Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

Externally the composition is remarkably good in its larger features (Fig. [40]). The dome, of slightly pointed outline, on a high drum, rises grandly from the substructure, and is well proportioned in relation to it. The wall surfaces are treated broadly, with no orders carried across them. They are divided into two stages, with a pediment over each façade. Super-imposed pilasters are set on the angles, and a Doric entablature, carried across the whole front, with ressauts over the lower pilasters, divides the two stages. The wall of the lower stage is entirely plain, with a severely simple rectangular portal surmounted by a pediment. The wall of the upper stage is divided into rectangular panels, as in the attic of the Pazzi chapel in Florence, the central panel being pierced with a square-headed window and framed with an order of which the capitals are Ionic and the entablature Doric. The cornice of the top story and the raking cornice of the pediment of each façade are broken into ressauts over the pilasters, and an order of Ionic pilasters, with a very high entablature broken into ressauts, surrounds the drum which supports the dome. Square detached towers are set in the reëntrant angles of the west side, only one of which was carried to completion. The completed one is in three stages, each adorned with a heavy order, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian respectively. In these orders half-columns are coupled with angle pilasters, as in the interior, and the entablatures have ressauts on the angles over these members. An octagonal spire-like lantern, with a tall drum adorned with an order of Corinthian pilasters and surmounted by an attic, crowns the tower. Small obelisks set on the tower angles and reversed consoles against the angles of the attic give a simulation of Gothic form to the neo-classic scheme, and show the strong hold that mediæval ideas still retained upon the minds of the designers. The first of these spire-like towers of the Renaissance appears to be that of the church of Santo Spirito in Florence, which is spoken of by Milizia as the most beautiful of Italian bell towers.[75] It was designed by Baccio d’Agnolo, who, beginning as a wood carver, imbibed the new enthusiasm for the antique, and after studying the ancient monuments of Rome[76] began the practice of architecture. This campanile is thus noteworthy as the first of a large class of modern towers with spires of which Wren’s famous steeples were the ultimate outcome. The scheme is based on the mediæval campanile, the earliest form of which is the Lombard Romanesque tower. The Lombard tower is characterized by its simple rectangular outline, the walls rising sheer from the ground to the cornice, and strengthened and adorned with shallow pilaster-strips, corbelled string-courses marking the successive stories, and by small grouped openings. The tower of Santa Maria Novella in Florence is designed on this model, and the neighbouring tower of Prato and Giotto’s famous campanile are later and richer modifications of the same type. In the tower of Santo Spirito (Fig. [41]) Baccio d’Agnolo has taken the Lombard scheme and clothed it with a pseudo-classic dress. While his classic details have much of that elegance which belongs to the best Italian work, they are out of place in such a structure. The tall pilaster-strips of the mediæval tower gave an expression as of an organic skeleton running through the building. They had been developed out of the classic pilaster to meet the needs of the mediæval type of structure, and in substituting the superimposed classic orders for the appropriate continuous members, the artist did violence to the true principles of design.

Fig. 41.—Tower of Santo Spirito.

The lantern with which this tower is crowned is an adaptation of Brunelleschi’s lantern on the dome of the cathedral, but made more aspiring in form, so that the general outline is like that of a Gothic spire. But the form of a Gothic spire is far removed from anything that is proper to classic composition.

Returning to San Biagio, it may be said that the orders here have a closer conformity with those of classic antiquity than occurs in the earlier monuments already mentioned, except the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio by Bramante.

Fig. 42.—Santissima Annunziatta, Arezzo.

In the nave of the church of Santissima Annunziatta in Arezzo, the same architect produced a different design. The nave (Fig. [42]), of only three bays, is covered with a barrel vault, and the aisles have small domes on pendentives. The supporting piers are square with a shallow Corinthian pilaster on the face of each and an entablature passing over the crowns of the arches. The archivolts are deep, and each one is moulded on the face and plain on the soffit. These are carried on plain pilasters with simple impost mouldings. The wall above the entablature is plain and unbroken, except by a round-arched window over each bay of the ground story, and is crowned with a heavy cornice from which the vaulting springs. We have here a structural system of imperial Roman massiveness, necessitated by the use of the great barrel vault.

After the early part of the sixteenth century Italy produced few architects of a high order of genius. Most of the more advanced neo-classic art is the work of mediocre men who, while professing to be ardent advocates of grammatical correctness according to the ancient rules, were hardly less capricious in their misuse of classic elements than their predecessors had been. To enter upon the examination of any large number of buildings in this later Renaissance style would be tedious and unnecessary; but in addition to what we have already seen of it in the work of Michael Angelo in St. Peter’s, we may give some attention to a few characteristic works of the two leading architects of the later time: Vignola and Palladio.

Few men did more to make the neo-classic ideas authoritative than Giacomo Barrozzi, called Vignola. Beginning like so many others with painting, Vignola was led early to the study of architecture, in which he strove to gain an exact knowledge of classic Roman forms by drawing and measuring the remains of the ancient edifices. He thus became a devoted partisan of the antique, and he wrote a treatise on the Five Orders which has been widely accepted as an authoritative guide in modern architectural practice. To him, says Milizia, “Architecture is under lasting obligations because he established it upon system, and prescribed its rules.”[77] And the same author tells us further that Vignola “purified architecture from some abuses which neither his contemporaries nor the ancients had perceived”; yet nevertheless, he adds, “his book has produced more harm than good, for to make the rules more general, and more easy of application, he has altered the finest proportions of the antique.” No system of architecture, Milizia says further, “is more easy than that of Vignola, but the facility of it is obtained at the expense of architecture itself.”