Florence, 1565. In five months, just in time for the wedding of the crown prince Francesco de' Medici to Joanna of Austria, an elevated corridor about a kilometre long takes shape above the city's rooftops: it starts at Palazzo Vecchio, crosses the first floor of the Uffizi, runs above the shops of the Ponte Vecchio, skirts a medieval tower whose owners, the Mannelli family, refuse to give it up, and arrives at Palazzo Pitti. Cosimo I de' Medici wants it for a precise reason: to be able to walk from his residence to the seat of government without ever stepping into the street, without ever being exposed. The man who manages to build it in record time is Giorgio Vasari, his trusted architect and painter — and, at the same time, the first art historian in Western history.
A painter who invents a discipline
Vasari is born in Arezzo in 1511 and trains as a painter, an indirect pupil of Michelangelo, whom he admires his whole life. He works as a court artist for the Medici in Florence, frescoing among other things the Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio, but his most lasting work is not a painting: it is a book. In 1550, and then in an expanded second edition in 1568, he publishes The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a collection of biographies running from Cimabue to his own contemporaries. It is the first book to tell the history of art as a continuous path, with progress and a culmination — which for Vasari is, naturally, Michelangelo — and he himself introduces the term «rebirth», from which the word Renaissance derives.
As an architect, Vasari is more pragmatic than innovative: he does not invent a new language, as Brunelleschi or Bramante had before him, but efficiently applies the classical orders to complex programmes, often under enormous time pressure from his patrons. The Uffizi, his most important project, are born in 1560 as an administrative headquarters: the very name, «uffizi», means offices. Cosimo I wants to gather Florence's thirteen magistracies, until then scattered across different premises around the city, into a single building.
A street with two arms, narrow and very long
The Uffizi project, begun in 1560, has an unusual plan: two long parallel wings, joined by a loggia on the short side facing the Arno, forming a kind of narrow, elongated piazza-corridor stretching toward Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari uses a repeated architectural order with great discipline, columns and pilasters marking the rhythm of the windows along the building's entire length, and lets the perspective itself, open onto the river, become the main scenographic element, more than any decoration. It is a project designed for bureaucracy, but handled with the same compositional rigour as a noble palace.
The Vasari Corridor, built five years later, is a work of urban engineering more than pure architecture: it has to cross already existing buildings, pass over a medieval bridge covered with butchers' shops (which Cosimo I later has replaced with goldsmiths, considered more fitting for a grand-ducal passage, a decision at the root of the Ponte Vecchio's goldsmith tradition still alive today), and skirt, in an abrupt curve, the Mannelli tower, the only family that refuses to sell its property to the Grand Duke, forcing Vasari into a compromise still visible today at one corner of the route.
A double legacy: stone and word
Vasari dies in Florence in 1574, leaving two legacies that continue to intertwine. As an architect, the Uffizi will become in the eighteenth century one of the first public art galleries in Europe, open to visitors on request from as early as 1765, in a building originally designed for bureaucracy. As a historian, The Lives remains for centuries the reference text for understanding how the Italian Renaissance thought of itself: he did not invent the idea of an art history with a before and an after, but he was the first to write it systematically, and every historian of architecture who came after him, including whoever writes these pages, owes him something.
A Medici propaganda palace in Pisa
In 1562, while already at work on the Uffizi, Cosimo I gives Vasari a second commission: rebuild the town hall of Pisa to house the newly founded Order of the Knights of Saint Stephen, a military-religious corps created to fight piracy in the Mediterranean. Vasari transforms the existing medieval building into a palace with a continuous façade decorated in sgraffito, a technique of scratching patterns into plaster to draw geometric and plant motifs without needing paint, cheaper than fresco and more durable outdoors. Busts of six Medici grand dukes appear on the façade: it is not just a functional building, it is a manifesto of dynastic power carved in stone.
The Palazzo dei Cavalieri, today also known as Palazzo della Carovana, still dominates the square of the same name, facing the church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, also designed by Vasari for the same order. Since 1810 the palace has housed the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, one of Italy's most prestigious universities, founded on the model of the Parisian École Normale Supérieure. The façade can be freely viewed from outside all year round; the interior, being an active university, is not open to the public except on specific occasions.