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Updated: June 6, 2025
The Rucellai family's present palace, I may say here, is in the Via della Scala, and by good fortune I found at the door sunning himself a complacent major-domo who, the house being empty of its august owners, allowed me to walk through into the famous garden the Orti Oricellari where the Platonic Academy met for a while in Bernardo Rucellai's day.
Baldassarre was given a chance to prove that he was not the servant, but the great scholar to whom Tito was indebted for his learning. "The ring I possess," said Rucellai, "is a fine sard that I myself purchased from Messer Tito. It is engraved with a subject from Homer. Will you turn to the passage in Homer from which that subject was taken?"
The recovery of a treatise of Cicero's or a tract of Sallust's from the dust of a monastic library was welcomed by the group of statesmen and artists who gathered in the Rucellai gardens with a thrill of enthusiasm. Foreign scholars soon flocked over the Alps to learn Greek, the key of the new knowledge, from the Florentine teachers.
The conjunction might have been taken for mere chance, since there were many passengers along the streets at this hour. But when Tito stopped at the gate of the Rucellai gardens, the figure behind stopped too.
His nature was perhaps not one that could have been attuned to a perfect harmony with that of a Greek or Roman of the golden days, but one better calculated to enjoy the hybrid atmosphere of the Italian Renaissance; and he would have been in his element in the Rucellai Gardens, conversing with feeble little Cosimino, or laughing with Buondelmonte and Luigi Alamanni.
Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo Rucellai retains many details of the mediaeval Tuscan style, especially in the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are transcripts from Roman ruins.
Begun in 1278, as some say, from the design of Fra Ristoro and Fra Sisto, the façade, one of the most beautiful in the world, is really the fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni Rucellai you may see their blown sail everywhere with that profound and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci.
This picture, representing the Virgin and Infant Jesus surrounded by angels, larger than life, then so novel, was regarded as such a wonderful performance, that all the people of Florence flocked in crowds to admire it, making all possible demonstrations of delight. It still adorns the chapel of the Rucellai family in the church of S. Maria Novella for which it was painted.
Florence's Bois de Boulogne Shelley The races The game of Pallone SS. Ognissanti Botticelli and Ghirlandaio Amerigo Vespucci The Platonic Academy's garden Alberti's Palazzo Rucellai Melancholy decay Two smiling boys The Corsini palace The Trinit
These demonstrations excited the ambitious mind of the duke to greater desire of dominion, and in order to gain himself the reputation of strict equity and justice, and thus increase his favor with the plebeians, he prosecuted those who had conducted the war against Lucca, condemned many to pay fines, others to exile, and put to death Giovanni de' Medici, Naddo Rucellai, and Guglielmo Altoviti.
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