Renaissance architecture

• 1. Introduction

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  Renaissance architecture was born in Florence in the early decades of the 1400s, and it did not creep into existence the way Gothic had slowly grown out of Romanesque. Particular architects made a deliberate choice to revive a lost order. They looked at the ruins of ancient Rome and decided that what had been abandoned could be reclaimed. The questions that follow are worth sitting with: who were these architects, what exactly were they trying to recover, and why did this movement grip city after city across an entire continent for more than two centuries? The story begins with one man standing in front of the Florence Baptistery, studying the way his eye followed the lines of the pavement.

• 2. Brunelleschi and the Rules of Seeing

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  Filippo Brunelleschi, born in 1377, arrived at the new architecture not through a patron's commission but through a problem in geometry. He observed that the eye follows regular structures according to a mathematical order, what we now call linear perspective, and he noticed that the buildings remaining among the ruins of ancient Rome obeyed that same logic. One rule, in particular, struck him as irrefutable: a semicircular arch is exactly twice as wide as it is high. No such fixed relationship governed Gothic architecture, where a pointed arch could be stretched or flattened to any proportion the builder chose.

  From this discovery flowed a commitment to symmetry and proportion in which every part of a building bears a fixed relationship to every other part. Brunelleschi gained the backing of wealthy Florentine patrons, including the Silk Guild and Cosimo de' Medici, and he put his ideas to work at a series of buildings that would serve as templates for the next century. The churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, designed around 1425 and 1428 respectively, each use the Latin cross plan built on a modular grid in which every dimension, horizontal and vertical, is a multiple of the square bay of the aisle.

  His most celebrated project, the enormous brick dome over Florence Cathedral, was a more complicated affair. The cathedral itself had been designed in the 14th century by Arnolfo di Cambio and left without a roof. The dome Brunelleschi built over that space borrowed the pointed Gothic arch and Gothic ribs that Arnolfo had apparently planned, but its structural thinking owed a debt to the ancient Pantheon in Rome, with its single-shell concrete dome, its coffering acting as hidden ribs, and its ocular opening of 8 meters across at the apex. Brunelleschi's solution used eight large ribs and sixteen internal ones to hold a brick shell, the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern that locked them in place without a conventional keystone. The dome became a civic monument that belonged, quite literally, to the city: eight different quarters of Florence each constructed one of its eight segments.

  In 1434 Brunelleschi designed Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence, the first centrally planned Renaissance building, organized around a central octagon ringed by eight smaller chapels. That centrally planned idea would echo through religious architecture for generations to come.

• 3. Alberti and the Theory of Architecture

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  Leon Battista Alberti, born in Genoa in 1402, approached architecture from a different angle than Brunelleschi. Where Brunelleschi was a builder who solved practical problems with his hands, Alberti saw the architect as a person carrying significant social responsibilities, and he did not supervise construction himself. His lasting contribution was partly intellectual: in 1450 he completed De re aedificatoria, the first treatise on architecture written in the Renaissance. It drew on Vitruvius's De architectura, a manuscript that had been rediscovered in 1414 in a library in Switzerland. When De re aedificatoria was printed in 1485, it became the first printed book on architecture, putting Alberti's ideas into circulation across Europe.

  Alberti's buildings embodied his theories in visible form. The Basilica of Sant'Andrea in Mantua was the first building to fully integrate the design of the plan with the façade, a problem that Brunelleschi had identified but never solved. The exterior is marked by an enormous triumphal arch motif, with a vast deeply recessed portico set against shallow pilasters and two low square-topped openings. Inside, Alberti abandoned the traditional nave and aisles entirely, replacing them with a slow procession of alternating tall arches and low square doorways, repeating the triumphal arch pattern across the interior wall.

  At Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where Alberti was commissioned to finish the decoration of a facade that included existing Gothic niches and polychrome marble work, he respected what was already there and introduced a device that would become standard: two large scrolls linking the lower roofs of the aisles to the height of the nave, solving the visual problem of different roof levels. That scroll detail, borrowed and adapted, can be found in church façades across Europe for the next two centuries.

  The Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, which Alberti designed between 1446 and 1451, applied the classical orders of columns across three levels of a domestic façade, one of the earliest prototypes of this treatment for a private house.

• 4. Bramante, Rome, and the High Renaissance

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  Donato Bramante was born in Urbino in 1444 and began his career as a painter before turning to architecture. His first significant patronage came from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, for whom he worked for roughly two decades. After French forces took Milan in 1499, Bramante moved to Rome, and it was there that his most celebrated work was done.

  In the cloister of San Pietro in Montorio, Bramante built what critics have called a perfect architectural gem: the Tempietto, a small circular temple marking the site where St. Peter was believed to have been martyred. The building adapted the style visible in the remains of the ancient Temple of Vesta, the most sacred site in Rome, and it was designed to be viewed framed by the arch of the surrounding cloister. His design for the choir addition to Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan shows a different side of his work: a hemispherical dome of approximately 20 meters across, rising inside an octagonal drum pierced with arched classical openings, all clad in local terracotta ornamentation.

  In 1506 Pope Julius II selected Bramante's design for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica and the foundation stone was laid. That project would outlast Bramante by decades, passing through the hands of Raphael, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and eventually Michelangelo, who when he took over in 1546 reverted to something closer to Bramante's original Greek-cross plan.

  Sebastiano Serlio, born in 1475, extended Bramante's influence into print. The first volume of his Regole generali d'architettura appeared in Venice in 1537, and five books were eventually published. Andrea Palladio followed in 1570 with I quattro libri dell'architettura, printed in Venice, which became the most widely circulated of all the architectural treatises and carried Renaissance ideas to readers far outside Italy.

• 5. Michelangelo and the Mannerist Break

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  Michelangelo Buonarroti, born in 1475, stands at the point where the classical harmony of the High Renaissance began to bend under pressure. The Renaissance ideal of proportion and regularity gave way, in his hands, to something more experimental and unnerving. His architectural work is concentrated in two buildings: the interiors of the Laurentian Library and its vestibule at San Lorenzo in Florence, and St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

  The vestibule of the Laurentian Library is a study in deliberate discomfort. The room is taller than it is wide, and a large staircase pours out of the library above in what the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described as a "flow of lava", breaking in three directions when it meets the landing. At the center, the stairs rise more steeply than at the sides, fitting only eight steps into the space that would normally accommodate nine. Where Brunelleschi had placed columns projecting boldly from walls, Michelangelo sank his paired columns deep into recesses in the wall, making functional elements seem to disappear into the surface. Pevsner judged the Laurenziana to reveal Mannerism in its most sublime architectural form.

  At St. Peter's, Michelangelo's intervention was structural as well as formal. He redesigned the piers, walls, and dome, giving the weight-bearing members massive proportions and eliminating the encircling aisles. For the exterior he designed a giant order of pilasters defining every bay, bound together by a continuous cornice. When he died in 1564 the building had reached the height of the drum. The architect Giacomo della Porta completed the dome, and whether it was della Porta or Michelangelo himself who decided on the steeper, more dynamic outline than the hemispherical dome shown in the wooden model remains unresolved.

  The Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, also designed by Michelangelo, used the giant order on a civic rather than religious scale, a large pilaster stretching the full height of a façade, linking floors that earlier architects would have treated as distinct registers.

• 6. Palladio and the Classical Temple

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  Andrea Palladio, born in 1508, came to architecture from stonemasonary and was introduced to the Humanist tradition by the poet Giangiorgio Trissino. He is described in the source material as the most influential architect of the whole Renaissance, and his influence rested on a distinctive interpretation of what classicism meant.

  Where Florentine and Roman architects looked to structures like the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine for their formulae, Palladio looked to classical temples with their simple peristyle of columns. He consistently applied the triumphal arch motif, a large arched opening flanked by two lower square-topped openings, at a small scale, as a window treatment rather than at the monumental scale Alberti had used at Sant'Andrea. That motif became known as the Palladian arch.

  His best known domestic building is the Villa Capra, also called La Rotonda, a centrally planned house with a domed central hall and four identical façades, each with a temple-like portico modeled on that of the Pantheon. At the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, he solved the long-standing problem of linking aisles to the nave by overlaying two interlocking temple fronts: a tall central temple with columns raised on high plinths, and behind it a lower wide temple façade whose columns and pilasters show through the gaps.

  His 1570 book I quattro libri dell'architettura, published in Venice, was printed and reprinted across Europe and translated Palladio's ideas for readers who had never visited Italy. His first major commission, the rebuilding of the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, established the setting in the Veneto where he would work for most of his life.

• 7. Across Europe

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  Renaissance style did not cross the Alps as a single wave. Each region received it at a different moment and filtered it through local traditions, so that a Renaissance building in Poland looks nothing like one in Portugal.

  In France, the earliest signs appeared around 1495 at the Château d'Amboise, where Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years. Italian architects were imported, and Sebastiano Serlio worked there, but French builders also sent their own architects to study in Italy, including Philibert de l'Orme, born in 1510. In England, Inigo Jones, born in 1573, returned from studying in Italy and designed the Queen's House at Greenwich in 1616 and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, three years later. These buildings, with their clean lines and strict symmetry, arrived in a country where mullion windows and crenellations were still the norm.

  In Hungary, the Renaissance appeared early, after the marriage of King Matthias Corvinus and Beatrice of Naples in 1476 brought Italian artists and craftsmen to Buda. The Ottoman conquest after 1526 cut the development short and destroyed most of what had been built; the Bakócz Chapel, commissioned by Cardinal Tamás Bakócz, is described as the only completely preserved example of Hungarian Renaissance architecture.

  In Poland, the first period from roughly 1500 to 1550 was dominated by Italian architects from Florence, including Francesco Fiorentino and Bartolomeo Berrecci, working for Sigismund I the Old and his Italian-born wife Queen Bona Sforza. The Wawel Castle Courtyard and Sigismund's Chapel date from this time. By the third period, from 1600 to 1650, the Counter Reformation was driving architecture toward Mannerism and Baroque, producing the Kalwaria Zebrzydowska complex, a pilgrimage park of a basilica and 42 chapels modeled on the places of Jerusalem, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  In Russia, Grand Prince Ivan III invited Italian architects to Moscow. The Bolognese architect Aristotele Fioravanti arrived in 1475 to rebuild the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, using the 12th-century Assumption Cathedral in Vladimir as his model. In 1505 an Italian known in Russia as Aleviz Novyi built twelve churches for Ivan III, including the Cathedral of the Archangel, blending Russian Orthodox requirements with Renaissance spaciousness and proportion.

  In Spain the local variant was called Plateresque, named for the intricately detailed work of silversmiths, the Plateros. Later, under Philip II between 1556 and 1598, a more austere style called the Herrerian emerged, named for the architect Juan de Herrera, whose most prominent example is El Escorial. In Bolivia, the Church of Curahuara de Carangas, built between 1587 and 1608, is known locally as the Sistine Chapel of the Andes for its rich Mannerist interior decoration.

• 8. What the Style Was Made Of

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  The visual grammar of Renaissance architecture is not a single formula but a set of principles applied with varying degrees of strictness. Plans are square and symmetrical, proportions based on a modular unit, space organized by geometry rather than by intuition as in medieval buildings.

  Façades are symmetrical around their vertical axis, organized by systems of pilasters, arches, and entablatures. One of the earliest true Renaissance façades is Pienza Cathedral, dated 1459-1462, attributed to the Florentine architect Bernardo Gambarelli, known as Rossellino, with Alberti possibly contributing as well. The Palazzo Farnese in Rome, begun in 1517, is held up as an emblem of the treatment of windows, with alternating triangular and segmental pediments across its façades. That travertine for its architectural details came not from a quarry but from the Colosseum.

  Arches are semicircular; vaults are barrel-shaped and set on a square plan, returned to use after the ribbed Gothic vault had dominated for centuries. Domes appear both as large exterior landmarks and as coverings for smaller interior spaces. After the success of Brunelleschi's dome at Florence Cathedral, and its adoption by Bramante in his 1506 plan for St. Peter's, the dome became, as the source states, an indispensable element not only in church architecture but eventually in secular buildings, including Palladio's Villa Rotonda.

  External walls are built of brick, rendered, or faced with precisely cut stone laid in straight courses, with rusticated quoins emphasizing corners and rusticated basements at buildings like the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, built between 1444 and 1460. Internal walls are smoothly plastered; more formal spaces carry frescoes. Sculptured figures stand on plinths or in niches, separate from the structural fabric, unlike medieval carving that grew out of the stone itself.