Palazzo Gondi is located in piazza San Firenze 1-2, one block
from piazza della Signoria, also overlooking via de' Gondi 2-4, in
Florence. Today it is one of the few Florentine palaces that still
belongs to the descendants of the family who had it built.
The building appears in the list drawn up in 1901 by the Directorate
General of Antiquities and Fine Arts, as a monumental building to be
considered a national artistic heritage, and is mentioned in the
UNESCO bond of the historic center.
In ancient times, a portion of the Roman theater extended over this
portion of the city, of which traces remain of the walls of the ancient
burelle and of the inclination of the trampling between Piazza della
Signoria and Piazza San Firenze. The first Gondi to reside in this area
was Giuliano il Vecchio, husband of Maddalena Strozzi, who bought a
house here in 1455, later enlarged with various houses belonging to the
Giugnis, the Asinis (in 1489, for 1200 florins), the Court of
Merchandise ( a tower, in 1480, where Leonardo da Vinci had lived) and
of the Municipality itself, then demolished to make way for a new
palace. Thanks also to the approval of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with
whom he bartered some real estate, at the beginning of 1489 work began
to build the family palace.
This new, large building was designed
by Giuliano da Sangallo in 1490 for Giuliano di Lionardo Gondi, taking
as an example other important noble palaces in the city, such as Palazzo
Medici and Palazzo Strozzi, but with a renewed stylistic
reinterpretation. Among the elements borrowed from these previous works
is the cubic shape set around a central courtyard, the ashlar work
sloping upwards on each of the three floors, the arched windows on the
string course frames, the cornice. Giuliano da Sangallo also designed
the Gondi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella.
However, the building
had a very slow construction process and remained incomplete for several
centuries. In 1495 it hosted Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who was visiting
the city. From Giuliano's will drawn up in 1501 it can be deduced that
on that date the new building was already inhabited, although not yet
finished and, despite the document obliging the heirs to bring it "to
perfection" (it is not clear whether extending on the left side or on
the right), the wishes of the testator were not fully satisfied.
Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the
eighteenth century, Antonio Maria Ferri for the architecture and Matteo
Bonechi for the pictorial decoration worked there on behalf of Vincenzio
and Angelo di Amerigo Gondi. New stables were built and some living
quarters were renovated on the first floor. Until 1870 the building had
three floors distributed along six axes, with two gates looking out over
the square, but on the current Via dei Gondi the building was flanked by
the ancient building of the Asini family, which was demolished around
1870 to widen the road that flanked Palazzo Vecchio, as part of the
"renovations" during and after the period of Florence as capital. The
south side of the building was arranged between 1870 and 1874 by
Giuseppe Poggi, the architect of Piazzale Michelangelo and the Viali di
Circonvallazione, who balanced the façade by giving it symmetry with a
new axis of windows and a third door on Piazza San Firenze, and tried to
disguise with some tricks the fact that the new shape of the building
was no longer at right angles, but characterized by a sharp corner on
the new left side of the facade.
Leonardo da Vinci lived in one
of the houses destroyed to expand the palace, rented by his father ser
Piero for 30 florins a year by the Gondis, to whom he had also entrusted
the execution of his testamentary dispositions, for the Florentine part,
before leave for France; from a window of this house he drew the corpse
of Bernardo Bandini, hung in Palazzo Vecchio after the Pazzi conspiracy
and it is said that he painted La Gioconda right here (tradition,
however, based only on hypothetical calculations, and not supported by
real documents), and in memory of this prestigious record, an
inscription dictated by Cesare Guasti was placed in the entrance hall on
via de' Gondi:
In 1874 the palace could be considered finally
finished, with the affixing of the Gondi coat of arms on what had become
the lateral corner (gold, with two black decussate maces, bound in red,
replaced in 1972 by a copy made by the sculptor Mario Moschi). To make
the fronts homogeneous, a careful choice was made of the stones used,
however easily distinguishable by looking at the main elevation.
Palazzo Gondi in the twentieth century is identified with the life of
Amerigo Gondi, known universally as Bibi, he was born in 1909, son of
Guido and Isabella Ginori, grandson of Eugenio. In April 1954 Amerigo
commissioned the architect Emilio Dori to design and supervise the works
of the top floor of the building, implementing a very balanced recovery,
which left intact the ancient Renaissance roof terrace overlooking the
facade of the complex San Firenze and various multi-level terraces,
including a small hanging garden designed by the landscape architect
Pietro Porcinai (1957) on the north terrace, facing towards the
cathedral. Between 1960 and 1972 various maintenance and embellishment
works continued, always under the direction of the architect Dori, such
as the replacement of the cantonata coat of arms with a copy made by the
sculptor Mario Moschi in 1972 (for conservation and public safety
reasons). Palazzo Gondi was also damaged by the flood of 1966, this
disaster is remembered with a small plaque placed in the entrance at a
height of about 3 meters from the floor. In 2005 Bernardo Gondi
inherited the building and with his wife Vittoria undertook long
conservative restorations lasting six years followed by the architect
Paolo Fiumi.
Today it still belongs to the descendants of the
family, and can be visited in part by appointment. On the ground floor
there is a bar and other shops.
In 2008, a building site restored
the 19th-century facade, the roofs and the courtyard.
Compared to his models, Sangallo was able to set up an evolution in
the use of typical Florentine elements, making it one of the most
successful examples of palaces of the time. The building develops around
a monumental courtyard, with porticos on four sides. The facades are
designed on three orders, with sloping ashlar in pietra forte. The
ground floor is characterized by recurrences of cushion ashlars, with
three arched framed portals and small square windows. The first floor
has flat ashlars and the last floor has a smooth facing, both with
arched windows (originally divided into a Guelph cross and lunette
above, until the nineteenth-century renovations - a fifteenth-century
lunette with heraldic maces is now displayed in the courtyard ) that
repeat the shape of the portals. The most innovative element is the
design of the windows, with the profile of the stones arranged in a
radial pattern, which resembles the facets of a precious stone, while
between one window and the other there are stones in the form of a
modified cross with two long arms and two short ones , the ends of which
end in a point. The windows on the second floor were also made
imperceptibly higher, to optically compensate for the perspective view.
Other architectural elements are the street bench, which creates a
sort of stone plinth around the building, the elegant cornice with
corbels of modest overhang, and the roof terrace, with columns on the
top of the building, in line with the door at no. . 2. From the door to
no. 1 (with two beautiful flag irons on the sides) leads to the
courtyard.
The facade on via dei Gondi, by Giuseppe Poggi, shows
five axes and three portals, with a large triangular terrace on the main
floor, overlooking Palazzo Vecchio. Poggi also designed the further axis
on the corner and the third portal, which gave symmetry to the
Sangallesque project, with the median portal which rightly corresponded
with the center of the courtyard. For these works, Poggi used many
materials recovered from destroyed houses: capitals, columns and the
drafts of the famous tower.
The palace develops around a monumental central courtyard, porticoed
on four sides with Corinthian columns with three and two arches per side
(the capitals are slightly different from each other). In the center
there is a double cup fountain from 1652, which uses the water from the
Boboli garden by ancient grand-ducal concession, which also feeds the
fountain of Neptune.
Under the portico there is a robed statue
from the Roman era traditionally known as Senator Macrinus (2nd century
AD), perhaps coming from the nearby Roman theater or from the ancient
baths, already destined, according to Vasari, to decorate the side of
the building. There are also various Gondi coats of arms, with crossed
maces. It has been written about the courtyard: "rather than being a
compromise between the outside and the inside and marking the transition
from the liveliness of the street to the quiet of the house, here it
already seems to be part of the apartment, and one is surprised not to
find some piece of furniture that furnishes it".
From here, on the northern side, the monumental staircase by Sangallo
begins for the upper floors, with the steps decorated on the profile
with zoomorphic and phytomorphic figures (the originals, sold to Stefano
Bardini, are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum). On each step of the
staircase there are innovative balustrades decorated with spiral fluting
and acanthus leaves. For the ceiling, Sangallo used stone squares
covered with decorations that speak of the Gondi's wealth and their
social relationships: paired cornucopias full of flames stand next to
diamonds with tongues of fire surrounding a central diamond decorated
with leaves. Both cornucopias and diamonds, personal emblems of Giuliano
Gondi, communicate wealth and abundance. Ribbons inscribed with the
letters SIN hold the cornucopias together. According to Corbinelli, SIN
apparently refers to Giuliano's motto Non Sine Labore, composed as a
gift for the Florentine merchant by the king of Naples and his son
Alfonso, duke of Calabria.
Furthermore, to facilitate access to
the main floor from the carriage hall, Poggi devised a new flight of
stairs which, without passing from the outside of the courtyard like the
old one, which led directly to the vestibule of the hall, specularly
duplicating the original one of the Sangallo.
On the main floor, a sumptuous vestibule decorated with stone reliefs
similar to those of the grand staircase leads to the large hall where,
in addition to the eleven large portraits of the most important members
of the Gondi family of the French branch starting from Giuliano il
Vecchio, is conserved the beautiful and monumental stone fireplace,
again designed by Giuliano da Sangallo between 1501 and 1505. Rich in
allegorical bas-reliefs and crowned by two large statues, Hercules and
Samson, it is in itself one of the most important examples of a
sixteenth-century Florentine fireplace still intact in its original
location.
The alcove dates back to 1710, created on the occasion
of the marriage of Angelo Gondi to Elisabetta, daughter of Senator
Filippo Cerretani. Here the stucco reliefs with the angels supporting
the Gondi coat of arms are by Giovanni Battista Ciceri, the frescoes on
the vault are by Matteo Bonechi, and quadrature by Lorenzo Del Moro
(decoration of the boxes, parapets and window intrados).
Between
the alcove and the hall are the corridor of Time which seizes Beauty,
the Sala dei Paesaggi with two views by Niccolò Connestabile, and the
Sala di Giove ed Ebe, with decorations by Luigi Catani.
Other
The third floor, renovated in the second half of the 20th century,
features an apartment which benefits from the roof terrace overlooking
Piazza San Firenze and various terraces on several levels, on one of
which Pietro Porcinai created a remarkable hanging garden.
In the
basement, the cellars were opened as a wine shop and restaurant space.