Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo Rucellai retains many details of the mediæval Tuscan style, especially in the windows divided by slender pilasters. But the three orders introduced by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, one of the most beautiful in Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the palaces they constructed at Pienza.
This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those times. The just medium between mediæval massiveness and classic simplicity was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond description. Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. Yet here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead. After Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of Cosimo de' Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo; and Il Cronaca. Cosimo de' Medici, having said that "envy is a plant no man should water," denied himself the monumental house designed by Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo. Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of architecture. Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be the residence of the Medici through all their chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.[[33]] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic architecture.[[34]] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders, and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice illustrates the emancipation from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly Cinque Cento.[[35]]
In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more inseparably connected with the decorator. The labours of the stone-carver, who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief, pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys, ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics, vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels, torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.[[36]] The wood carver contributes tarsia like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.[[37]] The worker in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra Cintola at Prato. The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for the lunettes above the doorways. Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.[[38]] Meanwhile mosaics are provided for the dome or let into the floor;[[39]] agates and marbles and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;[[40]] stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.[[41]] Tapestry is woven from the designs of excellent masters;[[42]] great painters contribute arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.
Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting. The fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main æsthetical purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting shell is left: what, for instance, would the façades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and inlaid marbles? The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details, and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts. As the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest literary extravagances—the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance—have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.
In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production of new yet classic form was more completely realised. The reckless employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more true.
To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of the golden age.[[43]] Though little of his work survives entire and unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over both successors and contemporaries. What they chiefly owed to him, was the proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity and to unity of effect. He came at a moment when constructive problems had been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister arts had reached their highest point. His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor cupolas—elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to determine the future of architecture for all Italy. Nature had gifted Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for structural symmetry was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier Renaissance, we must remember how salutary was the example of a rigorous and modest manner in an age which required above all things to be preserved from its own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to say how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in Northern Italy is genuine; most of it, at any rate, belongs to the manner of his youth. The Church of S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of the Cancelleria at Rome, and the unfinished cathedral of Pavia, enable us to comprehend the general character of this great architect's refined and noble manner. S. Peter's, it may be said in passing, retains, in spite of all subsequent modifications, many essentially Bramantesque features—especially in the distribution of the piers and rounded niches.
Bramante formed no school strictly so called, though his pupils, Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura Vitoni, carried out his principles of building at Pavia and Pistoja. Vitoni's church of the Umiltà in the latter city is a pure example of conscientious neo-Roman architecture. It consists of a large octagon surmounted by a dome and preceded by a lofty vaulted atrium or vestibule. The single round arch of this vestibule repeats the testudo of a Roman bath, and the decorative details are accurately reproduced from similar monuments. Unfortunately, Giorgio Vasari, who was employed to finish the cupola, spoiled its effect by raising it upon an ugly attic; it is probable that the church, as designed by Vitoni, would have presented the appearance of a miniature Pantheon. At Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated through Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Baldassare Peruzzi. Raphael's claim to consideration as an architect rests upon the Palazzi Vidoni and Pandolfini, the Cappella Chigi in S. Maria del Popolo, and the Villa Madama. The last-named building, executed by Giulio Romano after Raphael's design, is carried out in a style so forcible as to make us fancy that the pupil had a larger share in its creation than his teacher. These works, however, sink into insignificance before the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the masterpiece of Giulio's genius. This most noble of Italian pleasure-houses remains to show what the imagination of a poet-artist could recover from the splendour of old Rome and adapt to the use of his own age. The vaults of the Thermæ of Titus, with their cameos of stucco and frescoed arabesques, are here repeated on a scale and with an exuberance of invention that surpass the model. Open loggie yield fair prospect over what were once trim gardens; spacious halls, adorned with frescoes in the vehement and gorgeous style of the Roman school, form a fit theatre for the grand parade-life of an Italian prince. The whole is Pagan in its pride and sensuality, its prodigality of strength and insolence of freedom. Having seen this palace, we do not wonder that the fame of Giulio flew across the Alps and lived upon the lips of Shakspere: for in his master-work at Mantua he collected, as it were, and epitomised in one building all that enthralled the fancy of the Northern nations when they thought of Italy.
A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo. The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the annals of Italian painting. The memory of the Roman banker's splendid style of living marks it out as no less noteworthy in the history of Renaissance manners.[[44]]
Among the great edifices of this second period we may reckon Jacopo Sansovino's buildings at Venice, though they approximate rather to the style of the earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance of decorative detail. The Venetians, somewhat behind the rest of Italy in the development of the fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth during the middle period of the Renaissance; and no city is more rich in monuments of the florid style. Something of their own delight in sensuous magnificence they communicated even to the foreigners who dwelt among them. The court of the Ducal Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo Corner, and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the, strong yet fanciful bravura style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice. Nowhere else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through all changes the impress of a people splendour-loving in the highest sense. The Library of S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crowning triumph of Venetian art. It is impossible to contemplate its noble double row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant, without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.