Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola
Vignola wrote a textbook on the five orders of columns that was used in Europe for three hundred years. He designed the Jesuit church of Il Gesù, which became the template for Baroque churches, and the Villa Farnese at Caprarola with its round courtyard.
Giacomo Barozzi was born in 1507 in Vignola near Modena, from which he took his name. He trained as a painter in Bologna but turned to architecture. In the 1530s he came to Rome, where he measured ancient buildings for an academy that studied Vitruvius. He worked for a time in France at the court of Francis I at Fontainebleau, where he helped make bronze casts of ancient statues. Back in Italy he received commissions from Pope Julius III and then from the Farnese family, who became his most important patrons.
For Julius III he built the Villa Giulia in Rome, a villa with semicircular courtyards and a sunken nymphaeum. For Cardinal Alessandro Farnese he converted a pentagonal fortress at Caprarola into a palace with a round courtyard and a spiral staircase. He continued the work on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome and succeeded Michelangelo on the building of St Peter’s. Il Gesù, the Jesuits’ principal church, was begun to his designs in 1568, with a wide nave, side chapels and a dome. His book Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura, on the five orders, was published in 1562.
Vignola died in Rome in 1573. His book was easy to use, with engravings showing each order in exact proportions, and it became the standard work for architects, master builders and joiners throughout Europe. It was translated into many languages and printed in hundreds of editions. In Sweden Vignola’s orders were used in teaching at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and by builders well into the 19th century. Il Gesù became the model for Jesuit churches in Europe and America and for early Baroque in general. Vignola is regarded as one of the architects who carried the Renaissance over into the Baroque.