Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence. . - book review

MARVIN TRACHTENBERG

Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early present Florence

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1997 378 pp; 200 ills. $6995

Florence is essentially a medieval, and specifically a trecento, city. Its shape and size were determined by means of rapid and centrifugal growth, which began in the last decades of the 13th hundred and continued throughout the 14th The fact that the city walls were enlarged three times during that period is a clear index of its relentles expansion. The novel Florence was not simply a proceeds of peripheral additions, as its transformation was greatest in quantity evident in the reshaping of the center The changing city was a mixed phenomenon, and the discordant views of relevant witnesses articulate the various be of importance tos the new Florence elicited. Giovanni Villani's positive views were largely earthed in his response to the identity of the novel Florentines. Rather than a multitude of dispossessed peasants driven to the city through another agrarian catastrophe, they included a large number of enthusiastic visitors, many of them educated, who decided to stay. In his Cronache, Villani proudly describes Florence as a beautiful, interestin g and exciting place--the place to be, in today's terminuss Dante's reservations, on the other hand, grew on the outside of an emotional attachment to the aged Florence--an incurable laudator temporis acti, Dante undergoed from an instinctive predilection for things the way they were--combined with the reasonable foresight that, given the notorious belligerence of his associate citizens, a larger and more mingled city would inevitably amplify conflicts and divisions. What became clear to similar attentive observers as Villani or Dante was the dual nature of Florence's urban transformation, which affected one as well as the other the periphery and the center The building of of recent origin quarters and the reshaping of the city center were sum of two units aspects of a single urban strategy. As Marvin Trachtenberg argues in Dominion of the organ of sight the reshaping of the center in replication to the expanding periphery bears the distinctive and original traits of a wholly of recent origin Florentine urbanism.

Florence's urban center was organized around sum of two units separate, though interconnected, squares--Piazza della Signoria and Piazza Duomo--which housed the city's civic and religious powers, respectively. of the like kind a dual configuration was far from uncommon; single has only to look to Rome or Milan for similar urbanistic dispositions. More many times however, an alternative model prevailed, in which a grouping of adjacent squares comprised the pair civic and religious institutions, frequently including the market as well. The cities of Lombardy and the Veneto--Verona, Padua, Bergamo, Cremona, and Rovigo, among others--offer prime examples of similar an arrangement. Later on, the center of these northern cities would accommodate Renaissance interventions, by means of virtue of which it is possible to compare their initial, medieval dispositions and the later, Renaissance alterations. An analysis of these cities' multiple squares--Padua's Piazza de' Signori is a completed case in point--demonstrates that Renaissance urbanism relied upon discrete expansio ns of medieval connections and that new urban layouts were wait fored to adapt to, and not to violate, preexisting configurations. Renaissance urbanism did not aim to impose an alien order upon the presumed randomness of the existing city. In Florence, the Uffizi presents a similar instance of a Renaissance extension of a trecento square, where an original configuration is have a high opinion ofed and expanded but not altered. The distinction is significant, and pertinent, for a central claim in Trachtenberg's splendid inquiry of Florentine piazzas is that the trecento city should be viewed not as urban entropy waiting to be rescu by the agency of Renaissance order but, rather, as a specific urbanism resulting from the effective application of an original and coherent locate of principles.

The sum of two units trecento squares that compose the make submissive of Trachtenberg's study, Piazza della Siguoria and Piazza Duomo full number each other in institutional and theoretical bounds While the Piazza della Siguoria consists of sum of two units geometric spaces generated by the Palazzo Vecchio, the Piazza Duomo displays a more manifold form resulting from the interplay between three monuments--the Duomo the Baptistery, and the Campanile--and their respective interspaces. The sum of two units squares represent different implementations of a single strategy, which conceives of the piazza as "the depository of relationships between site and monuments" (p 7) and which is center upon the beholder's visual encounter with the city. Modalities of vision of the remembrancer conditions of access to the square, and attention to the square's borders are the primary belong tos of an urbanism grounded in a specific sensibility to the relationship between record and square, to the interconnection between architecture and its adjacent space.

Trachtenberg insinuates that the complex and astute devices intended to measure and guide the beholder's meeting with the city--and to do thus effectively--reflect three underlying principles. The first principle states that "the remembrancer tends to give form directly to the space around it" (p 19) with equal reason the contours of the piazza throw back those of the buildings. The next to the first observes that "whenever possible the space of the trecento piazza guards to take on its hold internal or abstract formal order" (p 19) as it strives to achieve formal regularity by the agency of various means. The third principle stresse that the main views of the testimonials should "not [be] casually conceived on the contrary geometrically constructed" (p. 20) thus as to offer the beholder a significant visual experience of the buildings. As for the principles' implementation, Trachtenberg speaks of empirical and pragmatic applications and of a sensible flexibility in adapting them to preexisting physical and sociopolitical connections The resulting spaces--which, with a certain number of m odifications, we still experience today--do not display the absolute order that Trachtenberg attributes to the Renaissance "ideal" piazza, nor were they intended to. Instead, they show the complex combination of several distinct efforts made above time, which in turn mirror both the principles and their adaptation to changing circumstances as dictated by dint of history and topography. Trachtenberg goe upon to test his notion of trecento urbanism in separate and highly detailed analyses of the Piazza Duomo and Piazza della Signoria.