Description
Palazzo Rucellai is one of the finest examples of private Renaissance architecture in Florence, on Via della Vigna Nuova. What matters is the facade, designed by Leon Battista Alberti: a model for the homes of Florentine lords.
"Out of eight houses I made one": so the very wealthy merchant Giovanni Rucellai described his undertaking. He bought, one after another, the houses around his family's and fused them into a single palace, with a new facade to hold them together.
It was designed by his friend Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist architect who wrote treatises. The facade looks like an illustration of his theories: three floors with three classical orders stacked one above the other and pilasters that make the palace look taller than it is.
The works were directed by Bernardo Rossellino. It is not known precisely when it was built: the documents have been lost, but the work was done in several phases, between about 1455 and 1470, while the family kept living in it.
If you look closely at the right side, the wall ends ragged: a continuation was planned, with a third portal, that never came.
The effect is varied and elegant, for the light that vibrates between the smooth parts, the pilasters, and the dark ones, the openings. Alberti wrote that the lord's house should be "more pleasing in look than proud." The palace served as a model, for example, for Palazzo Piccolomini in Pienza.
Inside is a lovely Renaissance courtyard, with two sides arcaded and columns with very elaborate Corinthian capitals. At the back the former church of San Pancrazio houses the Museo Marino Marini and another masterpiece by Alberti, the little temple of the Holy Sepulchre.
Not to be missed are the stone bench along the facade, with a back imitating Roman walls, and the swelling sails of the Rucellai in the frieze. Opposite is the Rucellai Loggia, also by Alberti, which gives the square an orderly look. The palace still belongs to the family.
"Out of eight houses I made one": so the very wealthy merchant Giovanni Rucellai described his undertaking. He bought, one after another, the houses around his family's and fused them into a single palace, with a new facade to hold them together.
It was designed by his friend Leon Battista Alberti, the humanist architect who wrote treatises. The facade looks like an illustration of his theories: three floors with three classical orders stacked one above the other and pilasters that make the palace look taller than it is.
The works were directed by Bernardo Rossellino. It is not known precisely when it was built: the documents have been lost, but the work was done in several phases, between about 1455 and 1470, while the family kept living in it.
If you look closely at the right side, the wall ends ragged: a continuation was planned, with a third portal, that never came.
The effect is varied and elegant, for the light that vibrates between the smooth parts, the pilasters, and the dark ones, the openings. Alberti wrote that the lord's house should be "more pleasing in look than proud." The palace served as a model, for example, for Palazzo Piccolomini in Pienza.
Inside is a lovely Renaissance courtyard, with two sides arcaded and columns with very elaborate Corinthian capitals. At the back the former church of San Pancrazio houses the Museo Marino Marini and another masterpiece by Alberti, the little temple of the Holy Sepulchre.
Not to be missed are the stone bench along the facade, with a back imitating Roman walls, and the swelling sails of the Rucellai in the frieze. Opposite is the Rucellai Loggia, also by Alberti, which gives the square an orderly look. The palace still belongs to the family.