History

Tommaso Spinelli was among the most powerful Florentine bankers of the mid-fifteenth century: banker to the papacy, financier of Santa Croce’s second cloister and a chapel inside the church, owner of properties in Rome and a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice. His commission for Borgo Santa Croce was at the peak of that prosperity, and the architect he chose — Bernardo Rossellino, already active at Santa Croce for the same patron — was among the most accomplished of the generation trained under Brunelleschi and Alberti. The attribution has been contested (the name of Simone del Pollaiuolo, called Il Cronaca, has also been raised), but the palazzo’s design is consistent with Rossellino’s documented work in scale and in the handling of the portal.

The palazzo passed out of Spinelli hands at the end of the nineteenth century, passing by inheritance to the Rasponi di Ravenna and then, from 1934, to the Marchesi Malenchini, who commissioned a restoration by the Livornese architect Lando Bartoli. Further works by Mannelli and Cesare Benini in the 1920s and by Bartoli again between 1962 and 1965 modified the interior distribution while preserving the facade. In 1978, the piano nobile was occupied by the Istituto per l’Arte e il Restauro — one of Italy’s principal schools for the conservation of art, architecture, and heritage objects — which maintained its headquarters here until 2010.