RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-£. I6OO
facade of S. Maria Novella, and when in his old age he wrote an
account of his life he said of the architectural and decorative work
he had commissioned for the churches of his beloved native town:
"All these things have given me, and are giving me, the greatest
satisfaction and the sweetest feelings. For they do honour to the
Lord, to Florence and to my own memory". It is this attitude that
made it possible for the donors of the frescoes inside the choir of the
same church to appear lifesize in the costumes of the day as if they
were actors in the sacred stories. It is this attitude also that made
the patricians of Florence—and the cardinals of Rome—build their
Renaissance palaces. That of the Medici begun by Michclozzo in 1444
was the first (fig. 49), that of thePitti, originally, it seems, designed
by Alberti about 1458 and considerably enlarged a century later, and
that of the Strozzi are the most famous. They are massive yet orderly,
faced with heavily rusticated blocks and crowned by bold cornices.
Their windows, symmetrically placed, are divided into two by
graceful columns (a Romanesque motif again). What one expects of
Renaissance delicacy and articulation is to be found chiefly in their
inner courtyards. There the ground floors are opened as cloisters with
the graceful arcades of the Foundling Hospital and Sto. Spirito, and
the upper floors are also enlivened by an open gallery or pilasters
dividing the walls into separate bays, or some such feature.
Only in Rome was a severer treatment of courtyards evolved. It
appears first in the Palazzo Verxezia, a building begun in 1455. It is
derived from the classic Roman motif of columns attached to solid
piers, the motif of the Colosseum and also of the front of Alberti's
S. Francesco in Rimini. Maybe it was he who suggested its resuscita-
tion in Rome, though his name cannot be documentarily connected
with the Palazzo Venezia. A most attractive compromise between
the Florentine and the Roman systems appears in the Ducal Palace
at Urbino (pi. xnx), another of the architecturally and altogether
aesthetically most enterprising smaller courts of Italy. It is known
that Luciano Laurana worked at Urbino between 1466 and his death
in 1479. Probably we owe the courtyard to him. It preserves the airy
lightness of the Florentine arcades, but emphasises the corners by
pilasters. The result is the happiest balance, making Michelozzo's
courtyard appear flimsy, and the Roman ones clumsy.
Alberti himself designed one palace in Florence, the Palazzo
Rucellai (pi. LI), begun in 1446 for the same patron as the facade ot
S. Maria Novella, The courtyard here has no emphasis, but Alberti
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