Belonging to the Individual or the Collective? The Urban Residence as a Public/Private Building in Renaissance Italy (1300-1500)

Nele De Raedt

doi:10.7146/psj.v2i.132278

Authors

Nele De Raedt

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/psj.v2i.132278

Keywords:

urban residences, renaissance italy, citizenship, urban community, political community, belonging, ownership, public, private

Abstract

This article explores the public/private character of the urban residences of the social and political elite in Renaissance Italy. The public-private dichotomy is not understood here in terms of accessibility or openness, but in terms of ownership and belonging. Although the residence was owned by the private family, it also belonged to the urban and civic community, as well as the communal authorities. Praise for urban residences in written sources are both an expression and an active contribution to this phenomenon. Such praise presented urban residences as ornaments of the city that made a fundamental contribution to its splendour and beauty. Urban residences also assumed an increasingly prominent position in the urban fabric, along those roads that the political authorities developed into the representational face of the city. Finally, financing mechanisms led to a more ambiguous status of the urban residence as a public/private building. In several cities, communal authorities financed, in part or in full, the construction of such buildings. By exploring the public/private character of urban residential architecture in Renaissance Italy in terms of ownership and belonging, this article contributes to the many studies that have already explored this topic, but mainly in terms of design and use.

References

Unpublished sources

Biblioteca Medicea Laurentiana, Plut.47, cod.17, fols.78-102

Published sources

Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1988.

Antonelli, Armando and Marco Poli. Il Palazzo dei Bentivoglio nelle fonti del tempo. Venice: Marsilio, 2006.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

Belvederi, R. “I Bentivoglio e i Malvezzi a Bologna negli anni 1463-1506." Pubblicazioni dell'Università di Bari: Annali della Facoltà di Magistero 6 (1967): 33-78.

Boerefijn, Wim. “About the Ideal Layout of the City Street in the Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries: The Myth of the Renaissance in Town Building.” Journal of Urban History, no. 42 (2015): 5. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144214566983.

Bruni, Leonardo. Laudatio Florentine Urbis. Edited by Stefano U. Baldassarri. Firenze: Sismel, 2000.

Clarke, Georgia. “Magnificence and the City: Giovanni II Bentivoglio and Architecture in Fifteenth Century Bologna.” Renaissance Studies 13 (1999): 397-411.

Conti, Sigismondo dei. Le storie de suoi tempi dal 1475 al 1510. 2 vols. Rome, 1883.

Costa, Pietro. Civitas: Storia della cittadinanza in Europa. Rome: Laterza, 1999.

J Crum, Roger and John T Paoletti. ““... Full of People of Every Sort”: The Domestic Interior.” In Renaissance Florence: A Social History, edited by Roger J Crum and John T Paoletti, 273-91. Cambridge (Mass): Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Dalla Tuata, Fileno. Istoria di Bologna: Origini – 1521. Edited by Bruno Fortunato and Armando Antonelli. Bologna: Costa, 2005.

Elet, Yvonne. “Seats of Power: The Outdoor Benches of Early Modern Florence.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 4 (2002): 444-69.

Friedman, David. “Palaces and the Street in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy.” In Urban Landscapes, edited by J W R Whitehand and P J Larkham, 69-113. London: Routledge, 1992.

Howard, Peter. Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence. Publications of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studie. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012.

James, Carolyn P. The Letters of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (1481-1510). Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002.

Friedrichs, Christopher R. Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe. London and New York, 2000.

Gherardi da Volterra, Jacopo. Il diario romano di Jacopo Gherardi da Volterra dal 7 Settembre 1479 al 12 agosto 1484. Edited by Enrico Carusi. Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1904-1911.

Ghirardacci, Cherubino. Della historia di Bologna. Parte terza. Edited by Albano Sorbelli, 2 vols. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 33.1. Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1915-32.

Gigli, Giacomo. Cronica, 1494-1513. Edited by Bruno Fortunato. Bologna: Costa, 2008.

Green, Louis. “Galvano Fiamma, Azzone Visconti, and the Revival of the Classical Theory of Magnificence.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 98-113.

Grossman, Max. “A Case of Double Identity: The Public and Private Faces of the Palazzo Tolomei in Siena.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 1 (2013): 48-77;

Hurx, Merlijn. Architecture as Profession: The Origins of Architectural Practice in the Low Countries in the Fifteenth Century. Turnhout: Brepols, 2018.

Infessura, Stefano. Diario della città di Roma di Stefano Infessura scribasenato. Edited by Oreste Tommasini. Rome: Forzani, 1890.

Jenkins, A D Fraser. “Cosimo De' Medici's Patronage of Architecture and the Theory of Magnificence.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Instutites 33 (1970): 162-70.

Lindow, James R. The Renaissance Palace in Florence: Magnificence and Splendour in Fifteenth-Century Italy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Lines, David A. Aristotle's Ethics in the Italian Renaissance (1300-1650): The Universities and the Problem of Moral Education. Leiden, Boston and Köln: Brill, 2002.

Menant, François. L'Italie des communes 1100-1350. Paris: Belin, 2005.

Milani, Giuliano. I comuni Italiani: secoli xii-xiv. Gius. Laterza &Figli, 2005.

Nevola, Fabrizio. Life in Renaissance Italy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

Nevola, Fabrizio. “Home Shopping: Urbanism, Commerce, and Palace Design in Renaissance Italy.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 2 (2011): 153-73.

Polcri, Alessandro. “Teoria e prassi della magnificenza tra Marsilio Ficino, Timoteo Maffei e Cosimo de'Medici.” Italian History & Culture 13 (2008), 111-34.

Prak, Maarten. Citizens without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c.1000-1789. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Robertson, Ian. Under the Mantle of St Peter. Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.

Roick, Matthias. Pontano's Virtues: Aristotelian Moral and Political Thought in the Renaissance. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Saalman, Howard and Philip Mattox. “The First Medici Palace.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44 (1985): 329-45.

Schraven, Minou. “Foundation Rituals in Renaissance Italy: The Case of the Bentivoglio Tower in Bologna,” In Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual. Proceedings of the Conference at the University of Heidelberg, edited by A. Michaels, 339-357 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010).

Smith, Christine. Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Trachtenberg, Marvin. Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Weintraub, Jeff. “The Theory and Practice of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, edited by Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, 1-42. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Welch, Evelyn. “Public Magnificence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano's “De Splendore” (1498) and the Domestic Arts.” Arts Journal of Design History 15, no. 4 (2002): 211-21.