The Building of a Palace
by PIERO DI COSIMO, Oil on panel, 83 x 197 cm
This mysterious panel, owned by the Medici in the seventeenth century, was ordered by the guild of the masters of stone and wood (Arte dei Maestri di Pietre e di Legname) in Florence. This highly sequential and disjointed narrative unfolding in an exotic present is now extremely useful to scholars for its accurate depiction of the construction of an idealized Renaissance palace.