The Ponte Vecchio and the Art of Urban Planning in Late Medieval Florence

Author(s): Theresa Flanigan

Source: Gesta , 2008, Vol. 47, No. 1 (2008), pp. 1-15
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of
Medieval Art

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20648957

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The Ponte Vecchio and the Art of Urban Planning
in Late Medieval Florence*
THERESA FLANIGAN
The College of Saint Rose
Abstract
The mid-fourteenth-century design of the Ponte Vecchio
continues to be mischaracterized as an irrational example of
late medieval Florentine architecture. Rather, as evidence pre
sented in this essay will demonstrate, the superstructure of the
Ponte Vecchio was based on a highly rational plan organized
according to a sophisticated geometric proportional system.
According to medieval aesthetic theory, such harmonious
order was required for a design to be considered beautiful, a
quality prescribed in the document that records the commis
sion of the bridge. Once construction of the Ponte Vecchio was
complete, regulations passed by the Florentine government
forbade any modification that would detract from the bridge 's
appearance, indicating that its rational design was to be
maintained. The Ponte Vecchio provides evidence to support
recent theories that rational order and its maintenance were,
in fact, the desired goals of late medieval Florentine urban
planning and the legislation that regulated it.
Travel to Florence's historic center is rarely complete
without a visit to the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) that spans
the Arno River, linking the city's former Roman forum
(present-day Piazza della Repubblica) to the Oltrarno by ex
tending the ancient cardo (the via Calimala and via Por Santa
Maria) to the river's southern bank (Figs. 1 and 2). Despite
the significance of this late medieval structure (built 1339?
ca. 1346), scholars have neglected to analyze its design, per
haps because of the Ponte Vecchio's utilitarian nature (can a
bridge be considered art?) and its having been built too early
in the city famous as the birthplace of the Renaissance.1 As
a structure that predates the Renaissance (a period lauded for
its revival of classicism, rational design principles, and lofty
artistic theories), the Ponte Vecchio has been described by
architects and scholars with such anti-Renaissance adjec
tives as "picturesque," "haphazard," "organic," "ad hoc," and
"empirical."2 One recent scholar cites the Ponte Vecchio as
a structure "resulting from the haphazard accumulation and
juxtaposition of individual initiatives." He provides a counter
example in the sixteenth-century Rialto Bridge in Venice,
which was built with a "logic that witnesses the intention to
provide the city with a precious element of urban composi
tion, designed by architects according to the rules of the
profession. . . . here [at the Rialto] architecture and town
GESTA MIX ? The International Center of Medieval Art 2008 1
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planning have been elegantly united in order to meet com
mercial requirements."3
Despite various threats to its preservation (most notably
World War II and the flood of 1966), the current Ponte Vecchio
is the only Florentine bridge to maintain its mid-fourteenth
century vaulted substructures and a substantial portion of its
urban superstructure. This superstructure's plan consists of a
central piazza, offering expansive views of the Arno River,
bisected by a single street that is flanked by four rectangular
blocks containing the bridge's famous shops.4 This combina
tion of bridge, street, and shops makes the Ponte Vecchio im
portant both as a thoroughfare and a commercial zone. The
Ponte Vecchio's shops line its street with a stylistic diversity
of glassed-in fronts, their river facades projecting over the river
to varying degrees on diagonal wooden braces called sporti
(Figs. 3 and 4). Many of these individuated structures, stacked
high with multiple stories, are embellished with vibrantly
colored exteriors, wrought-iron terraces, balconies, and roof
gardens (Fig. 5). During the Renaissance, the bridge's origi
nally more symmetrical appearance was substantially altered
by the addition of an enclosed passage, called the Vasarian
Corridor, which was built between 1564 and 1565 atop the
eastern shop blocks to connect the Florentine town hall (the
Palazzo Vecchio), situated north of the Arno River, with
the former ducal residence (the Palazzo Pitti), located just
beyond the river's southern bank (see Fig. I).5 With all of
these disparate features, it is no wonder that the bridge's design
is often mischaracterized as nonrational. In its day, however,
the Ponte Vecchio's design was praised by Florentine his
torians, including Giovanni Villani (1280-1348), Marchione di
Coppo Stefani (1385), Goro Dati (1380-1405), and Leonardo
Bruni (1403-4).6 Additional documentary evidence shows that
the Ponte Vecchio's patrons considered the bridge, despite its
utilitarian and profit-making capacity, as a civic monument
with the potential to bring beauty and honor to the city.
This article is part of a larger project intended to provide
the Ponte Vecchio, an important civic monument of the
Florentine trecento, with the study it deserves. My present
aim is to demonstrate that the Ponte Vecchio's urban super
structure was consciously designed according to rational prin
ciples that incorporated pure geometry, mathematically related
proportions, and a modular system. Scholars including Marvin
 FIGURE 1. Florence, Ponte Vecchio, view from the east (photo: author).

Trachtenberg, David Friedman, and Paula Spilner have already

shown that rational and geometric planning were in fact goals
of Florentine trecento urban design and can be traced to clas
sical planning strategies found in the Castrum plans of ancient
Roman colonies (including ancient Florence).7 This study
provides another component of the expanding discourse sur
rounding late medieval Florentine urbanism. It will be shown
that, due to its de novo nature, the Ponte Vecchio was the
most perfectly realized example of trecento rational design
principles within the city of Florence.

The Ideal Plan

On 21 May 1339 the Florentine government appointed
six officials to determine the "length, height, width, manner
and form" for a "beautiful and honorable" masonry bridge to
be constructed across the Arno River at the site of the former
Ponte Vecchio, which had been destroyed by the devastating
flood of 4 November 1333.8 Athough civic documents record
the phases of the reconstruction of the Ponte Vecchio, which
lasted almost a decade, they reveal little about the layout of
the bridge's superstructure and shops. The most detailed con
temporary descriptions of the Ponte Vecchio's design come FIGURE 2. Florence, city plan, showing the locations of: (1) the Ponte Vec
instead from two fourteenth-century chronicles. The first was chio, (2) the Ponte alia Carraia, (3) the Ponte Rubaconte (now Ponte alle
written about 1300-1348 by the Florentine historian Gio Grazie), (4) the Ponte a Santa Trinita, (5) the Piazza della Repubblica
vanni Villani. He states: (former Roman forum), (6) the Duomo, (7) the Piazza della Signoria, (8) the
Palazzo Vecchio, and (9) the Piazza Sant'Apollinare (drawing: author).

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FIGURE 3. Ponte Vecchio, street facade of northwestern block (photo: author).

FIGURE 4. Ponte Vecchio, view from the west (photo: author).

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 In said year 1345, on 18 July was completed the con
struction and closing [of the vaults?] of the new bridge
with two piers and three very beautiful and rich arches
[that was] rebuilt across the Arno River where the
Ponte Vecchio previously stood. It will cost a good [left
blank by Villani] gold florins. It was sturdily founded
and 32 braccia wide with a street that is 16 braccia
wide, which we believe to be too large. The bases of
the arches are 2 braccia. The shops from one side to
the other are 8 braccia wide and 8 braccia long. They
were built on the firmness of the arches with vaults
above and below. There were 43 shops from which the
commune would receive rental payments of 80 or more
gold florins a year. In the past these [shops] were wooden
and projected over the Arno and the entire bridge was
a narrow 12 braccia.9

A similar description of the Ponte Vecchio appears in the

later chronicle by Marchione di Coppo Stefani, completed
about 1385:

This year [1345] the Ponte Vecchio was rebuilt of stone

and enriched by three arches. This bridge was 16 braccia
wide, plus the shops, which were built on each side.
They were 43 in number and would be rented so that in
less than 20 years [the city] would make the amount
they spent on the bridge. These shops were vaulted for
greater security.10

Stefani's account, which is believed to have been influenced

by Villani's earlier chronicle and not necessarily based on
his own observation, corresponds with that of Villani in its
description of the Ponte Vecchio's masonry construction, the
number of its vaults, its forty-three shops, the \6-braccia
width of its street (the only dimension given by Stefani), the
arrangement of shops on either side of this street, and the use
of vaulting in the shop interiors.11 Villani's description of the
layout of the bridge's superstructure is more detailed than Ste
fani's. He tells us that the new Ponte Vecchio had a total
width of 32 braccia, which was subdivided into a 16-braccia
wide main street flanked by forty-three perfectly square shops,
each measuring 8 braccia by 8 braccia (Fig. 6).12 Neither
author, however, describes the precise arrangement of the
shops, the thickness of their walls (often recorded in medi
eval plans simply as a single line), their heights, or how the
bridge's river and street facades were to be articulated and
adorned. Nor does either author make any mention of one of
the Ponte Vecchio's most noteworthy features, the open
piazza located at its center.
Until now, Villani's account has served historians as
proof of the terminus ante quern for the Ponte Vecchio's re
construction, and 18 July 1345 is the currently accepted date
for the completion of the present bridge with its shops (mi
nus later accretions including the modern shop fronts and the
FIGURE 5. Ponte Vecchio, detail of street facade of southwestern block
(photo: author).
Vasarian Corridor).13 Previously unpublished documentary
evidence, however, reveals that the Ponte Vecchio's shops
were not commissioned until 28 November 1345, four
months after the date of Villani's chronicle entry.14 On that
day the Florentine government called for the appointment of
a new committee of bridge officials to be placed in charge of
the construction and completion of shops on the Ponte Vec
chio, which they required to be vaulted and not to extend be
yond the 32-frracc/a-width of the bridge.
Further evidence for the bridge's incomplete state as
of 18 July 1345 includes a document dated 21 March 1346,
eight months after Villani's chronicle entry, which states: "To
begin, the first provision is that the said ruling Priors of the
Arts and Standard Bearer of Justice desire that the Ponte
Vecchio etcetera is complete in all of its construction."15 The
Ponte Vecchio, therefore, could not have been completed by
18 July 1345. Based on this new documentary evidence, the
date of 18 July 1345 may be interpreted as indicating only
the completion and "closing" of the Ponte Vecchio's vaulted
substructure, which Villani describes slightly later in the same

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-.-.-.-.
m +/

> 32 , 6 I

_ k., a, ,_i a.rl

--A' V-/

?o _I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

j1' lV 1 1 k/~h[
FIGURE 6. Ponte Vecchio, diagrammatic plan with dimensions in braccia based on ideal dimensions provided by Villani, includes piazza not in V
(reconstruction: author, drawing: Cecelia Hallahan).

sentence as having "two piers and three very beautiful and

Comparison of Villani's Dimensions to the Bridge's Actual Dimensions
rich arches." It is highly possible that Villani returned to
some of his entries at a later date to fill in new information, Villani Actual*'

and he presumably intended to return to this entry to fill in the braccia* meters braccia* meters
blank he left for the total cost of the bridge's construction.
Entire width32 18.64 32.73 19.1
This may explain the use of the past tense in Villani's de
scription when he records the shops as "built" in an entry Piazza
thatwidth 32.73 19.1
predates their commission. This reading does not exclude the 32.21 18.8
Piazza
possibility, however, that a design for the layout of the Ponte
length
Vecchio's shops existed before 28 November 1345, and that
Street width 16 9.28 16.72 9.76
it is on this design that Villani relies.
Shop depth 4.67 4.67
In fact, a comparison of Villani's account with existing
physical evidence reveals many similarities between his
* 1 braccia = .5836 meters (23 inches)
description and the bridge's plan as executed. According toon dimensions by M. Georges Rohault de Fleury
** based

Villani's July 1345 description and the commission docu

FIGURE 7. Chart comparing Villani's dimensions to the Ponte Vecchio's
ment of 28 November 1345, the Ponte Vecchio's vaulted sub
actual dimensions (author).
structures were intended to support a deck 32 braccia (18.64 m)
wide.16 The deck was indeed constructed to this approximate
width, as is confirmed by the measurement of the actual suspended
width above air and water: a slight imprecision in the
of the deck: 19.1 m (32.73 braccia). This figure is less than
positioning of the vaulted substructure, the unpredictability
of the settling of underwater foundations, the difficulty of
half a meter greater than Villani's figure. Villani also describes
the Ponte Vecchio's 32-braccia-widt deck as subdivided into precise measurements on the double slope of the
obtaining
bridge
the following three parts: a street 16 braccia wide flanked ondeck, and/or the rudimentary tools used to lay out a
each side by shops that extend 8 braccia from the streetbuilding
to thein this period, such as rope or wooden rods.
bridge's outer edge. Modern measurements of these elements The dimensions recorded by Villani and those evident
also come quite close to Villani's dimensions. The street is lateral measurement of the actual bridge reveal that
from the
9.76 m (16.73 braccia) wide, and the shops measure the 4.67Ponte
m Vecchio's plan was conditioned by rational geom
(precisely 8 braccia) deep. This close relationship between
etry and based on a single unit of measure, resulting in a pro
the dimensions in Villani's description and the actualportional
lateral relationship between its planimetric parts. Villani's
dimensions are all multiples of an S-braccia module (or an 8
dimensions of the bridge we see today suggests a relationship
between the Ponte Vecchio and the design described by by-S-braccia
Villani square), and they all form part of the geometric
(Figs. 7 and 8). Slight discrepancies between Villani'sprogression
dimen 8 to 16 to 32, which can be expressed as the ex
sions and the actual dimensions of the bridge can beponential
attrib function of 2 in which each of the parts proportion
ally relates to the next largest component by a ratio of 1:2.
uted to a number of factors inherent in building a structure

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 TTTTTTTTTT1 iTTTTTTTTTTI I

FIGURE 8. Ponte Vecchio, plan as built with dimensions in meters (reconstruction: author, drawing: Cecelia Hallahan).

Thus, if we take 8 braccia as the organizational unit x (or
module), the series becomes lx:2x:4x, where the length and
width of each shop equals lx, the width of the roadway equals
2x, and the width of the entire bridge equals 4x.
The Geometry of the Piazza
Further evidence of rational planning can be found in the
open public space, or piazza, located at the exact center of the
Ponte Vecchio (Figs. 8 and 9). This central piazza is one of
the bridge's most singular features. Nonetheless, it is curiously
absent from both Villani's and Stefani's descriptions of the
bridge, suggesting that the piazza may not have been included
in early proposals, despite evidence that points to the presence
of such an open space on the previous bridge.17 The Ponte
Vecchio's current piazza spans the entire width of the bridge,
which, as noted earlier, measures 19.1 m (32.73 braccia).
The piazza measures 18.8 meters (32.21 braccia) in length,
coming even closer to the 32-braccia width recorded by
Villani. The fact that the piazza's length comes so close to
the width of the bridge as noted by Villani suggests that the
goal was to approximate a perfectly square space measuring
32 by 32 braccia (with a difference of 0.52 meters) and, there
fore, a space with proportions as near as possible to 1:1.18
Currently, any sense of the piazza's original geometry is im
peded by a three-bay loggia that was built across the eastern
quarter of the piazza in the mid-sixteenth century to support
Vasari's corridor (see Fig. 9). Before this corridor was built,
the central piazza on the bridge was completely open to the
sky, offering a full sense of its pure geometry. Moreover, from
the center of the Ponte Vecchio's piazza, the medieval viewer
could have been treated to unobstructed views up and down
the river that would have revealed Florence's defining topog
raphy (the Arno River, the hills to the south, and the plain to
the north) in addition to its flourishing industry and its other
magnificent bridges. Due to the density of Florence's urban
fabric, this would have been one of the few spaces within the
compact monumental core of the city where such a panoramic
view would have been possible.
The Shop Blocks
Extending north and south from the four corners of the
Ponte Vecchio's piazza are four rectangular blocks not men
tioned by Villani that contain the shops he describes. Not
only can these rectangular shop blocks still be discerned in
the current structure of the bridge, but they also appear as
uniform blocks with river-facing defensive crenellations and
evenly spaced square windows in the earliest image to depict
the Ponte Vecchio after the flood of 1333, the so-called chain
map of about 1470-90 (Fig. 10). The construction of large
blocks containing shops arranged side by side would have
resulted in a continuous street edge, thus conforming to the
Florentine statutes of 1325 that required new buildings to align
with the frontages of adjacent properties to create a straight
and orderly street.19 This row house-style arrangement, in
which each shop shares a single common dividing wall with
the adjacent shops, would have been an economical and orderly
means to construct quickly a series of uniform spaces, thereby
creating a unified and rational appearance for the entire bridge.
Villani describes the Ponte Vecchio as having forty-three
shops each perfectly square in plan, measuring 8 braccia wide
by 8 braccia deep (or 4.67 meters on each side), and therefore
geometrically and proportionally related on all sides to the

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 FIGURE 9. Ponte Vecchio, view of piazza from the street looking north (photo: author).

bridge's approximately 32-braccia-wide piazza according to
a ratio of 1:4.20 As previously noted, each of the shop blocks
measures 4.67 meters deep, equaling precisely the 8 braccia
recorded by Villani, resulting in a 1:2 proportional relation
ship with the width of the street. If the depths of the shops
conform to Villani's description, however, the widths of the
shops diverge significantly. The interiors of the shops measure
between 3.31 and 3.41 m (5.72-5.8 braccia) wide. Thus, the
shops are rectangles less wide than they are deep by a ratio of
about 3:4 instead of the 8 by 8 braccia (1:1) squares de
scribed by Villani.
There is a logical explanation for this reduction of the
widths of the shops from the dimension recorded in Villani's
text. If executed, the scheme that Villani describes, forty-three
shops (21 or 22 per side) each 8 braccia (4.67 m) wide, would
have resulted in the shop blocks extending 98.07-102.74 m
(168-76 braccia) on a side, without including the piazza. The
total length allowed by the Ponte Vecchio's site was only
about 95 m (162.78 braccia). Thus, if the scheme described
by Villani had been built, it would have lacked the piazza
and exceeded the available site's dimensions. Furthermore,
physical and documentary evidence reveals that forty-six
shops were actually built instead of the forty-three described
by Villani and Stefani, presumably to generate more income
from their rental.21 These additional shops would have further
exceeded the site limits if the shop widths were not reduced.
The planimetric scheme referred to by Villani, therefore,
must have been an ideal one and could never have been built
as described. It had to be modified to include three additional
shops and a piazza measuring approximately 32 by 32 braccia,
while staying within the physical limits of the site. This
adaptation of an ideal scheme to fit the dimensional realities
and irregularities of an actual site is not unique to the Ponte
Vecchio's design. A contemporaneous example of site-related
plan modification has been noted by Franklin Toker in the
design of the Palazzo Sansedoni on the Piazza del Campo in
Siena. As built, this palace's elevation differs from the draw
ing of an ideal design of 1340 to take into account the irreg
ularities of its curved, sloped site.22 Another example can be
found in the construction of the Piazza della Signoria, where,
as Trachtenberg has shown, between the 1350s and 1380s a
number of compromises to the plan were made to accommo
date preexisting site conditions, including the angles of build
ings and streets that surrounded the piazza.23

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FIGURE 10. Anonymous 18th-century copy, "Chain Map" of Florence, ca. 1470-90, detail showing bridges from bottom to top: Ponte alia Carraia, Ponte
a Santa Trinita, Ponte Vecchio, and Ponte Rubaconte (now Ponte alle Grazie) (photo: by permission Alinari / Art Resource, NY).

The final design of the Ponte Vecchio reveals a willing
ness on the part of the city officials to sacrifice pure geometry
to increase the number of shops on the bridge and, therefore,
the amount of rental income that the bridge could generate. The
chronicles of both Villani and Stefani indicate the importance
of this income to the city, and Stefani further notes that this
money was to be used to pay for the bridge's construction, the
cost of which presumably increased as the period of its con
struction was prolonged, lasting from 1339 to about 1346.24
The Meaning of the Ponte Vecchio 's Proportional System
As demonstrated above, Villani indicates that the propor
tional series 8:16:32 (which can be reduced to 1:2:4) condi
tioned the Ponte Vecchio's design and was consciously chosen
to govern at least the lateral dimensions of the bridge's plan.
What motivated the decision to use a proportional system,
and why was this specific geometric progression chosen?
A design based on a rational system would have been ex
tremely practical and relatively simple for a builder to trans
late into stone. Related building dimensions could have been
easily remembered and communicated to the builder and his
workmen through verbal or written instructions, eliminating
the need for precisely drawn architectural plans and for the
constant presence of the bridge's still unidentified designer.25
Moreover, these related measurements could have been easily
laid out by unskilled laborers using rudimentary tools, such
as a portable A-braccia (2.33 m) rod.
In addition to concern for efficiency in construction,
the cost of and profit from spaces built according to a fixed
modular plan could have been easily calculated before con
struction. This certainly would have appealed to the merchants
who ran the Florentine government and commissioned the
Ponte Vecchio's design. These merchant-governors would have
been adept at calculating proportional relationships using
arithmetical formulas such as the Rule of Three, also called

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the Merchant's Key, typically used to solve proportional
problems involved in currency exchange and bartering. This
rule, which Michael Baxandall claims was "a universal arith
metic tool of literate Italian commercial people," employed
three proportional formulas to triple-check the relationship
between the numbers in a numeric series.26 The Rule of Three
would have been learned by merchants at an early age while
attending a scuola dell 'abaco (abacus school), which focused
on training in commercial mathematics through textbooks with
exercises in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry.27 Any Floren
tine merchant or artisan who had received such training would
have immediately understood the logical and calculable value
of the application of a modular system in the design of the
Ponte Vecchio.28
The specific proportional series found in the Ponte
Vecchio's plan may have been derived from Boethian number
theory, which would have been familiar to anyone with a
medieval liberal arts education taught from the standard text
book for arithmetic, the De institutione arithmetical This text
was written by Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius (d. 524),
who was responsible for establishing the quadrivium (arith
metic, music, geometry, and astronomy) as part of the medieval
liberal arts curriculum and for composing the mathematical
textbooks that were to remain standard into the Renaissance.
The number theory espoused in Boethius's De institutione
arithmetica was based on the neo-Pythagorean scholarship of
Nicomachus of Gervasa (2nd cent.) and was rooted in Platonic
geometry as found in Plato's Timaeus. In his text, Boethius,
basing himself on Plato, explains the formation of the world
as the creation of order out of the formless and claims that
this order can be comprehended only through arithmetic. He
states:
[Arithmetic] is prior to all not only because God the
Creator of the massive structure of the world consid
ered this the first discipline as the exemplar of his own
thought and established all things in accord with it; or
that through numbers of an assigned order all things
exhibiting the logic of their maker found concord; but
arithmetic is said to be the first for this reason, also, be
cause whatever things are prior in nature, it is to these
underlying elements that the posterior elements can be
referred.30
According to Boethius, universal order is established when
each part is in proportion to both the other parts and to the
whole. Moreover, arithmetic can be used to understand this
divine order, which is rational and harmonious (he later ex
panded on this idea in his treatise on music). According to
Platonic theory, the World Soul was composed of the first
three powers of 2 and 3 in the double series 1:2:4:8 and so
forth and 1:3:9:27 and so forth.31 The geometric progression
found in the plan of the Ponte Vecchio corresponds to the first
of these numeric sequences.32 The inherent perfection of this
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numeric progression is clearly demonstrated by the following
figures:
8x 8 = 64
4 x 16 = 64
2 x 32 = 64
1 x 64 = 64
In this example, which is the one that appears in the first book
of Boethius' text, all multiples equal 64.33 These same pro
portions, Boethius argues, can be found in the distances be
tween the planets, the combination of the elements that make
up the physical world, and in the composition of the human
soul.34
According to medieval aesthetics, beauty (which, along
with honor, was a required component of the Ponte Vecchio's
design, per the 1339 commission) was not an arbitrary or sub
jective quality; rather, it was dependent on harmony (con
sonantia). This particular definition of beauty derives from
Platonic thought and can be found in scholastic discourse,
including Ulrich Engelbert's (d. 1277) chapter entitled "De
pulchro" in Summa de bono, which states that "material beauty
subsists in a harmony of proportion"; and in the Dominican
theologian St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa theologica (1265-74),
which claims that "harmony is indispensable for beauty."35
The proportional system found in the Ponte Vecchio's
design is in fact harmonic. The lateral dimensions of each of
the bridge's parts were related in the ratio of 1:2 (an octave),
which is considered "perfect" consonance or the sacred con
cord found in Pythagorean mysticism. Dominican theologians,
including St. Thomas Aquinas and the popular Florentine
preacher Fra Remigio de' Girolami (d. 1319), praised order
and unity as the expression of divinely inspired good govern
ment.36 The architectural harmony and order on the Ponte
Vecchio would have represented the Florentine government's
capability to impose harmony and order on its public spaces
and, therefore, the potential to obtain these qualities from its
citizenry.
One might question how conscious the average Florentine
would have been to these high-minded symbolic references in
the Ponte Vecchio's design and whether the numeric corre
spondences to Neoplatonic Boethian theory could have been
coincidental. Any merchant could have appreciated the merit
of the proportional relationships of the Ponte Vecchio's design.
Any builder could have grasped the usefulness of construct
ing a modular design, familiar to him from a long building
tradition that relied on geometry and rationality as the basis
(scientia) of structural stability and good design.37 Only some
one with a more sophisticated education, however, could
have determined the daringly flat profile of the segmental
arches of the bridge's substructure. Only someone (possibly
the same person) with a more sophisticated education could
have consciously chosen the exact numbers and proportions
used in the design of the bridge's superstructure, whether
 FIGURE 12. Giglio Fiorentino, plan, designed ca. 1350, never built (from
Friedman, Florentine New Towns, fig. 29, ? 1989 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and AHF, by permission of The MIT Press).

FIGURE 11. Terranuova, plan, 1337 (from Friedman, Florentine New
Towns, fig. 16, ? 1989 Massachusetts Institute of Technology and AHF, hy
pe rmiss ion of The MIT Press).
or not he understood the intellectual significance and divine
nature of this orderly system.
The logical loci for the confluence of such advanced
learning would have been the city's monasteries, specifically
Florentine Urban Planning in the
the Dominican monastery of Sta. Maria Novella, where one
Mid-Fourteenth Century
might have learned scholastic theories that combined theo
logical, arithmetic, and architectural order. Moreover, the
Dominicans at Sta. Maria Novella were also the primary
vaulting experts in Florence, having provided their church
with the earliest large-scale vaults in the city. According to
Nikolas Pevsner, the term architectus (versus master mason)
was first consistently used in Italy by the friars at Sta. Maria
Novella and three men are named as "architects" in the Ne
crology of Sta. Maria Novella?* According to the Necrology,
these architects include Fra Ristoro "maximus architectus"
(d. 1283), who, along with Fra Sisto, was responsible for re
pairing the Ponte Santa Trinita and the Ponte alia Carraia after
the flood of 1269;39 and Fra Giovanni da Campi (d. 1339),
who is credited by the Necrology as the "principalis et unicus
architector" of the Ponte alia Carraia after the flood of 1333.40
It is significant that these three men are credited with Floren
tine bridge construction, suggesting a direct link between the
Dominicans of Sta. Maria Novella and bridge construction
within the city. Moreover, one of them, Fra Giovanni da Campi,
was involved in the reconstruction of the Ponte alia Carraia,
which was destroyed along with the Ponte Vecchio in the
flood of 4 November 1333 and was the first bridge rebuilt in
its aftermath. Fra Giovanni da Campi's death in 1339, the
year the Ponte Vecchio's reconstruction was commissioned,
means that he could not have been involved in the con
struction of the bridge.41 Regardless of whether a Dominican
was involved in creating the design for the Ponte Vecchio or
whether the numeric relationships of that design result from
the practices of a long tradition of building, this evidence
indicates that fourteenth-century Florence was an environ
ment in which sophisticated ideas originating in theological
discourse and in the liberal arts curriculum could have come
together to influence the design of a major civic monument.
The use of rational geometry combined with a mathe
matical proportional system in late-fourteenth-century Flor
entine urban planning is not unique to the Ponte Vecchio.
David Friedman and Marvin Trachtenberg have already dem
onstrated that such regularized planning was the desired ideal
in fourteenth-century Florentine urban design.
Friedman has shown that rational planning was used to
design Florentine defensive colonies built throughout the Arno
Valley in the early fourteenth century, including Scarperia
(built in 1306), Terranuova (built in 1337), and Giglio Fioren
tino (designed about 1350) (Figs. 11 and 12).42 He concludes
from an analysis of the plans of these towns that the integra
tion of all parts following a single system of mathematical
ratios should be considered "basic criteria for good design"
by late-fourteenth-century Florentines, who considered pure
geometric shapes and the "dimensional values" of their parts
as "rational, strong and aesthetically pleasing."43
A number of similarities exist between the Ponte Vecchio
and the basic urban planning strategies that governed these
Florentine new towns. As with the Ponte Vecchio, all the com
ponents of each city were coordinated into a rational whole.
According to Friedman, each of these towns was designed de
novo as a complete unit and laid out on a rectangular plan with
proportions of approximately 1:2 or 1:2.5.44 At the center of
each was a perfectly square or rectangular piazza that typically

10

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contained the market, town hall, and main religious build
ings. In the designs of Terranuova and Giglio Fiorentino, this
piazza was bisected by two perpendicular cross streets that
generated the rest of the town's orthogonal plan composed of
straight streets lined with blocks of contiguous lots of equal
width.45
The most telling comparison is between the Ponte Vecchio
and the plan of the town of Giglio Fiorentino that was de
scribed in a document of 1350, making it almost contemporary
with the bridge's superstructure. Although it was never built,
Friedman used this documentary evidence to reconstruct its
plan (see Fig. 12).46 Like Giglio Fiorentino, the plan of the
entire Ponte Vecchio was rectangular, and its center is marked
by an almost perfectly square open space. At Giglio Fiorentino
this square piazza was to measure 70 by 70 braccia (minus
the 10-braccia-wide streets that were to run along its northern
and southern edges). Bisecting Giglio Fiorentino's piazza
were to be two main streets each measuring 14 braccia wide.
They were to serve as the principal axes of symmetry for the
blocks of shops that lined them, recalling the orthogonality
found in the rectilinear layout of the Ponte Vecchio's shop
blocks. The row house-style lots that lined this street were to
be 28 braccia deep. These street and lot dimensions are in the
ratio of 1:2 with a base unit of 14 braccia. The relationship
between street, lot, and piazza at Giglio Fiorentino, therefore,
was 14:28:70, or 1:2:5. Like the town's main streets and lots,
its secondary streets and lots were also planned to be in a 1:2
ratio, that is, the streets were to be 10 braccia wide and lots
20 braccia deep. The predominant proportional relationship
between lot and street in Giglio Fiorentino, therefore, was 2:1,
the reverse of what was executed on the Ponte Vecchio. On
the bridge the numeric progression found at Giglio Fiorentino
was given a new base unit and its parts were rearranged rel
ative to the Ponte Vecchio's dual function as a thoroughfare
lined by single-use, commercial structures.47 According to
Friedman, such close coordination between street and lot
dimensions was unique to fourteenth-century Florentine
town planning.48 Because these two contemporaneous urban
schemes exhibit a similar proportional logic, which governed
Florentine urban planning, the Ponte Vecchio can be seen as
a reduced version of the ideally planned city.
Rational orthogonal urban planning finds its origins in
classical antiquity, first known from the Greek colony of
Miletus. Later Roman examples exist in the gridded city plans
found throughout the former empire in colonial towns as far
afield as Timgad in North Africa and as near as Florence,
itself established as a Roman colony by either Julius or
Augustus Caesar.49 Florence's own rational plan can be seen
in the orthogonal layout of the streets at the heart of the city
in the vicinity of the current Piazza della Repubblica, which
was once the site of the ancient forum (see Fig. 2). The or
thogonal design of the Ponte Vecchio can, therefore, be said
to be part of the late medieval revival of this classical urban
planning strategy.
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FIGURE 13. Piazza della Signoria, plan showing the piazza's ideal geom
etry (solid line) superimposed over the piazza 's actual shape (dashed line)
(from Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, fig. 114, by permission of Marvin
Trachtenberg).
Trachtenberg has demonstrated that even within the
densely built-up Florentine city center rational planning was
the goal. He has shown that efforts were made to retrofit and
rationalize the city's most important civic piazza, the Piazza
della Signoria, whose basic L-shaped form developed from
the merging of two disparate piazze during the years between
1299 and the 1380s.50 According to Trachtenberg, begin
ning about 1350, the Florentines began the costly and time
consuming process to "correct" their irregularly shaped piazza
by extending and straightening its northern, western, and
southern boundaries according to an ideal plan based on pro
portionally related squares that derived from the dimension
of the palace's northern facade (Fig. 13). The Piazza della
Signoria project, which extended into the 1380s, consisted of
the costly demolition of numerous buildings surrounding the
piazza (including at least one church), the widening of the
streets entering the piazza, and the "amputation" of portions
of the buildings located along its western edge to create a
rationally defined space. This effort, intended to achieve the
appearance of geometric regularity, can only be interpreted as
consciously planned urban design. Trachtenberg's analysis of
the Piazza della Signoria's regularization has demonstrated the
strong desire on the part of the city government for rational
spaces within the city even if it required the difficult and time
consuming process of subtracting from preexisting urban
fabric.
That such geometric purity was the desired goal of
fourteenth-century Florentine architectural design is revealed
in Villani's criticism of the late-thirteenth-century Palazzo
Vecchio's irregular form (see Fig. 13). In his chronicle, he
states: "In order that the Palazzo should not be built on the
11
area where the houses of the Uberti had once stood, those
responsible built it crooked; but this was unsatisfactory, be
cause the Palazzo should have had a square or rectangular
form."51 The Florentine government also expressed its pref
erence for rectilinearity in a provision of 1386 that praises the
Piazza della Signoria's newly completed form as "square and
adequate" [squadretur et adequetur] and "made honorable in
its squareness" [in quadro honorabilitar actari].52
Unlike the Piazza della Signoria and the Palazzo Vecchio,
the Ponte Vecchio's shop blocks and piazza were designed and
constructed together in less than a decade and did not result
from a process of give and take over several decades in which
the preexisting urban fabric had to be subtracted in order to
retrofit a rational space where one did not previously exist.53
Instead, the Ponte Vecchio's piazza was built de novo employ
ing an additive process on a site (the vaulted bridge deck) that
was not conditioned or confined by surrounding structures.
This allowed the Florentines the rare opportunity to use the
latest urban planning strategies to design the most rational
and geometrically perfect open space within the city (credit
for this is usually given to the Renaissance Piazza Santissima
Annunziata).
Regulation of the Bridge 's Appearance
Finally, not only did the Florentines want to create
rationalized spaces, but archival evidence reveals that the
Florentine government was willing to pass legislation that
would maintain the orderly form of the Ponte Vecchio's
original design. On 21 March 1346, four months after the
shops were commissioned and presumably near to their com
pletion, the government banned modifications to the shops
that would "detract from the bridge's decoration and overall
appearance" [quod cedeat ad de decorationem].54 These reg
ulations prohibited additions to the shop exteriors and bridge
piers, the breaking of exterior walls facing the river, the pro
jection of spaces over the river on wood or stone braces called
sporti, and the destruction of the bridge's pavement and shop
floors. In addition, these laws banned the construction of spaces
above the shop vaults, the breaking or modification of these
vaults, and the removal or construction of anything on the
bridge by individuals who were not authorized by the city
government. Violators of these regulations would incur a fine
of two hundred small florins and pay the cost of restoring the
bridge to its pristine condition. This list of prohibitions indi
cates that the ad hoc extension of the Ponte Vecchio's shops
visible today was not original. In fact, it would have been
contrary to the aesthetic desires of the city's governors. These
changes most likely occurred after 1495, when, in desperate
need for income, the city privatized the bridge's shops, thereby
liberating the shop owners from government regulation.55
The Ponte Vecchio's plan, along with these regulations,
would have restricted the size of shop interiors to slightly
more than 11 feet by 15 feet. In this single space, labor, sales,
12
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and display were to take place, and all of this activity would
have been visible through the arched entryway to anyone who
passed by. Although the regulations on the Ponte Vecchio did
not forbid the construction of mezzanine spaces inside the
shops beneath the vaults, if built, such mezzanines would
have been cramped, making them more suitable for storage
than long-term residential use. There is no evidence that any
of the spaces on the Ponte Vecchio were intended for perma
nent residential use. Commission documents, chronicles, and
fourteenth-century rental documents consistently refer to these
spaces as apothece or botteghe.
Concern for public safety certainly inspired some of the
rules imposed by the provision of 1346, as modifications to
the Ponte Vecchio by amateurs could result in injury to the
pedestrians and animals that crossed the bridge, impede traffic,
and cause serious structural damage to the bridge itself; how
ever, safety is nowhere mentioned in this document. Instead,
an aesthetic motive is clearly stated, asserting specifically
that such alterations would "detract from the bridge's deco
ration and overall appearance." That the Ponte Vecchio was de
signed to be a work of beauty is also indicated in the bridge's
original commission document of 21 May 1339, when the
city leaders commissioned the construction of a "beautiful and
honorable" stone bridge.56 Such requirements and regulations
reflect the Florentine government's conviction that even utili
tarian structures within the city could contribute to the aesthetic
of the urban whole, reinforcing Wolfgang Braunfels' notion
that the citizens of late medieval Florence did, in fact, see
their city as a "work of art."57 With the passage of these regu
lations affecting the Ponte Vecchio's appearance, the Floren
tine communal government was attempting to establish and
maintain an architectural aesthetic that remained true to the
original rational and harmonious design of the bridge's super
structure.
Conclusion
As the evidence presented here has shown, the mid
fourteenth-century Ponte Vecchio's urban superstructure was
planned as a suspended ideal city that was purely commercial
in nature. Built as close as possible to an ideal design, the
Ponte Vecchio is the best-preserved and most perfect example
of the use of trecento rational design principles within the city
of Florence. Its plan, following a highly regularized scheme,
was based on pure geometry and harmonic proportions that
can be found in Neoplatonic Boethian theory, which would
have been familiar to any Florentine merchant with a late
medieval liberal arts education. Thus, a person standing in the
bridge's almost perfectly square central piazza would have
been in perfect consonance with the universe, the human soul,
and the divine.
The Ponte Vecchio's order was meant to contribute to
the beauty and honor of the city, qualities so important to the
Florentines that they were required by the bridge's commis
sion to be incorporated into its design and preserved through
legislation passed by the city government that forbade modi
fications that would detract from the bridge's rational appear
ance. To the late medieval viewer, the architectural harmony
and order on the Ponte Vecchio would have demonstrated the
Florentine government's ability to impose and maintain order
NOTES
* An earlier version of this argument, which derives from my disserta
tion, was presented in a lecture delivered to the Turpin Bannister chapter
of the Society of Architectural Historians in April 2006. I am grateful
for the comments of my dissertation committee consisting of Marvin
Trachtenberg, David Friedman, and Christopher Ratte. I would also like
to thank Clark Maines and the prepublication readers of this article
for their helpful suggestions. I am also especially grateful to Matthew
Cohen for taking the time to listen to my argument and discuss Boethian
numerology with me and to Cecelia Hallahan for producing the new
drawings that accompany this article.
1. Brief histories of the Ponte Vecchio can be found in the following books
that address the bridges of Florence: M. G. Rohault de Fleury, "Les
ponts ? Florence," in La Toscana au moyen age: Lettres sur I 'architec
ture civile et militaire en 1400 (Paris, 1874), vol. 2, letter 33, 90-107;
I. Folli, / Ponti e le Porte di Firenze (Florence, 1904), 1; Florence,
Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Documentaria e Iconografica degli An
tichi Ponti di Firenze (Florence, 1961), ed. G. Camerani Marri, 4-5;
P. Bargellini, / Ponti di Firenze (Florence, 1962), 3-12; and F. Gurrieri,
L. Bracci, and G. Pedreschi, / Ponti sull'Arno dal Falterona al Mare
(Florence, 1998), 177-81. The only monographs on the Ponte Vecchio
are also relatively brief and include D. M. Manni, Delia Vecchiezza
Sovraggrande del Ponte Vecchio di Firenze e de' Cangiamenti di Esso
(Florence, 1763); R. Baldaccini, II Ponte Vecchio (Florence, 1944); G. C.
Romby, Un Ponte, una Citt?: II Ponte Vecchio di Firenze (Florence,
1988); and D. Liscia Bemporad, ed., Un Ponte dalle Botteghe d'Oro:
Le Botteghe degli Orafi sul Ponte Vecchio Quattro Secoli di Storia
(Florence, 1993). This last work concentrates on the history of the
goldsmith shops on the bridge from the late sixteenth century on, with
the exception of A. Guidotti's chapter, "II Ponte Vecchio dalle Origini
al 1593," 53-62. Additional essays that focus predominantly on the
Ponte Vecchio's shops appear in a small pamphlet distributed by the
Florentine beefsteak association, Aspetti di Vita e di Cultura Fioren
tina (Florence, 1996): F Franceschi, "II Ponte Vecchio di Firenze nel
Medioevo," 17-40; and C. Cresti, "Ponte Vecchio: Appunti di Storia e
di Cronica dal Cinquecento ad Oggi," 41-50. All of these works focus
on the Ponte Vecchio's building history and the production of its shops,
and none provides any analysis of the bridge. For new documentary
evidence and a more current and detailed study of the Ponte Vecchio's
building history, authorship, and analysis of its form, see T. Flanigan,
"The Ponte Vecchio: Building an Urbanized Bridge in Early Modern
Florence" (Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University,
2006).
2. P. Panerai ("Between the City and the Water," Rassegna, year 13, 48/4
[December 1991], 35) described the Ponte Vecchio as a bridge that "all
but disappears under a vast number of homes and shops which have
been built in an apparently haphazard manner." J. Mesqui ("The City
and the Bridge in Medieval Europe," Rassegna, year 13, 48/4 [December
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over its public spaces and thus over its citizenry. The Ponte
Vecchio's trecento design, therefore, cannot be labeled "pic
turesque," "haphazard," "organic," "ad hoc," or "empirical," and
these qualities must not be interpreted as characteristically
medieval. Rather, they should be seen as completely contrary
to Florentine late medieval aesthetic ideals.
1991], 23) states, "toward the end of the fifteenth century design began
to be taken into consideration with respect to this kind of urbanized
works" as opposed to "the organization of inhabited bridges [that] was
chiefly based on empiricism." He cites the Ponte Vecchio as an example
of the latter. M. Dennis in "The Uffizi: Museum as Urban Design,"
Perspecta, 16 (1980), 72, states: "The Ponte Vecchio?at once a bridge,
street, corridor, and viewing platform?was transformed into one of
the world's truly memorable images by the superimposition of Vasari's
Corridor. Without it the bridge would have been merely a picturesque
jumble of medieval shops and houses, incapable of contributing to the
urban scale. With it, the bridge and the Corridor combine to form a
regular primary structure which controls and gives new meaning to the
ad hoc array of small-scale, secondary elements protruding from the
sides of the bridge."
3. J. Dethier, "Past and Present of the Inhabited Bridge," Rassegna, year 13,
48/4 (December 1991), 11.
4. It is only after September 1593 that these shops were occupied exclu
sively by the city's best jewelers. Before this date, they housed a variety
of professions.
5. Most of the known documentation concerning the construction of the
Vasarian Corridor was published by J. del Badia, Miscellanea Fiorentina
di Erudizione e Storia, 2 vols. (Florence, 1902; rpt. Rome, 1978), 1:3
11. The construction of the corridor was also recorded by A. Lapini,
Diario Fiorentino dal 252 al 1596 (Florence, 1900), 142. See also
Giorgio Vasari's description of this project in G. Vasari, Le Vite de' Pi?
Eccelenti Pittori, Scultori ed Architettori Scritte da Giorgio Vasari
Pittore Aretino (1568), ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1906), 7:703-4. The
most recent study of the corridor is F. Funis, "Scavalcando il Fiume:
La Costruzione del Corridoio Vasariano, Firenze 1565," in Architettura
e Tecnologia: Acque, Tecniche e Cantieri nelVArchitettura Rinasci
mentale e Barocca, ed. C. Conforti and A. Hopkins (Rome, 2002), 59
75.1 would like to thank Ms. Funis for providing me with a copy of her
essay.
6. G. Villani, Cronica di Giovanni Villani, 13 vols. (Rome, 1980), 12:46;
M. di Coppo Stefani, Storia Fiorentina (fino al 1385), ed. N. Rodolico
(Citt? di Castello, 1903), rubric 619a, 224; G. Dati, Istoria di Firenze,
dal 1380 al 1405, ed. L. Pratesi (Florence, 1735), 115; L. Bruni, Pane
girico della Citt? di Firenze (1403-1404), trans. B. Kohl and R. Witt
in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society
(Philadelphia, 1978), 121-75.
7. M. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in
Early Modern Florence (Cambridge, 1997); D. Friedman, Florentine
New Towns: Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1988);
and P. Spilner, "Ut Civitas Amplietur. Studies in Florentine Urban De
velopment, 1282-1400" (Dissertation, Columbia University, New York,
1987).
13
 8. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 29, fols. llv-13
(21 May 1339), published in part by G. Gaye, Carteggio Inedito di Ar
tisti dei Secoli XIV, XV, XVI (Florence, 1839), vol. 1, app. 2, 488. The
flood of 4 November 1333 is described in depth by Villani, Cronica,
11:1. The pertinent excerpt from the commission document of 1339 is
as follows: "ad faciendum et fieri et construi pro ipso comuni quendam
pulcrum et honorabilem pontem de lapidibus in flumine arni in eo loco
in quo consuevit esse pons vetum illius videlicet longitudinis, altitudinis
et latitudinis et eo modo et forma de quibus et prout dictis offitialibus
vel quatour ex eis in alio et aliis abque et inreguisitus vel definitis placerit
et videbit."
9. Villani, Cronica, 12:46: "Nel detto anno 1345, a di 18 Luglio, si compie
di volgere e di serrare il nuovo ponte rifatto sopra l'Arno ove antica
mente era stato il Ponte Vecchio con due pile e tre archi, molto bello e
ricco, e cost? bene fiorini [-] d'oro e fu bene fondato e largo braccia
32, con la via che vi rimase larga braccia 16 che fu troppo grande al
nostro parere, e base l'arcora braccia 2 e le botteghe dall'uno lato e
dall'altro larghe braccia 8 e lunghe braccia 8 e furono fatte in sul sodo
dell'arcora con volte di sopra e di sotto, e furono 43 botteghe, onde il
Commune n'ebbe l'anno di rendita di pigione da 80 fiorini d'oro o pi?,
ch'anticamente erano di legname sportato sopra l'Arno, e '1 ponte stretto
braccia 12 in tutto."
10. Stefani, Storia Fiorentina, rubric 619a, 224: "Questo anno fu rifatto il
Ponte Vecchio di pietre ed archi tre e riccamente. Lo quale ponte rimase
largo 16 braccia, oltre alle botteghe, che vi si feciono suso d'ogni lato,
che furono 43, delle quali s'ebbe di pignone tanto che in meno di 20 anni
francarono la spesa che cost? il ponte. E furono in volta le botteghe per
pi? sicurt?."
11. Masonry vaulting was also required in the commission document of 28
November 1345. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 33,
fol. 69 (28 November 1345). For a discussion of Stefani's reliance on
Villani's earlier chronicle, see L. Green, Chronicle into History: An
Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century
Chronicles (Cambridge, 1972), 90-102.
12. One Florentine braccia is equivalent to 0.58 meters.
13. The following scholars (cited in n. 1 above) all date the Ponte Vec
chio's completion to 1345 based on Villani's chronicle: D. M. Manni,
R. Davidsohn, M. G. Rohault de Fleury, I. Folli, R. Baldaccini, G. Came
rani Marri, P. Bargellini, G. Fanelli, G. C. Romby, D. L. Bemporad,
A. Guidotti, F. Gurrieri et al., and F. Franceschi.
14. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 33, fol. 69 (28 No
vember 1345).
15. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 34, fol. 18v (21 March
1345).
16. Villani, Cronica, 12:46. Measurements of the piazza were taken between
the outer edges of the parapet walls to its east and west and between
the facades of the shops to its north and south. The measurements used
in this analysis come from Rohault de Fleury's drawings of the Ponte
Vecchio as reprinted in Friedman, Florentine New Towns, 210, pi. 104.
More recent architectural drawings of the Ponte Vecchio have been
produced by G. Balzanetti Steiner, Firenze Disignata: Le Strade da Porta
a Porta nella Successione delle Mura Urbane / Florence in Drawings:
The Streets from Gate to Gate Following the Order of the City Walls
(Florence, 2001), 115-21. These drawings are partially freehand and,
therefore, not reliable for dimensional analysis. See also D. Scacaroni,
in Muro e Muri: Tipi e Architetture a Firenze e Dintorni, ed. E. Mandelli
and M. Rossi (Florence, 2002), 108. These drawings of the bridge's ele
vations and lateral section appear to have been produced using modern
survey equipment and, therefore, are likely to be the most accurate.
However, they do not include dimensions and are not accompanied by
a scale.
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17. For a discussion of the Ponte Vecchio's history before the flood of 1333,
see Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio," chap. 1.
18. The virtual squareness of the Ponte Vecchio's piazza was previously
noted in Friedman, Florentine New Towns, 210.
19. This requirement was first proposed in 1248. See ibid., 207; and
Spilner, "t/f Civitas Amplietur" 251-56.
20. Villani, Cronica, 12:46.
21. See Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio," chap. 5.
22. F. Toker, "Gothic Architecture by Remote Control: An Illustrated Build
ing Contract of 1340," AB, 67 (1985), 78.
23. Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 88-147.
24. The date of 18 July 1345 given by Villani can only be interpreted as
recording the date the bridge's vaulted substructure was completed.
Further documentary evidence reveals that its shops were not commis
sioned until November 1345, and there is no known record of their
completion date. For the building history of the Ponte Vecchio, see
Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio," chaps. 1-4.
25. For a discussion of the authorship of the Ponte Vecchio's design, see
ibid., 443-90.
26. M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy
(Oxford, 1988), 95-99.
27. Similar proportional formulas influenced the Renaissance composi
tions of Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forli, Marco Palmezzano,
and Leonardo da Vinci. This evidence suggests continuity between
late medieval and Renaissance approaches to the use of proportion in
artistic design. For a discussion of the mathematical treatises by Piero
della Francesca, see M. Daly Davis, "Piero's Treatises: The Mathematics
of Form," in The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca, ed.
J. M. Wood (Cambridge, 2002), 134-51; and J. V. Field, "Piero della
Francesca's Mathematics," in ibid., 152-70.
28. The Florentines were very well educated. Villani indicates that in the
1330s 1,000-1,200 males were enrolled in the six abacus schools in
Florence. See C. T. Davis, "Education in Dante's Florence," in Dante's
Italy and Other Essays, ed. Davis (Philadelphia, 1984), 137-65.
29. For an introduction to Boethian number theory, see N. Hiscock, The Wise
Master Builder: Platonic Geometry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and
Cathedrals (Aldershot, 2000), 83; M. Masi, introduction to Boethius
and the Liberal Arts: A Collection of Essays, ed. Masi (Bern, 1981),
1-16; and idem, Boethian Number Theory: A Translation of the "De In
stitutione Arithmetica" (Amsterdam, 1983), 11-12.
30. As quoted by Hiscock, The Wise Master Builder, 82. See also Masi,
Boethian Number Theory, 74.
31. Masi, Boethius and the Liberal Arts, 6. For discussions of the use of
Boethian number theory in medieval architecture, specifically at Chartres
Cathedral, St. Michael at Hildesheim, and in the early designs for
Milan Cathedral, see Masi, Boethian Number Theory, 31-38; and O. von
Simpson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the
Medieval Concept of Order (1956; rpt. Princeton, 1988), 21-58. The
influence of Boethian number theory in Italian Renaissance architec
ture was convincingly argued by Matthew Cohen in a lecture entitled
"How Much Brunelleschi? Prior Dolfini's Contributions to the Propor
tions and Overall Design of the San Lorenzo/Old Sacristy Complex"
(annual meeting, Society of Architectural Historians, Savannah, Georgia,
27 April 2006). The use of Boethian number theory in the construction
of the Ponte Vecchio and S. Lorenzo suggests that similar rational plan
ning strategies were employed in late medieval and early Renaissance
architecture.
32. Additional correspondence with this series may be revealed when further
measurements of the bridge are taken, specifically in its details and ver
tical dimensions, which are not dealt with in this study, which focuses
on the planimetric- measurements of the bridge's superstructure because
they are described in Villani's text. An analysis of the bridge's vertical
dimensions is much more complex and will have to take into account
the bridge's slope, which results in an inconsistency of facade heights
from one end of the bridge to the other.
33. A similar sequence is published in Hiscock, The Wise faster Builder,
83. This exact proportional series can be found in Boethius, De instruc
tione arithmetica 1.9, published in Masi, Boethian Number Theory,
80-82.
34. Masi, Boethius and the Liberal Arts, 6.
35. For theological arguments for harmony as a prerequisite for beauty,
see Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, "De pulchro et bono," in De
devinis nominibus, cap. 4, lect. 5; Ulrich Engelbert, "De pulchro," in
Summa de bono; and St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica l.q.39a.8c.
Translations of these texts and a discussion of medieval aesthetics can
be found in A. K. Coomaraswamy, "Mediaeval Aesthetic, I: Dionysius
the Pseudo-Aeropagite, and Urlich Engelberti of Strassburg," AB, 17
(1935), 31-47; and idem, "Mediaeval Aesthetic, II: St. Thomas Aquinas
on Dionysius, and a Note on the Relation of Beauty to Truth," AB, 20
(1938), 66-77.
36. St. Thomas Aquinas, "The Government of Things in General," in Summa
theologica, prima parte, trans, and ed. the Benziger Brothers (West
minster, MD, 1947), 103-19. C. T. Davis, "An Early Florentine Political
Theorist: Fra Remigio de' Girolami," in Davis, Dante's Italy, 198-223.
A more contemporary theorist is the layman Marsilius of Padua (ca.
1270-ca. 1342) who in his Defensor pads (1324) also argued that a
proportional balance is necessary for good government. This idea is
Aristotelian in origin. See "Marsilius of Padua: From Defensor Pads,
1324," in The Early Medieval World, vol. 5 of The Library of Original
Sources, ed. O. J. Thatcher (Milwaukee, 1907), 423-30.
37. For discussions of the scientia of medieval design and its basis in
geometry, see J. Ackerman, 'Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est: Gothic Theory
of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan," AB, 31 (1949), 84-111; and
F. Bucher, "Design in Gothic Architecture: A Preliminary Assessment,"
JSAH, 27 (1968), 49-71.
38. S. Orlandi, ed., "Necrologio" di S. Maria Novella (Florence, 1955),
entry 133 (Fra Ristoro and Fra Sisto), entry 145 (Fra Sisto), and entry
284 (Fra Giovanni da Campi); and N. Pevsner, "The Term Architect in
the Middle Ages," Speculum, 17 (1942), 559-60.
39. This flood occured in October 1269. See Villani, Cronica, 7:34;
Stefani, Storia fiorentina, rubric 146a, 54; and Vasari, Le Vite, 1:351
(Vasari misdates the flood to 1264). Villani attributes the reconstruc
tion of these bridges to Fra Ristoro. This is confirmed by Orlandi,
"Necrologio" di S. Maria Novella, entry 133.
40. Orlandi, "Necrologio" di S. Maria Novella, entry 284.
41. For further discussion of the authorship of the Ponte Vecchio and for
Fra Giovanni Bracchetti da Campi's role in the reconstruction of the
Ponte alia Carraia, see Flanigan, "The Ponte Vecchio," 177-83 and
478-80.
42. See Friedman, Florentine New Towns, 50-61. Evidence that sym
metrical and axial planning was also used to design certain towns as
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early as the mid-thirteenth century can be found in H. Klotz, Filippo
Brunelleschi (New York, 1990), 118 and n. 135. See, for example, the
towns of Pietrasanta (1255), Manfredonia (1256), and Citaducale
(1309). For a discussion of the influence of these Florentine new towns
on urban design projects sponsored by Charles II in southern Italy, see
C. Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples (New Haven, 1994), 104-6. Related
city plans can also be found in the villeneuves and the bastides in
France. I am grateful to the prepublication readers of this article for
identifying these parallels.
43. Friedman, Florentine New Towns, 118.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 79-80 and 117.
46. Ibid.
47. Documents concerning the construction of the shops on the Ponte
Vecchio consistently refer to these spaces as shops {apotece). This can
be compared with references to some of the structures on the Ponte
Rubaconte (now the Ponte alle Grazie) as residential.
48. Friedman, Florentine New Towns, 70.
49. Early historians of Florence including Giovanni Villani were very much
aware of their city's Roman origins. For a discussion of early Floren
tine historians and their interest in the city's ancient past, see C. T
Davis, "II Buon Tempo Antico," in Florentine Studies: Politics and
Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. N. Rubinstein (London, 1968),
45-69; for Villani, see 50-51.
50. See Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 87-147; idem, "Scenographie
urbaine et identite civique: Reflexion sur la Florence du trecento,"
Revue de Fart, 103 (1993), 11-31; and idem, "What Brunelleschi Saw:
Monument and Site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence," JSAH, 47
(March 1988), 14-44.
51. Villani, Cronica, 8:26, as trans, in Klotz, Filippo Brunelleschi, 118.
52. This provision is quoted in Trachtenberg, Dominion of the Eye, 109.
53. See ibid., 18-21 ("planning principles") and his discussion of the ap
plication of these principles to the construction of the Piazza del
Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria.
54. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 34, fols. 13v-14
(21 March 1345), published in part by Gaye, Carteggio Inedito, vol. 1,
app. 6, 497 (misdated as 10 March). See also Florence, Archivio di
Stato, Libri Fabarum 26, fols. 39v, 40v, 41, and 41 v (21-22 March
1345); and Libri Fabarum 27, fols. 28 [29] and 28v [29v] (21-22 March
1345). Communal statutes of 1322 and 1325 already listed several rules
about what one could or could not do on or near the city's bridges. See,
for example, R. Cagnese, Statuti della Repubblica Fiorentina, new ed.,
2 vols. (Florence 1999), 1:158-63.
55. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 186, fols. 143-144
(26 November 1495).
56. Florence, Archivio di Stato, Provvisioni Registri 29, fols. llv-13
(21 May 1339), published in part by Gaye, Carteggio Inedito, vol. 1,
app. 6, 488.
57. W. Braunfels, Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana (Berlin,
1953), 42-44.
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