Seats of Power: The Outdoor Benches of Early Modern Florence

Abstract

Outdoor public seating is an intriguing and virtually unstudied element in the history of western architecture and urbanism. This article focuses on Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tracing the numerous stone benches that once existed on piazzas, streets, loggias, and palace façades throughout the city. More than simply utilitarian appendages, the benches were carefully integrated into the design of iconic urban spaces and building fronts, both civic and private. The study draws on abundant and varied primary source material: contemporary chronicles, histories, letters, poetry, statutes, etiquette books, and architectural treatises, which provide a wealth of information on the use and form of the benches. Together with Renaissance images recording Florentine daily life, the documents reveal a rich culture and vocabulary of alfresco bench-sitting by people of all ranks, from government officials to vagrants. I examine the design, sociopolitical functions, and urban context of the benches. I propose that benches were part of the Tuscan urbanistic model for a civic piazza, and show how in Florence, the civic piazza was configured with tiered seats, exploring formal and semiotic resonances with the tribunal, theater, and council hall. I explore the appearance of stone façade benches on private palaces in fifteenth-century Florence. This was in part a monumentalization of a vernacular element, but I also suggest that for the Medici and other patrician builders, the bench was a direct reference to the civic center. The palaces valorized the stone façade bench for domestic architecture and codified it as a common element of Renaissance palace typology. References to contemporary seating provisions of other Italian towns and to precedents in Roman antiquity and late-medieval Italy provide context for the Florentine innovations. The bench emerges as a versatile element, both functionally and semiotically, which provides new insight into representations of power through the social control of outdoor space, and expressions of political ideology in urbanistic and architectural forms.

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