ETRUSCAN SPEECH CINQUECENTO ARCHITECTURE IN FLORENCE AND THE ARAMEI

The 1550 edition of Vasari's Lives contains an epigraph describing the Sangallo brothers as the champions of Tuscan architecture: "Cedite Romani structores, cedite Graii, Artis, Vitruvi to quoque cede parens. Hetruscos celebrate viros." These verses are actually a meaningful paraphrase of Propertius and were printed when an apocryphal myth about the origins of Florence had reached its greatest popularity: after Giambullari's Il Cello was published in 1546, the fictitious history of how the Aramaic language was brought to Etruria by Noah strengthened the claim for the supremacy of the city. As recent scholarship has pointed out, the questione della lingua in mid-Cinquecento Florence was inextricably intertwined with architectural theory, and this article explores to what extent a neglected generation of architects those of the first decades of Cosimo I's reign - appealed to Etruscan antiquity as a model for their own formulation of a national style.