Architecture in Florence: Brunelleschi and the Birth of the Renaissance

Florence is the city where Renaissance architecture was born. The architecture most worth seeing is Filippo Brunelleschi's dome over the cathedral, vaulted in 1420–1436 without centring from the floor, and his loggia at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, which is usually counted as the first building of the Renaissance. With them go Leon Battista Alberti's façade for the Palazzo Rucellai and Michelangelo's library, the Biblioteca Laurenziana, where the rules are turned upside down and Mannerism begins. All four lie within walking distance of one another.

Facts

The Dome Nobody Knew How to Build

Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, was begun in 1296, and in the 1360s it was decided that the crossing would be covered by an enormous octagonal dome, without visible flying buttresses. The problem was that nobody knew how to build it. The opening was about 45 metres wide, and there was not enough timber for ordinary centring. In 1418 a competition was announced. Brunelleschi, a goldsmith by training, had studied the ancient ruins in Rome and claimed that he could vault the dome without centring.

He made it double, with a thick inner shell and a thinner outer one, joined by eight large ribs at the corners, and with stairs between the shells. The bricks were laid in a herringbone pattern, so that each ring supported itself while the mortar set, and rings of stone, iron and wood hold the dome together like the hoops on a barrel. He also designed an ox-driven hoist that could change direction without the animals turning. The dome was inaugurated in 1436, and the feat became the symbol of the Renaissance: a modern architect could measure himself against the Pantheon of antiquity.

Look at the pointed profile, Gothic in form because it pushes outwards less than a hemisphere, the white ribs on the red brick and the marble lantern, begun in 1446, the year Brunelleschi died. The copper ball at the top was made in the 1470s in Verrocchio's workshop, where the young Leonardo da Vinci worked. The dome became a model for St Peter's in Rome and St Paul's in London.

Innocenti: Measurements You Can Read

The year after the competition for the dome was announced, Brunelleschi began to build a home for abandoned children, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, commissioned by the silk merchants' guild. Building began in 1419 and the hospital received its first child in 1445. The loggia facing the square has nine round arches on slender Corinthian columns, and each bay is covered by a small dome.

What is new is the order. The width of the bay equals the height of the columns, so that each bay forms a cube, and the details in grey sandstone, pietra serena, draw out the system of measurements against the white walls. Everything derives from the same measure, and that is why the arcade feels calm and clear. Andrea della Robbia's medallions with swaddled infants in blue and white terracotta were added around 1487. The loggia became the model for the Piazza Santissima Annunziata, where a similar loggia was built opposite in the 16th century.

Alberti: the Façade as a System

Leon Battista Alberti was a humanist and theorist rather than a master builder. He wrote around 1452 De re aedificatoria, the first great architectural book since Vitruvius, in which beauty is a harmony between the parts, so that nothing can be added or removed. He designed, and others built. The façade of the Palazzo Rucellai, c. 1446–1451, was executed by Bernardo Rossellino for the merchant Giovanni Rucellai.

It was the first on a private palace in which the orders of columns were placed one above another, storey by storey, on the model of the Colosseum, here in flat form as a grid of pilasters and cornices. The rustication is flat and incised instead of rough. Compare the Palazzo Medici, built at the same time, with rough rustication and a fortress-like look. Along the street runs a stone bench, and in the frieze Rucellai's emblem can be seen, a sail in the wind. Alberti also gave Santa Maria Novella a façade with large volutes. The difference between pilaster and column is explained in the guide to piers, columns and pilasters.

Michelangelo Turns the Rules Upside Down

A hundred years after Brunelleschi, Michelangelo was commissioned in 1523 to design a library for the Medici family's collection of books at the monastery of San Lorenzo. Building began in 1524, but Michelangelo moved to Rome in 1534, and the staircase was executed only in 1559 by Bartolomeo Ammannati following his instructions. The Biblioteca Laurenziana opened in 1571.

The vestibule, the ricetto, is tall and narrow. The columns do not stand free but in niches in the wall, the brackets beneath them carry nothing, and the windows are blind. The staircase flows out across the floor like lava and divides into three flights. Everything goes against the classical rules that Brunelleschi and Alberti had re-established. The long reading room behind is instead calm and bright, with wooden reading desks that Michelangelo also designed. The room is regarded as a key work of Mannerism and points forward to the Baroque; the path continues in the guide to architecture in Rome.

Architecture and Art in the Same Quarter

Florence is a city where architects, sculptors and painters were the same people. Brunelleschi was a goldsmith and has a page of his own in the art section too, as the architect who rediscovered perspective; how it works is explained in the guide to linear perspective. Michelangelo's David stands in the Galleria dell'Accademia a few blocks from the cathedral, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus hangs in the Uffizi.

A walk can begin at the cathedral and the dome, go north to Piazza Santissima Annunziata and the Innocenti, west to San Lorenzo and the Laurenziana and then south towards the Arno and the Palazzo Rucellai. Brunelleschi's sacristy in San Lorenzo, the Sagrestia Vecchia, and his church Santo Spirito on the other side of the river show more of the same order. Renaissance architecture as a whole is described in the guide to Renaissance architecture, the period under the Italian Renaissance and the buildings on the map.

Florentine Renaissance: What to Look For

Exercise

Which building in Florence is usually counted as the first of the Renaissance?