Local antiquities, local identities

Art, literature and antiquarianism in Europe, c. 1400–1700

Kathleen Christian, Bianca de Divitiis

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526131034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte rinascimentale

This collection investigates the wide array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era. Breaking new ground, it explores local concepts of antiquity in a period that has been defined as a uniform 'Renaissance'. Contributors take a novel approach to the revival of the antique in different parts of Italy, as well as examining other, less widely studied antiquarian traditions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Poland. They consider how real or fictive ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to demonstrate a particular idea of local origins, to rewrite history or to vaunt civic pride. In doing so, they tackle such varied subjects as municipal antiquities collections in Southern Italy and France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian Peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of Giants.

1 A local Renaissance: Florentine Quattrocento palaces and all’antica styles¹

Richard Schofield

In some cities in the fifteenth century, satisfying medieval architectural continuums had been established for certain categories of buildings which made the introduction of all’antica styles unnecessary or even undesirable. Fifteenth-century Florentine private palaces demonstrate perfectly the inertia of local traditions, and the architects who built their facades, as opposed to their courtyards, largely ignored the siren voices proclaiming that Florence was a second Rome and the megalomaniac dreams of Lorenzo il Magnifico.²

In fifteenth-century Florence two principal formats were employed for palace facades. One type, used for the houses of the very wealthy, depended on the model of the Palazzo della Signoria and other authoritative late medieval buildings and comprised rusticated ground floors, upper storeys with less prominent rough surfaces and windows of various configurations sitting on string courses. This category evolved into a group with various grades of rustication on all three floors, exemplified by Palazzo Medici Riccardi (begun 1445) and continued up to Palazzo Strozzi (1490s), after which it disappeared. The format had disadvantages: it was costly, some patrons were embarrassed by the use of oppressive and showy rustication, and the presence of cornices made the inclusion of loggie difficult.³

A second and simpler type ran concurrently with those with rustication. Masaccio and Masolino in the Brancacci Chapel and Domenico Veneziano in S. Zanobius Resurrecting the Child in the Saint Lucy altarpiece (c. 1445) show houses with arched windows on string courses, some with balconies, and otherwise undecorated surfaces. In Masolino’s The Raising of Tabitha and Healing of the Lame Man (1425) we see three-storey buildings, one crenellated, with plain arched windows and no other surface decoration.⁴ An unknown artist depicting the death of Savonarola (1498) in front of Palazzo Vecchio includes numerous houses, some crenellated, some with loggie, but none supplied with the orders, rustication or stucco decoration, except for the one immediately behind the palazzo. This type was also used for wealthier patrons’ houses but with doors and windows built in dressed stone, as, for example, on the much-restored Palazzo Gianfigliazzi Masetti (early 1460s) and the original version of Palazzo Ricasoli-Zanchini (c. 1480), to which ground-floor corner piers and windows were added later.⁵

A variation of the second type involved the addition of corner piers with rustication rising up through the floors and the exclusion of rusticated basements, but it is not clear when it first emerged.⁶ As early as the illustration of Aeneas at Troy by Apollonio di Giovanni (c. 1416–65), the central palace has a rusticated door and windows and quoins at the corners, but no rusticated surface or orders (fig. 1);⁷ so too in Leonardo’s Annunciation in the Uffizi (early 1470s) we see quoins, and in Cosimo Rosselli’s The Miracle of the Holy Blood in S. Ambrogio, Florence (1486), a palace with quoins on all floors.⁸ Sometimes buildings with old rusticated basements were refitted with quoins or corner piers on the upper floors, for example, Palazzo Della Stufa (c. 1350–80) with a loggia added before 1470 with Michelozzesque capitals with fluted bells and volutes formed by inverted leaves.⁹ But eventually facades decorated only with rusticated corner piers predominated, and a series of palaces attributed to or built by Baccio d’Agnolo and his sons had such corner piers but never included a full order; they were often provided with a loggia on top. The favourite decoration for corner piers was opus isodomum comprising courses of stone of equal size arranged so that the vertical joins between the blocks in alternate courses were aligned. These facade formats were apparently entirely satisfactory to patrons and they consistently refused to construct the rich panoply of the orders on palace facades. This inhibition produced astonishing contrasts between the austere facades presenting the public face of patrons, and the rich, partly all’antica decoration of the semi-public courtyards of, for example, the Medici Riccardi, Dietisalvi Neroni, Boni Antinori and Gondi palaces; presumably the facade of Bartolomeo Della Scala would have followed this pattern, had it been built.¹⁰

1 Apollonio di Giovanni, Aeneas meets Pentheus in Troy, before 1465. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 492, fol. 82^r

The single most arresting characteristic of this long continuum of facade construction was the absence of the orders built in stone. Yet years before the construction of Palazzo Rucellai (1450s), the only palace decorated with the orders on three storeys, Florentine artists had frequently represented them in their illustrations of palace facades. Brunelleschi built windows with tympanums (and had intended to build pilasters) on the upper storey of the Ospedale degli Innocenti (1420s) and unfluted pilasters at the corners of Palazzo Parte Guelfa, but since neither building was a private palace, these characteristics were not copied by palace-builders.¹¹ Paradoxically, however, we find numerous illustrations of palaces decorated with the orders from the 1430s. Ghiberti represented palaces with Corinthian pilasters in the Miracle of the Strozzi Boy in the Shrine of St Zenobius (1432–42), a scene set in the Borgo degli Albizzi in the fourth or early fifth century. By 1437 he had also shown several palaces with pilasters or pilaster strips and sometimes tabernacle windows in his panels of Jericho, Joshua, Solomon and Joseph on the Porta del Paradiso.

In Andrea di Giusto’s The Marriage of the Virgin in the Cappella dell’Assunta, Duomo of Prato (1435–36), the building at the left has an upper storey decorated with Corinthian pilasters framing windows with tympanums, and at the right, a palace with a powerfully rusticated ground floor and an entablature supporting biforate windows separated by pilaster strips.¹² Biforate windows between pilasters had therefore appeared in an imaginary palace in Jerusalem some fifteen years before they first arrived in stone on Palazzo Rucellai. Benozzo Gozzoli’s version of Menelaus’s palace in Sparta where Paris abducted Helen (c. 1437–39) includes fluted Corinthian pilasters below, unfluted pilasters above, then a Corinthian loggia.¹³

Similarly, Filippo Lippi presents a building with Corinthian pilasters on both storeys in the Martelli Annunciation in S. Lorenzo, Florence (c. 1440). In Stephen Preaching before the Women in the Chapel of Nicholas V at the Vatican palace (1448–50), Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli illustrate a palace with pilasters without capitals on the first two floors and small arched bifore between the pilasters on the first floor.¹⁴ In The Ordination of S. Stephen we observe a palace with an upper storey decorated with pilaster strips again enclosing arched bifore. And in 1477 Verrocchio’s Decapitation of the Baptist includes a structure with Brunelleschian Corinthian fluted pilasters on both storeys.

Finally, the illustration of Aeneas at Troy by Apollonio di Giovanni demonstrates the spectacular contrast between real Florentine and invented ancient palaces: at the right he shows a house evidently stuccoed with isodomum, then the central palace provided with a rusticated door and windows, plus corner quoins, but no orders – two plausible contemporary Florentine palaces. But the splendid palace at the left has a ground floor decorated with fluted Corinthian pilasters and windows with tympanums, and on the upper floor, windows separated by Ionic half-columns, forms never built on any Florentine Quattrocento palace (fig. 1).¹⁵

All these buildings were very distant in time and place from the Quattrocento, yet all were painted by Florentines and show what the builders of private palace facades excluded – the rich vocabulary of the orders with bases, half-columns and pilasters (fluted or unfluted), capitals (Corinthian or Ionic), entablatures and windows with tympanums. But stucco decoration was frequently applied to private palace facades and sometimes included representations of the orders. Four fifteenth-century examples survive. On Palazzo Lapi (c. 1452?, if it can be trusted after a restoration of 1916) we find fictive Ionic windows with tympanums and stuccoed isodomum;¹⁶ the orders on Palazzo Dietisalvi Neroni (apparently 1460s) are close to the style of Rossellino;¹⁷ Palazzo Nasi Quaratesi (c. 1460–70) has two storeys decorated with pilasters, perhaps related to the work of Giuliano da Maiano.¹⁸ Finally, the facade of Palazzo Lensi (decoration begun 1494) has pilasters with six flutes and capitals with fluted bells and two layers of leaves.¹⁹ So some patrons represented the orders on facades but did not build them. Since the loss-rate of such stucco-work has been very great, and since painters frequently illustrated facades with the orders from the 1430s, one can hardly deny that such stucco decoration predated Palazzo Rucellai (1450s), the first example with the orders built in stone.²⁰

But other forms of palatial wall surfaces illustrated in paintings, sculpture, manuscripts and stucco were ignored by architects. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century palace facades did not include opus isodomum (with one exception) or regular opus pseudisodomum, but painters, by contrast, illustrated them and a wide range of other surfaces. The term ‘regular opus pseudisodomum’ is used here to refer to courses of large stones of equal size alternating with courses of smaller stones of equal size. First, opus isodomum without margins was frequently illustrated as early as Spinello Aretino’s S. Catherine Baptised by the Hermit in the Oratorio di S. Caterina all’Antella (c. 1387), where the hermit leans out of a building constructed of such isodomum. In his Adoration of the Magi for Palla Strozzi (1423), Gentile da Fabriano shows a ruin behind the Virgin with tight isodomum and the characteristic wedges used for imposts, and immediately afterwards Donatello employed it in The Feast of Herod in the Baptistery of Siena (1423–2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis
• 1 A local Renaissance: Florentine Quattrocento palaces and all’antica styles: Richard Schofield
• 2 The Arch of Trajan in Ancona and civic identity in the Italian Quattrocento from Ciriaco d’Ancona to the death of Matthias Corvinus: Francesco Benelli
• 3 Roma caput mundi: Rome’s local antiquities as symbol and source: Kathleen Christian
• 4 A local sense of the past: spolia, reuse and all’antica building in southern Italy, 1400–1600: Bianca de Divitiis
• 5 The Gaulish past of Milan and the French invasion of Italy: Oren Margolis
• 6 Reusing and redisplaying antiquities in early modern France: William Stenhouse
• 7 Local antiquities in Spain: from Tarragona to Córdoba: Fernando Marías
• 8 Local antiquaries and the expansive sense of the past: a case study from Counter-Reformation Spain: Katrina B. Olds
• 9 Luís de Camões’s The Lusiads and the paradoxes of expansion: João R. Figueiredo
• 10 Semini and his progeny: the construction of Antwerp’s antique past: Edward Wouk
• 11 Resurrecting Belgica Romana: Peter Ernst von Mansfeld’s garden of antiquities in Clausen, Luxemburg, 1563–90: Krista De Jonge
• 12 On Romans, Batavians and giants: the quest for the true origin of architecture in the Dutch Republic: Konrad Ottenheym
• 13 The role of ancient remains in the Sarmatian culture of early modern Poland: Barbara Arciszewska
• 14 Inventing England: English identity and the Scottish ‘other’, 1586–1625: Jenna M. Schultz
• Index