Adumbrations of power and the politics of appearances in Medicean Florence

Abstract

As Nicolai Rubinstein has so eloquently appreciated, no single building in Florence has witnessed as much change or been endowed with as much sym bolic significance as the Palazzo della Signoria, also known as the Palazzo Vec chio.1 It has been a continuous seat of government in Florence since its completion in the early fourteenth century. With its imposing proportions, rusticated stone facade, and slender tower, the Palazzo Vecchio has long been associated with the history and culture of the Florentine Renaissance; within its walls humanists like Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni delivered their orations in praise of Florence and its republican traditions, and nearly a century later, Niccolo Machiavelli laboured there as secretary to the Second Chancery and to the Died in charge of foreign affairs.2 The Palazzo was originally commissioned in 1298 to be the seat of the guild dominated government of the newly constituted Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, or Standardbearer of Justice, and the Council of Priors. The new government traced its foundations to the victory of the Guelf faction over the Ghibellines and with the successful exile of unruly magnate clans from the city. From its very beginnings the Palazzo made a powerful political statement, for it was built on the site of the ruined medieval towers belonging to exiled magnate families. The Palazzo thus proclaimed a Guelf victory and the power of the city's wealthiest merchant guilds to restore order and govern itself. But by the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, guild government gave way to oligarchy, and first the Albizzi faction and then, in 1434, the Medici faction, led by Cosimo de' Medici, managed the city's affairs, in practice if not in name.