DELA CRUZ, JAY-R

RECEL, JAY-AR

BS ARCH IIB
ARCHITECTURE IN
RENAISSANCE ITALY
Italian Renaissance architects based their theories and practices on
Classical Roman examples. The Renaissance revival of Classical
Rome was as important in architecture as it was in literature. A
pilgrimage to Rome to study the ancient buildings and ruins,
especially the Colosseum and Pantheon, was considered essential
to an architect's training. Classical orders and architectural
elements such as columns, pilasters, pediments, entablatures,
arches, and domes form the vocabulary of Renaissance buildings.
Vitruvius's writings on architecture also influenced the
Renaissance definition of beauty in architecture. As in the
Classical world, Renaissance architecture is characterized by
harmonious form, mathematical proportion, and a unit of
measurement based on the human scale.
The PANTHEON is a building in
Rome, Italy, commissioned by
Marcus Agrippa during the reign of
Augustus as a temple to all the gods
of ancient Rome, and rebuilt by the
emperor Hadrian about 126 AD.
The COLOSSEUM or Coliseum,
also known as the Flavian
Amphitheatre is an elliptical
amphitheatre in the centre of the
city of Rome, Italy.
THE ITALIAN
RENAISSANCE
The Italian Renaissance was the earliest
manifestation of the general European
Renaissance, a period of great cultural change
and achievement that began in Italy during the
14th century and lasted until the 16th century,
marking the transition between Medieval and
Early Modern Europe.
The term Renaissance is in essence a modern one that
came into currency in the 19th century, in the work of
historians such as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt.
Although the origins of a movement that was confined
largely to the literate culture of intellectual endeavor
and patronage can be traced to the earlier part of the
14th century, many aspects of Italian culture and
society remained largely Medieval; the

Renaissance did not come into full swing until the
end of the century. The word renaissance
(Rinascimento in Italian) means "rebirth" in French,
and the era is best known for the renewed interest
in the culture of classical antiquity after the period
that Renaissance humanists labeled the Dark Ages.
These changes, while significant, were concentrated
in the elite, and for the vast majority of the
population life was little changed from the Middle
Ages.

In Florence, the Renaissance style was introduced
with a revolutionary but incomplete monument in
Rimini by Leone Battista Alberti. Some of the
earliest buildings showing Renaissance
characteristics are Filippo Brunelleschi's church
of San Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel. The
interior of Santo Spirito expresses a new sense of
light, clarity and spaciousness, which is typical of
the early Italian Renaissance.

Throughout the Gothic period in the middle ages, when architecture in France
and England was dominated by architecture executed on the grandest scale in
Western history, with immense and airy cathedrals representing one of the
highest points of European architectural genius, Italian architecture was an
uninspired and relatively small affair. Although there was Gothic architecture in
Italy, the sweep, genius and grandeur seemed to have passed those city-states by.
The Renaissance, however, saw the development of a new architecture from the
fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries that was the first "modern" architecture.
When we look at Renaissance buildings, they look familiar, almost as if they
were built one hundred years ago. The architectural language invented by the
Italian Renaissance architects became the dominant architectural language of
the modern world, displaced only by the advent of modernist architecture in
the twentieth century.
BACKGROUND
The architects of the Renaissance derived their architecture in part
from a revived interest in Roman and Greek ruins, from the recovery
of classical texts on architecture, particularly the Roman writer
Vitruvius's ten books on architecture. They also, however, invented new
forms and new visual language that was not derived from the classical
period. In the process, the architects, humanists, and painters of the
Renaissance (for architecture was considered a universal art in the
Renaissance) invented a new idea of public space in which civic pride
and organization would be organized on a city-wide scale.
In the Renaissance, architecture was seen as the supreme art. Theorists
on architecture believed that architectural design arose out of human
experience, like all arts, but that it also represented the highest artistic
achievement a human being could attain. Architecture, though, was not
considered a specialist profession, as it is now. Architectural design was
carried out by professional architects, painters, sculptors (such as
Michelangelo), humanists, masons, and just plain amateurs with alot of
time and money.


FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI
(1377-1466)
The invention of the uniquely Italian style in Renaissance architecture is
typically given to Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1466), who is also credited
with inventing the principles of linear perspective in drawing and
painting. In 1419, he was commissioned to build the dome over the
cathedral in Florence, which had been started in 1296. In 1419, the
building was still unfinished for no-one could quite figure out how to
build the dome. Brunelleschi solved the problem by inventing a new
type of dome. Rather than a hemisphere, Brunelleschi's dome is conical
and high. It has eight sides and Brunelleschi built white ribs on the
outside of the dome to call attention to these eight sides
.
LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI
(1404-1472)
Besides Brunelleschi, the most important architect of the period was
Leon Battista Alberti, who was also a significant political theorist and
civic humanist. He's best known for his books on architecture; in these
books, he draws up a theory of city planning and public space. His
ideal city is filled with isolated, monumental buildings all perfectly
balancing one another.While Brunelleschi is credited with inventing the
architectural language of the Renaissance, Alberti is generally
considered to have perfected it in terms of symmetry and disposition
ANDREA PALLADIO (15081580)
Andrea Palladio (15081580) was the chief architect of the Venetian
Republic, writing an influential treatise, I quattro libri dell'architettura
(Four Books on Architecture,1570; 41.100.126.19). Due to the new
demand for villas in the sixteenth century, Palladio specialized in
domestic architecture, although he also designed two beautiful and
impressive churches in Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and Il
Redentore (1576). Palladio's villas are often centrally planned, drawing
on Roman models of country villas. The Villa Emo (Treviso, 1559) was
a working estate, while the Villa Rotonda (Vicenza, 156670) was an
aristocratic refuge. Both plans rely on classical ideals of symmetry,
axiality, and clarity.
VILLA ALMERICO (VILLA ROTONDA):
FROM I QUATTRO LIBRI
DELL'ARCHITETTURA
One of the best-known and often
copied villas of the Renaissance, the
Villa Americo (156669), originally
built for Monsignor Paolo Americo
and completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi,
still overlooks the vineyards and
farmlands outside Vicenza.

The art rested on several principles derived ultimately from Vitruvius's
books on architecture. The most important of these was symmetria, or
symmetry, which demanded that the parts be geometrically balanced.
There is in the earliest Renaissance architecture a mania for order and
symmetry. In addition, the various parts of the architectural whole must
be congruous or harmonious with one another&emdash;in architectural
theory this was called dispositio, or disposition. As architecture
developed, however, designers began to rebel against the strictures of
Vitruvian theory. In the 1530's,particularly in the work of Michelangelo,
architects began to go crazy with dysymmetry and wildly incongruous
mixtures of architectural elements. This rebellious style of architecture
is called mannerist architecture after a similar phenomenon in
Renaissance painting.
MANNERISM IN "VISUAL
ARTS IN THE RENAISSANCE"
TITIAN, SACRED AND PROFANE
LOVE
ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN, THE
DESCENT FROM THE CROSS
The High Renaissance, as we call the style today, was introduced to
Rome with Donato Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio
(1502) and his original centrally planned St. Peter's Basilica (1506),
which was the most notable architectural commission of the era,
influenced by almost all notable Renaissance artists, including
Michelangelo and Giacomo della Porta. The beginning of the late
Renaissance in 1550 was marked by the development of a new column
order by Andrea Palladio. Colossal columns that were two or more
stories tall decorated the facades.
ST. PETER'S BASILICA IN ROME
St. Peter's is a church
in the Renaissance
style located in the
Vatican City west of
the River Tiber and
near the Janiculum
Hill and Hadrian's
Mausoleum.
IN ANTIS AND PROSTYLE
This describes the temple in antis (in
which the side walls protrude to flank
the columns on the porch in front)
and refers to the Temple of the Three
Fortunes near the Colline Gate in
Rome. The text at the bottom
describes prostyle temples (buildings
with a row of columns, or portico, at
the front only) and considers the
Temples of Jove and Faunus on the
Isola Tiberina. The Temple of Faunus
is illustrated at the left in plan and at
the center right in a perspectival three-
quarter view. The cityscape portrays
the Isola Tiberina.