Early Renaissance Architecture in Italy Week 1

1.1 About the course

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
well 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 Brunelleschis 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

This is the FLORENCE we look at today and that
many of us know. But at the beginning of the 15th
century the Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore, the
cathedral of the city, was not yet built. In those
times, Florence had an independent Republican
government based on a tradition coming from the
Middle Ages, a tradition as well as for the city's
ordinary buildings as for its monuments. As far
back as 1367 the new cathedral Santa Maria del
Fiore was under construction following a Gothic
model.


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.

Among several examples that I could mention, seems
significant the Saint Louis Tabernacle that Donatello
completed in 1425 with the statue of the saint and that
later gave hospitality to the statue of Saint Thomas by
Verrocchio.
The tabernacle in antique forms was inserted in an
Orsanmichele's pillar.
We can see here the main order of pilasters and the
minor order of columns with the entablature on the
columns intersecting with the plaster on the major
order.
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 main example of the first early Renaissance Florentine
architecture raised on a late Gothic building, remains, in any
case, the Santa Maria del Fiore dome which Brunelleschi
completed in 1436, 40 meters in diameter and 56 meters in
height.
In the same year, Brunelleschi also won the competition for
the lantern's design.
Brunelleschi invented not only many technical solutions for
masonry, but also designed the machines of the erecting yard
when he became the solely responsible architect of the dome
in 1432.
Here we have a load positioner, a crane and the hoist.
(drawn by Bonaccorso Ghiberti, Lorenzo Ghiberti'snephew).

It is difficult therefore, to judge the new Brunelleschi
architectural language, from the mere shape of the
dome that we see here on the late Gothic structure of
the Florentine cathedral.






1.3 BRUNELLESCHI AND THE ARCHITECTURAL ORDER

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.


Architectural forms, coming from antiquity, appear in the portico
(porch) of the Ospedale, organized in a simplified and rational
progression of columns, with Corinthian capitals and full arches;
as a rule the proportion of the base corresponding to a square in
plan and in front.
To underline the novelty, the vaults are shallow domes (not
traditional groin vaults).
At the end of this series of arches on a simple impost block and
capitals, we find a measured order of fluted pilasters, always
Corinthian, sustaining an entablature, framing the arches and the
minor order.
The architectural order became again an instrument of proportion, as
it was in that remote antiquity.


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.

In the scheme we see piers becoming pilasters at the
corners.
The pendentives are sustaining an umbrella dome
over the cubic space.





Here we have the umbrella dome with arches and
vaults in between, the solution invented by
Brunelleschi.





We find folded pilasters in the corners, pilasters in
the corners of a little choir, a small part of entire
pilasters in the inner corners, a solution to save
space between all that's inside the square plan.

Full evidence of Brunelleschi's meaning of architectural
order appears in the nave of San Lorenzo Church that
Brunelleschi continued after the Sagrestia Vecchia.
The impost that we found in the Innocentis Porch (Portico
of the Innocenti) between capitals and arches becomes in
fact a block of entablature, corresponding to the entablature
that ran on the pilasters of the aisles.
As in the Innocenti porch, at the cross between the nave and
the transept, the series of arches stops at the major order
and frames the minor order and its arches with its
entablature.


And here we see the corner
solution with the major order
framing the minor order and
arches on it. This is Brunelleschi's
system here, fully realized; using
square bases, borders, and arches
he gives sure proportions to his
two dimensional space.

(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 Lorenzos 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.




The Facade of San Lorenzo has remained without orders and
unfinished.


1.4 THE SOURCES OF THE ANTIQUITY
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.

This is specified by the representations of Rome:

This fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico di Siena (Public palace,
Town Hall) is dated at the beginning of the 15th century and
characterized by realistic and symbolic elements within a circle -
synonymous of perfection.

We can observe the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Capitol Hill,
the monumental columns, the Dioscuri on the Quirinal Hill, the
Marcus Aurelius still aside San Giovanni, numerous churches,
and on the right side of the river Tiber, the Saint Peters Basilica
defended by Sant'Angelo Castle.



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.





Everywhere the Pantheon emerges as the principal
moment of antiquity - preserved because used as a
church - with its big pediments and columns, its bronze
doors and its impressive dome.







The architects of those times tried to represent such a huge building in the little
pages of their sketch books - either as a whole or in details - doing a big effort of
abstraction through their drawings. Here we see the Pantheon's door carefully
represented, with all its parts well delineated.






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 Constantines
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.






Therefore, also the antique sculptures began to be imitated, to
be placed in new architectural spaces, as happened for the
statue of Marcus Aurelius in the capital's Piazza.

And on the left we see a bronze representation of Marcus
Aurelius by Filarete following the antique model.







The statues of the Dioscures, then attributed to Phidias, will
be represented many times and restored on the Quirinal Hill,
where they still are today.