Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

In St. Andrea at Mantua the use of pilasters instead of columns, and the absence of ressauts in the great order, as well as the substitution of a pediment for the attic, make a great difference in the general character of the design; and yet the triumphal arch idea is even more strongly marked in this case, because it is not confined to the mere façade but extends to the form of the whole porch. The great barrel-vaulted recess is an exact reproduction of the central passageway of the Roman arch, and so are the lesser arches which open out of this recess on either side.

The triumphal arch idea applied to church fronts appears to be peculiar to Alberti. Most other architects among his contemporaries and immediate successors limit themselves to an application of the orders variously proportioned and disposed. In some cases the mediæval scheme of buttresses dividing the front into bays is retained, and this scheme is enriched with pilasters, or columns, and mouldings of classic profiling, as in the façade of the Duomo of Pienza by the Florentine architect Rossellino. In the later Renaissance façades, as we shall see, there is frequently no organic division of the whole front into bays by continuous members embracing its whole height, but superimposed pilasters and entablatures are variously disposed upon the surface without any suggestion, in the composition as a whole, of the triumphal arch idea (as in Vignola’s fronts, Figs. 49 and 50). But in the characteristic Palladian scheme an organic division is formed by a great order of columns reaching to the top of the nave compartment, and overlapping a smaller order of pilasters extending across the whole front as in Figure 54.

The foregoing examples are enough to illustrate the character of Florentine church architecture, and that which was wrought elsewhere under Florentine influence, in the fifteenth century. These examples show us that the designers, while ostensibly striving to revive the antique forms, were in reality working more or less unconsciously on a foundation of mediæval ideas from which they could not free themselves. The inconsistencies of their work are largely due to the irreconcilable nature of the elements which they sought to unite, not appreciating the logic of mediæval art on the one hand, nor the true principles of the best art of antiquity on the other. The classic orders were entirely unsuited to the buildings to which they affixed them. They properly belong to a very different type of architecture which had been developed by the Greeks in ancient times, and the Greeks alone have used them with propriety. The Romans misapplied and deformed them, and the Italians of the Renaissance now surpassed the Romans in their misapplication and distortion. Many further illustrations of this will appear as we go on.

Early in the sixteenth century this architecture began to assume another phase in which the mediæval elements became less conspicuous, though they were not eliminated, and the imperial Roman features were more rigorously reproduced, yet they were never used with strict conformity to ancient models. This phase of the art was inaugurated by the architect Bramante after his settlement in Rome. We shall consider the Roman work of Bramante, in the following chapter.

CHAPTER IV
THE DOME OF ST. PETER’S

When in the year 1503 Pope Julius II came to the papal chair, the architect Bramante had recently settled in Rome. Born in Urbino, he had spent his early manhood in the North of Italy, where he had come under the influence of the Florentine architect Alberti at Mantua, and of the early Renaissance masters at Milan and elsewhere. Under these influences he had acquired a style that was peculiar to the North at that time. But since coming to Rome he had begun to form a new manner under the more direct influence of the Roman antique,[36] and he soon developed a style in which the ancient Roman forms were reproduced with stricter conformity to the ancient usage, and with smaller admixture of mediæval features than had before prevailed.

An early work in Rome in which he exhibits this more rigorous classic tendency is the small building known as the Tempietto in the cloister of San Pietro in Montorio. It consists of a circular cella with shallow pilasters, surrounded by a colonnade of the Roman Doric order, and surmounted by a hemispherical dome on a high drum. It is thus in form like a Roman temple of Vesta with its dome raised out of the abutting drum and set upon its top without abutment. A glance at Figures 21 and 22, a part section and part elevation of the temple of Vesta at Tivoli, and an elevation of the Tempietto, respectively,[37] will show how great a change Bramante made in the adjustment of the vault to the supporting drum, while it will show also the essential likeness in other points between the two monuments. In Figure 21 it will be seen that the vault is well abutted by the roof of the portico, and by stepped rings of masonry over the haunch, while in Figure 22 the drum is raised high above the encircling portico, and the vault is sprung from its top, and has no abutting rings. The architect appears to have realized that such a scheme would be unsafe on a large scale, for in the one which he prepared for the dome of St. Peter’s he took care, as we shall see, to provide strong abutment.

Fig. 21.—Temple of Vesta, Tivoli, from Serlio.

The Tempietto is but a modified copy of an ancient model, and in no true sense an original design. The changes wrought by the copyist are not of a creative kind consistent with true principles of building. The pilasters, and the balustrade with which the order of the portico is crowned, are superfluous, and the work as a whole shows little of Bramante’s real ability as an architect. Such merit as it has is primarily due to the ancient model which he would have done better to have reproduced more exactly.