The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade

The architectural facade addresses and enhances the space of the city, while displaying, or dissembling, interior arrangements. In this book, Charles Burroughs tracks the emergence of the facade in late-medieval Florence and then follows the sharply diverging reactions of Renaissance architects to new demands and possibilities for representation in both residential and governmental contexts. Understanding the facade as an assemblage of elements of diverse character and origin, Burroughs explores the wide range of formal solutions available to architects and patrons. In the absence of explicit reflection on the facade in Renaissance architectural discourse, Burroughs notes the theoretical implications of certain celebrated designs, implying mediation on the nature of architecture itself and the society it serves and represents, as well as on the relationship between nature and culture.

• Explores the emergence of the facade as architectural form and cultural phenomenon • Offers a semiotic interpretation of the most innovative and conspicuous facades of Renaissance Florence • Locates the discourse inherent in facade design outside the period’s architectural canon, in the literature on conduct and politeness that arose in courtly circles

Introduction; 1. The forked road to modernity: ambiguities of the Renaissance facade; 2. Domestic Architecture and Boccaccian Drama: court and city in Florentine culture; 3. Between opacity and rhetoric: the facade in Trecentro Florence; 4. The facade in question: Brunelleschi; 5. From the bones of grammar to the rhetoric of flesh; 6. Setting and subject: the city of presences and the street as stage; 7. Bramate and the emblematic facade; 8. Facades on parade: architecture between court and city; 9. From street to territory: projections of the urban facade.