Renaissance style places emphasis on symmetry, proportion, geometry and the regularity of parts, as they are demonstrated in the architecture of classical antiquity and in particular ancient Roman architecture, of which many examples remained. Orderly arrangements of columns, pilasters and lintels, as well as the use of semicircular arches, hemispherical domes, niches and aedicules replaced the more complex proportional systems and irregular profiles of medieval buildings.
High Renaissance
In the late 15th century and early 16th century, architects such as Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and others showed a mastery of the revived style and ability to apply it to buildings such as churches and city palazzo which were quite different from the structures of ancient times. The style became more decorated and ornamental, statuary, domes and cupolas becoming very evident. The architectural period is known as the "High Renaissance" and coincides with the age of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.
Bramante
Bramante
Donato Bramante, (1444–1514), was born in Urbino and turned from painting to architecture, finding his first important patronage under Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, for whom he produced a number of buildings over 20 years. After the fall of Milan to the French in 1499, Bramante travelled to Rome where he achieved great success under papal patronage.
The apse of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.
Bramante’s finest architectural achievement in Milan is his addition of crossing and choir to the abbey church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (Milan). This is a brick structure, the form of which owes much to the Northern Italian tradition of square domed baptisteries. The new building is almost centrally planned, except that, because of the site, the chancel extends further than the transept arms. The hemispherical dome, of approximately 20 metres across, rises up hidden inside an octagonal drum pierced at the upper level with arched classical openings. The whole exterior has delineated details decorated with the local terracotta ornamentation.
In Rome Bramante created what has been described as "a perfect architectural gem", the Tempietto in the Cloister of San Pietro in Montorio. This small circular temple marks the spot where St Peter was martyred and is thus the most sacred site in Rome. The building adapts the style apparent in the remains of the Temple of Vesta, the most sacred site of Ancient Rome. It is enclosed by and in spatial contrast with the cloister which surrounds it. As approached from the cloister, as in the picture above, it is seen framed by an arch and columns, the shape of which are echoed in its free-standing form.
Bramante went on to work at the Vatican where he designed the impressive Cortili of St. Damaso and of the Belvedere. In 1506 Bramante’s design for Pope Julius II’s rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica was selected, and the foundation stone laid. After Bramante’s death and many changes of plan, Michelangelo, as chief architect, reverted to something closer to Bramante’s original proposal
Sangallo
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, (1485–1546), was one of a family of military engineers. His uncle, Giuliano da Sangallo was one of those who submitted a plan for the rebuilding of St Peter’s and was briefly a co-director of the project, with Raphael.
Antonio da Sangallo also submitted a plan for St Peter’s and became the chief architect after the death of Raphael, to be succeeded himself by Michelangelo.
His fame does not rest upon his association with St Peter’s but in his building of the Farnese Palace, “the grandest palace of this period”, started in 1530. The impression of grandness lies in part in its sheer size, (56 m long by 29.5 meters high) and in its lofty location overlooking a broad piazza. It is also a building of beautiful proportion, unusual for such a large and luxurious house of the date in having been built principally of stuccoed brick, rather than of stone. Against the smooth pink-washed walls the stone quoins of the corners, the massive rusticated portal and the stately repetition of finely detailed windows give a powerful effect, setting a new standard of elegance in palace-building. The upper of the three equally sized floors was added by Michelangelo. It is probably just as well that this impressive building is of brick; the travertine for its architectural details came not from a quarry, but from the Colosseum.
Raphael
Raphael, (1483–1520), Urbino, trained under Perugino in Perugia before moving to Florence, was for a time the chief architect for St. Peter’s, working in conjunction with Antonio Sangallo. He also designed a number of buildings, most of which were finished by others. His single most influential work is the Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence with its two stories of strongly articulated windows of a "tabernacle" type, each set around with ordered pilasters, cornice and alternate arched and triangular pediments.
Mannerism
Mannerism in architecture was marked by widely diverging tendencies in the work of Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Baldassare Peruzzi and Andrea Palladio, that led to the Baroque style in which the same architectural vocabulary was used for very different rhetoric.
Peruzzi
Baldassare Peruzzi, (1481–1536), was an architect born in Siena, but working in Rome, whose work bridges the High Renaissance and the Mannerist. His Villa Farnesina of 1509 is a very regular monumental cube of two equal stories, the bays being strongly articulated by orders of pilasters. The building is unusual for its frescoed walls.
Peruzzi’s most famous work is the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in Rome. The unusual features of this building are that its façade curves gently around a curving street. It has in its ground floor a dark central portico running parallel to the street, but as a semi enclosed space, rather than an open loggia. Above this rise three undifferentiated floors, the upper two with identical small horizontal windows in thin flat frames which contrast strangely with the deep porch, which has served, from the time of its construction, as a refuge to the city’s poor.
Giulio Romano
Giulio Romano (1499–1546), was a pupil of Raphael, assisting him on various works for the Vatican. Romano was also a highly inventive designer, working for Federico II Gonzaga at Mantua on the Palazzo Te, (1524–1534), a project which combined his skills as architect, sculptor and painter. In this work, incorporating garden grottoes and extensive frescoes, he uses illusionistic effects, surprising combinations of architectural form and texture, and the frequent use of features that seem somewhat disproportionate or out of alignment. The total effect is eerie and disturbing. Ilan Rachum cites Romano as “one of the first promoters of Mannerism”.
Michelangelo
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was one of the creative giants whose achievements mark the High Renaissance. He excelled in each of the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture and his achievements brought about significant changes in each area. His architectural fame lies chiefly in two buildings: the interiors of the Laurentian Library and its lobby at the monastery of San Lorenzo in Florence, and St Peter's Basilica in Rome.
St Peter's was "the greatest creation of the Renaissance", and a great number of architects contributed their skills to it. But at its completion, there was more of Michelangelo’s design than of any other architect, before or after him.
St Peter's
The plan that was accepted at the laying of the foundation stone in 1506 was that by Bramante. Various changes in plan occurred in the series of architects that succeeded him, but Michelangelo, when he took over the project in 1546, reverted to Bramante’s Greek-cross plan and redesigned the piers, the walls and the dome, giving the lower weight-bearing members massive proportions and eliminating the encircling aisles from the chancel and identical transept arms. Helen Gardner says: "Michelangelo, with a few strokes of the pen, converted its snowflake complexity into a massive, cohesive unity."
Michelangelo’s dome was a masterpiece of design using two masonry shells, one within the other and crowned by a massive lantern supported, as at Florence, on ribs. For the exterior of the building he designed a giant order which defines every external bay, the whole lot being held together by a wide cornice which runs unbroken like a rippling ribbon around the entire building.
There is a wooden model of the dome, showing its outer shell as hemispherical. When Michelangelo died in 1564, the building had reached the height of the drum. The architect who succeeded Michelangelo was Giacomo della Porta. The dome, as built, has a much steeper projection than the dome of the model. It is generally presumed that it was della Porta who made this change to the design, to lessen the outward thrust. But, in fact it is unknown who it was that made this change, and it is equally possible and a stylistic likelihood that the person who decided upon the more dynamic outline was Michelangelo himself at some time during the years that he supervised the project.
The vestibule of the Laurentian Library
Laurentian Library
Michelangelo was at his most Mannerist in the design of the vestibule of the Laurentian Library, also built by him to house the Medici collection of books at the convent of San Lorenzo in Florence, the same San Lorenzo’s at which Brunelleschi had recast church architecture into a Classical mold and established clear formula for the use of Classical orders and their various components.
Michelangelo takes all Brunelleschi’s components and bends them to his will. The Library is upstairs. It is a long low building with an ornate wooden ceiling, a matching floor and crowded with corrals finished by his successors to Michelangelo’s design. But it is a light room, the natural lighting streaming through a long row of windows that appear positively crammed between the order of pilasters that march along the wall. The vestibule, on the other hand, is tall, taller than it is wide and is crowded by a large staircase that pours out of the library in what Pevsner refers to as a “flow of lava”, and bursts in three directions when it meets the balustrade of the landing. It is an intimidating staircase, made all the more so because the rise of the stairs at the center is steeper than at the two sides, fitting only eight steps into the space of nine.
The space is crowded and it is to be expected that the wall spaces would be divided by pilasters of low projection. But Michelangelo has chosen to use paired columns, which, instead of standing out boldly from the wall, he has sunk deep into recesses within the wall itself. In San Lorenzo's church nearby, Brunelleschi used little scrolling console brackets to break the strongly horizontal line of the course above the arcade. Michelangelo has borrowed Brunelleschi’s motifs and stood each pair of sunken columns on a pair of twin console brackets. Pevsner says the “Laurenziana... reveals Mannerism in its most sublime architectural form”.
Giacomo della Porta
Giacomo della Porta, (c.1533–1602), was famous as the architect who made the dome of St Peter’s Basilica a reality. The change in outline between the dome as it appears in the model and the dome as it was built, has brought about speculation as to whether the changes originated with della Porta or with Michelangelo himself.
Della Porta spent nearly all his working life in Rome, designing villas, palazzi and churches in the Mannerist style. One of his most famous works is the façade of the Church of the Gesù, a project that he inherited from his teacher Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola. Most characteristics of the original design are maintained, subtly transformed to give more weight to the central section, where della Porta uses, among other motifs, a low triangular pediment overlaid on a segmental one above the main door. The upper storey and its pediment give the impression of compressing the lower one. The center section, like that of Sant'Andrea at Mantua, is based on the Triumphal Arch, but has two clear horizontal divisions like Santa Maria Novella. See Alberti above. The problem of linking the aisles to the nave is solved using Alberti’s scrolls, in contrast to Vignola’s solution which provided much smaller brackets and four statues to stand above the paired pilasters, visually weighing down the corners of the building. The influence of the design may be seen in Baroque churches throughout Europe.
Andrea Palladio
Andrea Palladio, (1508–80), "the most influential architect of the whole Renaissance"', was, as a stonemason, introduced to Humanism by the poet Giangiorgio Trissino. His first major architectural commission was the rebuilding of the Basilica Palladiana at Vicenza, in the Veneto where he was to work most of his life.
Palladio was to transform the architectural style of both palaces and churches by taking a different perspective on the notion of Classicism. While the architects of Florence and Rome looked to structures like the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine to provide formulae, Palladio looked to classical temples with their simple peristyle form. When he used the “triumphal arch” motif of a large arched opening with lower square-topped opening on either side, he invariably applied it on a small scale, such as windows, rather than on a large scale as Alberti used it at Sant’Andrea’s. This Ancient Roman motif is often referred to as the Palladian Arch.
The best known of Palladio’s domestic buildings is Villa Capra, otherwise known as "la Rotonda", a centrally planned house with a domed central hall and four identical façades, each with a temple-like portico like that of the Pantheon in Rome. At the Villa Cornaro, the projecting portico of the north façade and recessed loggia of the garden façade are of two ordered stories, the upper forming a balcony.
Progression from Early Renaissance through to Baroque
In Italy, there appears to be a seamless progression from Early Renaissance architecture through the High Renaissance and Mannerist to the Baroque style. Pevsner comments about the vestibule of the Laurentian Library that it "has often been said that the motifs of the walls show Michelangelo as the father of the Baroque".
While continuity may be the case in Italy, it was not necessarily the case elsewhere. The adoption of the Renaissance style of architecture was slower in some areas than in others, as may be seen in England, for example. Indeed, as Pope Julius II was having the ancient Basilica of St. Peter’s demolished to make way for the new, Henry VII of England was adding a glorious new chapel in the Perpendicular Gothic style to Westminster Abbey.
Likewise, the style that was to become known as Baroque evolved in Italy in the early 17th century, at about the time that the first fully Renaissance buildings were constructed at Greenwich and Whitehall in England, after a prolonged period of experimentation with Classical motifs applied to local architectural forms, or conversely, the adoption of Renaissance structural forms in the broadest sense with an absence of the formulae that governed their use. While the English were just discovering what the rules of Classicism were, the Italians were experimenting with methods of breaking them. In England, following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, the architectural climate changed, and taste moved in the direction of the Baroque. Rather than evolving, as it did in Italy, it arrived fully fledged.
In a similar way, in many parts of Europe that had few purely classical and ordered buildings like Brunelleschi’s Santo Spirito and Michelozzo’s Medici Riccardi Palace, Baroque architecture appeared almost unheralded, on the heels of a sort of Proto-Renaissance local style. The spread of the Baroque and its replacement of traditional and more conservative Renaissance architecture was particularly apparent in the building of churches as part of the Counter Reformation.
Spread in Europe
The 16th century saw the economic and political ascendancy of France and Spain, and then later of Holland, England, Germany and Russia. The result was that these places began to import the Renaissance style as indicators of their new cultural position. This also meant that it was not until about 1500 and later that signs of Renaissance architectural style began to appear outside Italy.
Books or ornament prints with engraved illustrations demonstrating plans and ornament were very important in spreading Renaissance styles in Northern Europe, with among the most important authors being Androuet du Cerceau in France, and Hans Vredeman de Vries in the Netherlands, and Wendel Dietterlin, author of Architectura (1593–94) in Germany.
Croatia
In the 15th century, Croatia was divided into three states – the northern and central part of Croatia and Slavonia were in union with the Kingdom of Hungary, while Dalmatia, with the exception of independent Dubrovnik, was under the rule of the Venetian Republic. The Cathedral of St.James in Šibenik, was begun in 1441 in the Gothic style by Giorgio da Sebenico (Juraj Dalmatinac). Its unusual construction does not use mortar, the stone blocks, pilasters and ribs being bonded with joints and slots in the way that was usual in wooden constructions. In 1477 the work was unfinished, and continued under Niccolò di Giovanni Fiorentino who respected the mode of construction and the plan of the former architect, but continued the work which includes the upper windows, the vaults and the dome, in the Renaissance style. The combination of a high barrel vault with lower half-barrel vaults over the aisles the gives the façade its distinctive trefoil shape, the first of this type in the region. The cathedral was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.
Kingdom of Hungary
One of the earliest places to be influenced by the Renaissance style of architecture was the Kingdom of Hungary. The style appeared following the marriage of King Matthias Corvinus and Beatrice of Naples in 1476. Many Italian artists, craftsmen and masons arrived at Buda with the new queen. Important remains of the Early Renaissance summer palace of King Matthias can be found in Visegrád. The Ottoman conquest of Hungary after 1526 cut short the development of Renaissance architecture in the country and destroyed its most famous examples. Today, the only completely preserved work of Hungarian Renaissance architecture is the Bakócz Chapel (commissioned by the Hungarian cardinal Tamás Bakócz), now part of the Esztergom Basilica.
Russia
Prince Ivan III introduced Renaissance architecture to Russia by inviting a number of architects from Italy, who brought new construction techniques and some Renaissance style elements with them, while in general following the traditional designs of the Russian architecture. In 1475 the Bolognese architect Aristotele Fioravanti came to rebuild the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin, damaged in an earthquake. Fioravanti was given the 12th-century Vladimir Cathedral as a model, and produced a design combining traditional Russian style with a Renaissance sense of spaciousness, proportion and symmetry.
Poland
Polish Renaissance architecture is divided into three periods: The First period (1500–50), is the so-called "Italian". Most of Renaissance buildings were building of this time were by Italian architects, mainly from Florence including Francesco Fiorentino and Bartolomeo Berrecci (Wawel Courtyard, Sigismund's Chapel).
In the Second period (1550–1600), Renaissance architecture became more common, with the beginnings of Mannerist and under the influence of the Netherlands, particularly in Pomerania. Buildings include the New Cloth Hall in Kraków and city halls in Tarnów, Sandomierz, Chełm (demolished) and most famously in Poznań.
In the Third period (1600–50), the rising power of Jesuits and Counter Reformation gave impetus to the development of Mannerist architecture and Baroque.
Crown of Bohemia
The Renaissance style first appeared in the Crown of Bohemia in the 1490s. Bohemia together with its incorporated lands, especially Moravia, thus ranked among the areas of the Holy Roman Empire with the earliest known examples of the Renaissance architecture.
The lands of the Bohemian Crown were never part of the ancient Roman Empire, thus they missed their own ancient classical heritage and had to be dependent on the primarily Italian models. As well as in other Central European countries the Gothic style kept its position especially in the church architecture. The traditional Gothic architecture was considered timeless and therefore able to express the sacredness. The Renaissance architecture coexisted with the Gothic style in Bohemia and Moravia until the late 16th century (e. g. the residential part of a palace was built in the modern Renaissance style but its chapel was designed with Gothic elements). The façades of Czech Renaissance buildings were often decorated with sgraffito (figural or ornamental).
France
During the early years of the 16th century the French were involved in wars in northern Italy, bringing back to France not just the Renaissance art treasures as their war booty, but also stylistic ideas. In the Loire Valley a wave of building was carried and many Renaissance châteaux appeared at this time, the earliest example being the Château d'Amboise (c. 1495) in which Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years. The style became dominant under Francis I (See Châteaux of the Loire Valley).
Netherlands
As in painting, Renaissance architecture took some time to reach the Netherlands and did not entirely supplant the Gothic elements. An architect directly influenced by the Italian masters was Cornelis Floris de Vriendt, who designed the city hall of Antwerpen, finished in 1564. The style sometimes known as "Antwerp Mannerism", keeping a similar overall structure to late-Gothic buildings, but with larger windows and much florid decoration and detailing in Renaissance styles, was widely influential across Northern Europe, for example in Elizabethan architecture, and is part of the wider movement of Northern Mannerism.
In the early 17th century Dutch Republic, Hendrick de Keyser played an important role in developing the Amsterdam Renaissance style, which has local characteristics including the prevalence of tall narrow town-houses, the "trapgevel" or Dutch gable and the employment of decorative triangular pediments over doors and windows in which the apex rises much more steeply than in most other Renaissance architecture, but in keeping with the profile of the gable. Carved stone details are often of low profile, in strapwork resembling leatherwork, a stylistic feature originating in the School of Fontainebleau. This feature was exported to England.
Germany
The Renaissance in Germany was inspired first by German philosophers and artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Johannes Reuchlin who visited Italy. Important early examples of this period are especially the Landshut Residence, the Castle in Heidelberg, Johannisburg Palace in Aschaffenburg, the City Hall and Fugger Houses in Augsburg and St. Michael in Munich. A particular form of Renaissance architecture in Germany is the Weser Renaissance, with prominent examples such as the City Hall of Bremen and the Juleum in Helmstedt.
In July 1567 the city council of Cologne approved a design in the Renaissance style by Wilhelm Vernukken for a two storied loggia for Cologne City Hall. St Michael in Munich is the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps. It was built by Duke William V of Bavaria between 1583 and 1597 as a spiritual center for the Counter Reformation and was inspired by the Church of il Gesù in Rome. The architect is unknown. Many examples of Brick Renaissance buildings can be found in Hanseatic old towns, such as Stralsund, Wismar, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Friedrichstadt and Stade. Notable German Renaissance architects include Friedrich Sustris, Benedikt Rejt, Abraham van den Blocke, Elias Holl and Hans Krumpper.
England
Renaissance architecture arrived in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, having first spread through the Low countries where among other features it acquired versions of the Dutch gable, and Flemish strapwork in geometric designs adorning the walls. The new style tended to manifest itself in large square tall houses such as Longleat House.
The first great exponent of Italian Renaissance architecture in England was Inigo Jones (1573–1652), who had studied architecture in Italy where the influence of Palladio was very strong. Jones returned to England full of enthusiasm for the new movement and immediately began to design such buildings as the Queen's House at Greenwich in 1616 and the Banqueting House at Whitehall three years later. These works, with their clean lines, and symmetry were revolutionary in a country still enamoured with mullion windows, crenellations and turrets.
Spain
In Spain, Renaissance began to be grafted to Gothic forms in the last decades of the 15th century. The new style is called Plateresque, because of the extremely decorated façade, that brought to the mind the decorative motifs of the intricately detailed work of silversmiths, the Plateros. Classical orders and candelabra motifs (a candelieri) combined freely into symmetrical wholes.
From the mid-sixteenth century, under such architects as Pedro Machuca, Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera there was a closer adherence to the art of ancient Rome, sometimes anticipating Mannerism, examples of which include the palace of Charles V in Granada and the Escorial.
Portugal
As in Spain, the adoption of the Renaissance style in Portugal was gradual. The so-called Manueline style (c. 1490–1535) married Renaissance elements to Gothic structures with the superficial application of exuberant ornament similar to the Isabelline Gothic of Spain. Examples of Manueline include the Belém Tower, a defensive building of Gothic form decorated with Renaissance-style loggias, and the Jerónimos Monastery, with Renaissance ornaments decorating portals, columns and cloisters.
Scandinavia
The Renaissance architecture that found its way to Scandinavia was influenced by the Flemish architecture, and included high gables and a castle air as demonstrated in the architecture of Frederiksborg Palace. Consequently, much of the Neo-Renaissance to be found in the Scandinavian countries is derived from this source.
In Denmark, Renaissance architecture thrived during the reigns of Frederick II and especially Christian IV. Inspired by the French castles of the times, Flemish architects designed masterpieces such as Kronborg Castle in Helsingør and Frederiksborg Palace in Hillerod. Frederiksborg Palace (1602–1620) in Hillerod is the largest Renaissance palace in Scandinavia.
Elsewhere, in Sweden, with Gustav Vasa's seizure of power and the onset of the Protestant reformation, church construction and aristocratic building projects came to a near standstill. During this time period, several magnificent so-called Vasa castles appeared. They were erected at strategic locations to control the country as well as to accommodate the travelling royal court. Gripsholm Castle, Kalmar Castle and Vadstena Castle are known for their fusion of medieval elements with Renaissance architecture.
The architecture of Norway was influenced partly by the occurrence of the plague during the Renaissance era. After the Black Death, monumental construction in Norway came to a standstill. There are few examples of Renaissance architecture in Norway, the most prominent being renovations to the medieval Rosenkrantz Tower in Bergen, Barony Rosendal in Hardanger, and the contemporary Austrat manor near Trondheim, and parts of Akershus Fortress.
There is little evidence of Renaissance influence in Finnish architecture.
Baltic States
The Renaissance arrived late in what is today Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the so-called Baltic States, and did not make a great imprint architecturally. It was a politically tumultuous time, marked by the decline of the State of the Teutonic Order and the Livonian War.
In Estonia, artistic influences came from Dutch, Swedish and Polish sources. The building of the Brotherhood of the Blackheads in Tallinn with a façade designed by Arent Passer, is the only truly Renaissance building in the country that has survived more or less intact. Significantly for these troubled times, the only other examples are purely military buildings, such as the Fat Margaret cannon tower, also in Tallinn.
Latvian Renaissance architecture was influenced by Polish-Lithuanian and Dutch style, with Mannerism following from Gothic without intermediaries. St. John's Church in the Latvian capital of Riga is example of an earlier Gothic church which was reconstructed in 1587–89 by the Dutch architect Gert Freze (Joris Phraeze). The prime example of Renaissance architecture in Latvia is the heavily decorated House of the Blackheads, rebuilt from an earlier Medieval structure into its present Mannerist forms as late as 1619–25 by the architects A. and L. Jansen. It was destroyed during World War II and rebuilt during the 1990s.
Lithuania meanwhile formed one half of the large Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Renaissance influences grew stronger during the reign of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania Sigismund I the Old and Sigismund II Augustus. The Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania (destroyed in 1801, a copy built in 2002–2009) show Italian influences. Several architects of Italian origin were active in the country, including Bernardino Zanobi de Gianotis, Giovanni Cini and Giovanni Maria Mosca.
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