Renaissance architecture – characteristics and key buildings

Renaissance architecture arose in Florence in the 1420s and is based on ancient Rome: symmetry, simple geometric forms, harmonious proportions, columns and pilasters, round arches and domes. Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, Michelangelo and Palladio are the great names, and during the 16th century the style spread to the rest of Europe.

Facts

Brunelleschi and the dome in Florence

Florence Cathedral had long stood without a roof over the crossing, because no one knew how to vault the enormous opening. Filippo Brunelleschi solved the problem: the dome, built 1420–1436, was laid with two shells and a herringbone pattern of brick that allowed it to be built without huge scaffolding from the ground.

Brunelleschi also designed the Ospedale degli Innocenti, a foundling hospital begun in 1419, with a long arcade of slender columns and round arches. Every bay is based on the same measure, a module. The clear, measurable space became the ideal of the Renaissance.

Alberti and the right proportions

Leon Battista Alberti was a humanist, writer and architect. In his book on the art of building, completed around 1452, he built on Vitruvius and described beauty as a harmony in which nothing can be added or taken away without making the whole worse.

The façade of the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence shows his method: three storeys with pilasters in different orders, one above another, as on the Colosseum. The façade is flat but carefully divided into a grid of horizontal cornices and vertical pilasters. Read more about the orders in the guide to the classical orders.

The High Renaissance in Rome

Around 1500 the centre shifted to Rome. Donato Bramante built the Tempietto, a small round temple on the spot where, according to tradition, Peter was crucified, surrounded by Doric columns and crowned by a dome. Already in its own time it was regarded as a perfect building.

In 1506 the new St Peter's Basilica was begun to Bramante's designs. Construction went on for more than a hundred years and involved several architects. Michelangelo designed the great dome, which was completed after his death. He also designed the vestibule of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, with an idiosyncratic, almost Mannerist treatment of the classical forms.

Palladio and his legacy

Andrea Palladio worked in Venice and Vicenza, building churches, palaces and country villas. Villa La Rotonda, begun around 1567, is square with a temple front with columns on each side and a dome in the middle. It is the building's symmetry taken to its extreme.

Palladio's Four Books of Architecture of 1570 made him one of the most influential architects in history. His forms were taken up in 18th-century England and in the United States, where Monticello and many public buildings are based on his villas. The style is called Palladianism.

The Renaissance north of the Alps and in Sweden

Outside Italy the new forms mixed with local traditions. The French château of Chambord, begun in 1519, has a symmetrical plan but a roof full of towers and chimneys. In Spain the monastery palace of El Escorial was built in a severe, almost bare style, and in Denmark Kronborg took on its Renaissance form in the 1570s and 1580s.

In Sweden Gustav Vasa and his sons turned fortresses into palaces. Vadstena Castle, begun in 1545, is one of the best preserved, with symmetrical façades and rich gables. The period has its own page: the Renaissance. To compare with what came after, read the guide to Baroque architecture.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Who built the dome over Florence Cathedral?