Exterior view

Vasari stated that Baccio went to Rome to study, a trip now dated to 1510-11, and this seems to have been an important stylistic influence. Certainly his architecture after c. 1515 shows a greater, though still limited, awareness of antique and High Renaissance detail. From this date he adopted almost exclusively a particular form of Doric order, the capitals embellished with rosettes and egg-and-dart. Baccio later adopted a more elaborate type with a high neck and fluted collar, for example at the Palazzo Bartolini-Salimbeni (1520-23), designed for Giovanni Bartolini (1472-1544). This was Baccio’s most ambitious building, and here Baccio and his son Giuliano Baglione (1491-1555) also furnished much of the woodwork, including the fine ceiling in the Sala Grande.

The plan of the building is narrow and deep, the three-sided loggia of the courtyard occupying much of the ground-floor space. The layout, as in contemporary Roman palazzi, emphasizes such semi-public spaces, including in this case the ample vestibule on the first floor between the stairs and the Sala Grande, the latter occupying the whole width of the fa�ade. An airy inward-facing terrace runs around the top of the building at the level of the exterior frieze and cornice.

The fa�ade uses Roman motifs in a Florentine three-storey arrangement with rusticated quoin pilasters. The massive all’antica cornice, a literal copy of that of the Temple of Serapis in Rome, gives the impression, as Vasari observed, of an over-large hat. The fenestration derives partly from Raphael’s design, in Florence, for the Palazzo Pandolfini (c. 1514; with pedimented tabernacle windows on the top floor linked by sunken panels and continuous horizontal mouldings), while the piano nobile is enlivened by shell niches between the windows in a manner recalling Raphael’s Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila (destroyed) in Rome. Peculiar to Baccio are the curious superimposed colonnettes attached to the window mullions on the front and the rusticated rectangular window-frames on the side fa�ade.

The photo shows the fa�ade.

View the ground plan of the building.