Other peculiarities of design are found in some of the early Renaissance palaces of Bologna, where in the Palazzo Bevilacqua the windows of the principal story have the mediæval form of two small arches under a larger arch, modified by the omission of the central shaft which gives the middle of the tympanum the form of a pendant. But it is not worth while to follow these aberrations of early northern Renaissance design further. The palace architecture of the later Renaissance in north Italy has no distinctive character that calls for particular comment. It is for the most part based on the art of Palladio and Vignola which we have already enough considered. While it exhibits many more of those misadjustments of structural members, and other vagaries of design, in which Italian architects have been at all times fertile, it has no great importance to justify special remark. To point out in detail many such meaningless caprices as those introduced by Pellegrini in the court of the Palazzo Brera in Milan, where the arches of the superimposed arcades are sprung from pairs of columns connected by short entablatures, making it necessary to double the transverse arches of the vaulting behind them, or such novelties as occur in the windows of the basement of the Palazzo Martinengo of Brescia, which are adorned with small Doric columns carrying architraves without the other parts of an entablature, while an upright block with a ball on it rises over each column (Fig. [95]), would be tiresome and profitless. We may therefore pass on in the next chapter to a brief consideration of the carved ornament of this architecture, before taking up the architecture of the Renaissance in France and England.
CHAPTER X
ARCHITECTURAL CARVING OF THE RENAISSANCE
All effective sculpture on buildings, including that of the human figure, is architectural carving; but it is in Gothic art only that sculpture of the human figure, as well as that of subordinate ornamentation made up of the other elements, has at once an appropriate architectural character and a high degree of excellence in the development of form. In the best Greek art the carving of the human figure has, indeed, a grandly monumental quality; but the Greek sculptor did not seek primarily to give his work an architectural expression. He wrought it with a kind of perfection that is not compatible with the fullest measure of such expression. Greek sculpture, though placed on a building, is in a measure independent of it, and thus it not only loses nothing, but may even gain in value, when taken from its place on the building and set up in a museum where it can be viewed by itself.
In the art of the Renaissance the human figure in the full round is treated so independently as to lose nearly all monumental expression, while for strictly architectural carving we have reliefs on pilasters, friezes, and capitals, made up of scrolls and meanders with leafage, grotesque animal life, and a great variety of objects, including the human figure, represented more or less fantastically as ornament. Renaissance sculpture of the human figure thus having so little proper architectural character, we shall not consider it here, but confine our attention to the relief carving, which has a closer architectural connection, if not a much truer architectural expression.
Fig. 96.—Roman Arabesque.
Plate IX
RELIEF OF THE LOMBARDI
Venice