One of the more evident consequences of the diffusion of
Brunelleschi's idiom was the new love for architectural elements
in the urban facades. After the early fifteenth century, arches
used for doors and windows were almost exclusively round-headed.
The arches were built much as before in palaces with stone facing
although more attention was paid to their patterning in the
facade, with large robust wedge-shaped blocks set fanwise and
interlocked with the rusticated ashlars. Continuous cornices
(more or less elaborate) were adopted for the windows of the
plastered palace facades (Pal. Pazzi-Quaratesi); in ordinary
houses the solution was often a continuous smooth fascia of
pietra serena. In some more important palaces a classical type of
window with a simple architrave appeared for the first time
(courtyard of Pal. Busini, facade of Pal. Rucellai) while
Brunelleschi was the first to introduce windows with a triangular
pediment in the facade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti. This
solution however did not spread until the following century,
together with that of a curved tympanum. It does however appear
in the sgraffito facade of Palazzo Lapi. Twolight windows with a
round arch and small columns in classical style occur in the more
important palaces (Palazzo Medici,
Rucellai, Strozzino, Pazzi, Strozzi). A rudimentary cross window
is to be found in Palazzo Rucellai, in Palazzo Pitti, while in Palazzo
Sertini in Via Corsi and in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi the
form, which then spread in the sixteenth century, is more
developed.
In the palaces and larger houses the portal had two leaves, in
one of which there was often a smaller door for normal daily use.
The external and internal doors were veneered with boards nailed
onto the wood of the inner side with studs over the entire
surface if the leaf was uniformly flat or along the frames around
the panels. They had panels with rosettes or inlays or carved,
iron rings to move the door, doorlatches. The main door of the
Palazzo Medici, with panels and studding, is in fifteenth century
style.
Windows were closed with wooden shutters, generally studded, (as
in the doors the nails were distributed over the whole shutter if
it was flat and on the frames if the shutter was divided into
panels) which swung inwards. The shutter was articulated in
several hinged pieces (two, three, four or even more) one above
the other thanks to upright pivot pins or hinges, as can be seen
in Palazzo Strozzi. The size and position of the opening could
thus he regulated to furnish the amount of light and air desired.
In many houses, but above all in the ordinary type, the windows
had nothing but these shutters to close them, while in others
they were coupled with the 'impannate' (first used, although
infrequently in the fourteenth century), frames stretched with
linen cloth that had been painted with turpentine or oil varnish
to make it waterproof and more transparent. The impannata had two
leaves, each comprised below of a movable shutter on a list of
the frame. These shutters always opened outwards, at times
turning vertically like the leaves of a door, more often from the
bottom upwards and kept at the desired height either by a cord
fastened to the lower list of the shutter, or passing through a
hole set high in the vertical middle list of the shutter and
fastened to a hook or a slender iron rod (similar props are still
used in Florence today to keep the louvered shutters raised).
Flat glass panes were practically unavailable commercially and
the tondos imported from Venice, France or Flanders were
expensive and rarely to be found. The louvered shutters so much
part of the Florentine urban scene of today (and of Italy in
general as distinguished from the rest of Europe) were not yet to
be found in fifteenth-century Florence and did not make their
appearance until the end of the eighteenth century, to be widely
disseminated in the nineteenth. The tenants had to see to their
own 'window-furniture' which therefore rarely fitted the windows
of the rented house. This is why in the iconography of the time
the window frames are hardly ever set inside the jambs, but are
applied outside the opening. Sometimes the lower part of the
window was furnished with jalousies which were made of crossed
wooden rods so that it was possible to spy on events in the
street below without being seen.
Curtains were hung either on the rods set in the iron hooks along
the facade in which case they were then set so far out and so low
that the light could freely enter from above, serving less as a
shade against the sunlight than as a way of keeping out the
prying eyes of neighbors, or on much shorter rods supported by
hooks set above in the jambs or at the sides of the windows.
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