Renaissance and Baroque

In 1418 the wardens of Florence Cathedral announced a competition for a problem nobody knew how to solve. The octagonal crossing of their church, begun more than a century before, was some 45 m across (wider than any vault built since antiquity), and no forest could supply the timber needed to hold a dome of that span while its mortar set. The man who solved it, the goldsmith Filippo Brunelleschi, had spent years in Rome measuring the ruins. His dome is at once the last great work of the Gothic masons’ lodge and the first work of the architecture we call Renaissance: a revival of antiquity that was also a new science of building and a new idea of the architect.

Florence: the dome and the loggia

The dome is not a hemisphere but a pointed, eight-sided cloister vault whose angle ribs follow the Tuscan curve called the quinto acuto or “pointed fifth”, struck with a radius of four-fifths of the span (The pointed fifth). The pointed profile pushes outward less than a round one and, more important, keeps the brickwork of each ring from leaning too far inward while it is built. Brunelleschi made the dome of two shells (a thick inner one that carries, a thin outer one that sheds the weather and gives the great silhouette), linked by eight marble angle ribs and sixteen hidden ones, and bound by horizontal chains of stone and timber (Two shells tied by ribs). The bricks were laid in rings locked by herringbone courses, so that each stage stood by itself without centering (Building a dome without centering). The dome was closed in 1436; the lantern that crowns it and pins the ribs together was begun in the year of Brunelleschi’s death, 1446.

While the dome rose, Brunelleschi built something smaller and more revolutionary. The loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Foundling Hospital, begun in 1419, is a row of round arches on slender Corinthian columns, raised on a flight of steps across the whole front. Its novelty is its measure: each bay is as wide as the columns are high and as deep as it is wide, so that the loggia is a sequence of cubes of space, each covered by a small sail vault, a hemisphere trimmed by the four sides of its square (The bay as a cube, The sail vault over a square bay). The grey pietra serena of the columns and arches is drawn against white plaster like the lines of a perspective drawing, and in the same years Brunelleschi is said to have demonstrated the laws of linear perspective with painted panels of the Baptistery.

Leon Battista Alberti, a humanist in the papal service, gave the new architecture its theory. His On the Art of Building, completed about 1452, defines beauty as concinnitas, a harmony of the parts so complete that nothing can be added or taken away except for the worse (Beauty is concinnitas), and derives the ratios of good rooms from the consonances of music (Ratios from the musical consonances). His buildings show how to fit the ancient vocabulary to modern needs. For the Gothic front of Santa Maria Novella in Florence he devised a temple front over the nave and two great scrolls to mask the lower aisles, the whole governed by squares (Scrolls to join nave and aisles); at Sant’Andrea in Mantua he fused the temple front with the triumphal arch and carried the arch motif through a nave of barrel-vaulted chapels, a model for church interiors for two centuries.

℟Scrolls to join nave and aisles

Where a church has a tall nave and low aisles, give the front a lower storey as wide as the whole church and an upper storey as wide as the nave, and join the two with great scrolls.

Rome: the circle and the city

Around 1500 the centre of gravity moved to Rome, where the popes were rebuilding the city as the capital of Christendom. The architect who defined the High Renaissance there was Donato Bramante. His Tempietto, built in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio over the supposed place of St Peter’s crucifixion, is a round temple of sixteen Doric columns on three steps, crowned by a balustrade, a drum and a hemispherical dome (The round temple and its hemisphere). Barely larger than a room, it was treated at once as a classic: Serlio and Palladio both published it among the temples of antiquity.

The Tempietto embodies the ideal of the central plan (The centrally planned church). For Renaissance thinkers the circle, without beginning or end, was the natural image of God, and the figure of a man inscribed in a circle and a square (the “Vitruvian man” drawn by Leonardo) tied the human body, the building and the cosmos together. Bramante’s plan for the new St Peter’s (1506) was a Greek cross under an enormous dome; the building occupied every major architect in Rome for more than a century, and Michelangelo, who took charge in 1546, returned it to a central plan and designed the ribbed dome on its drum. Only in 1607 was the nave lengthened to suit the liturgy.

℟The centrally planned church

Where the purpose allows, plan the church about a single centre (a circle, a square or a Greek cross) so that every part stands in the same relation to the middle, under a dome.

The same geometric ideal shaped the Renaissance image of the city. Filarete’s treatise, written in Milan in the early 1460s, describes Sforzinda, a city laid out as an eight-pointed star (two squares turned against each other inside a circular moat), with sixteen streets running from the central square to the gates and towers (The city as a star, Radial streets from a central square). Artillery soon gave such geometry a military purpose. The angled bastion, whose flanks could sweep the faces of its neighbours with fire, turned fortress walls into regular stars (The bastioned trace), and in 1593 Venice founded Palmanova, a nine-pointed fortress town with a hexagonal piazza and radial streets: the ideal city built at last, as a garrison.

Palladio: the architecture of the book

Andrea Palladio, a stonemason from Padua trained and renamed by the humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino, spent his working life in and around Vicenza and Venice. His first great commission, the loggias wrapped round Vicenza’s medieval town hall from 1549, solved a practical puzzle with a motif published by Serlio: each bay is a Serliana, a central arch springing from the entablature of two narrow flat-headed side openings (The Serliana), framed by a larger order of half-columns. Because the arch reads as the constant, the side openings can stretch or shrink to absorb the irregular spacing of the old piers without anyone noticing (Keep the arch, vary the sides).

Palladio’s villas for the landowners of the Veneto are his most influential works. The owner’s house is raised on a basement of service rooms (The principal floor raised on a basement), fronted by a temple portico, which Palladio believed, wrongly, that ancient houses had possessed (The temple front on the house), and planned in strict symmetry, with rooms of the shapes and heights he tabulated in his book (The seven most beautiful room shapes, The height of a vaulted room). The Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza carries the logic to its limit: a square block with an identical Ionic portico on each face and a round, domed hall at the centre, completed after Palladio’s death by Vincenzo Scamozzi, who built the low stepped dome.

What made Palladio the most imitated architect in history was his book. I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570) set out the orders, his reconstructions of ancient buildings and his own designs in clear, measured woodcuts. It was the book that Inigo Jones carried round Italy in 1613–14, that Lord Burlington and his circle made the rule of English taste in the 1720s, and that Thomas Jefferson used in Virginia; through it the portico, the Serliana and the symmetrical villa became part of the architecture of three continents.

Mannerism: knowing the rules

The generation after Raphael knew the ancient vocabulary so well that it could play with it. In Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te at Mantua (1524–34) triglyphs slip out of the frieze and keystones burst through pediments; in Michelangelo’s vestibule to the Laurentian Library columns are sunk into the walls, where they carry nothing, and a stair pours down into the room like lava. Michelangelo also gave the classical language new, serious forms that later architects would use for two centuries: the giant order that rises through two storeys on his palaces for the Capitoline Hill (The giant order), and the broken, layered and nested pediments of the Porta Pia (A pediment within a pediment). Scholars disagree about whether “Mannerism” is a style or merely a period, but the attitude (virtuoso, self-aware, sometimes disquieting) is unmistakable.

℟The giant order

To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.

The Baroque: architecture in motion

The church of the Jesuits in Rome, Il Gesù, designed by Vignola in 1568 and given its front by Giacomo della Porta, set the model for the churches of the Counter-Reformation: a broad nave for preaching, side chapels, a dome over the crossing, and a two-storey façade whose narrow upper storey is joined to the wide lower one by scrolls (The two-storey church front). Its successors pressed the design into depth. At Santa Susanna (1597–1603) Carlo Maderno stepped the wall forward towards the door, turning pilasters into half-columns and breaking the entablature over each support, so that the façade builds to a climax at its centre (Step the wall forward to the centre).

In the hands of Bernini and Borromini the Baroque became an architecture of curves, light and movement. Both used the oval, which combines the concentration of a central plan with the direction a church needs (The oval plan). Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (1658–70) sets the oval across the entrance axis, so that the visitor faces the altar across its short dimension and the whole curving wall opens round him; its gilded coffers diminish towards a lantern full of light (Coffers that diminish towards the lantern), and the altar is lit from a hidden window above (Light from a hidden source). Borromini’s tiny San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1634–41) is a longitudinal oval generated from triangles and circles, and its late façade (1665–67) undulates in plan (concave, convex, concave below; three concave bays above), so that the classical order itself seems to bend (The undulating front).

Baroque design was never confined to single buildings. Bernini’s colonnades embrace the piazza of St Peter’s like arms; the avenues of Sixtus V’s Rome linked the pilgrimage churches across the city; at Versailles, Le Vau, Hardouin-Mansart and Le Nôtre extended the axis of a palace across a whole landscape of gardens and canals. In France the style was disciplined by the Royal Academy, whose first professor, François Blondel, taught the orders, stairs and proportion as a body of rules (Cours d’architecture), and defended proportion against Claude Perrault’s argument that it was mere custom. In Central Europe, Spain, Portugal and Latin America the Baroque flowered late, in abbeys and palaces whose ceremonial stairs became the principal rooms (The imperial stair) and whose vaults were painted away into skies.

Rococo and the end of an age

The final phase, the Rococo, began in the Paris interiors of the 1720s: panels framed by asymmetrical shells and scrolls (rocaille), mirrors, white and gold. In the pilgrimage churches of Bavaria and Franconia (the Wieskirche, Vierzehnheiligen) it became a total architecture of interlocking ovals flooded with light. By then critics were already turning against it. Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture of 1753 condemned broken pediments, twisted columns, two-storey church fronts and most of what this chapter has described (Licences to avoid), and the rediscovery of Greek temples and of Pompeii turned taste towards a sterner antiquity. That story (Neoclassicism and the revivals of the nineteenth century) is told in the next chapter.

℟Licences to avoid

Avoid the ornaments that have no model in the hut: broken or curved pediments, pediments on the long side of a roof, orders piled storey upon storey on a church front, arches carried on columns, and twisted or cabled shafts.