PERSPECTIVES IN THE PALACE: IMAGE AND SELF-IMAGE IN URBINO

The Renaissance saw the development of a range of discourses and practices concerned with displaying and explaining the human interior in terms of the exterior. Physiognomy offered a proto-scientific approach, while the impresa, or emblematic forms in general, typically combined literary and artistic expression to challenge the wit and learning of its audience. However understood, the “exterior” of a person of rank included various forms of material and especially architectural self-representation. The elucidation of architectural meaning in the Renaissance cannot be conducted without connection to this wider frame of reference and indeed, at times, suggestions of a kind of anthropomorphism, not of physique but of character.

Through its facade, a building projects a certain ethos or quality. In the elite residential architecture of the Renaissance, antithetic front and rear facades are not uncommon, one accommodated to an urban condition, and one to a garden, a symbolic green space, or to an actual suburban or rural setting. In some cases, they evoke(d) diverse qualities or interests of the patron. An early and prominent case is the ducal palace at Urbino, where one facade, towered and lofty, addresses a dependent landscape and the road linking Urbino with major seats of power (Fig. 35), while the other forms part of the city of Urbino and adapts itself to the relatively modest scale and character of its urban context (Fig. 36).