The Tale of a Renaissance Palace

Leon Battista Alberti: Palazzo Rucellai, Firenze

The outer appearance of a building tells a lot about its inhabitants, functions and history. We often miss to spot how many odd, non-fitting elements are hidden on a house. Elements which, were they clues, would right away set into action the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot... A few years ago I had a chance to spend a whole week in Florence as a member of a symposium on Renaissance architecture. Here, they made us thoroughly acquainted with Palazzo Rucellai, which might not be among the most famous or magnificent buildings of the city but for sure is one of its most interesting ones. Let us see why the window on its side wall is cut into two by the second floor?

View from the backstreet

The building was erected for representative purposes by the wealthy merchant family of Rucellai, who were distantly akin to Michelangelo. The family, being not only well-off but of an economic attitude as well, decided that instead of purchasing one large lot, they would buy the two houses in line to their two old neighbouring  houses. Then they would construct in front of these a fancy façade, by which they really would not spare costs, asking Alberti, the most prominent architect in town to design it. Yet stinginess can leave a mark on the most ambitious plan, too: the fourth lot was too expensive, so they didn't buy that one and the building was simply cut off. The last, seventh row of windows is missing from it, although a proper Renaissance palace should have an odd number of windows, usually 5 or 7, so that the two entrances can be placed onto it proportionally. Poor Alberti couldn't but build the fake façade with six windows. By the way, he was the one who invented that Classical Greek column orders, which had been in use only in the inner courtyards until then, should be placed above each other on the front as decoration. In primary school, all of us learnt their names: Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. These columns support weight in the inner courtyards but are merely ornamental here. He used this motif for the first time on this house, so the home of the Rucellais can well be called the first Renaissance style palace in Florence.

The kind of knee-high stone wall-seat that sourrounds the building is also of some interest. This was the elongation of the inner floor level and had multiple functions: on the one hand, it helped the gentleman or lady mount his/her horse comfortably and on the other hand emphasized the rank difference between the house-dwellers and the simple "man of the street". The man of the street did not get offended over this discrimination, since he could sit down on the wall-seat and live his social life whenever he felt like.