Gothic and Neo-Gothic

Around 1243 Bonatacca Sansedoni, an outstanding figure on the Sienese diplomatic and military scene as a Ghibelline, bought a house and tower in the San Vigilio district, between the Piazza del Campo and the Via Francigena. This purchase was an opportunity that Bonatacca and his descendants would enhance with the construction, enlargement, and continuing embellishment of a home that over the centuries revealed itself to be the prime glue holding the family together, its source of social and political prestige, and an unalienable base onto which the Sansedoni family poured all their best energies. In the decades after the purchase the Sansedoni family renovated the hause and built other buildings in the surrounding area (1243-1261). A result of this phase are the most original and in some ways surprising medieval structures in the entire complex: a tower-house, with a skeleton structure based on corner piers, connecting arches and thinner curtain walls, and a new tower, which until 1760 rose to a great height above the tower-house. Between the end of the thirteenth and the first decades of the fourteenth century (-1318), the building was transformed completely from tower-house to palace. The material evidence shows that the work was carried out in two phases. In the first, the tower-house was enlarged on the left, by building another two stories. Twelve trifores were also opened, four on each floor. In the second phase, a new section was added on the left, almost duplicating the existing volume. After this phase of renovation the Sansedoni home had an appearance right in step with the times, demonstrating an immediate reception of the innovations in civic architecture that were circulating in Siena. In 1340 renovations on the architectural complex involved the north side, on Banchi di Sotto. The most information about this work comes from a famous contract assigning the job (the “Sansedoni contract”). The impeccable arrangement of the structures of the new facade is closely tied to the role of representing the prestige of the family that this façade was meant to assume on the most visible street in the city. The medieval palace sailed through the Renaissance and early baroque age practically unchanged up the seventeenth century. But then a real revolution took, as is the case for other buildings overlooking the Campo. The process of transformation was set in motion at the end of the seventeenth century when a grand baroque chapel honoring Blessed Ambrogio, the family’s candidate for sainthood, was built on the first floor on the Banchi di Sotto side. Its creation was the springboard for an artistic endeavor that in the span of about eighty years led to a complete redefinition of the old palace and the buildings adjacent to it (1691-1787). The formula adopted for Palazzo Sansedoni in the eighteenth century is clear: total redefinition in the Baroque style for the interior and the façade on Banchi di Sotto, and preservation of Gothic characteristics on the Campo side, extending this criterion also to the buildings absorbed during the new additions. This is not an isolated case. The same principles had been the guides for the renovation of other important buildings, public and private, between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, to the point of constituting a volume of work of unusual proportions for the Italy of that time: the Archbishop’s Palace (1658-65), the Town-Hall (1687-), the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala (1718-19), the Marescotti Palace (1787-). Was this a true revival or a continuation? We cannot rule out the possibility of building projects in the Gothic style also during the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries in Siena, but certainly none are known up to now. The revival of Gothic forms in Siena, after a period of total or relatively total abandonment, could fit in with the renewed interest in medieval architectural concepts that took place in Italy right in the baroque age. The case of Palazzo Sansedoni probably fits into the category of those, documented also in other parts of Italy, in which the use of medieval stylistic elements in the modern age constituted an element connoting the ancient nobility of the patrons. In the Middle Ages the family had created its fortune, settled on the Campo, and built its house. Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni had lived in the Middle Ages. The building of the chapel dedicated to him at the end of the seventeenth century was the first act in the resurrection of the family pride that was expressed in its urban dimension in the reproposal of the Gothic style in the façade on the Campo.