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ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE
Posted Date: 22 May 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Travel & Tourism
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Posted By: TULASI KRISHNA Member Level: Gold
Rating:  Points: 1
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The families who governed rival cities in northern Italy in the 15th century—de Medici, Sforza, da Montefeltro, and others—had become wealthy enough through commerce to become patrons of the arts. People of leisure began to take a serious and scholarly interest in the neglected Latin culture—its literature, its art, and its architecture, whose ruins lay about them.
Early in the 15th century, work on Florence cathedral was still in progress. Piers had already been erected to support a dome almost as large as that of the Pantheon in Rome. A proposal for its completion was submitted by Filippo Brunelleschi, who had studied Roman structural solutions. The dome that he designed and built (1420-1436), and which crowns the cathedral today, is derived from Rome but differs in being octagonal, having an inner and an outer shell connected by ribs, being pointed and rising higher, and being crowned with a lantern. Its drum, pierced by circular windows, stands without buttressing, for the base contains a tension ring—huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps and topped with heavy iron chains. Two additional tension rings are contained within the dome’s double shells. Brunelleschi stood at the threshold between Gothic and Renaissance. His Pazzi Chapel (begun c. 1441), also in Florence, is a clear statement of new principles of proportion and design.
A new type of urban building evolved at this time—the palazzo, or city residence of a prominent family. Palazzi were several storeys high; rooms were grouped around a cortile, or courtyard.
The Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his design for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446-1451), incorporated three superimposed classical orders into the façade, much as in the Roman Colosseum, except that he used pilasters instead of engaged columns. They seem to have been engraved in the wall plane; the resulting compartmentalization of the façade provides a logical setting for the windows. In 1485 Alberti also published the first book on architectural theory since Vitruvius, which became a major influence in promoting Classicism.
Study of Pia Doorway
Michelangelo emphasized the monumental in this drawing, Studio di Porto Pia, (Study of Pia Doorway, 15th century). The drawing is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
In the 16th century, Rome became the leading centre for the new architecture. The Milanese architect Donato Bramante practised in Rome beginning in 1499. His Tempietto (1502), an elegantly proportioned circular temple in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, was one of the earliest Renaissance structures in Rome.
The erection of a new basilica of St Peter in Vatican City was the most important of many 16th-century projects. In drawing the first plan (1503-1506) Bramante rejected the Western basilica concept in favour of a Greek cross of equal arms with a central dome. Popes who succeeded Julius II, however, appointed other architects—notably Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno—and, when the church was completed in 1612, the Latin cross form had been imposed with a lengthened nave. Michelangelo’s dome, ribbed and with a lantern, is a logical development from Brunelleschi’s in Florence. It rises in a high oval and is the prototype not only for the domes of later churches but for those of many state capitol buildings in the United States.
Towards the middle of the 16th century such leading architects as Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, and Giacomo da Vignola began to use the classical Roman elements in ways that did not conform to the rules that governed designs in the early Renaissance. Arches, columns, and entablatures came to be used as devices to create dramatic effects through the manipulation of depth and recession, asymmetry, and unexpected proportions and scales. This tendency, which coalesced in the style Mannerism, is exemplified by the sophisticated Palazzo del Te (1526-1534) at Mantua.
The architect Andrea Palladio worked in and around Vicenza and Venice. Although he visited Rome, he did not wholly adopt the Mannerist approach. In the villas he built for gentleman farmers, he explored many variations on classical norms: governing axis defined in the approach, single major entrance, single major interior space surrounded by smaller rooms, secondary functions extended in symmetrical arms, and careful attention to proportion. They were immortalized by Palladio’s publication The Four Books of Architecture (1570; trans. 1738), in which drawings for them appear, with the dimensions written into the plans to emphasize Palladio’s harmonic series of dimensions that govern the major proportions. These books later enabled Inigo Jones in England and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to propagate Palladian principles among the gentleman farmers of their times. In two large Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and II Redentore (1577), Palladio made important contributions to the adaptation of classic ideas to the liturgical and formal traditions of Roman Catholicism.
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