The Palazzo Davanzati is one of the oldest palaces in Florence, dating back to the early part of the 14th century.
The palace was originally owned by the Davizzi, a family of prosperous wool merchants, but was bought by the Davanzati family, in 1578. It is the latter’s enormous coat of arms, which looks so out of place on the facade.

In the years between 1400 and 1600 Italians became the most extravagant builders in Europe. Wealthy citizens commissioned magnificent palaces, and displayed their gentility and education through splendid possessions. Prestigious artists would produce domestic objects as well as paintings and sculpture. Social, cultural and moral messages could be found in a portrait or an inkstand.

The Renaissance was a period of profound change. Its revival of classical antiquity took place in a world of economic growth, scientific and geographical discovery, political and religious conflict. While reflecting these upheavals, domestic life also played an active role in the creation of art and culture.

In the Early Renaissance this was not the only purpose paintings served. The walls of palaces were decorated in fresco, and their rooms were filled with painted furniture. Comparatively few of these secular frescoes have been preserved. Taste in the fifteenth century changed rapidly (almost as rapidly as it does today), and when the decoration of a room appeared old-fashioned, it was commonly superseded by a decorative scheme that looked more up-to-date. In Florence and in its neighborhood Gothic secular frescoes can never have proliferated as they did at the courts of Northern Italy, but a few examples survive to show the type of decoration that was employed. In the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence, for example, one of the large reception rooms is decorated with fictive wall hangings painted as though suspended from hooks in the molding above them, and at the top is a frieze divided by little colonnettes with vases of flowers between which runs a landscape with carefully rendered shrubs and trees.[1]  

Palazzo Davanzati is a unique example of a transitional period of domestic architecture in Florence. It combines some safety and layout features of the late medieval tower home with some of the ideals that developed in the 15th century home. Sections of the building re-opened to the public in late 2005 after a long restoration, and parts are still inaccessible.

Located in the center of Florence, this is a rare museum, very interesting to get a sense of what life was like during the Renaissance.
The narrow building extends to a height of five floors, but the top floor was only added in the 16th century. The three portals on the ground floor would originally have been open onto the street for the purposes of trade, as was common practise in the 14th century.

In the ceiling of the ground floor loggia there is a reminder of the defensive function of the palace in the form of four openings through which molten lead could be poured onto any attackers below!

The wrought ironwork on the outside of the palace is the earliest in the city to survive intact. The horizontal bars, which run across the facade on the upper floors, would have been used for displaying costly silk banners decorated with the family coat of arms. Cages containing exotic birds and small animals would have been hung from the hooks.

The palace is now home to one of the most fascinating museums in Florence, the Museo della Casa Fiorentina Antica, which attempts to recreate the atmosphere of everyday life in a medieval house. The original furnishings were sold at the turn of the century (the furnishings one now sees come from other museums and collections), but one can still see a number of the original wall paintings, which date from as early as the 14th century.

Purchased in 1904 by the antique dealer Elia Volpi, It was restored and opened in 1910 as a museum. The collection of this museum was always in flux, since Volpi also used it partially as an antique showroom and the objects were for sale! In his restoration, the frescoes were enthusiastically in-filled, and the furnishings reflected the scholarship of the day on how the early Renaissance palazzo must have looked. This initiative must be taken into consideration in light of the late 19th century revival of the Florentine Trecento, fathered by Americans like Bernard Berenson (the art historian) and Herbert Horne (the collector; his place is also a museum).

A complicated history characterizes the war periods, with lots of changing of hands. In the 50’s the palazzo reopened as a state museum, but the money for restoration was not enough to keep it standing. It was closed in 1995 because the building was falling down. It is now being opened again after 10 years of restoration.
The restoration has been major. The whole building had to be secured; floors were taken up and relaid, walls consolidated and frescoes repainted. The architectural framework is now safe and the work that is left to be done is on the walls and then the refurnishing of the museum. It’s an interesting place to visit already, and will be even more so when completed. Hopefully the scholars on board will take into account the vast scholarship now available on domestic architecture and furnishings, which has blossomed in the past 40 years, when choosing how to set up the new museum. New literature on the Palazzo Davanzati would also be a big step, since there are only a few books on it and they are not highly informative.

The facade was added to a grouping of medieval tower houses that were purchased with the intent of unifying them. The topmost level is an open loggia that was added in the 16th century.
INTERIOR: Ground Floor

The palazzo is in some ways typical of trecento family architecture in that it is rather well reinforced. The ground floor, now accessed by large doors set in arches, was before an open space (loggia) for commercial use. These kinds of spaces were typical of Florentine palaces of the 14th century, and can be related to the city’s strong merchant population. The loggia was used for storage or business, while the family lived upstairs, in this case with two levels of living quarters and the top level dedicated to cooking and servants.

Through the loggia you reach an open courtyard and a stone stairway reaching to the first floor. Notice that, beyond the first floor, the upper part of the stairway is built in wood, not stone. This might be done so that, in case of riot, the family could hole up upstairs and knock down the stairway so that nobody could get at them. This remains part of tower-home mentality. On the other hand, the concept of a courtyard as a communicative space for the whole building is rather new. It indicates a certain amount of spatial planning. Also, the courtyard was a private space for the family. The use of a courtyard as both a practical and a familial space was theorized in the 15th century, and the courtyard became a standart part of palace architecture.
UPSTAIRS

On the first floor above ground, the “piano nobile” in Italian, the front room was for business affairs. In correspondence with the three openings of the loggia below are three holes in the ground that can be revealed by opening up trap doors. These permitted the owner to check who was coming in, and in case of undesireables, drop heavy things on their heads. A storage nook in the wall behind one of these holes now contains a stone ball and I imagine this space was used to store defense objects like that. The room has a few pieces of furniture and paintings from the 15th and 16th centuries now on display, suggestive of what it might have looked like before. On the central wall of this room, adjacent to the courtyard, take note of the well, which permitted residents to draw water throughout the whole house.

The Sala dei Pappagalli (room of the parrots). A room adjacent to this one is set up like a dining room, and has a large fireplace. The much-restored frescoes on the wall (at this point more rightly called wall paintings than true frescoes) have a pattern of diamonds and parrots after which the room is named.

A very small room in between this one and the next was a bathroom, with a potty hole. Florentines reinvented indoor personal hygeine, which was known to the Ancients but lost in the middle ages.

Next to this bathroom was the study, or studiolo. Its wall paintings are now lost, but it is suggestively set up with objects that one might find in the man of the house’s room used for storage of business and recreational items. On display are a forziere (safe or strongbox), a cassone covered with velvet (more rightly found in a bedroom), some chairs, some small bronze statuettes, and some paintings with mythological scenes.

Accessed from the hallways is a bedroom set up with an antique bed and crib, as well as with other objects that would be found in the Renaissance home, like devotional paintings and a cassone. There is an “ensuite bathroom” with wash basin and other apparatus (though no hole connected to the central drainage system here).

Sections of the upper floors of the buliding are still under restoration, but each has the same layout as the first floor, and was used for family living.

The third floor hosted the kitchens, since this was most convenient for dispelling the heat of cooking, as well as in case of fire. There is an interesting display of practical objects from everyday life, like spinning tools and cooking pots. Servants’ quarters were also up here. As of Summer 2009, the kitchens are open for guided visits (free with entry) every hour on the hour. You must phone to reserve a slot, or be available to wait until there is a free space on the tour.
CONCLUSIONS

The walls of all these rooms were once decorated with frescoes; where they do not represent realistic scenes they were patterned in imitation of the tapestries that would have hung on special occasions or in winter to keep warm. Those that are now on view are heavily restored (ie, in-painted). They must be taken only as illustrative of the “early renaissance palazzo” but not considered for stylistic elements.

The art-historic significance of this palazzo is mainly its architecture, as an example of a typical domestic building of the mid trecento. However, the various changes in the quattrocento and the major restorations of the 19th and early 20th century make it hard to use as a “document”. However, many forward thinking elements, like the courtyard that gives access to all the rooms, and the desire to create a logical space for family life, are important predecessors of the great 15th century palaces, like those built by the Strozzi and Medici.

Palazzo Davanzati