Character of Renaissance Architecture

by Charles Herbert Moore

Among the many influences that were stirring the artistic minds of the Renaissance there were two of chief importance, the Neo-pagan revival, and the true intellectual life of the people which was independent of the retrospective movement, and had been growing up through the Middle Ages. The most sterling qualities of the artistic products of the period are due to this intellectual life, and Florentine and Venetian painting, the two most admirable phases of the supreme art of Italy, are the finest expression of this. In other words, it was not the revival of interest in ancient thought and feeling, nor the influence of classic models, so much as the ripened development of the native Italian genius itself, that produced what is most excellent in the Fine Arts of the Renaissance. A consciously retrospective motive can hardly be a vital force in artistic development, and the direct attempt, in so far as such attempt was made, to shape the arts after classic models was an unmixed evil. The native traditions and innate tendencies of the Italian people were enough of themselves to give a strong classic quality to their art. In architecture what of classic feeling was natural to them needed only in the fifteenth century to be freed from the elements which had been misappropriated from the mediæval art of the North to allow it true expression in forms adapted to their needs. In normal human progress each successive stage of development creates its own appropriate forms; but peoples, like individuals, sometimes pass through periods of partial aberration, and while genius may still find scope enough, as in the Renaissance, to produce much that is admirable, the noblest forms of art are not an outgrowth of such conditions.

CHAPTER II
THE DOME OF FLORENCE

The great dome of the cathedral of Florence marks the beginning of the Renaissance movement in architecture, though in its general form and structural character it has no likeness to ancient domes, and has few details drawn from the Roman classic source. It exhibits a wide departure from any previous forms of dome construction, and is an expression of the creative genius of a remarkably gifted man of great independence, working under inspiration drawn in part from ancient sources, in part from mediæval building traditions, and in still larger part from the new motives that were beginning to animate the artistic ambitions of the fifteenth century.

The dome of the Pantheon and the dome of St. Sophia, the two greatest domes of former times, had been built on principles that did not admit of much external effect, and the numerous smaller ones of the Middle Ages, in western Europe, had been equally inconspicuous externally, if not entirely hidden from view, in consequence of rising from within a drum which reached far above the springing level. In most cases the whole construction was covered with a timber roof, so that from the outside the existence of a dome would not be suspected. This was a secure mode of construction, and one that for stability could not be improved; but it did not give the imposing external effect that Brunelleschi sought.

Fig. 1.—Hagia Theotokos.

Fig. 2.—Aachen.

Attempts to make the dome a conspicuous external feature had indeed been made before Brunelleschi’s time. The later Byzantine builders had raised small domes on drums resting on pendentives, and rising above the main roof of the building, but they had still carried these drums up somewhat above the springing of the dome, and had further fortified them with buttresses built over the supporting piers, as in Hagia Theotokos of Constantinople ([Fig. 1]). Thus in such designs the dome still remains partly hidden from view, the drum being the most conspicuous part of the composition. Among the early domes of western Europe is that of Aachen ([Fig. 2]). In this case the drum is carried up far beyond the springing, and is covered with a timber roof which completely hides the dome from external view. The same adjustment of the dome to its drum is, with minor variations of form (the dome being in some cases polygonal on plan, as at Aachen, and in some cases hemispherical) found in most other mediæval domes, and the timber roof over all is likewise common. But in a few cases a different scheme was adopted in which the dome is set on the top of the drum instead of within it. In such cases, however, the drum is low, not rising above the ridge of the timber roof of the nave, and the dome, being unprovided with abutment, is insecure except in so far as it may have a form that is self-sustaining as to thrusts (which removes it from the true dome shape, or may be secured by some kind of binding chain.[7] An example of such a dome occurs on a small scale over the crossing of the cathedral of Pisa ([Fig. 3]). This dome is not hemispherical, its sides rise steeply, and with such moderate curvature as to render it measurably self-sustaining as to thrust.[8] Another instance of a similar scheme, and on a larger scale, is that which appears to have formed a part of Arnolfo’s design for the cathedral of Florence. This dome was never executed, and our knowledge of it is derived from the well-known fresco in the Spanish chapel of Santa Maria Novella.[9] Here both the dome and the drum are octagonal in conformity with the plan of the part of the building which it covers. The outline [(Fig. 4]) is slightly pointed, but the sides are nevertheless so much curved in elevation that a structure of this form would not stand without strong cinctures. It is, however, not unlikely that the fresco painter has given it a more bulging shape than Arnolfo intended. But domes of this character were exceptional in the Middle Ages. The builders of that epoch confined their practice for the most part to the safer form in which the vault is made to spring from within the drum, and is thus necessarily, either in part or entirely, hidden from external view.