The Quattrocento city: between reality and ideality
The subject of this article is an ideal city in Italy of the Early Renaissance. Starting with the first decades of the 15th century the erecting a new buildings at cities, primarily in Florence which was at that time a very progressive part of Italy, could be seen as a tendency to realize a perfect city on the basis of humanistic conceptions. Even the real situation when medieval patterns of planning and building combined with Renaissance elements in Florence was interpreted from an idealized perspective: the social and political superiority of Florentine Republic seems interflowed with its perfect appearance. Despite the fact that a new type of the city as architectural and planning whole was not devised in Renaissance Italy, the «model» of an ideal city was being successfully developed there in Quattrocento treatises on architecture and vedutas. The author of this article examines the principles underlying the idea of such city with optimal potentialities for man to fulfill its predestination on Earth as it was presented concepts of humanism.