After Agostino del Nero
had bought Roberto Nasi’s unfinished new palazzo in 1552, he hired Domenico di
Baccio d’Agnolo, Baccio’s most talented son, to finish the job. In the second
edition of his Le Vite de’ più eccellenti
pittori, scultori ed architettori (1568), Giorgio Vasari wrote that for
Agostino, Domenico had made on the Piazza de’Mozzi ‘the corner parts and a
beautiful terrace to those houses of the Nasi that his father Baccio had
already started to build’ (‘[…] in sulla
piazza de’ Mozzi le cantonate, ed un bellissimo terrazzo a quelle case de’ Nasi
già cominciate da Baccio suo Padre’). However, Domenico cannot have
accomplished much, because he already died a year after Agostino had hired him.
In documents on Palazzo del Nero, Valentina Catalucci recently found that
Agostino had Davide Fortini, an architect who did important engineering projects
for the Medici, work on the palazzo.* I gather that Fortini succeeded Domenico
as architect of the palazzo and that what Vasari described was all his doing. Leonardo Ginori Lisci, author of the standard work on
Florentine palazzi**, recognized the building as described by Vasari, in a print
with the Del Nero genealogical tree from 1590. (fig. 1)
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