Architecture: Gothic and Renaissance

by T. Roger Smith

In Italy, Renaissance churches, great and small—from St. Peter’s downwards—and magnificent secular buildings, some, like the Vatican Palace or the Library of St. Mark at Venice, for public purposes, but most for the occupation of the great wealthy and princely families, abound in Naples, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Venice, Milan, and indeed every great city.

In France, the transition period was succeeded by a time when vast undertakings, e.g. the Hôtel de Ville, the Louvre, the Tuileries, Versailles, were carried out in the revived style with the utmost magnificence, and were imitated in every part of the country in the structures greater or smaller which were then built.

In England, the works of Inigo Jones, and of Wren, are the most famous works of the developed style, and to the last-named architect we owe a cathedral second to none in Europe for its beauty of outline, and play of light and shade. To Germany, and the countries of the north-east Europe, and to Spain and Portugal on the south, the style also extended with no very great modification, either of its general forms or of its details.

ANALYSIS OF BUILDINGS.

Plan.

The plan of Renaissance buildings was uniform and symmetrical, and the picturesqueness of the Gothic times was abandoned. The plans of churches were not widely different from those in use in Italy before the revival of classic art took place, but it will be remembered that these were by no means so irregular or picturesque at any time as the plans of French and English cathedral churches.

In secular architecture, the vast piles erected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Italian, French, and Spanish architects are to the last degree orderly in their disposition. They are adapted to a great variety of purposes, and they display a varying degree of skill. The palaces of Genoa are, on the one hand, among the cleverest examples of planning existing; on the other hand, many of the palaces in France are weak and poor to the last degree. As a rule the scale of the plan is more considerable than in Gothic work. A very large building is often not divided into more parts than a small one, or one of moderate size. In St. Peter’s, for example, there are only four bays between the west front and the dome, everything being on a most gigantic scale. As a contrast to this principle we may cite the nave of the Gothic cathedral at Milan, which is not so long at St. Peter’s, but has at least thrice as many bays, and looks much larger in consequence.

No style affords more room for skill in planning than the Renaissance, and in no style is the exercise of such skill more repaid by results.

Walls and Columns.

In the treatment of external walls, the mediæval use of small materials, involving many joints for the exterior of walls has quite disappeared, and they are universally faced with stone or plaster, and are consequently uniformly smooth. Perhaps the principal feature to note is the very great use made of that elaborate sort of masonry in which the joints of the stones are very carefully channelled or otherwise marked, and which is known by the singularly inappropriate name of rustic work. The basements of most Italian and French palaces are rusticated, and in many cases (as the Pitti Palace, Florence) rustic work covers an entire façade.