FIG. 171.—INTERIOR OF ST. PETER’S, ROME.
CHURCHES. The type established by St. Peter’s was widely imitated throughout Italy. The churches in which a Greek or Latin cross is dominated by a high dome rising from a drum and terminating in a lantern, and is treated both internally and externally with Roman Corinthian pilasters and arches, are almost numberless. Among the best churches of this type is the Gesù at Rome, by Vignola (1568), with a highly ornate interior of excellent proportions and a less interesting exterior, the façade adorned with two stories of orders and great flanking volutes over the sides (see [p. 277]). Two churches at Venice, by Palladio—S. Giorgio Maggiore (1560; façade by Scamozzi, 1575) and the Redentore—offer a strong contrast to the Gesù, in their cold and almost bare but pure and correct design. An imitation of Bramante’s plan for St. Peter’s appears in S. M. di Carignano, at Genoa, by Galeazzo Alessi (1500–72), begun 1552, a fine structure, though inferior in scale and detail to its original. Besides these and other important churches there were many large domical chapels of great splendor added to earlier churches; of these the Chapel of Sixtus V. in S. M. Maggiore, at Rome, by D. Fontana (1543–1607), is an excellent example.
PALACES: ROME. The palaces on the Capitoline Hill, built at different dates (1540–1644) from designs by Michael Angelo, illustrate the palace architecture of this period, and the imposing effect of a single colossal order running through two stories. This treatment, though well adapted to produce monumental effects in large squares, was dangerous in its bareness and heaviness of scale, and was better suited for buildings of vast dimensions than for ordinary street-façades. In other Roman palaces of this time the traditions of the preceding period still prevailed, as in the Sapienza (University), by della Porta (1575), which has a dignified court and a façade of great refinement without columns or pilasters. The Papal palaces built by Domenico Fontana on the Lateran, Quirinal, and Vatican hills, between 1574 and 1590, externally copying the style of the Farnese, show a similar return to earlier models, but are less pure and refined in detail than the Sapienza. The great pentagonal Palace of Caprarola, near Rome, by Vignola, is perhaps the most successful and imposing production of the Roman classic school.
VERONA. Outside of Rome, palace-building took on various local and provincial phases of style, of which the most important were the closely related styles of Verona, Venice, and Vicenza. Michele Sammichele (1484–1549), who built in Verona the Bevilacqua, Canossa, Pompei, and Verzi palaces and the four chief city gates, and in Venice the P. Grimani, his masterpiece (1550), was a designer of great originality and power. He introduced into his military architecture, as in the gates of Verona, the use of rusticated orders, which he treated with skill and taste. The idea was copied by later architects and applied, with doubtful propriety, to palace-façades; though Ammanati’s garden-façade for the Pitti palace, in Florence (cir. 1560), is an impressive and successful design.
VENICE. Into the development of the maturing classic style Giacopo Tatti Sansovino (1477–1570) introduced in his Venetian buildings new elements of splendor. Coupled columns between arches themselves supported on columns, and a profusion of figure sculpture, gave to his palace-façades a hitherto unknown magnificence of effect, as in the Library of St. Mark (now the Royal Palace, Fig. 172), and the Cornaro palace (P. Corner de Cà Grande), both dating from about 1530–40. So strongly did he impress upon Venice these ornate and sumptuous variations on classic themes, that later architects adhered, in a very debased period, to the main features and spirit of his work.
FIG. 172.—LIBRARY OF ST. MARK, VENICE.
VICENZA. Of Palladio’s churches in Venice we have already spoken; his palaces are mainly to be found in his native city, Vicenza. In these structures he displayed great fertility of invention and a profound familiarity with the classic orders, but the degenerate taste of the Baroque period already begins to show itself in his work. There is far less of architectural propriety and grace in these pretentious palaces, with their colossal orders and their affectation of grandeur, than in the designs of Vignola or Sammichele. Wood and plaster, used to mimic stone, indicate the approaching reign of sham in all design (P. Barbarano, 1570; Chieregati, 1560; Tiene, Valmarano, 1556; Villa Capra). His masterpiece is the two-storied arcade about the mediæval Basilica, in which the arches are supported on a minor order between engaged columns serving as buttresses. This treatment has in consequence ever since been known as the Palladian Motive.