Palazzo Medici Riccardi

Cosimo il Vecchio wanted power without provocation, and the palace he commissioned from Michelozzo in 1444 argued the case in stone: rusticated and severe outside, luminous within. Here Lorenzo il Magnifico held court, Gozzoli painted the family into the Magi's procession, and a baroque ceiling by Luca Giordano later crowned the Riccardis' mirrored gallery.

Why it matters

Cosimo the Elder rejected Brunelleschi's design as too sumptuous and commissioned Michelozzo to build instead on the site of today's Via Cavour. Completed about 1460, the palace's graded rustication, bifora windows and heavy classical cornice became a model for later Renaissance palaces, including Palazzo Strozzi. Cosimo and Lorenzo il Magnifico lived here; artists including Donatello, Uccello, Gozzoli, Botticelli and the young Michelangelo worked in or for the palace. The Republic seized it in 1494 along with Donatello's bronze David and Judith and Holofernes. After the Medici returned, the family's centre moved to Palazzo Vecchio in 1540. In 1659 Ferdinando II sold the palace to Marchese Gabriello Riccardi. The Riccardi enlargement added the Galleria degli Specchi, whose vault Luca Giordano painted between 1682 and 1685.

What to notice

Benozzo Gozzoli's 1459 fresco in the Cappella dei Magi depicts the Procession of the Magi, with contemporary portraits including Lorenzo de' Medici and the Milanese prince Galeazzo Maria Sforza. The composition alludes to the cavalcade held during the Council of Florence in 1439. The altar Nativity is a copy of Filippo Lippi's original, now in Berlin. In the Galleria degli Specchi, Giordano's apotheosis of the Medici fills the vault, with cardinal Virtues at the corners, stuccoes by the Foggini workshop and four painted 'mirrors' by Bimbi, Reschi and Gabbiani. Other features include first-floor state rooms, the Charles VIII Hall, Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child of about 1466–69, the Marble Museum of Riccardi antiquities and archaeological remains beneath the courtyard, including the diverted bed of the Mugnone stream, late-antique burials, stables, cellars, ovens and cisterns.

Context and history

The palace's later history reflects political change in Tuscany. Confiscated in 1494 and returned in 1512, it ceased to be a Medici residence in 1540 when Cosimo I moved to the Signoria. The Riccardi family acquired it in 1659; architects including Baldi and Foggini added Baroque features, while Michelangelo is credited with the 'kneeling' window design of 1517. Financial decline led to its transfer to the state in 1810 and the Grand Ducal government in 1814. During Florence's decade as Italy's capital it housed the Ministry of the Interior. The Province of Florence bought it in 1874, and the Prefecture moved in the next year. In 1944 the Tuscan Liberation Committee occupied the palace; the Istituto Storico della Resistenza later established its base there. The palace was declared a museum in 1974 and is now owned by the Città Metropolitana di Firenze.