4: Palaces and Palatine Chapels in 15th-Century Italian Dukedoms: Ideas and Experiences

Abstract

The comparative study of dynastic palaces requires an examination of both institutional and juridical categories of interpretation and not only a morphological or classificatory analysis. In Europe, during the early modern era, the protagonists of public life still operate within a conceptual framework in which jurisdictional privilege and architectural forms inherited from the late Middle-Ages are inseparably bound together: the different levels of authority are physically incarnated in the centres of power, strongholds of the symbolic relations which characterize urban landscapes. Here, we shall focus on the relations between the palatium and the capella - materialized in the fabricated ‘palatine chapel'. This combination necessarily implies a reference to a sacred conception of power and its spatial expression, cultivated since late antiquity. During the 15th century, in the northern princedoms of Italy and the Alpine region, palace chapels can be considered as the meeting between late medieval political ideologies and the emerging Renaissance artistic expressions of central Italy. Moreover, within the same time span, the terms palatium and capella begin to be used with increasing unconcern for the actual institutions. They thus become, in effect, the modern era denominations of architectural types rather than political concepts. This article aims to define a first comparative periodization of this phenomenon and the importance of the palatine chapels in the northern and central Italian princedoms at the end of the Middle-Ages, in particular with regard to the dynasties who come to acquire and consolidate the status of dukedoms: such cases can be considered as variations on the royal and imperial models which, in turn, are the premises for the endless list of architectural activity set in motion by the local rulers.