Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

Fig. 14.—Badia of Fiesole.

The façade of the Pazzi has been considered as showing noteworthy originality of design. But there are older buildings in the neighbourhood to which it bears enough likeness to suggest its derivation from them. The façade of the Badia of Fiesole (Fig. [14]) is one of these. By substituting a free-standing colonnade for the blind arcade of this front, and breaking its entablature and attic wall with an arch, we should get the leading features of the Pazzi front. Sant’ Jacopo Soprarno, with its attic surmounting an open portico having an arcade on Corinthian columns, is also strongly suggestive of the same scheme. The features that are peculiar to the Pazzi, the arch breaking the entablature, the barrel vault sprung from the order, and the dome bisecting this vault, do little credit to the architect as a consistent designer.

Fig. 15.—Impost of San Lorenzo.

Two more important examples of church architecture in Florence, which appear to be mainly by Brunelleschi, are San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. What part Brunelleschi had in the design of San Lorenzo is not perfectly clear,[31] but the main scheme was probably his, though the work was not completed until after his death. In the old sacristy of this church, which appears to be the part that was first built, the interior design of the Pazzi chapel is reproduced with some modifications of proportions and details, including the celled vault on a system of ribs, resting on pendentives. The church itself exhibits a frank return to primitive basilican forms and methods of construction, though with modifications and some additions. The nave has a flat wooden ceiling, but the aisles are covered with domical vaulting on salient transverse ribs, and over the crossing is a hemispherical dome on pendentives. In the arcades, which are carried on Corinthian columns like those of the portico of the Pazzi, the entablature blocks of late Roman design are reproduced in the impost (Fig. [15]). The revival of this meaningless feature shows again how little impression the logic of mediæval art had made on the Italian mind, and what lack of discrimination in their borrowings from the antique the designers of the Renaissance often show. Whatever features the Roman models displayed were looked upon as authoritative, and copied without question; and the frequency with which this superfluous detail was reproduced in the subsequent architecture of the Renaissance has given it wide acceptance in more recent times. Notwithstanding the intention of the designer to revive the ancient style, mediæval features are conspicuous in San Lorenzo, and something of the mediæval logic of structural adjustment occurs in some details. Not only is the dome over the crossing supported on pendentives, which, in their developed form, are mediæval features and thus foreign to classic Roman design, but the piers sustaining this dome are compound, and consist of members of different proportions adjusted in the organic mediæval manner. The members which take part in the support of the aisle arcades are necessarily short, while those which carry the great pendentive arches are lengthened to reach the higher level from which those arches spring. But all of these members have the form of fluted Corinthian pilasters (Fig. [16]). Thus were classic members used in ways that are foreign to classic principles, and their proportions altered with as much disregard for the rules of Vitruvius as the mediæval builders had shown.

Fig. 16.—Crossing pier of San Lorenzo.

The church of Santo Spirito, built after the architect’s death, closely resembles San Lorenzo in its architectural character, though it is larger in scale. The entablature blocks occur in the arcades here also, but instead of a dome over the crossing as in San Lorenzo, there is a circular celled vault on converging ribs, like the vault of the Pazzi chapel. The interior is spacious and finely proportioned, but it presents no features that afford further illustration of the progress of neo-classic design.

The retrospective movement was carried further by the Florentine scholar and architect Leon-Batista Alberti, who, says Milizia, is justly regarded as one of the principal restorers of the architecture of antiquity.[32] His chief designs in church architecture are found in Santa Maria Novella of Florence, in San Francesco of Rimini, and in Sant’Andrea of Mantua. The first two of these are mediæval structures in which Alberti’s work is confined to the remodelling of the exteriors, but the last was wholly designed by him, though the work was not completed within his lifetime, and the dome over the crossing is the work of another architect of a later time.