Giorgio Vasari designed this corridor for Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1565 as a literal power trip: its purpose was to provide private passage for the Grand Duke and his family between the Pitti Palace to the south and the Palazzo Vecchio to the north. The product of voyeuristic autocracy and a symptom of popular political unease, the corridor strolls through the city center like a flamboyant chameleon on stilts. It is in turn monumentally expressed and dutifully repressed. The private hallway and its supporting apparatus reorganizes the city in some instances and conforms to contemporary conditions in others. It crashes out of the Palazzo Vecchio and allows the Uffizi breathing room before creating an outdoor enfilade along the Arno, pacing the Ponte Vecchio, sidling around Mannelli Tower, leaping across Via de’ Bardi, lending Santa Felicita a pious hand, and finally sliding into Palazzo Pitti’s flank via the Grotta del Buontelenti.
The first image on the left highlights the passage as it sky-bridges from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Uffizi, which Vasari also designed for the Medici family. The relationship between the Corridor and the Uffizi is curiously ambiguous, internally interlocked but externally offset. As you can see in the image, the Corridor attaches just behind the building’s articulated mass rather than incorporating into it.
The Corridor leaves the Uffizi in the next image to the right. The discernible connection is again absent but this time the gallery turns grandly autonomous as it crosses to the bank of the Arno and marches to the Ponte Vecchio. As it extends the length of the bridge, it paces the shops’ dimensions and uses their barnacle-like conglomeration to cement its connection to the older stone bridge below. At mid-span, the corridor’s pillars frame a view of over the Arno. Without this break in the line of storefronts, it would be difficult for a pedestrian to realize he wasn’t on solid ground. The corridor did not instill this capacity—shops have inhabited the Ponte Vecchio since the medieval era—but it did distinctly change its timbre. On account of foul transit odors, Cosimo I relocated the contemporary meat market (sited for waste disposal convenience) in exchange for the goldsmith shops that occupy the bridge today.
Not all of Cosimo’s edicts were so successful, however. The Mannelli family successfully opposed his call for their tower’s demolition and the next image, second from the right, shows Vasari’s resultant evasive maneuver. Here he cantilevers the corridor out on sporti, wooden struts anchored into stone corbels. This tectonic strategy had been typical in medieval Florence when towers such as the Mannelli’s provided protective cores that could blossom and even interconnect into fortress-like enclaves of related clans.
The corridor next arches across Via de’ Bardi with a Ponte Vecchio-like span (far right of the image second from right). Soon after alighting across the street, the Vasari Corridor passes before a church (image to far right) and disappears into a building development. With only the slightest tidying tweaks of its tectonic language (pietra serena column capitals and sail vaulting), the corridor presents itself as an ecclesiastic loggia. Above the public space thus created, the corridor punctures the façade to deposit a personal balcony over and behind the other participants’ heads. The Medici could thus observe any religious observances without being observed themselves.
*map at top scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's History of the City
