AN ARCHITECTURAL RETROSPECT.
Under the pontificates of Sixtus IV. and his two successors, Pintelli, a pupil of Brunellesco, ornamented Rome with such monuments as San Pietro in Montorio, the façade of St. Peter, and the Sistine Chapel. He brought to his work the boldness and taste of his master, who had made profound study of the monuments of ancient Rome.
This was the period of the first renaissance, with its charms and imperfections, at once timid and capricious, imitating the models of antiquity in their details, but utterly mistaking the proportions which are the essential, while succeeding brilliantly in the accessories and ornaments borrowed from the ancients and used in profusion with some endeavor to adapt them to the ideas and needs of the period. The fundamental principle of architecture, which requires that the exterior should express or respond to the use for which the interior is destined, was unknown to Pintelli.
To break the monotony of the lines, the façade of any given building was, as it were, framed, decoration was freely used, and the object was to please the eye, no matter by what means. At that day, the architect was also the painter, and the majority of artists were both. The first renaissance obtained its apogee toward the year 1500. In the nature of things it had then outlived its day, and a change became indispensable at the risk of degradation.
Fortunately Bramante was ready to answer the call. He was from Umbria, and Raphael was his nephew. He had studied in the north of Italy, where, amid plains devoid of stone, the architect was forced to use brick. Hence the novelty of combination introduced by him in Rome, whose inexhaustible stone quarries were such ancient monuments as the Coliseum. It is from the absence of heavy building-stone and the contrast of the German taste of the Longobards with the Byzantine style of Ravenna that the Lombard style is begotten. It brought with it precisely what the renaissance most needed, namely, its exquisite sentiment of proportions, and it forms the transition between the two schools of the renaissance, the latter of which formed the golden era of architecture in Italy.
Its reign in Rome has left indelible traces. Its productions—and among them are the court of St. Damas, the Belvedere, the galleries of the Vatican, the Giraud palace—were the pride of the age. They taught the comprehension of proportions, the calculation of perspective, the culture of harmony of detail and ensemble, reformed false taste, and created an epoch in profane architecture. With increase of public security, even the Roman barons began to understand that the greatest beauty of the architectural art might be found elsewhere than in a high tower or a battlemented block-house. Even the mezzo-ceto, or middle class, began to contract a taste for something beyond the absolutely necessary, and sought to adorn even their modest habitations. A private dwelling-house built at this period and exclusively bramantesque may still be seen in Rome on the strada papale, opposite the Governo Vecchio. It yet bears the date of its construction (1500) and the name of its builder.
After the death of Bramante appeared Raphael, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano, and Balthasar Peruzzi, who, prodigal of their treasures of genius, created a golden age.
Romano's Villa Madama became the type of the country-seat; Peruzzi's Farnesina, that of the modern palace. Raphael, more as painter than as architect, composed the designs of the palace Vidoni. It was the great epoch of the culture of simplicity in grandeur, of disdain for the small and the superfluous, of faithful and noble expression of the idea conceived.
The models of antiquity were still followed, but they were transformed. The architect translated modern conceptions into the sonorous but dead and strange language of the old Romans. In interior ornamentation, however, the artist could give free rein to his inspirations, and throw off the trammels of the severe rules scrupulously followed as to the façade and the general composition of the design. Alas! it was here they planted the germs of degeneration and decay. Public taste—never a safe guide—seized upon and clung to these prodigalities of an exuberant and fantastic imagination supposed to be inexhaustible. At Florence, in his work on the chapel of the Medicis, Michael Angelo was the first to enter this flowery but treacherous path.
We see and admire these niches, windows, and ornaments, charming indeed to the eye, but which have no raison d'être. It was at a later period, under the pontificate of Paul III., that the painter of the "Last Judgment" and the sculptor of "Moses" revealed himself at Rome, as an architect stamped his work on the Farnese palace, and astonished the world by reconstructing St. Peter's. Soon this style gained the upper hand. Simplicity yielded to riches; logic to caprice; unrestricted liberty succeeded the voluntary curb which the great masters of the epoch had imposed upon themselves. Presently came pauses. Halts were made. As in all human affairs, action and reaction succeeded. Not so much in details as in ensemble, Vignoli in Rome, Palladio at Vicenza, and to a certain degree Scamazzi in Venice, brought back architecture to the sobriety of the commencement of the century.
But the death of Michael Angelo appeared to have completely demoralized the architects who survived. For thirty years he had reigned supreme. In him alone had the popes confidence; and upon architects employed by them, they imposed the obligation of following him. Piero Ligorio, architect of St. Peter, was dismissed because he manifested an intention to put aside Michael Angelo's plans. In thus officially guarding the manes of the dead master, they apparently hoped to transfer his genius to those who succeeded him. But it was a sad and fatal mistake.
The amount of building effected in Rome during the last third of the sixteenth century has never, probably, been exceeded. In examining the productions of that epoch, the struggle between the servile imitators of Buonarotti and the men of progress, desirous, but through lack of originality incapable, of emancipating themselves, is readily discerned. But let us leave this retrospect, descend the steps of the Pincian Hill, and, traversing the Piazza di Spagna and the Via Condotti, enter