Page 99 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

left: fig. 4. Diagrammatic Reconstruction of
Brunelleschi's Perspective Panel of the Baptistery
2
(z , l z , are points of convergence of sides of Baptistery
at maximum possible width for the panel)

below: fig. 5. North-east side, main square, Pienza.
c. 1459-64

was limited by the piecemeal growth of the old
city and the multitude of private property inter-
ests, but during the course of the fourteenth
century the Florentine government made stren-
uous and largely effective efforts to reorder the
most important civic and religious-civic spaces.
The greatest effort was devoted to the creation
of the huge L-shaped piazza beside the Palazzo
dei Priori (or dei Signori, the current Palazzo
Vecchio), which grew in stages to reach its
present dimensions. The documents that record
the compulsory acquisition of properties and
the regulation of rebuilding lines reiterate the
social and aesthetic motives of the commis-
sioners—defense and security, utility, regu-
larity, prestige, and beauty—in a way that
anticipates the principles Alberti was to enunci-
ate in the next century. Considerable effort was
also devoted in 1389-1391 to the widening
and regularizing of the Via de' Calzaiuoli, the
main thoroughfare between the Piazza della
Signoria and the important space in front of the
cathedral in which the magnificent Baptistery
was located. It was from the vantage point at
which the Via de'Calzaiuoli opens onto the
Piazza della Signoria that Brunelleschi painted
his famous view of the Palazzo Vecchio in one of
the two panel paintings (now lost) which he
created to demonstrate his invention of linear
perspective. His other demonstration panel
showed the Baptistery from the central doorway
of the Cathedral, thus depicting another build-
ing that was a focus of civic pride in an orderly
11
urban space. Later in his career, Brunelleschi
himself would conceive projects to open up new
urban spaces in Florence. 12
The humanist chancellor, Leonardo Bruni,
writing his Panegyric of the City of Florence
during the early years of the fifteenth century, fig. 6. Filarete, Geometrical City Plan from Trattato d'Architettura. c. 1464, pen and ink and wash. Biblioteca
bears witness to exactly the kind of effect the Nazionale, Florence

98 CIRCA 1492