Aside from the facade of Palazzo Pitti characterized by the
search for a Roman type of monumentality, Brunelleschi's solution
for the urban landscape as seen in the facade of the Innocenti
used the same two-color scheme of contrast between pietra serena
and plaster that he was so fond of in the ideal purity of his
interiors and which was to meet with success in the century to
come. As for Alberti, he loved to display an elect intellectual
retrieval of the classic Romanesque two-color schemes both in his
exteriors (S. Maria Novella) and his interiors (S. Pancrazio).
But side by side with the puristic or idealizing tendencies
interpreted and proposed by Brunelleschi and Alberti, there were
various other elements that played a part in composing the color
panorama of fifteenth-century Florence, which was much more
articulated and varied than might be hypothesized by
oversimplifying in terms of the white plaster and serene greys of
the macigno. Florence at the time was actually very colorful
(once more a continuation of its Gothic period). While the
facades of the great palaces offered the calculated color
variations of the stone facing and the wealth of design of
classical ornamentation, the plastered facades of the ordinary
houses were frequently painted in bright colors, now after
centuries of transformation and changes in taste to be seen only
in the paintings of the time. The colors shown include various
hues of yellow, blue, green, pink and even red. The spread of the
facade with sgraffito decoration also played a role in making the
urban landscape much more colorful than is generally thought. The
fifteenth-century sense of color left its mark in other fields as
well: monuments were colored (the Bruni and Marsuppini tombs in
S. Croce) and, apart from pictorial cycles such as those by Paolo
Uccello (Chiostro Verde in S. Maria Novella), interiors, whether
real (the chapel in Palazzo Medici so full of color from the
floor to the ceiling) or imagined (Andrea del Castagno's Last
Supper, Cenacolo di S. Apollonia), are signs of a tendency to use
color that was to flower in the seventeenth century with the art
of inlays in pietre dure (L. Berti).
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