Jacob Burckhardt defined Florence as the rusticated stone city, and Venice as the clad city, thus succinctly summarizing the specific features of fifteenth century architecture in two different and contrasting cultural realities.
And yet, those cultures shared the tension of a revolt against the architectural style that in Venice was reduced to marble cladding, a precious frame, and in the Florentine rustications an elegant graduation of the pattern of the stones that reproduced the hierarchy of values from the Doric (or Etruscan) to the Corinthian as in the Palazzo Medici.
Or it transposed the plastic strength of the giant order to the walls, powerful and continuous on several stories, as in the curtain of the Pitti Palace. If in Florence, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, architectural experimentation took place mainly within the tectonics of the order and chromatics defined by Brunelleschi, this does not mean that research aimed at contesting the value of the order, did not gain strength: it was suppressed or reduced to fine cladding, an ornamental cornice or overhead panel so as to render the boundaries between the two cultures even more uncertain, boundaries, which, with reference to the fifteenth century could still be clearly defined, as Burckhartd had done.
The possibilities of variations in the Brunelleschian order had been indicated by Michelangelo, Vasari and Buontalenti during the sixteenth century in a process of critical revision aimed at finding release from fifteenth century syntactic rigor. It went as far as Buontalenti's revolutions, of architectural details transformed into monsters, and the petrification of textile paraments in projects such as the façade of the church of Santa Trinita (1593-94).

In seventeenth-eighteenth century Florentine architecture columns and entablatures con-served their traditional proportions, but their relationship with the wall became complex, partly due to Michelangelo's formula for the Laurentian library that had relaunched the debate over the column's position in relation to the wall.
The tympanum was fragmented and multiplied; Buontalenti's invention of the broken and overturned was often reproduced, selected as the emblem of a cultural break and replicated in other regions of Italy, and in particular in perspective painting.
A principle detail of Florentine architecture was Brunelleschi's corbel which, however, was to undergo significant changes and deformations. Fifteenth and sixteenth century themes also developed in relation to Roman experiences that marked Florentine architecture up to the mid-eighteenth century without however cleanly surpassing and breaking away from Brunelleschi's heritage. Architects such as Lodovico Cigoli, Matteo Nigetti and Pier Francesco Silvani either worked in Rome or were interested in Roman culture.
Some leading figures on the Roman architectural scene such as Pietro da Cortona and Carlo and Francesco Fontana were involved in the design and construction of Florentine buildings. It is within this context of artistic relationships that we can place the creation of the Accademia Medicea in Rome, by Cosimo III in 1673.
Ercole Ferrata and Ciro Ferri taught there, and until it was prematurely closed in 1686 it was an important step in the training of Florentine artists. It was here that Giovan Battista Foggini and Carlo Marcellini, two of the leading figures on the Florentine artistic and architectural scene between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studied.
Nor should we overlook the changes in the tastes of the patron's such as Alessandro Capponi or Bandino Panciatichi, that derived from their involvement in pontifical politics, or the many requests for advice from Paolo Falconieri, dilettante architect and "Gentleman in Waiting" to the Grand Duke in Rome, by Florentine families that were remodeling their residences according to Roman trends. In the mid eighteenth century, Ignazio Pellegrini and Zanobi Del Rosso were still looking towards Rome, and it was with them that the developments in Florentine architecture influenced by Bernini or Borromini came to their conclusion.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century in both the city's architecture and design, we see the development of Brunelleschi's heritage that had become complex and stripped of its initial syntactic rigor.
Cigoli, who from 1604 was in Rome, working on - among other projects - the completion of St. Peter's, designed the main chapel of the church of Santa Felicita perhaps as early as 1596-97, which was completed by Gherardo Silvani in 1623. The order forms a pattern in Florentine pietra serena on a white plaster base. The Brunelleschi-style corbel was transformed into a vertical structure with a prismatic base resting on the pulvin.

Between 1601 and 1604 Giovanni Battista Caccini, having completed the loggia with Corinthian columns and pietra serena arches against the Santissima Annunziata complex, where the central arch had been designed by Antonio da Sangallo and frescoed by Pontormo, finished the design of the piazza that now had porticoes on three sides, starting from Brunelleschi's work on the Ospedale degli Innocenti.
Caccini even reproduced the details of Brunelleschi's language such as the conclusion of the corner pillars derived from the transepts of the churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. He augmented its plastic accents by multiplying the pilaster strips and the typical corbel which, instead of being in line with the columns to suggest a continuity of support between them and the entablature, was shifted to the extrados of the keystone due to the excessive distance required between the entablature and the columns to save Pontormo's fresco.
Notwithstanding the similarity with Brunelleschi's use of color and his fundamental linguistic elements, the work clearly expressed the loss of the intellectual and allusive strength of Brunelleschi's architecture in the need to set the arches, on the wall side on pilaster strips and not on corbels suspended in the abstract empty spaces of the wall, as in the loggia of the Ospedale, and of deforming the corbel vertically so that it could rest on the keystone and not be suspended in space as Brunelleschi had done.

Gherardo Silvani's work assured continuity with fifteenth-sixteenth century architecture, traversing the era of linguistic experimentalism without substantially deviating from a Buontalenti-style revolution, declined in taste and lost in the fundamental anxiety of recreating an already broken syntactic rigor In many palaces and church interiors, Silvani developed Brunelleschi's chromatics and architectural order, along with the courtly style of Raphael's designs.
His son, Pier Francesco, would continue to use fifteenth century style architectural structures such as in the church of San Marco (1678) where he radically modified Michelozzo's plans, insofar as he was interested in varying aspects of Roman architecture.

A radical transformation in the concept of interior wall coverings also took place. They were enriched by fine fabric drapings, and elaborate stucco work cornices and paintings with architectural backgrounds.
In some of cases, the paintings played a fundamental role in defining the interior (the Guadagni, Corsini, Capponi, Riccardi, and other palaces). In the churches, and mainly in the chapels the taste for color and similar perspective illusions (details and aerial views) also developed, breaking into the Olympic might of the Brunelleschian spaces.
The works of the perspective painters, that augmented starting from the early seventeenth century, became decisive in qualifying space. The protagonists of these forms of decorating walls to define space, were painters who studied perspective applied to architecture in Giulio Parigi's atelier, such as Giovanni da San Giovanni and Baccio del Bilani, along with artists from Bologna, specifically Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli.
Baldassare Franceschini, known as Volterrano was the dominant figure in the mid-seventeenth century; then in the 'eighties, Luca Giordano in Florence identified the further lines for development
Cigoli decorated the pilaster strips of the Usimbardi chapel (1602-07) in the church of Santa Trinita with inlays, transforming them into stoles. In the middle of the transept of the church of Santo Spirito Caccini built the octagonal choir, with the central baldachin (1599-1606, ca.), an arabesque complex played out in the search for real or apparent transparencies, achieved with the metallic lattice work on the dome, and the "lace" of fine marble and colored stone intarsias.
Inside the church of Santissima Annunziata, Caccini designed the aediculas against the tribune pillars, further expressions of his taste for the colors of marble and stone. Precious cladding became the dominant theme in the chapel of the Princes, situated on the longitudinal axis of the church of San Lorenzo and conceived as its scenic conclusion (even though the wall between the chapel and church was never torn down).
In the final decades of the sixteenth century, under the reigns of Francesco I and Ferdinando I, semiprecious stones were amassed and carved ft)r the cladding of a grandiose mausoleum that was to be built for the Medici family, however, the initial plans have been lost.
In 1602 the grand duke sponsored an architectural competition for the design of the chapel of the Princes, the plans by Matteo Nigetti and Giovanni de' Medici (brother to Ferdinando I) were selected. Work continued until the mid-eighteenth century, and the chapel floor was only done in 1874.
If in his designs for the chapel, Buontalenti had entrusted the control of the interior geometries to the Brunelleschian fabric of the architectural order, as revealed by the fact that the columns are separate from the walls, Nigetti turned away from this order He exalted the choice of semi-precious stone cladding, configuring the chapel as an unusual and precious stone tapestry of multicolored, framed panels, with larger panels at the sides of the niches with aediculas located in the geometric apses, forming overhanging stoles that seem to be overlays.
The pilaster strips were not placed at the big arches of the apse, to create a masonry framework, but were set into sectors of the walls, like precious and statically useless symbols that only support the carved green marble bases. The preciousness of the giant-scale cabinet came from the color and shine of the agate, chalcedony, jasper and lapis lazuli inlays; the shafts of the pilaster strips were made of jasper from Barga, the capitals and bases in bronze; the statues on the sarcophagi were gilded.
Above the semi-precious stone inlays, is the series of abstract, relief cornices that develop sixteenth century indications of the design of the whole, from Raphael to Vasari to Buontalenti, always in pursuit of a sublimation of the order. The exteriors brought color to the city's architecture in the form of white marble frames and inlaid panels on the stone clad walls. However it was the pattern rather than the color that indicated the tension towards a breakaway from Florentine architectural traditions.
In the cornices of the windows between the counter-forts, there is the expression of the anxious quest for innovation achieved through complex superimposed mouldings from which fragments of an architectural order reduced to ornamental status show through. The cornices were sunk into squares made in the wall, according to a taste derived from Michelangelo that treats the wall as if it were plastic and not stone.
Long, narrow marble panels, shaped like hanging stoles were set into the counterforts, similar to the inlays, hut subtly translating the preciousness of the interior decorations. The apse with the semi-dome is adorned with an order reduced to an abstract framing of wall sectors and the marble window cornices present a different pattern obtained through plays of the stratification of the moulding. The assembly of the elements and the configuration are decidedly ungraceful and inconsistent.
The result can be considered the extreme expression of the Buontalenti line of study and research, rendered in terms of geometric abstraction, around zoomorphic shapes and the petrification of the cloth paraments. Nigetti was also involved in the construction of the church of San Gaetano (1604-30) that was completed by Gherardo and Pier Francesco Silvani. Here he broke up the nearly Albertian force of the pillars of the arches through the design of the surface and the niches created in the arch supports.
In the transept he used pilaster strips and entablatures as architectural shapes, lacking thickness and static strength, superimposed on the pillars. In the construction of the façade of the church of Ognissanti (1637, circa), Nigetti once again varied the themes of abstract framing of the span, stratification of the moulding, of the Buontalenti style tympanum and of the column sunken into the body of the pilaster strip which re-emerges in narrow vertical segments that frame the cylindrical shaft with an intense shadow. The effect of the column in the cavity is that of a figure suddenly emerging from the rear.
The solution comes from the sixteenth century system of pilaster strips against lateral semi-pilaster strips or fins, which Nigetti used on the upper level of the façade, but instead of the central pilaster strip there is a column in the cavity. This is a special version of the more general theme of the column within a niche, typical of early seventeenth century architecture, primarily in Rome, as evident in the façade of St. Peter's by Carlo Maderno, in the recesses and spans on the first floor of the Palazzo Barberini, again by Maderno - with the collaboration of Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Nigetti seems to modify the version proposed by Borromini in the altar designed for the Filomarino family in the church of the Santi Apostoli in Naples (begun in 1635), by accentuating the projection of the narrow pilaster strips clustered around the column.
One of the recurring themes in Nigetti's architecture, derived from considerations of Buontalenti's examples is that of the decorative element applied over the covering and pendant. Pendant applications had already been used on the panels in the Chapel of the Princes, they also became the frames for the windows on the façade of the church of Ognissanti, carved almost in the shape of volutes, about to separate from their supports, and often fastened by false nails, that is the bosses. These claddings pervade the covering without becoming part of the structure, and thus tend to separate and express their true nature as added or superfluous elements. Perhaps they indirectly reflect Alberti's influence of distinguishing between the structure and ornamentation that would have led to the separation of decorative cladding and which, as Filippo Baldinucci showed in the Vocabolano toscano dell'arte del disegno (1681) was still the focus of interest for Florentine theoreticians.
In the early decades of the seventeenth century, this cladding still obeyed the rules of composition dictated by the fundamental lines of the architectural order and discreetly occupied sections of wall or bands without invading or trespassing the boundaries. In the portico of the church of San Domenico in Fiesole (1635), Nigetti distributed curled, relief scrolls in the sections between the protruding keystones and the entablature, he hung stoles to frame the recesses, and transformed Brunelleschi's corbels from allusively tectonic to draping, flowing and fastened cloth. On the façade of the church of San Gaetano, attributed to Pier Francesco Silvani, within a pattern created by the arrangement of composite pilaster strips, the stone moulding on the aediculas in the niches with the saints, above the lateral doors and the central round window, bend and flutter like fabric, and lose their tectonic value revealing their precarious superimposition on the walls in the details of the bosses.
If we consider the cladding, cabinet, and the panels and stoles in the Chapel of the Princes and on the façades of the churches of Ognissanti and San Domenico, we can see the outlines of a trend towards linguistic renewal which no longer uses the tectonic nature of the order, but transfers light, ornamental, and transient textile paraments to architecture, creating them in stone, or drawing inspiration from structural procedures and shapes taken from interior furnishings.
This revolutionary attitude with respect to Vitruvio's style was not new to Florence, even before Buontalenti and Nigetti. At the time of the maximum affirmation of the restoration of the tectonic style by Brunelleschi, Alberti and their followers, the city had come to know the sgraffito façade, often characterized by ornaments defined as grotesques in the fifteenth century, but arranged in the form of textile panels, stitched together and trimmed, covering the walls excluding the representation of the order Those paintings had been harshly criticized by Vitruvio because it proposed a deformed reality, of unreal architecture and monsters.
However, it insinuated itself in the cultural worlds of Raphael and Vasari, it aroused the curiosity of Buontalenti and in the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century it could still be considered an alternative to the architectural order Nigetti, and with him Gherardo and Pier Francesco Silvani, Giovan Battista Foggini and Carlo Marcellini, hesitated between the two outlooks, and they themselves produced hybrids of styles and scrolls, wavering between stone and textile, often losing themselves in the labyrinth of uncontrolled formal contaminations that only a major artistic force or theory could have oriented and structured in a poetic manner.
In the second half of the seventeenth century Nigetti's experiments or experiences in Ognissanti concerning the plastic and tectonic effects of the column in the cavity were differently interpreted by Alfonso Parigi the Younger, Pier Francesco Silvani and Ciro Ferri, who turned to examples of Roman and Michelangelesque origin. Around 1655, when Parigi was replacing the flat ceiling in the church of San Giovannino Evangelista with a vault, he also modified Bartolomeo Ammannati's façade.
The vertical alternations of sections of wall and cavities with coupled semicolumns comes from Michelangelo's columns set into the wall, as created for the Laurentian library, and it is no coincidence that it corresponds to the issues of the column inside the niche as created by Roman architects who had drawn their inspiration from that same example.
Ferri studied the recessed column in contemporary Roman works. He was a pupil of Cortona who tried the solution, especially in the Michelangelesque version of the column sunken into the wall. From Rome, in February 1676 Ferri sent the model for the Chapel of Santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, to be built in the church of the Carmelitane in Borgo Pinti. He inserted the shafts of the columns in the wall cavities to align them with the edge of the entablatures, and he also transformed the vertical wall sectors into architectural order through use of ornamentation. Details such as the tympanums of the openings and the design of the extrados of the dome (that was not built according to the plans) were clearly based on Cortona's architecture.
The motif of the column in the niche can also be found in the Corsini chapel in the church of the Carmine, begun in 1675, by Silvani, who also monitored the work on the Ferri chapel.