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Early Renaissance Architecture in Italy Week 1
Early Renaissance Architecture in Italy Week 1
Welcome to the class. During these eight weeks, we'll pass through many different artistic centers and
architectures in renaissance Italy. We hope to excite your interest for the creativity and culture of the field, and
we’ll concentrate our attention on the second part of the 15th century. 1450-1500. The architectural proposals
that matured in those times, coming from an Italian and a European context, medieval, for political and social
institutions, and gothic for the architectural structures and forms, will continue to find success in the future.
Erwin_Panofsky identified the dividing line between medieval revivalism of antiquity and true renaissance in
the very awareness of a break in tradition. Once every continuity had fallen away, the Renaissance could create
a real REBIRTH OF ANTIQUITY by re-integrating the forms with their meanings. We will discuss this research in
architecture following the identification of the architectural orders, up to Donato Bramante, who will conclude
our class. In this first week, we will briefly touch the beginnings of the 15th century Florence, where Filippo
Brunelleschi renewed the architectural tradition looking back to antiquity, and Rome as source of antiquity,
because of so many ruins, defined the past greatness.
It will be useful to deal with the architecture of the second part of the century, starting from Leon Battista
Alberti who received, integrated and transformed Brunelleschi’s proposal looking to the antiquity, and giving
his own decisive contribution from the theoretical and practical point of view to the success of the new
Renaissance architecture. Alberti was also well aware of other components of Brunelleschi's renewal. He also
wrote about PERSPECTIVE, which is the geometrical method invented by Brunelleschi to represent on a
surface, three dimensional objects standing at different distances in the space. Invented for painting, the
perspective became the main way to imagine architectural and urban spaces and to measure them. But
another component of Brunelleschi's work was considered by Alberti, the invention and application of new
technologies, again looking at antiquity, particularly in order to compete with antique architectures and to
respond to different conditions and methods of building. The role of TECHNOLOGIES in Renaissance times is
more important than usually supposed. And Brunelleschi's building of the Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore in
Florence, or problems with erecting great monoliths demonstrate this.
We will also examine architectures, as fortresses and fortifications, responding to new firearms technologies.
When Alberti completed his treatise about architecture, around 1452, his initial study of texts and monuments
of antiquity was based on mathematics and geometry as a reflection of nature, with the strong belief that
architecture was a part of a man's civil duty. This attitude would condition the architectural principle of the
earlier Renaissance and the architects did not apply themselves to textual imitations of individual antique
moments. In Florence, they preferred to accept and articulate the rational system of Brunelleschi either by
transforming it, like Alberti, or breaking with it in a return to tradition like Michelozzo.
In north and south Italy the battle between innovation and resistance was increasing in strength and
substance. This was so because it not only encompassed immediate questions of decorative language, antique
forms and architectural orders, but also included the problems of conceiving and constructing an architecture
that could replace the gothic structural memory with a continuous measuring of antiquity. At first, the new
decoration was frequently adapted to the existing architectural system. And only later did it find a home in the
different spatial and structural conceptions that descended from Florentine example. Beside the antique
monuments, an important reference for earlier renaissance architects was the only antique text surviving on
architecture, “De Architectura” of Vitruvius, an architect of Augustus' time. But his Latin was obscure and the
illustrations lost, so that it was very difficult to link Vitruvius’ descriptions of buildings and the definitions of
architectural parts, with the existing ruins. This is also true for Vitruvius’ descriptions of the three old Greek
orders, Ionic, Doric, Corinthian and a simpler local order, Tuscan, with their own parts and proportions.
Moreover, a large part of surviving antique monuments were built after Vitruvius’ death.
Therefore artists and architects of the earlier Renaissance very soon found that there was not a full
correspondence between the ruins still visible and Vitruvius’ rules. This was an area of obvious problems of
interpretation and imitation, not to say about the artists’ difficulties to understand the Latin language.
We have very numerous contributions of all those topics as a result of long and thorough research by historians
- Art historians and architectural historians. They can be reached through the bibliography, quoted in the books
indicated, as the sources for our course. You could start with Giorgio Vasari, who wrote Lives of Artists and
Architects; “Le Vite”, a century later, 1550 and 1568. But I would suggest to start with the most recent book
indicated in our bibliography. To go back to the previous studies and the historical sources, following your
interests.
The course wants to illustrate as mentioned the extreme variety present in identifying the usage of
architectural orders in the second part of the 15th century. To demonstrate that the so-called five orders,
Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, as they will be established after Bramante, are not abstract entities
with eternal rules, became object of the passionate and inventive research after the first proposals of
Brunelleschi. It is not only a question of simply identifying the orders by the forms of capitals, but, as we will
see, of recognizing forms and proportions of every part of them: pedestals, columns with their bases, shafts,
capitals, trabeation with their architraves, friezes, cornices - it means: both the vertical parts, columns with, or
without pedestals, and the horizontal parts, trabeations; also relating the intercolumniation and the
superimposition of more stories until obtaining a complete proportionate frame, or the representation of the
frame of the building. The orders will therefore be related to the singular architectures examined even if it will
force us to ignore or mention briefly other aspects of such patterns, functions, and structural characteristics.
Following this line, the course commits its topics to images no less than to words. All the colored images are
mine. You will draw your conclusion from them as a complement of what I will be able to illustrate. You will find
names, dates, and references in the captions that will guide you to relate the different cities, sites, altars, and
monuments. Knowing that in spite of the lack of efficient communication systems a remarkable exchange of
ideas, forms and architectural solutions took place through artists and artisans between the main Italian artistic
centers. We will start to examine them from the next lecture.
1.2 FLORENCE IN THE EARLY XV CENTURY
They forsaw an octagonal dome, but a constructional technique had not yet been found. The great apses were
roofed in. And the drum of the dome was only raised to the spring level (= the level of the springer or tas-de-
charge) when Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti presented in 1418 a model for a double-shell dome,
which was approved and built on the late Gothic structure of the cathedral.
Other Medieval buildings were important in Florence for the new architectural early Renaissance:
the Palazzo Vecchio or Palazzo della Signoria, seat of the city government, a massive and rusticated
Gothic building with a high tower;
the Loggia della Signoria in front of Palazzo Vecchio, a full gothic space, although without pointed
arches.
the Orsanmichele with pointed windows, but with clear divisions and subdivisions of its huge rooms
and stories.
But the chief models for Brunelleschi and the artists who innovated the
Florentine artistic tradition were older and romanesque. The church of
San Miniato, which looks at Florence from the hill in front of the city
with a series of full arches and half columns at the first level of the
facade, with a pediment and pilasters at the second level, with green
and white intarsias on the walls.
The San Giovanni Baptistery, believed [to be]
antique from the Florentines of those times.
Those last buildings will be taken, as models, from the main Florentine architects, also in the later part of the
15th century, as Brunelleschi did, looking at antiquity, and at the Florentine tradition as well.
This is a solution that Brunelleschi had experimented, as we will see in the Porch of the Innocenti, and with the
Masaccio in the Holy Trinity's fresco, in Santa Maria Novella.
The research of a new architectural language adapted from antiquity by Filippo Brunelleschi goes on at the
same time as his research of technical solutions for building the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.
The two approaches share a rational and geometric statement in facing problems, statement that is also
present in the regularity of the plan in the Ospedale degli Innocenti ( the foundling hospital) designed by
Brunellesci in 1419.
The architectural order, aimed at proportional spaces, finds full expression in the Sagrestia Vecchia di San
Lorenzo. Brunelleschi was charged with the design probably in 1419 and the work began in 1422. He designed
a cubic space with pilasters at the corners of the walls, sustaining the arches and the pendentives under a
hemispherical umbrella dome of arches and walls in between.
(from top to bottom): the full order - full order with arches - full order and arches positioned on a square bay -
the composition of square bays with orders and arches.
A detail of San Lorenzo’s Corinthian capital shows why this is called “Corinthian”.
Brunelleschi interpreted the forms of antique Corinthian capital adding a volute on
the middle of each side to emphasize the perspective axis.
Antonio Manetti reports that Brunelleschi was in Rome with Donatello to survey the old monuments, as many
artists did after them. Rome was in fact the site where the remains of antiquity were more present and
imposing inside large spaces, only partly peopled within the walls of the city.
More realistic views are available at the end of the 15th century, as those in the Codex Escurialensis, where we
can see the Vatican complex, the Sant'Angelo Castle and the Pantheon - or the disorderly crowding of houses,
towers, and monuments along the Tiber.
The attempt to investigate and to know the solutions and forms of the
antique architectures and the great variety of ruins, found the main
sources in the Fora (latin plural for “forum”), that were not visible as
they are today, after several campaigns of excavation during the 19th
and 20th century. We have in fact to consider, that they were covered
by about six meters of ruins and earth.
Among the monuments still visible, the Triumphal Arches were without doubt, the main examples of the
architectural orders and their ornaments. Here, we can see the Septimius Severus’ arch and the Constantine’s
arch very far indeed from forms and solutions of the Greek or Hellenistic temples.
A temple still visible in the 15th century was for example, the
Minerva's temple, no longer existing. We can see it here in
the drawing of the codex Escurialensis. The drawing shows in
what condition the ruins were, through the eyes of architects
and artists: partly buried, confused with other ruins, difficult
to identify.
Here we can see 2 columns of the Forum Transitorium, still existing near the wall of the Augustus forum, as we
saw in the previous drawing. The “Augustus' forum” was at those times considered an antique model of
rusticated wall, probably of a palace. The decorative richness of the free standing columns of the Forum
Transitorium competes with the projecting entablature in their forms with those of the triumphal arches.
One of the most followed models, as far as the connection of the trilithic system of architectural orders and the
system of piers and arches concerns, was the Colosseum, the structure of concentric rings still visible today.
And we have here a representation of the 15th century, showing exactly the inner structure and the outside
structure of the monument.
Seen from the front, the Colosseum shows the superimposing orders from the heavier to the lighter:
Tuscan / Doric – Ionic – Corinthian; and the arches and piers framed by the orders, that is to say, half columns
and entablatures.
More than the triumphal arches, the Greek columns of Marcus
Aurelius and Trajan (image) show how important was in
antique architecture, the union with the sculpture, testimony
of enterprises, clothes, and arms of the ancient Romans.