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Bartolomeo Scala, the humanist and right-hand man of Lorenzo the Magnificent, chose for the building of his
Detail of the 18th-century
palace an outlying area of the city, near to the fourteenth-century city walls, where there were farmed lands and gar-
floor in painted maiolica,
dens.1 It was a place, more rural than urban, where both small and large convents were situated. The purchase of
loggia on the first floor of Palazzo Scala-Della Gherardesca, Florence.
the property dates from 1472 and it consisted of «a large house with a garden next to the walls». Given Scala’s fa-
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miliarity with Lorenzo, for the construction he was able to hire the services of the most highly regarded architect
The signature of the maiolica
in Florence at the end of the Quattrocento, Giuliano da Sangallo, who at that particular time was building the villa
worker “Ignazio Chiaiese”, the
of Poggio a Caiano and a short time after would build Palazzo Gondi, in what is now Piazza San Firenze, a splen-
artist/craftsman who executed the splendid floor of the 18th-century Neapolitan school.
did example of a Renaissance private residence. In 1488, in the same area, in Via Laura, Sangallo designed a large
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residence for Lorenzo the Magnificent that was never actually built. The building work was executed quickly, given the fact that at the time of Bartolomeo’s death in 1497 the palace, which was inherited by his daughters and son, was finished and had for some time been inhabited by its owner. The surviving part of the original building, as much in its structure as in its decoration, is represented by the magnificent square courtyard, arranged on two levels, emphasized by the rhythm of arches which are reminiscent of the Roman triumphal arches annotated by Sangallo in the notebook of his first journey to Rome and which he would repeat, with a different rhythm, in the outer loggia of the villa of Poggio.2
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