The Renaissance
Antiquity is reborn in Florence and spreads across Europe through books and builders.
In 15th-century Florence, architects began measuring the ruins of antiquity and reading Vitruvius. Their aim was an architecture founded on reason, measure and harmony. By way of Rome, printed books and travelling builders it reached the châteaux of France, the Escorial in Spain and the great houses of England.
The Renaissance revived the classical orders, the round arch, the dome and symmetry.
Brunelleschi’s dome over Florence Cathedral was built in 1420–1436 without scaffolding from the ground.
The architect became a learned artist who wrote theory and drew on paper.
The Florentine palazzo – a cube around a courtyard – became a model for the whole of Europe.
Michelangelo broke the rules and paved the way for Mannerism and the Baroque.
Palladio’s villas and books spread across the world.
In the north, the decoration – gables, portals, ornament – was adopted first, rather than the system.
Philip II’s El Escorial (1563–1584) is monastery, palace and royal mausoleum in a severe, almost undecorated Renaissance.
Inigo Jones brought Palladio’s classicism to England in the 1610s.
Netherlandish builders carried the gables and portals of the Renaissance on to Germany and Scandinavia.
Florence. Filippo Brunelleschi, trained as a goldsmith, solved the problem of the cathedral dome in Florence in 1420–1436. The opening was too wide to be spanned with ordinary timber centring, so he built a double dome of brick, laid in a herringbone pattern that held the courses in place while the mortar set, and bound together by rings of stone and timber. He also designed hoisting machines for the work. At the same time he built the first interiors in the new style: the Foundling Hospital (Ospedale degli Innocenti) of 1419, with a light loggia of round arches on slender columns, and the churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. Grey stone, pietra serena, set against white plaster marks out the lines of the space, and the dimensions follow simple ratios, so that the whole building can be read as a system of squares and cubes. The result was a clarity and calm that contrasted with the height and mystical light of the Gothic. The Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce shows the same ideas in a small space beneath a dome. Florence was a republic of merchants and bankers, where families such as the Medici paid for churches, chapels and art. The Renaissance was therefore also a way for a new elite to display learning and status.
Perspective and the ideal city. Around 1415, with an experiment in front of the Baptistery in Florence, Brunelleschi demonstrated how to construct a single-point perspective, in which all lines meet at a vanishing point. Masaccio used the method in his fresco of the Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, and Alberti described it in a book on painting in 1435. Perspective transformed both painting and architecture: space was to be taken in from a single point, and buildings were now drawn in plan, elevation and section before they were built. Paintings of ideal cities from Urbino, dating from the late 15th century, show empty squares with symmetrical buildings around a central round church. Filarete designed a star-shaped ideal city, Sforzinda, for the Duke of Milan. In 1459–1462 Pope Pius II had his home village of Corsignano rebuilt as Pienza, with a cathedral, papal palace, bishop's palace and town hall arranged around a trapezoidal square by the architect Bernardo Rossellino – the first planned Renaissance town. Later the ideal city often became a fortress, since cannon demanded bastions: Palmanova, founded in 1593 in north-eastern Italy, has a nine-pointed star shape. The same art of fortification reached the Nordic countries, and star-shaped ramparts can still be seen in Kristianstad and in the old town plan of Gothenburg.
The palazzo. The wealthy families of Florence built town palaces as a new kind of building. The Florentine palazzo is a cube around an inner courtyard with arcades. The ground floor has rough, rusticated stone that gives a heavy, defensible impression, the upper floors are smoother, and at the top a massive cornice caps the whole block. The windows are arranged in regular rows. Palazzo Medici, designed by Michelozzo and begun in 1444, became the model. Leon Battista Alberti gave Palazzo Rucellai pilasters in three orders, one for each storey, in the same way as the Colosseum. Palazzo Strozzi, begun in 1489, is the type in its most monumental form. In Urbino Duke Federico da Montefeltro built a palace with a bright arcaded courtyard and a small study, a studiolo, panelled in intarsia showing books and instruments in perspective. The ground floor was often used for business and storage, the piano nobile – the first floor – for receiving guests, and the upper floors for the family and servants. The type spread across Europe and lived on in the banks, clubs and apartment blocks of the 19th century.
Alberti. Leon Battista Alberti, born in 1404, was a humanist who wrote on painting, the family and mathematics before becoming an architect. His book on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, was completed around 1452 and printed in 1485. It draws on Vitruvius but is an independent theory: beauty is a harmony of the parts in which nothing can be added or taken away without making the whole worse, and ornament, above all the columns, is a kind of adornment that is added. Alberti often worked at a distance and let others direct the building work. He solved a difficult problem: how to give a church with a tall nave and low aisles a classical façade. At Santa Maria Novella in Florence he placed large volutes that link the broad lower storey with the narrower upper one, a device that came to be used on countless churches, especially in the Baroque. In Rimini he encased a Gothic church in a shell of Roman triumphal arches, and in Sant'Andrea in Mantua, begun in 1472, he used the triumphal arch both on the façade and as the motif for the chapels along a vast barrel-vaulted space. He showed that the forms of antiquity could be used for entirely new purposes.
The High Renaissance in Rome. Around 1500 the centre shifted to Rome, where the popes wanted to make the city the new capital of Christendom in ancient splendour. Donato Bramante, who came from Milan, built the Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio around 1502, a small round temple with a ring of Doric columns and a dome, on the spot where, according to tradition, the apostle Peter was crucified. It became the image of the perfect building. In 1506 Pope Julius II laid the foundation stone of a new St Peter's, and Bramante designed it as a huge centrally planned building: a Greek cross beneath a dome. The ideal of the Renaissance was precisely the centrally planned building, round or cruciform around a dome, as an image of the order of the world and of God. After Bramante's death in 1514 a succession of architects took over, among them Raphael and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and the plan was changed several times. Raphael also designed villas, and Sangallo began the mighty Palazzo Farnese. The Sack of Rome in 1527, when the emperor's troops took the city, interrupted the work and scattered the artists. The High Renaissance was brief, perhaps thirty years, but it set a standard for what monumental classical architecture should be, and for centuries to come Rome was the city architects travelled to in order to study.
Michelangelo and Mannerism. Michelangelo was a sculptor and painter before he became an architect, and he treated the building as a body with muscles and tensions. He broke the rules deliberately. In the vestibule of the Laurentian Library in Florence, from the 1520s, the columns are recessed into the wall instead of standing in front of it, brackets sit where they support nothing, and the staircase pours out into the room like a stream of lava. He designed the square on the Capitoline Hill in Rome with three palaces around a trapezoidal piazza, and there used the giant order, pilasters rising through two storeys. In 1547 he took over St Peter's, returned to a central plan and gave the dome its form; it was completed in 1590 by Giacomo della Porta. The style that played with the rules of the Renaissance is called Mannerism. In Mantua Giulio Romano built Palazzo Te, where triglyphs appear to slip down out of the frieze and the walls seem to collapse in the Sala dei Giganti – a joke for those who knew the rules. Mannerism was an art for connoisseurs, which assumed that the viewer knew how things ought to look. It led on towards the Baroque, but also lived on in the pattern books and fanciful ornament of northern Europe.
Palladio. Andrea Palladio, born in Padua in 1508 and trained as a stonemason, became the most imitated architect of the 16th century. In Vicenza he encased the city's medieval town hall in two storeys of loggias with a motif that has taken his name: a round arch flanked by two narrow flat-topped openings, the Palladian window or serliana. He built villas for Venetian noblemen who were to manage their estates on the mainland, and gave them temple fronts as if they were ancient sanctuaries. Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza, begun in the 1560s, has such a portico on each of its four sides around a central domed hall. Villa Barbaro at Maser combines residence and farm, with low wings for storage and stables. In Venice he designed the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, with façades of interlocking temple fronts. His “Four Books of Architecture” of 1570 had clear woodcuts that could be copied, and they were translated and spread across the world. Inigo Jones brought the style to England with the Queen's House at Greenwich in the 1610s, and Palladianism became dominant in 18th-century England. From there it reached the American plantations, the White House and manor houses across northern Europe with their symmetrical main buildings and wings.
Venice. Venice went its own way. The city stood on piles in the lagoon, and its houses turned light, open façades towards the canals. Jacopo Sansovino, who came to Venice after the Sack of Rome in 1527, designed the Marciana library on the Piazzetta with two storeys of arcades and a rich frieze, and Palladio gave the city the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore, where two temple fronts are interlocked to solve the problem of a tall nave and low aisles. On the mainland Palladio built villas for Venetian noblemen who ran farms, with temple fronts that turned farmhouses into monuments. The Villa La Rotonda outside Vicenza has four identical façades and a dome in the middle. Venice shows that the Renaissance was not a uniform style but a shared grammar that each city spoke with its own accent.
The books that spread the style. The Renaissance was the first style to be spread through printed books. From 1537 Sebastiano Serlio published a series of illustrated books on architecture, with orders, ancient buildings, portals and houses for different social classes. He later worked in France, and his images were used by master builders all over Europe. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's rule book on the five orders of 1562 showed exactly how columns and entablatures were to be constructed, and it was used in architectural training for several hundred years. Palladio's books of 1570 and later Vincenzo Scamozzi's completed the picture. In the north, pattern books of ornament became even more important. In the 1560s and 1570s the Antwerp artist Hans Vredeman de Vries published books of gables, perspectives, cartouches and strapwork – patterns that look like cut leather or wrought iron with rivets. Wendel Dietterlin's Architectura of the 1590s pushed the fantasy further, with orders overloaded with figures. That is why the Vasa castles and the Danish palaces often resemble Netherlandish and German buildings more than Italian ones: the master builders copied the ornament but not necessarily the system of proportion. Books also meant that a patron far from Italy could choose a design from a book and have a local stonemason carry it out.
The châteaux of France. The Renaissance came to France with the kings' military campaigns in Italy from 1494. French noblemen and kings saw the Italian palaces and gardens and wanted the same splendour at home. Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years at Amboise. In the Loire Valley châteaux were built that combined the round towers, moats and steep roofs of the medieval castle with Italian pilasters, window surrounds and ornament. Chambord, begun in 1519 for Francis I, has a symmetrical plan, a double spiral staircase at its centre on which two people can go up and down without meeting, and a roof crowded with chimneys, lanterns and turrets like a small town. Chenonceau spans the river Cher with a gallery. At Fontainebleau the Italians Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio worked on the Gallery of Francis I, where stucco and painting are combined – a style that spread through engravings and became known as the School of Fontainebleau. In Paris Pierre Lescot began rebuilding the Louvre in 1546 with a façade more classical and refined than anything previously seen in France. The French château, with wings around a courtyard and a high roof, became an intermediate form between Italy and the north and an important model for palaces across northern Europe.
Spain and the Escorial. In the 16th century Spain was the most powerful realm in the world, with silver and gold from the Americas. The early Spanish Renaissance is called Plateresque, because its ornament is so fine that it resembles silverwork; the façade of the university in Salamanca is an embroidery of medallions, coats of arms and scrolls. In Granada Charles V built a palace with a circular courtyard in the middle of the Alhambra, one of the purest Renaissance buildings outside Italy. His son Philip II wanted something else. El Escorial outside Madrid, built in 1563–1584 to designs by Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera, is monastery, palace, library and royal mausoleum in a single vast rectangle of grey granite, almost without decoration. The severe style named after Herrera long shaped public building in Spain and in its American colonies. Recognise it by the long, plain façades, the corner towers with pointed roofs and the sparing use of the classical orders.
The Renaissance north of the Alps. In the Netherlands, Germany and England the decoration was adopted first, rather than the system. The tall gables, steep roofs and brick walls of the Gothic lived on, but acquired volutes, obelisks, pilasters and portals with columns. Antwerp was the richest trading city in the north in the 16th century, and its town hall of 1561–1565 by Cornelis Floris, with a classical central section and rows of windows, became a model for northern European town halls. In Heidelberg the castle was given a façade in the 1550s, the Ottheinrichsbau, full of statues in niches and orders on several storeys. Augsburg Town Hall by Elias Holl, of 1615–1620, is one of the few German works that truly embraces Italian classicism. In England the courtiers of Elizabeth I built large symmetrical country houses with enormous windows; Hardwick Hall, from the 1590s, is said to be “more glass than wall”. In the Netherlands a style developed with red brick and bands of pale stone, stepped and scrolled gables and richly ornamented portals, often called Dutch Renaissance. Because of the Reformation, few new churches were built in Protestant countries; the major building work was on palaces, town halls, guildhalls and merchants' houses. It was this northern Renaissance, rather than Florence and Rome, that shaped northern Europe.
Inigo Jones and England. For a long time England received the Renaissance as decoration. Under Queen Elizabeth I courtiers built great houses with symmetrical façades and huge windows; Hardwick Hall, from the 1590s, was said to be “more glass than wall”. The first Englishman to understand the Renaissance as a system was Inigo Jones. He had travelled in Italy, studied Palladio’s buildings and read his books pen in hand. The Queen’s House in Greenwich, begun in 1616, and the Banqueting House in Whitehall, completed in 1622, are cubic, symmetrical and sparingly decorated, and they looked utterly foreign among London’s timber-framed houses. In the 1630s Jones also laid out Covent Garden as London’s first square on the Italian model. His Palladianism was forgotten for a time during the Baroque, but it was taken up again in the 18th century and spread from England to North America.