Dynamic Interiors: Life and Art in the Liminal Spaces of Florence's Early Modern Palazzi

This project explores the less studied parts of 15th-century Florentine palazzi, as a means of unlocking the relationship between art, space and life in the early modern domestic interior. These understudied parts include the camera terrena, the staircase, doorways and their overdoors, and the roof terrace. Their position outside the home's principal rooms is mirrored by their marginalisation in scholarship; seen simply as passages, they themselves are often only treated in passing. By providing an in-depth examination of their structure and decoration, the thesis aims to show that these transitional and liminal spaces were in fact key nodal locations, architectonically, decoratively and symbolically.
Several of these chapters focus on paintings in the National Gallery's collection which were once found in Florence's Palazzo Medici, in particular Filippo Lippi's The Annunciation and Seven Saints overdoor lunettes, and Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano. This project seeks to recover the original architectural contexts of these artworks, including by producing research-based digital 3D models of the now-lost domestic interiors they adorned in the 15th century, in collaboration with another CDP student. To broaden and complicate the narrative beyond Palazzo Medici, the project examines the interiors of more than a dozen other patrician palaces across the city. Surviving structures and extant artworks are contextualised by a wide range of sources, including household inventories, architectural floorplans, treatises on social customs and works of literature.