Francesco da Sangallo and the Identity of Tuscan Architecture

This project examines the long and wide-ranging career of Francesco da Sangallo, heir to a prestigious family of Renaissance architects. An enduring protagonist of the Florentine Cinquecento, Francesco was a privileged witness to the artistic environment of the city and cultivated a ramified network of acquaintances including Michelangelo and Giorgio Vasari. His activity as a polymorph artist necessitates a flexible and multi-faceted approach, one that is essential to this project's focus on a selection of autograph works that vary in scale, technique, and function. The attention to their materiality aims to reshape the possibilities of the monographic study, relying on a "return to the object" and seeking a new definition of context. In particular, the works' differing media and expressive registers are analyzed by questioning the crucial issue of artistic identity, thus highlighting the process of constructing a Tuscan national style as part of the linguistic codification that took place in Renaissance art.