wings that embrace the courtyard, clear evidence of Bernini's influence. In the throne room, designed by Ferri, the entablature curves at the coupled semi-columns according to Borromini's style and taste. With the Uffizi Palazzo Corsini became the most significant episode in the construction of a perspective and dialectic relationship between the city and river, that was only interrupted in the second half of the nineteenth century with the construction of the Lungarni.

The design and materic values of the covering of the palace are typical of the new façades of the Florentine buildings: the plaster coverings defined an abstract and immaterial background framed by pilaster strips in pietra forte, into which the windows are cut, and framed by aediculas in pietra forte. The giant pilaster strips emphasize the corners of the building and break-up the long façade creating two sectors with a series of five windows per story on the sides of the courtyard. The pilaster strips have fins, but not the relief of the architectural framework; they do not structure the façade in spans, nor they belong to any specific order since they are lacking capitals, they are reduced to cornices like the crowing entablature, atrophying the line horizontally. Only on the façade with the loggias, at the rear of the courtyard, do the pilaster strips and entablature have the order's ornaments, to emphasize the structure of a wall ribbed by pilaster strips and arches. The passages between the differently styled façades are created by a non-mediated approach, with surprisingly ungrammatical compositional effects. Another and more evident detail of this grammatical deviation consists of the horizontal cornices atop the windows that climb up onto the pilaster strips. The essentiality and the more or less deliberately ungraceful taste of the external backdrop are offset by the rich design of the interior coverings such as the grand staircase, finely articulated by the traditional pilaster strips and entablatures, panels in the spans that seem to be applied over empty space, and vertical panels that seem to continue the rhythms of the walls onto the ceiling.

The other significant experiment in the continuity of a scenic concept in the relationship between the building and city is the palazzo built for senator Alessando Capponi (1702-17), designed by Carlo or Francesco Fontana. The development of a central building in lower wings was inspired by the arrangement of the Pitti Palace following the modifications made by Giulio and Alfonso Parigi the Younger Even in relation to the structure of Florence, Palazzo Capponi contrasts with the Pitti Palace while replicating it's massive bulk symmetrically with respect to the monumental city center, which similarly imposes itself on the building fabric. The wall surface on the main, ground floor façade is designed in the shape of an isodomon arrangement (shaped by the stucco),attributed to the tradition of Florentine hewn stone, interpreted with a taste for Roman antiquities.

The secondary façade is characterized by a central, three level loggia overlooking the garden (probably derived from the Barberini and Falconieri palaces in Rome and similar to the one in the Palazzo Corsini). The single vault staircase is built in line with monumental Roman dimensions that became prominent in Florence with the Palazzo Corsini. In the great hall on the piano nobile, the covering is resolved in alternating architectural orders, clad, with delicate reliefs, and wall sectors with perspective paintings or views of the city in arabesque frames, which develop freely in the ceiling. It is important to note that Alessandro Cecchini who directed the work on the building wrote two treatises on the stability of Brunelleschi's dome. These were two decisive contributions to the debate (between 1694 and 1696) on the cracks he found and which also involved Carlo Fontana.

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