Palazzo Pitti

Luca Pitti (1398–1472), a Florentine banker, commissioned the building in 1458 as his town residence in the Oltrarno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio, and at the time it was raised it was the largest and most lavish house in Florence. Accounts of the man differ: he is described both as a principal supporter and friend of Cosimo de' Medici and as a rival of that family who wanted a residence more conspicuous than the one Michelozzo had just built for Cosimo. The legend attached to him has him insisting that the windows be larger than the main door of the Medici palace and that the courtyard be able to hold the whole of the Palazzo Strozzi. A square was laid out in front of the building, the first made before a private palace in Florence, giving the frontal view from below that Leon Battista Alberti had described as the privileged one.

The attribution of the design has never settled. Giorgio Vasari, writing in the following century, held that Brunelleschi was the architect and that his pupil Luca Fancelli was merely his assistant, and the tradition Vasari passed on has the Pitti approaching Brunelleschi around 1440 and taking up the design Cosimo de' Medici had set aside for his own palace as too grand and too likely to attract envy. Nothing else corroborates that account, and Brunelleschi had died twelve years before building began, so it is Fancelli, his pupil and collaborator, who is now generally credited.

The severe rusticated design was kept in every later addition to the palace and was taken up in 16th-century imitations and 19th-century revivals. Work stopped in 1465. Pitti had suffered financial losses after the death of Cosimo de' Medici the year before, and his political collapse and the size of the debt he had contracted are given as the reasons the house was never completed. The family lived in it from 1469, and Luca Pitti died in 1472 with the building unfinished.

Buonaccorso Pitti sold the palace in 1549 to Eleonora di Toledo, daughter of the viceroy of Naples and wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, later Grand Duke of Tuscany. Eleonora had contracted tuberculosis and suffered lung haemorrhages, her children were sickly and two had already died in infancy, and she held the Oltrarno to be healthier than the crowded centre on the north bank; brought up at the court of Naples, she felt confined by the narrowness of the Palazzo Medici and by the Palazzo Vecchio with its few windows and its unwholesome well water. Cosimo had Vasari enlarge the building, which was more than doubled by a new block along the rear, and in 1565 Vasari built the corridor that carries his name, an elevated walkway running from the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of government, through the Uffizi, over the Ponte Vecchio and past Santa Felicita to the Palazzo Pitti, so that the grand duke and his family could move between their official residence and the new one easily and safely. At first the palace was used mostly to lodge official guests and for occasional court functions, the Palazzo Vecchio remaining the Medici residence; it was under Eleonora's son Francesco I and his wife Johanna of Austria that it was occupied permanently and became the home of the Medici art collection. The move pulled the city's nobility across the river, and the Oltrarno filled with new palaces along via Maggio and via dei Serragli as families followed the grand dukes.

Land on the Boboli hill behind the palace was acquired for a large formal park. Niccolò Tribolo, the Medici court artist, began laying out the gardens and died soon afterwards, and Bartolomeo Ammannati took over. The design centred on an amphitheatre, shaped from the natural fall of the hill and from the pit left by the quarry that had supplied the palace stone; classically inspired plays, among them work by Giovan Battista Cini, were performed there for the amusement of the court, with elaborate sets by the court architect Baldassarre Lanci. Ammannati went on to build the courtyard immediately behind the principal front, linking palace to garden, its heavy banded rustication widely copied and not least in the Luxembourg palace built in Paris for Marie de' Medici. Between 1558 and 1570 he raised a monumental staircase to the piano nobile and carried the garden wings round a courtyard dug into the steep hillside, with the grotto called the grotto of Moses on the garden side and, on the terrace above, a fountain on the central axis where the Fontana del Carciofo by Giambologna's former assistant Giovanni Francesco Susini was completed in 1641.

The courtyard served for spectacle: it was flooded to a depth of nearly two metres for a mock sea fight between twenty Turkish and Christian ships, and it held the celebrations for the marriage of Ferdinando I de' Medici and Christine of Lorraine in 1589. Cosimo I had a chapel of relics built in 1560 for the grand-ducal reliquaries, consecrated in 1616. A competition was held in 1616 to extend the front on the piazza by three bays at either end; it was won by Giulio Parigi, Ammannati's nephew, work began in 1618, and his son Alfonso Parigi finished it in 1631. Cosimo III added the Fonte del Leone, under the Medici grand-ducal crown, in 1696, and during the 18th century Giuseppe Ruggieri built the two perpendicular wings that embrace the square in front, a court of honour on the French model.

The palace remained the principal Medici residence until Gian Gastone, the last male of the line, died in 1737. It was then occupied briefly by his elderly sister, the Electress Palatine; at her death the dynasty was extinct and the palace passed with the grand duchy to the Austrian house of Habsburg-Lorraine. The first Lorraine grand duke had no liking for Florence and never took up residence in the city, while his son Pietro Leopoldo was the first to govern Tuscany in person, with reforms that modernised both city and state, and from 1776 he had the wing known as the Palazzina della Meridiana built on the south side by the architect Gaspare Paoletti.

Napoleon used the palace as a residence when he passed through Florence during his government of Italy. Works were sent from it to France in the Napoleonic removals, and a catalogue published in the Bulletin de la Société de l'art français in 1936 records how several of them fared: the Stories of Jacob and the Stories of Mucius Scaevola by Bonifacio Veronese were despatched but lost on the journey and never reached their destination, as were Paolo Veronese's Moses crossing the Nile and Annibale Carracci's Holy Family, while Bartholomeus van der Helst's Portrait of a Man reached Paris and was exhibited at the Musée Napoléon, after which it was lost sight of while Canova was working on the restitutions.

With the Lorraine restored, the end rondò were laid out and Pasquale Poccianti built a new internal staircase; Gaspare Paoletti worked on the Palazzina della Meridiana until 1813, and a decade later Poccianti completed it, raising its southern front, adding rooms and directing its decoration. Ferdinand III bought a collection of German gold and silver work after his return from exile in 1815, following the French occupation, and it remains in the palace treasury. In 1833, under Leopold II, parts of the palace were opened to the public as a museum.

The Lorraine withdrew after the vote that annexed Tuscany to Piedmont, and when Tuscany passed to the House of Savoy in 1860 the Palazzo Pitti passed with it. Victor Emmanuel II lived here from 1865, when Florence became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, until 1871, when he moved to the Quirinal palace in the new capital at Rome; Florence held the capital for five years, from 1865 to 1870. Umberto I and Margherita of Savoy also lived in the palace from 1865, and it is their arrangement of the royal apartments that predominates today, recovered in a restoration completed in 1993. From the Savoy period there also survives Annibale Gatti's fresco of the Genius of the House of Savoy presenting Italy to the assembly of the other nations.

In 1912 the part of the palace that had been open as a museum since the time of the Lorraine passed to the state, the Savoys keeping only the rooms that now hold the Gallery of Modern Art, which they used on occasional visits to the city into the 1920s. In 1919 Victor Emmanuel III presented the palace to the nation. It was then divided into five separate art galleries and a museum, holding not only much of its own contents but works from other collections acquired by the state. The 140 rooms open to the public are in large part later than the original fabric, made mostly in two phases, one in the 17th century and one in the early 18th, though some earlier interiors remain and there are later additions such as the Throne Room.

On 22 July 1952 the Sala Bianca held the show from which Italian high fashion dates. Nine fashion houses took part, among them Roberto Capucci, Vincenzo Ferdinandi, Germana Marucelli, Antonelli, Carosa and Jole Veneziani, alongside sixteen boutique and leisurewear firms including Emilio Pucci, Luisa Spagnoli and Brioni; a very young Oriana Fallaci reported it for the weekly Epoca.

The Porcelain Museum opened in 1973 in the Casino del Cavaliere in the Boboli Gardens. Restoration through the 1980s and 1990s left the palace arranged as six museums: the Palatine Gallery and the monumental apartments on the piano nobile, the silver museum and the carriage museum on the ground floor, the Gallery of Modern Art on the second floor and the Costume Gallery in the Palazzina della Meridiana, reopened in 2007 after more than a century with Vincenzo Viviani's meridian line and the frescoes Anton Domenico Gabbiani painted for the Grand Prince Ferdinando. In 2005 forgotten 18th-century bathrooms came to light in the palace, their plumbing close in style to that of the 21st century.

The palace is owned by the Italian state and protected as Italian national heritage, and it stands within the Historic Centre of Florence, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. The reform of 2014 brought palace, garden and the Uffizi under a single administration, the Gallerie degli Uffizi, with a director answering directly to the ministry and ultimate responsibility for 250,000 catalogued works of art. The silver museum has since been renamed the Treasury of the Grand Dukes, while the carriage museum has been closed for decades; the Russian icons collected by the Lorraine grand dukes, mostly 18th-century work from Moscow and Novgorod, went back on show in 2022 in Cosimo III's summer apartments on the ground floor. The Amici di Palazzo Pitti, an association of volunteers and patrons founded in 1996, raise funds for the upkeep of the palace and its collections and for the display of what is in them. The palace received 650,612 visitors in 2022.