Fig. 87.
Fig. 88.
The nearly contemporaneous church of S. Fantino has the same general character, except that groined vaulting takes the place of domes on pendentives in all but the easternmost compartment of the nave, and the attic story is omitted.
Fig. 89.—Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Venice.
No work of the early Renaissance in north Italy exhibits more refinement in its details than the small church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, the design of which is ascribed to Pietro Lombardo (Fig. [89]). The plan is a simple rectangle with a rectangular sanctuary. The plain walls of the nave are covered with a round timber roof, and the sanctuary has a small dome on pendentives. The interior is richly incrusted with marble and relief carvings of the utmost delicacy, and of unusual beauty of design. The walls of the exterior are divided into two stages by superimposed orders of pilasters on podiums. The pilasters of the upper order carry archivolts instead of an entablature, thus recalling the mediæval Lombard blind arcade, and the walls above this are crowned with an entablature. Over the portal a curved pediment is set against the entablature of the lower order, and the whole façade is crowned with a semicircular pediment pierced with a large round opening and five smaller ones ranged on its semicircumference. The wall surfaces are incrusted with marble panelling set with disks and lesser panels of cruciform and rectangular shapes in faintly coloured marbles, and the whole building is a marvel of excellence in mechanical execution. But the use of the inappropriate superimposed orders falsifies the design by giving it the appearance of two stories while in reality it has only one.
The façade of Santa Maria Formosa exhibits another phase of early Renaissance design in Venice. This façade is noticeable as reproducing some of the larger features of Alberti’s west front of St. Andrea of Mantua with details having the character of the works of the Lombardi. The great central arch of St. Andrea is omitted here, and the existing portal is an alteration of a later time in a style that does not agree with the rest of the design. The three compartments into which the front is divided are treated as sunk panels flanked by half pilasters set against the larger ones, over which last the entablature is broken into ressauts. In each lateral compartment over a podium connecting the high pedestals on which the pilasters are raised is an opening of the Lombard type. The main lines of the composition correspond with the internal divisions of the building, except that the entablature of the order, which is carried across the entire front, divides the nave compartment into two stages.
The foregoing examples are enough to show the leading characteristics of the church architecture of the early Renaissance in north Italy. In the later period the local peculiarities give place for the most part to the measurably uniform style of which Vignola and Palladio were the leading masters, and which has been already considered under the heading of Church Architecture of the Roman Renaissance.