Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

CHAPTER VIII
CHURCH ARCHITECTURE OF THE RENAISSANCE IN NORTH ITALY

While the architecture of the Italian Renaissance assumed the two principal phases that are broadly classified as Florentine and Roman, from the localities in which the conditions and influences that gave rise to them chiefly prevailed, it is also true, as is well known, that other influences became active in various parts of Italy, leading to the production of phases of design that cannot be strictly classed as either Florentine or Roman. No exact classification of these can be made, but the most marked types having distinctly local characteristics are those of Lombardy and Venice.

But before we examine the church architecture of the Lombard and Venetian Renaissance, one small building of exceptional character in central Italy is worthy of special notice, namely, the façade of the church of San Bernardino of Perugia, dating from the second half of the fifteenth century. This work is remarkable for delicate workmanship, and affords a rare instance of the use of colour in the architecture of the Renaissance. It is made up of red and white marble, with points of dark green and turquoise blue, arranged with quiet harmony of effect. But it is a combination of members put together with no regard to structural consistency. The designer appears to have had not the slightest idea that arches and columns, pilasters and entablatures, have any meaning save as elements of abstract ornamental composition to be played about according to his fancy. The front (Plate [V]) is an upright rectangle, crowned with an entablature and a low pediment. A broad pilaster is set on each angle, and the space between is filled with a wide and deep recess having a splayed arch reaching to the entablature on splayed jambs. A smaller entablature at the arch impost crosses the entire front, breaking around the jambs and pilasters, and dividing it into two nearly equal parts. The smaller details consist of panellings and medallions in the splays of the jambs and archivolts, of sculptured reliefs on the tympanum and on the panels, and of shafted and gabled niches sheltering statues on the pilasters. The panels of the splays are flanked with diminutive pilasters which are superimposed with only a narrow fillet between those below and those which rest upon them, and the ornamental framing of the niches is made up of colonnettes carrying rectangular stilt-blocks on which small pediments are set. The elaborate richness of this façade is unusual in the Renaissance architecture of central Italy, except in the smaller compositions of tombs and pulpits, which in treatment it resembles. But profusion of ornament is a marked characteristic of the architecture of the Renaissance in north Italy, to which we may now turn. In Milan and Venice the neo-classic influences were, even more than in Florence and Rome, confined to ornamental details, and in these details the designers of the North had still less regard for classic correctness and consistency than those of central Italy had shown; while the larger structural forms of their buildings still remained essentially Lombard and Venetian. Much of the architecture of the North was, it is true, the work of architects from central Italy, but these architects were so far influenced by local tastes and conditions as to produce designs very different in character from those of Florence or of Rome.

A characteristic early example of this Northern Renaissance design in its most florid form is the well-known façade of the church of the Certosa of Pavia, dating from the close of the fifteenth century. The effect of this front is in its larger parts much like that of a late mediæval Italian one, but the details are pseudo-classic with strange admixture of mediæval elements. The general scheme is a reproduction of the pseudo-Gothic façade of the neighbouring cathedral of Milan, having nearly the same general proportions, and being divided into five bays by deep buttresses. The steep gable, however, which in Milan embraces the whole front, is omitted, and in its stead a horizontal cornice crowns the three central bays, and this, together with the strongly marked horizontal lines below, greatly modifies the general effect of the composition. In the smaller details there is no likeness between the two façades, that of Pavia showing a survival of Lombard Romanesque forms with the pseudo-classic elements ingrafted on them. A prominent feature of the Lombard Romanesque architecture is the diminutive open arcade. This feature is extensively employed in the mediæval portions of the church to which this façade is the western enclosure, and it is reproduced, with neo-classic modifications, at the top of each of the two principal stages into which the façade is divided. The arches are here carried on small piers, and are framed with diminutive pilasters and entablatures. The portal has a pair of free-standing Corinthian columns on each side, bearing a ressaut of an entablature which spans the opening, and from these ressauts an arch is sprung with spandrels in relief crowned with a classic cornice. In each one of the other bays of the ground story a rectangular window, with classic mouldings and a cornice of classic profile, is subdivided in the mediæval manner with two small arches on a central column and jamb shafts. These last have a tapering form, with a profusion of carved ornament in high relief, and are like the shafts of candelabra (Fig. [78]). The mediæval feature of a large circular opening over the central portal is enclosed within a rectangle surmounted by an entablature and a classic pediment, while this compound is flanked on either side by a pair of arches opening beneath a larger arch. To all this mixture of Romanesque and neo-classic features a pseudo-Gothic character is superadded by statues set in niches of the buttresses, and spiky pinnacles over the lateral bays. The details of this overelaborate composition, the work of several successive architects, have no merit in themselves, and the work as a whole is trivial and unmeaning.

Fig. 78.—Certosa of Pavia.

Among the monuments of the early Renaissance in Milan are several of importance, and of these the church and sacristy of San Satiro are of special interest because they are said to have been designed by Bramante.[104]

The church bears, I think, unmistakable marks of Bramante’s authorship, being a reflection on a reduced scale of St. Andrea of Mantua by Alberti, which there is every reason to believe had been studied and admired by Bramante during his travels in the north for improvement in his art, and a foreshadowing of the great scheme which he subsequently prepared for St. Peter’s in Rome. Like St. Andrea, it has a barrel-vaulted nave and transept, with a dome on pendentives over the crossing. The aisles have groined vaulting, and the piers are square and are faced with pilasters. The dome is raised on a very low drum moulded in stucco into the form of an entablature, and the vault surfaces are elaborately coffered in stucco. The church has no eastern arm, since a wall with a much-venerated painting of the Virgin is said to have stood so near the site that space for such an arm could not be had without demolishing it; and as this was not to be thought of, Bramante made a semblance of an eastern arm in the form of a sunk panel with splayed sides, on which he wrought in stucco relief the elaborate perspective which is so noticeable a feature of the interior.

Fig. 79.—Sacristy of San Satiro.