Ancient legacies
Ingenious and refined, the Etruscans largely influenced the Romans by their use of architectural elements such as the vault and the column, and their mastery of decorative arts such as wall painting and goldsmithing. Great builders, the Etruscans mastered perfectly the questions of town planning, and the Romans often installed their cities on the mesh of the pre-existing Etruscan cities. Mostly made of wood, few Etruscan constructions are still visible today. In the south-east of Tuscany, as well as in Roselle, in the Maremma, it is nevertheless possible to observe here and there remains of fortifications and surrounding walls. On the other hand, the Romans having preserved and protected them, one can still admire majestic Etruscan funeral sites in Volterra and Vetulonia, which were among the most powerful Etruscan cities.
From Roman antiquity, the ruins of two amphitheaters remain in Fiesole and Arezzo, while in Volterra the ruins of a theater and thermal baths are still visible. But the most obvious Roman legacy concerns urban planning. The checkerboard plan put in place by the Romans is still visible in Florence for example. Similarly, many medieval squares were in fact built in place of the ancient Roman forums of which we can see the remains as in the piazza del Mercato in Lucca which has preserved blocks of stone from its Roman amphitheater.
Romanesque treasures
From the eleventh century, three great Tuscan cities emerged: Florence, Siena and Pisa. Each of them developed their own architectural language with a new formal and decorative vocabulary. The Pisan-Lucquese school developed a very decorative style. The most beautiful examples of this style are the four religious buildings in the Piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa, or the Duomo di San Zeno in Pistoia. Polychromy of marble and mosaics, use of geometric forms such as the rhombus, stepped facades of galleries with superimposed colonnades and porticos with arcades are among the characteristic elements of this school. The Florentine school is characterized by a purity of lines and volumes, largely inspired by the classical ideal. This style uses many ancient elements: columns, capitals, and especially the basilica model. The Florentine Romanesque style can also be recognized by the importance given to the mural ornamentation, which involves a skilful play of polychromy combining white and green marble and serpentine. This type of decoration is directly inherited from the Roman-Byzantine tradition of mosaics. All these elements can be found in the Basilica of San Miniato al Monte and the Baptistery, both in Florence, or in the monastery of Badia Fiesolana in Fiesole. The Sienese school was largely influenced by foreign styles, especially Burgundian and Lombard, introduced into Tuscany by the religious orders. From the Benedictine monasteries, the Sienese school has kept the sobriety of the decoration. Another characteristic is the presence of a crypt and a Latin cross plan. The Abbey of Sant'Antimo, not far from Montalcino, is a superb example of this style, combining harmonious lines and delicate color effects. Despite a different architectural language, these three schools have traced the contours of a Tuscan Romanesque art where balance, sobriety, purity of structure, polychromy of decoration - all inherited from ancient and paleochristian traditions - prefigure the ideal of the Renaissance. This is why some have called this style proto-Renaissance.
Gothic effervescence
The power of the ancient and paleochristian heritage is such in Tuscany that the Gothic style only appeared in the 13th century. It was the Dominican and Franciscan orders that spread it widely in the region, building vast and luminous places of prayer. It is interesting to note that the Tuscan Gothic style does not seek verticality at all costs, but uses the amplitude of the volumes to emphasize an extremely worked decoration. Sobriety, power and width prevail over height. In Siena, Giovanni Pisano transformed the Romanesque cathedral by adding a Gothic facade richly decorated with gabled portals, towers, sculptures and other polychrome marbles. In Florence, Santa Maria Novella underwent the same transformation, while Santa Croce became the largest Gothic building in the city. Another superb example of Florentine Gothic is the Campanile designed by Giotto, which impresses with its geometric and polychrome decoration. In 1296, the city of Florence entrusted the realization of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore to Arnolfo di Cambio, one of the first great masters of Florentine architecture. And it is to him that we owe one of the most beautiful examples of civil Gothic: the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, whose somewhat austere appearance is offset by a decoration all in balance and finesse, especially with its facade equipped with geminated bays. The appearance of the civil Gothic style coincided with a major transformation of Tuscan society. Until then, the towns reigned supreme and impressed with the power of their walls, fortresses and other tower-houses, as in San Gimignano, which has preserved 15 of the 72 towers of its wall, which is why it is still called "the city of beautiful towers". But in the 13th century, the cities became city-states where political power competed with religious power. Communal palaces and palaces of the podestates (first magistrate of the city) were built. This new power had to dominate the city and the architecture had to contribute to establish this power, as in Siena with the Palazzo Communale and its beautiful Torre del Mangia with its elegant gothic decoration.
The Tuscan Renaissance
The end of the medieval era coincided with a period of unprecedented economic and cultural flourishing in the region. Generous patrons, the Medici helped make Florence a great center of the arts and the birthplace of the greatest masters of architecture. To better understand what this Rinascimento, or Renaissance, represented, we must look at the theories of Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. The former revolutionized the very practice of architecture by designing his creations on a plan. Until then, everything was done in a somewhat empirical manner, as the construction progressed. From then on, with Brunelleschi, everything was designed in advance and, above all, entirely managed by the architect, thus relegating the various master craftsmen to the rank of executors, which was not done without some protests. Brunelleschi also invented a new architectural language that had its roots in the ancient classical aesthetic. The mastery of perspective allowed him to control the dimensions of each building and to ensure their proportions in order to obtain a harmonious whole. Mathematics and geometry are essential to achieve this perfection. This ideal of beauty must also give back its place to Man, the measure of all things, and allow him to live and feel the architecture. A humanist vision that is illustrated in the use of the centered plan. The portico of the Hôpital des Innocents is the first application of this new language. One can admire the regular rhythm of its semicircular arches falling on Corinthian columns and its classical entablatures supported by pilasters. Brunelleschi was also responsible for the Sagrestia Vecchia della Basilica di San Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel. But his major work remains of course the Duomo di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Giant dome of 42 m in diameter and 100 m high, this duomo is an unprecedented technical feat. A double shell with a brick apparatus in fishbone and concentric rings allowed the structure to be self-supporting as it rose. Mixing ancient elements (pilasters, capitals, cornices) and Gothic (buttresses), this dome is an architectural masterpiece. Alberti wrote the first great treatise on architecture, De re ædificatoria. For him, architecture is eminently political and allows the humanist that he is to put into practice his theories while acting for the good of the community. The architect thus becomes a curator as well as a creator of culture. Seeking to break away from the Gothic style, which he judged to be in bad taste, Alberti developed criteria that would allow him to achieve correctness, rhythm and proportion. These three criteria are solidity, utility and beauty. Alberti was very active with the Rucellai family, whose palace he built. For the façade, he introduced columns and pilasters between the windows to create a clearer reading. At the request of the family, he also created the plans for the façade of the church of Santa Maria Novella, which was realized by Bernardo Rossellino. The first floor is composed of a Roman triumphal arch with four green marble columns lined with polychrome supports at the ends, and the top floor with a pediment reminiscent of ancient temples. Among the other leading architects of the Renaissance, let's mention Vasari, to whom we owe in particular the astonishing corridor linking the Palazzo Vecchio, the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi, and Michelozzo, master of the civil Renaissance, at the origin of the Renaissance palace model: the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, commissioned by Como de' Medici to consolidate his family's power. Huge and simple in form, this palace has a surprising facade where the rusticated base gives an impression of solidity, while the smooth stone floors give an impression of lightness. The balance in this clever play of contrasts gives the building its beauty.
Villa and Piazza
The Renaissance saw the development of a new type of dwelling: the villa, the counterpart of the urban palace in the countryside. Michelozzo, at the request of Como the Elder, transformed ancient medieval fortresses into Renaissance villas, as in Caffaggiolo and Careggi. But it is to the architect Giuliano da Sangallo that we owe the first true Medici villa: Poggio a Caiano. Built in 1480, this villa has the square plan dear to Brunelleschi. Indissociable from these villas, the garden became an architectural element in its own right. Renaissance theories were applied to the garden by arranging the natural elements in a geometric way, in harmony with the architecture of the villa.
Renaissance theories also emphasize the importance of the place within the city. Since Antiquity, it has played an essential role in community life, but during the Renaissance it also became the place where power was dramatized. If we take up the ancient amphitheater scheme on which they were built, the squares occupy the terraces, while the communal palaces occupy the stage...: all eyes are therefore turned towards them. A factor of unity, these piazze remind us that everyone belongs to the city. Among the most beautiful piazzas are the piazza del Campo in Siena (thanks to which the city could compete with Florence), the piazza dei Miracoli in Pisa (with its famous leaning tower), or the piazza del Duomo, the religious heart of Florence. There are also beautiful squares in Lucca where the piazza dell'Anfiteatro is surprisingly oval, in Livorno where the piazza Grande is the largest in Tuscany, in Greve in Chianti with its triangular piazza Matteotti, or in the village of Bagno Vignoni where the piazza delle Sorgenti is the only example of a square with a public pool in its center.
Mannerism and Baroque
At the end of the Quattrocento, Michelangelo prefigured Mannerism with works that played on contrasts. We owe him the funeral chapel of the Medici family, which impresses with its monumentality, and the plans for the Biblioteca Laurenziana. An architectural tour de force, the library has some astonishing elements such as its three-flight staircase or its vestibule whose columns seem to support nothing, thus creating a disturbance in the spatial reading and a certain form of theatricality.
Breaking more firmly with the humanist ideals of the Quattrocento, the Mannerists of the 16th century imagined an architecture that was free from the shackles of measure, order and rule. The two great Mannerist architects were Ammannati, who designed the Pitti Palace, the Medici's new home in Florence, and Bernardo Buontalenti, who contributed to the transformation of the Boboli Garden, which he endowed with a grotto where rockwork, mythological paintings and ancient statues were combined. A clear break with the sobriety of the previous century.
In the 17th century, Florence experienced a certain decline. Baroque did not develop very much and one speaks of late Mannerism rather than Baroque, because of the persistence of a classical style. Among the most important baroque buildings, we can admire the cathedral of Pescia and the basilica of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence.
Eclecticism and modernity
In 1865, Giuseppe Poggi proposed a new urban plan for Florence, creating viali (boulevards) on the old walls and developing the piazzale Michelangelo. Between 1870 and 1874, the architect Giuseppe Mengoni created the Mercato Centrale of San Lorenzo, a glass and iron structure inspired by the Parisian Halles. In the 1890s, the ancient heart of the city was destroyed to allow the development of the Piazza della Repubblica. As the capital of a unified Italy for nearly five years, Florence wanted to make this urban renewal the symbol of its newfound unity.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Tuscany was adorned with Art Nouveau buildings, called Liberty or Floreale, as in the villages of Montecatini and Viareggio. The great architect of this style is Giovanni Michelazzi, to whom we owe the Casa Galleria and the Villino Broggi-Caraceni in Florence, beautiful witnesses of this decorative art with curved lines and plant ornaments.
From the 1930s on, Florentine architecture was marked by rationalism. On the one hand, that of Pier Luigi Nervi, engineer and specialist in reinforced concrete, to whom we owe the Artemio-Franchi stadium with its elegant spiral staircases. On the other hand, there is the Gruppo Toscano, led by Giovanni Michelucci, who designed the church of San Giovanni Battista in Campo Bisenzio, an astonishing construction with freely aggregated volumes and an independent reinforced concrete roof. This church, like the Santa Maria Novella train station, reflects an organic rationalism influenced by a certain expressionism that advocates harmonious and natural integration into the urban fabric.
Since the 1970's, Tuscany has not experienced any real architectural effervescence, leaving the visitor to admire the masterpieces of the past... but beware of the Stendhal syndrome and the overflow of emotions caused by so much beauty!
