Painted topographical views of cities and their environs appear throughout the mid-sixteenth-century fresco decorations of the Palazzo Vecchio. This project focuses primarily on the most extensive series, those in the Quartiere di Leone X. Giorgio Vasari and his assistant Giovanni Stradano painted the five rooms of this apartment between 1556 and 1561. The city views take one of three forms in each painting: as a setting for a historical scene, as the background of an allegory, or as the subject of the view itself. The Quartiere paintings present a history of the Medici and their rule of Florence as a legitimization of the new ducal rule under Cosimo I. The topographical portraits promote this historical argument in two interdependent ways: they present its geographic extent and they promote its cogency.

To argue this thesis, the dissertation examines the position of the city views in relation to contemporary historiographic and cartographic practices. It begins by placing the Palazzo Vecchio city portraits within a new school of topographical views deriving from Antwerp, explaining how this type differs in their on-site sketching methods from other survey-dependant types. Vasari used that difference to help build enargeia for the history he presents in the decorations. The sketching proffered a more verisimilar information that lacked the specifics of measurement while capturing the character of the topography. That character permitted greater engagement through memory, thereby heightening the visualization required by historiography. Following three chapters that ground that argument, two sustained studies explain how the city views specific to a single room work in conjunction with the overall decoration. In the Sala di Clemente VII, the views act as settings that subtly manipulate the viewer's judgment of the presented history to present the Medici rule of Florence as just. In the Sala di Cosimo I, the city portraits celebrate the duke's fortification program to protect and make cohesive the Tuscan state. In both, and throughout the decorative program, the city paintings work to enhance belief in the dominion of the duke.