Palazzo Medici Riccardi
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The Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence is the first secular building of the early Renaissance and was commissioned by the Medici family in 1444 from the architect Michelozzo .
architecture
The palazzo is divided into three levels by storeys with different walls. The ground floor has rusticated masonry made of unsmoothed, little worked stone, which is very reminiscent of castles and is supposed to convey stability. The stables, kitchens and apartments of the employees were also housed there. The first floor is separated from the first floor by a tooth cut and cornices . There, too, is coat of arms of the Medici attached, the windows are decorated and the walls are made of smoothed stones.
This floor was the residential and representative floor, also known as the “piano nobile”. The second floor is very withdrawn and plastered. The bedrooms and storage rooms were also located in it. Especially because of this, the residential building loses its defensive character. The palazzo has a square inner courtyard, around which relatively small and narrow rooms are arranged.
The palace was commissioned by Cosimo Medici the Elder in 1444 to the architect Michelozzo , with the intention not to let it become too grand, so that the envy of the other patrician families would not be aroused. At that time Cosimo Medici was the most powerful of the approximately 80 bankers in Florence. The palace served both as a residence and as the seat of the global Medici Bank. Michelozzo built this palace for about 20 years (completed in 1460).
The building is a typical example of early Renaissance architecture in bourgeois palace construction: a closed, broad, cubic, mostly three-storey structure of clearly structured monumentality, a smooth wall surface with strict geometric shapes of the windows and doors in a long, regular row. The emphasis on simple geometric shapes was taken over by Michelozzo von Brunelleschi , who had introduced this principle in the interior of San Lorenzo 20 years earlier in 1420.
A simple rusting characterizes the ground floor.
What was the social situation like at that time? “As more and more workers moved into the city, the situation of the feudal lords worsened. Craftsmen and serfs evaded their duties to the liege lord by fleeing to freedom. Even very generous princes could seldom rival the appeal of city life.
The politically and economically cleverest of these feudal lords preferred to move to the city themselves before losing all of their subjects. They simply rebuilt their rural fortresses in the form of urban towers, practically completely shielded from the rest of the city, and transplanted their subordinates into these walls. The situation came to a head as more and more of these country nobility moved into the cities. Each of these noble houses, called consorteria, competed with the others and with the city lords to maintain the loyalty of their subjects and thus also their economic and military support. Everyone built the largest possible tower for themselves to demonstrate their rights and powers over the subjects they claimed. Italy's city silhouettes became little Manhattans. "
Among other things, rural defense architecture came to the city. And from these communal palaces, the form of the aristocratic palace is derived, as here that of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi.
The atmosphere of this architecture, which runs through all three historical variants - gender tower, communal palace, aristocratic palace -, this defenselessness proves the social situation of this time, the latent high-tension competition of individual families and groups, which could go as far as mutual murder. This architecture represents the stylistic and thus also psychological counterpoint to that of Venice, which always emphasized openness in accordance with the secure social conditions within the city. The completely different, aggressive atmosphere in Florence also led to a different architecture. Whether such an architecture has not also cemented and promoted the social tensions is another question.
From the late seventeenth century onwards, the architecture on the back, the interior layout and a large part of the interior decoration were fundamentally changed from the original rinascimental structure by the Medici and the Riccardi family (who subsequently acquired the palace). The central and most important furnishing of this Baroque supplementary phase is the Galleria Riccardiana on the second floor, designed by Luca Giordano .
The Adoration of the Child by Fra Filippo Lippi
The Palazzo Medici Riccardi is famous for a treasure on the first floor of the interior, the family chapel, which was painted with frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli from the summer of 1459 . They are themed "The Train of the Magi" and their decorative beauty contrasts sharply with the robust exterior of the palace. The procession of the Three Kings is spread over three walls of the chapel, with each fresco depicting one of the wise men.
In the central small choir chapel you can see the picture of "Adoration" by Filippo Lippi , also made around 1459. Around this adoration is the whole cycle of frescoes with St. Three kings laid out. This chapel was not only a place of prayer, but it also served as a reception room for delegations and rulers.
That such a devotional picture hangs in a private chapel and not in a church in a bourgeois palace was not a matter of course at the time, but a new function of painting. This genre of domestic devotional painting reached a high point in Florence in the late 15th century. The aspiring and self-confident bourgeoisie developed an increasing need for a new way of painting that existed outside the church, but should therefore not yet be profane. This means that church topics should continue to be presented, but they were not intended for the church.
And that created a new starting point for contemporary art of the 15th century. From then on, it essentially served two areas: firstly - as before - the traditional clients, i.e. the representative foundations for the church rooms and public buildings, and secondly - and that was new - for the private palazzi, the villas and the town houses .
Only now did the domestic devotional image come to the fore as its own motif and is no longer dependent on the cult images of the sacred spaces due to formal similarity. This scene by Lippi can be taken as an example of such a new genre, as a separation of the scene of adoration from the actual Christmas story.
The monk was not originally part of the historical scene. He serves here in an exemplary manner as someone who ponders the meaning of the birth of Christ. He looks out of the picture, is not involved in the subject according to Alberti's demand for a figure to introduce the subject of the picture. This new genre of images also shows “spiritual images” that a monk experiences “hallucinatory” (“thought images”), for example John the Baptist at the direct birth of Christ.
All tabs in the fresco cycle move from left to right, so the fresco can be read. The whole train leaves Maria and returns to her. The picture of Lippi belongs in a central place in this context.
Officially, this oil painting is the real, the spiritual center of the whole cycle. The statement of the arrangement of all the scenes reads: Just like the depicted three wise men, the viewer should draw his heart to Christ. However, this official occasion for the fresco sequence is more of a pretext, a framework performance, in order to depict the entire Medici family on the occasion of a magnificent parade during their participation in the Council of Florence in 1439 (In the background are the childish John the Baptist and the praying Bernard of Clairvaux ).
The 'Epiphany' from Gozzoli
Gozzoli largely renounced the new technical achievements of painting of his time, especially the perspective constructions. Instead, he concentrated on the magnificent portrayal of the costumes and the numerous important personalities. The quality of Benozzo's painting is therefore often rated much lower than that of other artists of his time and is rated more as a political and cultural testimony than as an artistic one.
On the right wall, in a section - probably - Lorenzo Medici is depicted as one of the three kings. A guide from the late 19th century sought to recognize historical figures in the numerous figures in this cycle, especially members of the Medici family and leading political and religious figures. These often unprovable claims of this one travel guide have meanwhile been repeated so often that it is believed that everything has been proven. Today's science is much more cautious about such equations.
The grandson of Cosimo Medici , Lorenzo , appears in the figure of the youngest of the three kings , who later, as "Lorenzo the Magnificent", will make Florence an artistic and spiritual center of the western world. Gozzoli seems to have foreseen the coming greatness of the then ten or eleven year old boy, because he moved him a little away from the rest of the family.
There is no question that it is actually Lorenzo. One need not only look for similarities in the child's face with his mother Lucretia Tornabuoni, from whom Lorenzo inherited the protruding eyes and the blurred gaze with the nearsightedness. The laurel that wraps around his torso, the seven spherical fittings on the bridle of his horse and the ostrich feathers on the tassels are unmistakable symbols of the Medici.
This fresco cycle is not a pure fantasy construction. The Medici actually did such parades. They even set up brotherhoods for this purpose. On St. John's Day 1445, for example, the whole Christmas story was performed in the city with around 200 riders. And the Medici wanted to have this move represented in their house chapel.
The left part of the fresco shows Lorenzo Medici's retinue. The splendor of color with which Gozzoli painted this cycle of frescoes was unprecedented in his time. It was not until much later that a similar fairytale color abundance was achieved again in Venetian painting.
Gozzoli portrayed the most important members of the Medici family, accompanied by members of other Italian ruling houses. The cavalcade has left the mountains behind and reached the plain. The core of the procession is the group of the elderly Medici, their friends and followers. Gozzoli himself is there too, he has signed his red cap. Two bearded Byzantines can be seen on its sides. In fact, the guests from the Orient are not only recognizable by the fairytale splendor of their foreign clothes, but also by the growth of their beards. In Florence, the republican custom of shaving persisted throughout the 15th century.
From left to right appear here - allegedly - Cosimo the Elder, the actual founder of the Medici dynasty - this is an attribution that is particularly clearly questioned today, as there is hardly any portrait resemblance; then one sees something in the background Giovanni, his second son with a headscarf, and finally on the right, recognizable by the high red hat, his firstborn Piero de Medici , called the gouty - il Gottoso - the father of Lorenzo. Two powerful Italian princes and military leaders appear to succeed the Medici: on the left Sigismondo Malatesta , Lord of Rimini , and on the right Giangaleazzo Sforza, future Duke of Milan.
When depicting the horses, Gozzoli uses every opportunity to demonstrate the detailed splendor of his painting in the drawing of the bridle. The wealth of the Medici can also be seen in the valuable harness of the horses and the elaborate clothing of their servants, for example in the case of a black servant who holds his master's hunting bow ready, and also to the right of the caring groom who watches Piero's horse (on his chest he wears Piero's coat of arms, a ring with a photomantic point. The motto "semper" (always) is written on a ribbon.). Gozzoli's penchant for detailed depiction of clothing may be related to the fact that his father was a jerkin maker, that is, Gozzoli was privy to the manufacturing process of garments from childhood. And then his apprenticeship with a goldsmith like Ghiberti certainly plays a role.
For a long time, the landscape as a subject of painting was of secondary importance. The reawakening of the largely lost interest in a largely realistic portrayal of nature in the Middle Ages is one of the main characteristics of the humanistic intellectual movement. The extent to which this conception of a landscape is really “realistic” here at Gozzoli needs to be discussed. In this kind of nature the Renaissance saw the suitable setting for its new idealized human being, here as a suitable space for the procession of the Medici family.
These natural formations are not directly realistic descriptions, but a clear creative will is effective here, which pays attention to order and geometry. This is not a wild, natural creation, this is the ideal of a human-ordered world.
The humanist Giannozzo Manetti remarks: “Everything that surrounds us is our own work, the work of man: houses, castles, villas, magnificent buildings that seem to have sprung from the hands of angels are made by human hands [...] When you see them, such of wonderful things we realize that we are capable of wonderful creations, more perfect than anything that was produced in the past. People no longer dream of becoming angels, they are themselves angels who have descended from heaven and have assumed the daily form of human beings. "
The humanistic intellectual trend was linked to an emphasis on active social life in contrast to the medieval negative catalog of rules - and this also had clear political effectiveness. Man wanted to interfere in social affairs and shape them and not worship them like an eternal order willed by God. Religion was not abolished, but as a 'zoon politikon' man became part of the God-state, an active part and not a passive recipient.
use
The palace, formerly the seat of the Province of Florence, has been the seat of its legal successor, the Metropolitan City of Florence, since January 1, 2015, and a museum that was visited by more than 85,000 visitors in 2014.
Individual evidence
- ^ Alain J. Lemaitre: Florence and its art in the 15th century. Photographs by Erich Lessing . Terrail, Paris 1992, ISBN 2-87939-067-2 , p. 74.
- ^ Wilfried Koch : Architectural Style. The great standard work on European architecture from antiquity to the present. Special edition, expanded and completely reworked. Orbis-Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-572-00689-9 , p. 308.
- ^ Rolf Toman (ed.): The art of the Italian Renaissance. Architecture, sculpture, painting, drawing. Könemann, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-89508-054-3 , p. 30.
- ↑ For the early room layout cf. Wolfger A. Bulst: The original interior layout of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. In: Communications from the Art History Institute in Florence . Vol. 14, No. 4, 1970, pp. 369-392, JSTOR 27652248 .
- ^ Frank Büttner: The Galleria Riccardiana in Florence (= Kiel art historical studies. Vol. 2). Lang, Bern et al. 1972, ISBN 3-261-00832-6 (at the same time: Kiel, University, dissertation, 1970).
- ↑ It's a copy; the original is in the Berlin Museum
- ^ Rolf Toman (ed.): The art of the Italian Renaissance. Architecture, sculpture, painting, drawing. Könemann, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-89508-054-3 , p. 253.
- ↑ Ronald G. Kecks: Madonna and Child. The domestic devotional image in Florence in the 15th century (= Frankfurt research on art. Vol. 15). Mann, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-7861-1517-6 , p. 14, (at the same time: Frankfurt am Main, University, dissertation, 1983).
- ↑ Pedigree of the Medici see Rolf Toman (Ed.): The art of the Italian Renaissance. Architecture, sculpture, painting, drawing. Könemann, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-89508-054-3 , p. 256.
- ↑ a b Zimmermanns, Klaus: Florenz. Cologne [1984] 6th edition 1990. (DuMont art travel guide), Klaus Zimmermanns: Florenz. A European center of art. History, monuments, collections. (= DuMont documents. DuMont art travel guide ). 6th edition. DuMont, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-1441-8 , p. 257.
- ↑ Pico della Mirandola: the deed determines the being of man (free development of life in contrast to the animal). The human being as a 'free artist' can degenerate as an animal or be divinely purified.
- ↑ cittametropolitana
- ↑ palazzo medici riccardi nel 2014 oltre 85 mila visite (provincia.fi.it; ital.)
Web links
Coordinates: 43 ° 46 ′ 31 ″ N , 11 ° 15 ′ 19 ″ E