Palazzo Rucellai

Alberti’s façade for the merchant Giovanni Rucellai was the first on a private palace to stack the classical orders one above the other, storey by storey, after the Roman model. The façade became a model for palaces throughout Europe.

Alberti was a humanist and theorist who wrote the first major book on architecture since Vitruvius, De re aedificatoria. In the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai he put his ideas into practice: the superimposed orders of the Colosseum, here in flat form, as a grid of pilasters and cornices that organises the whole wall. The windows and intervals follow simple proportions.

Compared with the Palazzo Medici, built at the same time, with its rough rustication and fortress-like appearance, Rucellai’s façade is calm and intellectual. It expresses a new view of architecture as a system of measure and order rather than mass and force. Opposite the palace stands the Loggia dei Rucellai, where the family held celebrations, and nearby is Alberti’s façade for Santa Maria Novella, also paid for by Rucellai.

• Renaissance
• Leon Battista Alberti