Rules · Ornament · Doors & windows · Walls
Build the gates of a fortress in rustication (rough, heavy blocks bound into a Tuscan or Doric order) so that the gate shows the strength of the walls it pierces.
Serlio assigns rustic work to the Tuscan, the plainest order, and recommends it for city gates, fortresses, prisons and arsenals. He calls the mixture of rough stone with the orders partly the work of nature and partly the work of art. His Extraordinario libro of 1551 is a pattern book of fifty gateways, thirty of them rustic, in which the blocks run across columns, break into pediments and swallow keystones. It is the most wilful book of the sixteenth century and a Mannerist manifesto.
The three gates of Palmanova, traditionally attributed to Scamozzi, are rusticated gateways of this kind.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
Mark the main door by setting a segmental pediment inside a larger triangular one, or by breaking the pediment open to hold a cartouche or statue.
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.
Give a fortified town a polygonal wall with an angled bastion at every corner, so that each face of every bastion and every stretch of curtain wall can be swept by fire from its neighbours.
Palmanova: a nine-sided trace with nine bastions and three gates
Give a new city a regular polygonal outline with a bastion at every angle, put the principal piazza at the centre with the chief church and the seat of government on it, and distribute lesser squares for the markets through the quarters.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The gate in rustic work”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/serlio-rustic-gate. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.