Palazzo Vecchio

For us Florentine citizens, “Palazzo Vecchio” is that magnificent palace that we admire, photograph but we maybe don’t know in detail. Probably, going inside and understanding it requires many days of accurate study, but sometimes a first step, even an in-depth reading, can stimulate our curiosity. Without dwelling upon the architectural structure or the historical part, renowned and described everywhere, I would like to convey something less known, some uncommon information. The contrast between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, that has always inflamed the souls of the city of Florence is everywhere, and maybe you noticed that the battlements of towers in ancient palaces may be different, they symbolize the affinity with one “faction”: the “Guelphs” decorated towers with square battlements, while “Ghibellines” used dovetail battlements.

And perhaps, we have come to the most mysterious facts: the chronicles of that time narrate that in 1504 one of the most important artistic disputes of the history of art took place in Palazzo Vecchio, in the Salone dei Cinquecento to be exact. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were summoned to fresco the walls of the Sala del Consiglio (Council Hall) with scenes of two key battles in the history of the Republic of Florence, the Battle of Anghiari and the Battle of Cascina. The artistic result of this competitive affair was a wonderful but very delicate fresco, painted by Leonardo using the experimental “encaustic” technique, which gave the master major problems since the beginning: the fresco deteriorated immediately after, letting the colours drain; Michelangelo, on the other hand, never realized his work and the reasons are still unknown. All that remains of these two masterpieces are the preparatory sketches and the tales that pass on the memory of an extraordinary competition between two giants of the Italian Renaissance, and also some copies of Leonardo’s fresco. A detail of the Battle of Anghiari is depicted in the “Tavola Doria” (attributed to Leonardo,) this painting disappeared from the “control” of the Italian artistic patrimony in 1939 and was displayed again in 1992 in a bank in Geneva, where it was guarded on behalf of its new owner, the Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai.

An international agreement with Japan allows the table to be exposed four years in its owner’s country and two years in Italy, in harmonious alternation. The table has been displayed at the beautiful exhibition dedicated to the genius of Da Vinci, which has been the cultural cloak that wrapped the Universal Exposition in Milan, EXPO 2015.

Vasari, a great admirer of Leonardo, painted later frescoes in the Salone dei Cinquecento, and with “The Victory of Cosimo I at Marciano in Val di Chiana” he left an enigma that hasn’t been solved yet. In fact, it has never been established whether he painted over Leonardo’s work, or he “saved” it in honor of the great master. In the top of Vasari’s painting you can observe the detail of a flag with the words “CERCA TROVA” (“seek find”), the most modern interpretation says that the cryptic sentence refers to a verse of Dante’s Inferno.

But this is only one of the many mysteries of Palazzo Vecchio, because in the Sala di Ercole (Hercules Room), on the second floor, there is a painting that depicts the “Nativity with Saint Giovannino” and in the background we can distinguish an unidentified flying object emanating rays of light, basically the depiction of an UFO as we imagine today. The flying object in the sky has an ellipsoidal shape, and all the carbon dating tests attributed the painting to the XV century.

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