How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

Peruzzi.—Peruzzi passed his early life in Siena, but while quite young moved to Rome and studied architecture and painting. His reputation was established when he built for the Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, a villa on the banks of the Tiber, which is now known as the Farnesina, a design remarkable for its grace and the delicacy of its details. The interior is famous for the frescoes, representing the myths of Psyche and Galatea, executed by Raphael and his pupils, while Peruzzi himself decorated a loggia with frescoes of the story of Medusa.

He was appointed architect of S. Peter’s, though his design for its completion was never carried out. During the sack of Rome in 1527 by the troops of the Constable Bourbon, Peruzzi fled to Siena, where he was elected city architect, and, as the city was preparing to resist attack, planned the fortifications which still in part exist. Returning to Rome, he designed several villas, of which the most important is the Massimi Palace. It is significant of the esteem in which Peruzzi was held by his contemporaries that at his death in 1536 he was buried by the side of Raphael in the Pantheon.

Ant. da Sangallo.—Antonio da Sangallo the Younger was one of the five members of a Florentine family, distinguished variously in architecture, engineering, sculpture, and painting. Coming to Rome when very young he became a pupil of Bramante, whose style he closely followed. Among his most notable works are the church of S. Maria di Loreto, near Trajan’s Column, and the Farnese Palace. The latter, completed by Michelangelo by the addition of a grand cornice, is regarded by some experts as the finest example of a Roman palace.

Vignola.—Distinguished among the upholders of the purity of the Classic style was Giacomo Barocchio or Barozzi, better known as Vignola, from the name of the place in which he was born, in 1507. After practising for some time in Bologna, Piacenza, Assisi, and Perugia, he was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius III, and built the villa Pope Julius, which is now the Etruscan Museum. But the principal example of his style is the Palace of Caprarola, erected some thirty miles from Rome for the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. It has a pentagonal plan enclosing a circular court. Above the ground story the façades consist of two stories, which have rusticated quoins at the angles and are composed of an order of Ionic, superimposed upon Doric. Situated on a craggy projection, overlooking the little town of Caprarola and commanding wide vistas that reach to the Volscian Hills and the Apennines, with the dome of St. Peter’s in the middle distance, this palace is embellished with beautiful gardens, the whole representing one of the most magnificent palace-villas of the Renaissance.

Vignola was one of the artists invited to Fontainebleau by Francis I. After the death of Michelangelo he was appointed architect of S. Peter’s and erected the cupolas. He also furnished the design of Il Gesu, the Jesuit church in Rome, which was one of many erected along the lines of S. Peter’s. His fame further rests on his writings, which include “The Five Orders of Architecture” and a work on perspective. He died in 1573.

Michelangelo.—At this date Michelangelo had been dead nine years, but it is convenient to consider him as the last great architect of the Roman School, for he introduced new elements of design, which in the hands of smaller men contributed to the decadence of the Renaissance style. Architecture played a relatively small part in his titanic and tempestuous career, which through the political confusion of the times and changes of popes, oscillated between Florence and Rome. In the former city he designed, as additions to Brunelleschi’s Medici church of S. Lorenzo, the Laurentian Library and the New Sacristy or Mausoleum which contains the tombs of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino.

In Rome, as early as 1505, Julius II had entrusted Michelangelo with the commission of erecting his tomb. The ambition of the patron and the imagination of the artist united in a project so colossal that S. Peter’s was to be rebuilt to serve as a mausoleum for it. Unfortunately for Michelangelo and perhaps for art, the death of Julius interfered with the project. His heirs desired a less expensive monument and succeeding popes were interested only in the rebuilding of S. Peter’s. After forty years all that had been accomplished of the tomb were the statues of Moses and the “Bound Captives.” “My youth has been lost,” cried the sore-afflicted artist, “bound hand and foot to this tomb.”

Even in the lifetime of Julius the planning of S. Peter’s had been taken from Michelangelo and given to Bramante, and it was not until his seventy-second year that Michelangelo was called in to supervise the work. He adhered to Bramante’s plan and added the supreme feature of the dome, which was completed after his death. Meanwhile, he finished, as we have noted, the Farnese Palace and remodelled the Palaces of the Capitol, the latter being his most characteristic work in architecture.

For in the novel design of these he introduced the so-called “one-order” treatment, abandoning the horizontal lines that mark the stories and carrying up through them a colossal order of pilasters. The effect lends grandeur and unity to the design, but at the expense of a violation of the principle of fitting the character of the exterior to the constructive character of the interior. It was a sacrifice of parts to the whole such as Michelangelo employed in sculpture and by his genius justified. When, however, his example was followed by others who had not his genius, it led to the degradation of style of the Baroque that alike in sculpture and architecture resulted in pretentiousness and extravagance.

The gradual decline from the purity of the Classic style to the showy and meretricious magnificence of the so-called “Baroque” period, was encouraged by the wealthy order of the Jesuits. It was characterised by a growing lack of architectural propriety, an increasing use of heavy and ill-applied ornament, and a general tendency to profusion of details for the sake of display—seen in broken and distorted pediments, huge scrolls, sham marble, excessive gilding, and a general riot of sculpture, often hysterical in its excess of emotional expression. The chief promoters of this decadence were Carlo Maderna (1556-1629), and Borromini (1599-1667), although the latter was an architect, capable also of finer achievement, as is proved by his colonnade enclosing the Piazza of S. Peter’s.