How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

S. MARIA DELLA SALUTE, VENICE

By Baldassare Longhena. [P. 356]

The decline of taste may have been hastened by the fact that Renaissance architecture involved no new principles of construction. It was essentially a product of adaptation, and with less consideration for structural problems than for external appearances. There was a change in the status of the architect: he ceased to be pre-eminently the master-builder; he became a designer, specifically interested in what one may perhaps call, the pictorial aspects of his building. He was occupied with the composition of his façade, as a painter is with the composition of his picture. He designed it on paper, as an organised arrangement of lines, masses, details, and patterning of light and shade. The days of working out the structural problems in the course of construction and of employing the co-operation of skilled craftsmen, to create the details of decoration had ceased with the passing of the mason-gilds. In their place were workmen, who followed implicitly the drawings of the designer.

And the latter, as was characteristic of the time, had become an individualist, stamping his design with the impress of his own personality. It was revealed not only in the larger elements of the composition but also in the exquisiteness of detailed decorations. Nor was the actual creativeness, involved in this tireless pursuit of the refinements of beauty, confined to the externals of buildings; it was expended with prolific invention on the interior fittings. Thus, churches and palaces alike became museums, enshrining endless objects of beautiful craftsmanship in metal-work, marble, terra-cotta, ivory, and textiles, as well as the mural decorations of the painter.

Museums, however, it is to be noted, which were not, as in our own day, huge storehouses of objects, separated from their original environment and use, but treasure houses of beautiful things that formed part of the habitual life of the people, palaces for those of high degree, churches and town halls for all classes of the community. We cannot enter into the spirit of the Renaissance unless we realise that to all classes of the Italians of the period beauty was a familiar and living element in their lives.

Classic Influences.—The influence of the classic remains began to be apparent in the sculpture of Nicolas Pisano, who died in 1278. It continued in the work of his son and became more marked in that of the latter’s pupil, Andrea Pisano. There are distinct traces of it in Giotto’s painting, especially in the details of the buildings, which are evidently rude imitations of Roman antiquities. That they are rude is fortunate, a proof that imitation of the past was not Giotto’s chief concern. Indeed, the vital thing in Giotto, which made him the leader of a new school of painting, was his effort to bring the arts into closer touch with human nature. It was his pursuit of natural representation and expression which caused him to be a leader in an age that was rediscovering an enthusiasm for human nature; and in this respect he set the main course for the whole of the fifteenth century. The trend of Quattrocento painting and sculpture was to relearn the principles of correct drawing and perspective and to use the growing knowledge and skill for the expression of subjects that, while they were suggested both by the Christian religion and the classic mythology, were informed with the naïve freshness and independence of the expanding Italian spirit.

A corresponding freedom from subservience to antique forms and a truly creative adaptiveness characterised the architecture of the period. It was during the Quattrocento that what is most original in Renaissance architecture was achieved, and the old methods of construction and old details of decoration were successfully applied to the new problems imposed by changed conditions of living and habits of thought. It is by the actual creativeness with which the readjustment was accomplished, as well as by the discretion and refinement of taste, exhibited in the whole and every part of the design, that the architecture of this period is distinguished.