Description
Palazzo Strozzi is one of the best-known Renaissance palaces in Italy, between Via Tornabuoni and Piazza Strozzi, in Florence. Imposing as a fortress, with three identical portals on three sides, it now hosts art exhibitions.
Filippo Strozzi had a score to settle with the Medici, who had exiled his family in 1434. Back in Florence in 1466, very rich thanks to his bank in Naples, he decided to build the biggest palace the city had ever seen. To make room for it he demolished fifteen buildings.
Nothing was left to chance: even astronomers were summoned to choose the right day for the first stone, August 6, 1489. Giuliano da Sangallo made a wooden model of it.
The form openly copied Palazzo Medici, but on a larger scale, with the rustication that makes it look like a fortress.
The building site was then overseen by Il Cronaca, to whom we owe the top floor with the projecting cornice, from 1502, and the courtyard arcaded on four sides, from 1503. Work resumed in 1523, but the south facade and half of the cornice on Via Tornabuoni remained unfinished.
Outside, not to be missed are the fifteenth-century wrought ironworks: lanterns, torch holders and rings for tying up horses, which Vasari cited in his Lives. They were made by Niccolò Grosso between 1491 and 1498, to a design by Benedetto da Maiano, and at the corners there are lanterns shaped like little temples, dragons and sphinx torch holders.
Filippo, however, died barely two years later, and the work went on by fits and starts.
It stopped for good in 1538, when Filippo Strozzi the Younger, an enemy of Cosimo I de' Medici, was taken prisoner and killed himself. The palace was confiscated. Today the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has made it a major center for art exhibitions, and the palace also houses the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and the Gabinetto Vieusseux.
Filippo Strozzi had a score to settle with the Medici, who had exiled his family in 1434. Back in Florence in 1466, very rich thanks to his bank in Naples, he decided to build the biggest palace the city had ever seen. To make room for it he demolished fifteen buildings.
Nothing was left to chance: even astronomers were summoned to choose the right day for the first stone, August 6, 1489. Giuliano da Sangallo made a wooden model of it.
The form openly copied Palazzo Medici, but on a larger scale, with the rustication that makes it look like a fortress.
The building site was then overseen by Il Cronaca, to whom we owe the top floor with the projecting cornice, from 1502, and the courtyard arcaded on four sides, from 1503. Work resumed in 1523, but the south facade and half of the cornice on Via Tornabuoni remained unfinished.
Outside, not to be missed are the fifteenth-century wrought ironworks: lanterns, torch holders and rings for tying up horses, which Vasari cited in his Lives. They were made by Niccolò Grosso between 1491 and 1498, to a design by Benedetto da Maiano, and at the corners there are lanterns shaped like little temples, dragons and sphinx torch holders.
Filippo, however, died barely two years later, and the work went on by fits and starts.
It stopped for good in 1538, when Filippo Strozzi the Younger, an enemy of Cosimo I de' Medici, was taken prisoner and killed himself. The palace was confiscated. Today the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has made it a major center for art exhibitions, and the palace also houses the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and the Gabinetto Vieusseux.