ABSTRACT
Richard Sennett has argued that societys image of the city as a theatre of human action is one of the underpinnings of attitudes to the organization of traditional urban life. The complex of the Uffizi was commissioned by Cosimo I to house the offices of the magistracy, and from this utilitarian function the court architect Vasari conjured an urban composition which produced city-wide resonances. The architectural language in which Vasari constructed the Uffizi and which does so much to contribute to its urban impact is derived from that developed by Michelangelo in the Laurentian Library forty years earlier. In Arezzo Vasari created a civic facade but in the process used the arcade to connect the piazza into the urban network. He thereby employed spatial relationships both parallel and perpendicular to the linear block. The development of perspective, and the visual control of space that it afforded, had its uses and manifestations in both urban and theatrical contexts.
