Renaissance Drawing High School Lesson Plan

The Dome of Florence Cathedral,
designed by Brunelleschi.
An iconic symbol of the
Florentine Renaissance.

HISTORY
For details of art movements
and styles, see: History of Fine art.
For chronology and fundamental dates
run across: History of Art Timeline.
For data well-nigh terms,
see: Compages Glossary.

Art HISTORIANS
For the groovy historians of
Renaissance fine art, run across:
Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97)
Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
Kenneth Clark (1903-83)
Leo Steinberg (1920-2011)

Renaissance Compages (c.1400-1600)
History, Characteristics, Famous Buildings

Contents

• Introduction
• Leading Architects
• Highlights
• Renaissance Compages in Florence
• Brunelleschi's Cathedral Dome in Florence
• Church of San Lorenzo (Brunelleschi)
• The Medici Palace (Michelozzo di Bartolommeo)
• Renaissance Palace Design
• Theories of Leon Battista Alberti
• The Palazzo Rucellai (Alberti)
• Renaissance Architecture Exterior Florence
• Church of San Francesco, Rimini (Alberti)
• Church of Sant'Andrea, Mantua (Alberti)
• Ducal Palace, Urbino (Luciano Laurana)
• Church of Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato (Sangallo)
• Renaissance Compages in Rome and Its Environs
• Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio (Donato Bramante)
• Renovation of the Piazza del Campidoglio (Michelangelo)
• Renovation of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Michelangelo)
• Saint Peter'due south Basilica
• Giacomo Barozzi/Vignola
• Villa Farnese at Caprarola (Vignola)
• Renaissance Architecture in Venice
• Piazza San Marco (Sansovino)
• Palladio
• Monastery Church of San Giorgio Maggiore (Palladio)
• Villa Capra (La Rotunda) (Palladio)
• List of Famous Italian Renaissance Buildings

For a general guide to the development of building design.
please see: Architecture: History, Styles (3000 BCE - present).

St Peter'due south Basilica, Rome. Symbol of
Roman Renaissance design, information technology was
the work of 3 main architects:
Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta
and Carlo Maderno, although it
also involved Bramante, Sangallo,
Fra Giocondo, Raphael and Peruzzi.

Introduction

Although unable to free themselves from the engineering and blueprint legacy of either Romanesque architecture (c.800-1200) or Gothic architecture (c.1150-1375), the architects of the Italian Renaissance sought their main inspiration from Greek and Roman architecture - making liberal utilize of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders, combining classicism with the new principles of Humanism upon which and then much of Renaissance art was based. In a higher place all, they sought to establish the ideal proportions for a building, based on those of the idealized human body. Architecture during the Renaissance was besides closely associated with urban planning and the broadcasting of ideas, thanks to the new technique of press. The 15th century quattrocento became the era of the treatise, as exemplified by Alberti's De re aedificatoria (X Books on Architecture) (1485), the printed translations of the writings of Vitruvius, the first century Roman builder, Vignola's The Rule of the V Orders of Architecture, and Sebastiano Serlio's Seven Books of Compages. The Renaissance was likewise a multi-media upshot: thus, architecture went paw in hand with sculpture equally well as mural painting. Furthermore, some of the all-time sculptors (Michelangelo) and Old Masters (Raphael) became excellent architects.

Leading Renaissance Architects

The greatest architects of the Renaissance included: Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), Giovanni Giocondo (1433-1515), Giuliano da Sangallo (1443-1516), Donato Bramante (1444-1514), the theorist Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), Michelangelo (1475-1564), Baldessare Peruzzi (1481-1536), Raphael (1483-1520), Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484-1546), Michele Sanmicheli (1484-1559), Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570), Giulio Romano (1499-1546), Giacomo Barozzi (Vignola) (1507-1573), Andrea Palladio (1508-80), Pirro Ligorio (1510-83), Galeazzo Alessi (1512-72), Giacomo della Porta (1533-1602), the theorist Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616), Carlo Maderno (1556-1629), Antonio Contini (1566-1600).

Highlights of Renaissance Architecture

Although the continuing need for monumental religious art meant that most architectural projects involved cathedrals, basilicas, churches, chapels, sacristies, baptisteries, temples and tombs, Renaissance architects too designed a wide range of secular structures, such as palaces, villas, libraries, hospitals, piazzas, fountains, and bridges. Celebrated examples of Renaissance design include: the dome of Florence Cathedral (1420-36) and the Church of San Lorenzo (1420-69) by Brunelleschi; Palazzo Medici Riccardi (1445-1460) by Michelozzo di Bartolommeo; Palazzo Rucellai (1446-51) by Alberti; Church of Santa Maria delle Carceri (1485-1506) by Giuliano da Sangallo; Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio (1502) by Bramante; Palazzo del Te, Mantua (1525-34) by Giulio Romano; Saint Peter's Basilica (1506-1626) for which many famous Renaissance and Baroque architects contributed ideas, including Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno and Bernini (1598-1680) - the Villa Farnese at Caprarola (c.1560) by Vignola; the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore (1562) and the Villa Capra (1566-91) by Palladio. Highlights of architectural Renaissance sculpture include Michelangelo's David (1501-four), and the Rape of the Sabine Women (1581-2, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence) past Giambologna (1529-1608).

Renaissance Compages in Florence

Travellers from beyond the Alps in the mid-15th century plant Florence - then the centre of Early Renaissance art - very different in advent from the northern cities. Instead of church spires piercing the heaven, the Florentine skyline was dominated, as it still is today, by the enormous mass of the cathedral dome rising above low houses, smaller churches, and the blocklike palaces of the wealthy, all of which had minimal exterior decoration. Encounter also: Renaissance Fine art in Florence.

I important case of pre-Renaissance architecture in Florence was the imposing Palazzo Vecchio (town hall), looking out onto the Piazza della Signoria, which was congenital between 1299 and 1314.

Brunelleschi's Cathedral Dome in Florence

The major borough projection of the early on years of the quattrocento was the still-unfinished cathedral, begun in the belatedly trecento and continued intermittently during the fourteenth century. As early on as 1367, its architects had envisioned a very tall dome to span the huge interior space, only they lacked the engineering know-how to construct it. When interest in completing the cathedral was revived around 1407, the technical solution was found by a immature sculptor-turned-builder, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), i of the key early Renaissance artists in Florence. Brunelleschi's intended career every bit a sculptor had concluded with his failure to win the 1402 competition to design new bronze doors for the Baptistry, which stands next to the Florence Cathedral. Brunelleschi declined a function as banana on that project and travelled to Rome, probably with his sculptor friend Donatello (1386-1466), where he studied Roman architecture and sculpture.

Brunelleschi, whose begetter had been involved in the original plans for the dome in 1367, advised constructing offset a tall drum, or cylindrical base. The drum was finished in 1410, and in 1417 Brunelleschi was deputed to design the dome itself. Work began in 1420 and was completed by 1471. A revolutionary feat of technology, the dome is a double crush of masonry that combines Gothic and Renaissance elements. Gothic construction is based on the pointed arch, using rock shafts, or ribs, to back up the vault, or ceiling. The octagonal outer shell is substantially a structure of this blazon, supported on ribs and in a pointed-arch profile; all the same, similar Roman domes, information technology is cut at the acme with an oculus (opening) and is surmounted past a lantern, a crowning structure fabricated upwardly of Roman architectural forms. The dome'southward 138-foot bore would have made the use of centering (temporary wooden construction supports) plush and even unsafe. Therefore, Brunelleschi devised machinery to hoist building materials as needed and invented an ingenious system past which each portion of the construction reinforced the next i as the dome was built upward course, or layer, past grade. The reinforcing elements were vertical marble ribs and horizontal sandstone rings connected with iron rods, with the whole supported by oak staves and beams tying rib to rib. The inner and outer shells were also tied together internally past a system of arches. When completed, this self-buttressed unit required no external support to keep information technology continuing. For more about the Florentine duomo - the icon of Renaissance architecture - run into: Florence Cathedral, Brunelleschi and the Renaissance (1420-36).

Church of San Lorenzo (Brunelleschi)

The cathedral dome was a triumph of applied science and structure technique for Brunelleschi, who was a pioneer of Renaissance compages. Other commissions came chop-chop after the cathedral-dome project, and Brunelleschi's innovative designs were well received past Florentine patrons. From about 1421 to his expiry in 1446, Brunelleschi was involved in two projects for the Church of San Lorenzo. Offset, the architect designed a sacristy (a room where ritual attire and vessels are kept), completed in 1428 and called the Old Sacristy, as a chapel and mausoleum for the Medici family of Florence. He was then commissioned to rebuild the church itself. The precise history of this second project is obscured by intermittent construction and later alterations. Brunelleschi may take conceived the plans for the new church at the same time as he designed the sacristy in 1421 or perhaps every bit late every bit almost 1425, after new foundations had been laid for the transept and sanctuary.

San Lorenzo is an austere basilica-plan church with elements of Early Christian fine art. The long nave, flanked by single side aisles opening into shallow side chapels, is intersected by a short transept with a square crossing. Across the crossing infinite facing the nave is a square sanctuary flanked by minor chapels opening off the transept. Projecting out from the south transept is Brunelleschi'due south sacristy, today called the Former Sacristy to distinguish it from one built in the sixteenth century.

What is entirely new in San Lorenzo is its mathematical regularity and symmetry. To plan the church, Brunelleschi used a module - a bones unit of measure that could exist multiplied or divided and applied to every element of the design. The result was a series of clear, rational interior spaces in harmony with each other and on a man scale.

Brunelleschi's modular organisation was too carried through in the proportions of the church'due south interior. Ornamental details were carved in pietra serena, a grayish rock that became synonymous with Brunelleschi'southward interiors. Beneath the plain clerestory (upper-story wall of windows) with its unobtrusive openings, the arches of the nave are carried on tall, slender Corinthian columns made even taller by the insertion of a favoured Brunelleschian device, an impost block betwixt the column uppercase and the springing of the circular arches. The arcade is repeated in the outer walls of the side aisles in the arched openings to the chapels surmounted by biconvex lunettes. Flattened architectural forms in pietra serena clear the wall surfaces, and each bay is covered by its own vaulted ceiling. The foursquare crossing is covered by a hemispherical dome, the nave and transept by flat ceilings.

San Lorenzo was an experimental edifice combining erstwhile and new elements, but Brunelleschi'southward rational approach, unique sense of order, and innovative incorporation of Classical motifs were inspirations to later Renaissance architects, many of whom learned from his work firsthand by completing his unfinished projects.

The Medici Palace (Michelozzo di Bartolommeo)

Brunelleschi'due south role in the Medici palace (at present the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi) in Florence, begun in 1444, is unclear. According to the sixteenth-century painter, architect, and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), Brunelleschi'south model for the palazzo, or palace, was rejected as too grand past Cosimo de' Medici the Elder, who later hired Michelozzo di Bartolommeo (1396-1474), whom most scholars have accepted as the designer of the building. In any instance, the palace established a tradition for Italian town houses that, with interesting variations, remained the norm for a century. The plain outside was in keeping with political and religious thinking in Florence, which was strongly influenced by Christian ideals of poverty and charity. Similar many other European cities, Florence had sumptuary laws, which forbid ostentatious displays of wealth - but they were frequently ignored. Nether Florentine law, for instance, individual homes were express to a dozen rooms; Cosimo, even so, acquired and demolished twenty modest houses to provide the site for his new residence.

Huge in scale (each story is more than 20 feet high), with fine proportions and details, the building was synthetic effectually a central courtyard surrounded by a loggia, or covered gallery. On one side the basis floor originally opened through large, circular arches onto the street. Although these arches were walled up in the sixteenth century and given windows designed by Michelangelo, they are withal visible today. The facade of large, rusticated stone blocks - that is, with their outer faces left rough, typical of Florentine town house exteriors - was derived from fortifications. On the palace facade the stories are clearly set up off from each other by the alter in the stone surfaces from very rough at the basis level to almost smoothen on the third. The Medici Palace inaugurated a new monumentality and regularity of plan in residential urban architecture.

Renaissance Palace Blueprint

Noble families of the Early Renaissance in Italy congenital a number of magnificent urban palaces, many of which were designed to look imposing and fifty-fifty intimidating. The front face of a building (the facade), offers clues as to what lies behind information technology: a huge central door, for instance, suggests power; rusticated stonework suggests strength and the fortifications of a castle; precious marbles and/or relief sculpture indicates wealth; a cartouche, accompanied by a family coat-of-arms, is an emphatic symbol of dignity.

The majority of Renaissance palaces used designs derived from ancient Greek architecture or aboriginal Roman buildings - columns fashioned in the Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian orders, decorated entablatures, and other such elements - in a style known as classicism. The Palazzo Farnese in Rome, for instance, was built for the Farneses, one of whom, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1468-1549), became Pope Paul III in 1534. Designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Michelangelo, and Giacomo della Porta, this immense building stands at the caput of and dominates a wide open public square, or piazza. The palace's three stories are clearly defined by two horizontal bands of stonework, or cord courses. A many-layered cornice sits on the facade like a weighty crown. The moldings, cornice, and entablatures are decorated with classical motifs and with the lilies that course the Farnese family unit glaze-of-arms.

The enormous central door is emphasized past elaborate rusticated stonework (as are the edifice'southward corners, where the shaped stones are known as quoins), and is surmounted by a balustrade suitable for formalism appearances past the owner, over which is ready the cartouche with the Farnese arms. Windows are treated differently on each story: on the ground floor, the twelve windows sit down on sturdy scrolled brackets, and the window heads are topped with architraves. The story directly to a higher place is known in Italy every bit the pianoforte nobile, or kickoff floor (Americans would phone call it the second story), which contains the grandest - or "noble" - rooms. Its twelve windows are decorated with alternating triangular and biconvex pediments, supported by pairs of engaged half columns in the Corinthian order. The second floor (or American 3rd story) has thirteen windows, all with triangular pediments whose supporting Ionic half columns are set on brackets echoing those under the windows on the ground flooring.

Renaissance palaces were typically oriented inward, away from the noisy streets. Many contained open courtyards. Classical elements prevailed here, as well. The courtyard of the Palazzo Farnese has a loggia fronted by an arcade at the ground level. Its Classical engaged columns present all the usual parts: pedestal, base, shaft, and uppercase. The progression of orders from the everyman to the highest story mirrors the appearance of the orders in aboriginal Hellenic republic: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian.

Theories of Leon Battista Alberti

Past the eye of the fifteenth century, more artists had become students of the past, and a few humanists had ventured into the field of art theory and design. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), a humanist-turned-architect, wrote most his classical theories on art before he e'er designed a building. Alberti studied at the universities of Padua and Bologna, then worked equally a Latin scribe for Pope Eugene Iv. This position, which involved diplomatic travel and thus put Alberti in contact with the best potential patrons in Italy, was critical to his afterward career as an builder. Alberti's various writings present the first coherent exposition of early Italian Renaissance aesthetics, including the Italian mathematical perspective system credited to Brunelleschi and ideal proportions of the homo body derived from Greek art. With Alberti began the gradual change in the status of the architect from a hands-on builder - and thus a manual labourer - to an intellectual expected to know philosophy, history, and the classics besides as mathematics and engineering science.

The Palazzo Rucellai (Alberti)

The human relationship of the facade to the body of the edifice behind it was a continuing challenge for Italian Renaissance architects. Early in his architectural career, Alberti devised a facade - begun in 1455 but never finished - to be the unifying front end for a planned merger of eight adjacent houses in Florence caused past Giovanni Rucellai. Alberti's design, influenced in its bones arroyo by the Palazzo Medici, was a simple rectangular front suggesting a coherent, cubical three-story edifice capped with an overhanging cornice, a heavy, projecting horizontal molding at the top of the wall. The double windows nether round arches were a feature of Michelozzo's Palazzo Medici, but other aspects of the facade were entirely new. Inspired by the ancient Colosseum in Rome, Alberti articulated the surface of the lightly rusticated wall with a horizontal-vertical design of pilasters and architraves that superimposed the Classical orders: Doric on the ground flooring, Ionic on the 2d, and Corinthian on the 3rd. The Palazzo Rucellai provided a visual lesson for local architects in the apply of classical elements and mathematical proportions, and Alberti's enthusiasm for classicism and his architectural projects in other cities were catalysts for the spread of the Renaissance motion.

Italian Renaissance Compages Outside Florence

Church of San Francesco, Rimini (Alberti)

The spread of Renaissance architectural designs beyond Florence was due in meaning measure to Leon Battista Alberti, who travelled widely and expounded his views to potential patrons. As a effect he undertook an unusual projection in Rimini, fitting for an artist steeped in classical knowledge: to transform an existing medieval church, the Church of San Francesco, into a Renaissance "temple" honouring the local ruler, Sigismondo Malatesta, and his mistress Isotta degli Atti. Although the projection, designed in 1450, was never completed, the partly altered exterior crush even so provides an encyclopedia of Albertian architectural ideas. The facade, set up in front of the original church building wall, combines forms derived from a Classical temple front and a Roman triumphal curvation such as the nearby Arch of Augustus. The high podium with the Corinthian guild of attached columns and the entablature supporting a triangular pediment constitute the temple forepart. The triple arches, attached columns, roundels, and heavy projecting cornice acquit the triumphal-arch motif. This layering and combining of motifs and references is typical of humanistic thinking and similar in concept to the handling of mythologies, devised past Botticelli (1445-1510).

Church of Sant'Andrea, Mantua (Alberti)

Another patron, the ruler of Mantua, in 1470 deputed Alberti to overstate the small Church building of Sant'Andrea, which housed a sacred relic believed to exist the actual claret of Jesus. To satisfy his patron'south want for a sizable edifice to handle crowds coming to see the relic, Alberti proposed to build an "Etruscan temple." (Meet also: Etruscan Fine art.) Work began on the new church building in 1472, merely Alberti died that summer. Construction went frontward slowly, at first according to his original plan, simply information technology was finally completed just at the end of the eighteenth century. Thus, it is non always articulate which elements belong to Alberti'south original blueprint.

The Latin-cross plan - a nave more 55 anxiety wide intersected by a transept of equal width; a square, domed crossing; and a rectangular sanctuary on centrality with the nave — is certainly in keeping with Alberti's ideas. Alberti was responsible, too, for the barrel-vaulted chapels the aforementioned height every bit the nave and the low chapel niches carved out of the huge piers supporting the barrel vault of the nave. His dome, nonetheless, would not take been perforated and would not have been raised on a pulsate, as this one finally was.

Alberti'southward pattern for the facade of Sant'Andrea echoes that of the Tempio Malatesta in Rimini in its fusion of temple front and triumphal arch, but the facade now has a articulate volume of its ain, which sets it off visually from the building behind. Two sets of colossal Corinthian pilasters clear the porch face up. Those flanking the butt-vaulted triumphal-arch entrance are two stories high, whereas the others, raised on pedestals, run through iii stories to support the entablature and pediment of the temple form. The arch itself has lateral barrel-vaulted spaces opening through two-story arches on the left and right.

Neither the simplicity of the plan nor the complexity of the facade hints at the grandeur of Sant'Andrea's interior. Its immense butt-vaulted nave extended on each side by alpine chapels was inspired by the monumental interiors of such ancient ruins every bit the Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius in the Roman Forum. In this articulate reference to Roman purple art Alberti created a edifice of such jumbo calibration and spatial unity that information technology affected architectural design for centuries.

Ducal Palace, Urbino (Luciano Laurana)

The court of Urbino was an outstanding artistic center nether the patronage of Federico da Montefeltro, who actively sought out the finest artists of the mean solar day to come to Urbino. In 1468, after failing to discover a Tuscan to take over the construction of a new ducal palace (palazzo ducale) begun about 1450, Federico hired i of the administration already involved in the project, Luciano Laurana, to direct the work. Amidst Laurana's major contributions were his closing the courtyard with a quaternary wing and redesigning the courtyard facades. The result is a superbly rational solution to the problems of courtyard peak design. The basis-level portico on each side has arches supported past columns; the corner angles are bridged with piers having engaged columns on the arcade sides and pilasters facing the courtyard. This arrangement avoided the awkward visual event of 2 arches springing from a single column and gave the corner a greater sense of stability. The Composite majuscule (Corinthian with added Ionic volutes) was used, mayhap for the first time, on the footing level. Corinthian pilasters flank the windows in the story in a higher place, forming divisions that echo the bays of the portico. (The 2 short upper stories were added later.) The plain architrave faces were engraved with inscriptions identifying Federico and lauding his many humanistic virtues. Not visible in the analogy is an innovative feature that became standard in palace courtyard design: the monumental staircase from the courtyard to the main flooring.

Church building of Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato (Giuliano da Sangallo)

A fifteenth-century Florentine architect whose piece of work was most important for developments in the sixteenth century was Giuliano da Sangallo (c.1443-1516). From 1464 to 1472, he worked in Rome, where he produced a number of meticulous drawings after the city'southward aboriginal monuments, many of which are now lost and known today just from his piece of work. Back in Florence, he became a favourite of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a great humanist and patron of the arts. Soon afterward completing a land villa for Lorenzo in the early 1480s, Giuliano submitted a model for a new church in Prato, nigh Florence, on which he began work in 1485. In 1484, a kid had claimed that a painting of the Virgin on the wall of the town prison had come to life, and plans were soon fabricated to remove the image and preserve it in a votive church building (a church built equally a special offering to a saint), to be named Santa Maria delle Carceri (Saint Mary of the Prisons).

Although the demand to accommodate processions and the gathering of congregations made the long nave of a basilica virtually a necessity for local churches, the votive church building became a natural subject area for Renaissance experimentation with the fundamental plan. The existing tradition of central-plan churches extended back to the Early Christian martyrium (a round shrine to a martyred saint) and perhaps ultimately to the Classical tholos, or round temple. Alberti in his treatise on architecture had spoken of the cardinal plan equally an ideal, derived from the humanist conventionalities that the circle was a symbol of divine perfection and that both the circle inscribed in a square and the cross inscribed in a circumvolve were symbols of the creation. Thus, Giuliano's Church of Santa Maria delle Carceri, congenital on a Greek-cross program, is one of the finest early Renaissance examples of humanist symbolism in architectural blueprint. It is likewise the first Renaissance church with a true cardinal programme; Brunelleschi's earlier experiment in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, for example, was for an attached structure, and Alberti'due south Greek-cross plan was never actually built. Drawing on his knowledge of Brunelleschi's works, Giuliano created a square, dome-covered central infinite extended in each direction by arms whose length was one-half the width of the cardinal space. The arms are covered by butt vaults extended from the round arches supporting the dome. Giuliano raised his dome on a short, round drum that increased the corporeality of natural low-cal inbound the church building. He likewise articulated the interior walls and the twelve-ribbed dome and drum with pietra serena. The exterior of the dome is capped with a conical roof and a tall lantern in Brunelleschian mode.

The exterior of the church is a marvel of Renaissance clarity and order. The ground-floor system of slim Doric pilasters clustered at the corners is repeated in the Ionic lodge on the shorter upper level, equally if the entablature of a small temple had been surmounted with a 2d smaller one. The church was entirely finished in 1494 except for installation of the fine dark-green-and white-marble veneer in a higher place the first story. In the 1880s, one section of the upper level was veneered; however, the philosophy of twentieth-century conservation requires that the rest of the building exist left in rough stone, as it is today.

Renaissance Compages in Rome and Its Environs

Benefiting from the achievements of 15th-century designers and inspired past studying the monuments of antiquity, the Renaissance architects who worked in Rome developed ideals comparable to those of contemporary painters and sculptors. The showtime-century Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius's x-volume work on classical architecture continued to be an of import source for architects during the High Renaissance in Italy. It inspired several encyclopedias of Renaissance design and practical manuals on classical way, equally did Giacomo da Vignola (1507-1573). Whereas religious fine art and architecture was a major source of commissions, some of the all-time opportunities for innovation were urban palaces and large land villas. For more than near fine art in the city, see: Renaissance in Rome (c.1480-1550).

Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio (Donato Bramante)

Born near Urbino and trained as a painter, Donato Bramante (1444-1514) turned to architectural design early on in his career. Petty is known of his activities until about 1481, when he became fastened to the Sforza courtroom in Milan, where he would accept known Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). In 1499 Bramante settled in Rome, but piece of work came slowly. The builder was nearing sixty when he was commissioned in 1502 to design a modest shrine over the spot where the campaigner Peter was believed to accept been crucified. The Tempietto Iseo ("picayune temple"), known as Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio, has been admired since it was built as an early perfect Renaissance interpretation of the principles of Vitruvius. Without copying whatever specific ancient monument but perhaps inspired by the remains of a small-scale round temple in Rome, Bramante designed the shrine, simply 15 anxiety in diameter, with a stepped base and a Doric peristyle (continuous row of columns). Vitruvius had advised that the Doric social club exist used for temples to gods of particularly forceful character. The first story of the shrine is topped past a tall pulsate, or circular wall, supporting a hemispheric dome (no longer original) recalling ancient Roman round tombs. Specially notable is the sculptural consequence of the building's exterior, with its deep wall niches creating contrasts of light and shadow, its Doric frieze of carved papal emblems, and its elegant balustrade (carved railing).

Presently after Julius II's ballot as pope in 1503, he commissioned Bramante to renovate the Vatican Palace, and in 1506 Julius appointed him chief builder of a projection to supervene upon Saint Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the site of Peter'due south tomb. Construction had barely begun when Julius died in 1513; Bramante himself died in 1514 without leaving a comprehensive plan or model that a successor could complete. After a series of popes and architects and diverse revisions, the new Saint Peter's was still nowhere near completion when Michelangelo took over the projection in 1546.

Renovation of the Piazza del Campidoglio (Michelangelo)

Subsequently Michelangelo settled in Rome in 1534, a rich and worldly Roman noble was elected as Pope Paul Three (reigned 1534-1549). He surprised his electors by his vigorous pursuit of reform within the Church, including in 1545 the Council of Trent, which brought together conservative and reform factions. He also began renovation of several important sites in Rome and the upgrading of papal backdrop. Among the projects in which he involved Michelangelo was remodelling the Campidoglio (Capitol), a public square atop the Capitoline Hill, once the citadel of Republican Rome. The buildings covering the irregular site had fallen into disrepair, and the pope saw its renovation equally a symbol of both his spiritual and his secular power.

Scholars still debate Michelangelo'south function in the Capitoline project, although some have connected the granting of Roman citizenship to him in 1537 with his taking charge of the piece of work. Preserved accounts mention the artist past name on but ii occasions, however. In 1539 his communication was taken on reshaping the base for the ancient Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius. In 1563 payment was made "to execute the orders of master Michelangelo Buonarroti in the building of the Campidoglio." Michelangelo's comprehensive plan for what is surely amid the virtually beautiful urban-renewal projects of all time is documented in prints identified equally having been washed from Michelangelo's program and model for the new Campidoglio. The Piazza del Campidoglio today closely resembles the conception recorded in these prints only a few years after Michelangelo's expiry, although the foursquare and buildings were not finished until the seventeenth century, and Michelangelo's exquisite star design in the pavement was non installed until the twentieth century.

Renovation of the Palazzo dei Conservatori (Michelangelo)

In 1537 the city quango (the Conservatori) allotted funds to renovate the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which contained its offices and meeting rooms. Although only three bays of the new facade were finished by the time of Michelangelo's expiry in 1564, his repeating vertical elements were connected on the Conservatori facade and on the then-chosen Palazzo Nuovo facing it across the piazza. The framework of the facade is formed by jumbo Blended order pilasters raised on alpine pedestals and supporting a wide architrave below the heavy cornice. Each ground-level bay opens into the deep portico through Ionic columns supporting their own architraves. On the main level above, although a wide central window was added later, the original design called for identical bays, each with a narrow primal window and a balcony flanked by engaged columns supporting segmental pediments. The horizontal orientation of the edifice is emphasized past the plain architrave below the balcony of the roof and is and then picked up below in the broken architrave above the portico.

Saint Peter's Basilica

Ever since the laying of the cornerstone for the new Saint Peter's by Julius II in 1506, Michelangelo had been well aware of the efforts of its architects, from Bramante to Raphael (1483-1520) to Antonio da Sangallo. When Paul III offered the post to Michelangelo in 1546, he gladly accepted. By this time, the seventy-1-year-old sculptor was not just confident of his architectural expertise; he demanded the right to bargain straight with the pope rather than through the committee of construction deputies. Michelangelo further shocked the deputies - but not the pope - past trigger-happy down or cancelling those parts of Sangallo's design that he plant without merit. Ultimately, Michelangelo transformed the central-plan church into a vast organic construction, in which the architectural elements work cohesively together like the muscles of a torso. Seventeenth-century additions and renovations dramatically changed the original programme of the church and the advent of its interior, but Michelangelo's Saint Peter's can still be seen in the contrasting forms of the flat and angled walls and the iii hemicycles (semicircular structures), whose colossal pilasters, blind windows (having no openings), and niches class the sanctuary of the church. The level above the heavy entablature was subsequently given windows of a different shape. How Michelangelo would have built the bully dome is not known; nigh scholars believe that he would accept made it hemispherical. The dome that was actually erected, by Giacomo della Porta in 1588-1590, retains Michelangelo'south bones design: a segmented dome with regularly spaced openings, resting on a loftier drum with pedimented windows between paired columns, and surmounted past a tall lantern reminiscent of Bramante'south Tempietto. Della Porta's major changes were raising the dome height, narrowing its segmental bands, and changing the shape of its openings.

Giacomo Barozzi/Vignola

Michelangelo designed the most prestigious buildings of sixteenth-century Rome, but there were far as well much money, appetite, and need for architectural skill for him to monopolize the field. 1 young creative person who helped run into that need was Giacomo Barozzi (1507-1573), chosen Vignola after his native boondocks, who became the almost of import architect of the Mannerism motility in Rome. He worked in the city in the belatedly 1530s surveying aboriginal Roman monuments and providing illustrations for an edition of Vitruvius, and so worked from 1541 to 1543 in France with Francesco Primaticcio (1504-1570) at the Fontainebleau Schoolhouse (1530-70). Later Vignola returned, he secured the patronage of the Farnese family, for whom he designed and supervised the edifice of the Villa Farnese at Caprarola from 1558 until his death in 1573.

Villa Farnese at Caprarola (Vignola)

At Caprarola, Vignola used the fortress built there past Antonio da Sangallo the Younger equally a foundation (podium) for his five-sided building. Dissimilar medieval castle builders, who had taken advantage of the natural contours of the land in their defenses, Renaissance architects imposed geometric forms on the land. Recently developed artillery made the high walls of medieval castles easy targets, and so Renaissance engineers built horizontal rather than vertical structures against long-distance firepower. Wide bastions at the outer points of such fortresses provided firing platforms for the defenders' cannons.

Vignola'south building rises in 3 stories effectually a circular courtyard. He decorated the external faces with an arrangement of circles, ovals, and rectangles, just as he had brash in his volume The Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture, published in 1562. The building was vaulted throughout, and the interior was lighted with evenly spaced windows. The courtyard appears to have only ii stories, but a third story of small service rooms is screened by an open, balustraded terrace.

The first and 2nd stories are ringed with galleries, and like the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence the ground level is rusticated. On the second level, Ionic half columns form a triumphal-arch motif, and rectangular niches topped with blind arches echo the arched niches of the first-floor arcade. Behind the palace, formal gardens extended beyond the moat.

Renaissance Architecture in Venice

The Sack of Rome in 1527 benefited other Italian cities when a large number of High Renaissance artists fled for their livelihoods, if not for their lives. Venice had long been a vital Renaissance architectural centre with its ain traditions, but the field was empty when the Florentine sculptor Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570) arrived at that place from Rome. Equally a result, Sansovino became the near of import architect of the mid-sixteenth century in Venice. The second one-half of the century was dominated by Andrea Palladio (1508-fourscore), a bright artist from the Veneto, the mainland region ruled past Venice. Palladio brought Venetian Renaissance architecture to its grand conclusion with his villas, palaces, and churches. Meet also Renaissance in Venice (1400-1600) and Venetian Painting (1450-1800).

Piazza San Marco (Sansovino)

Soon after settling in Venice, Sansovino was appointed to renovate the Piazza San Marco, the slap-up square in front of the Church of San Marco. In 1536 he created a model for a new library on the south side of the piazza, or open up square, inspired by such classical structures as the Colosseum in Rome, which featured regular trophy of superimposed orders. The flexibility of this design, with identical modules that can be repeated indefinitely, is reflected in the history of the Library of San Marco. Information technology was opened after the showtime vii bays were completed at the end of 1546. Then, betwixt 1551 and 1554, seven more bays were added, and in 1589, near two decades after the architect's decease, more than trophy were added to provide office space.

Drawing upon his earlier feel as a sculptor, Sansovino enriched the facade with elaborate spandrel figures and a frieze of putti and garlands. The roofline balustrade surmounted at regular intervals by statues elegantly emphasizes the horizontal orientation of the building. Although Michelangelo never saw the library, he reinterpreted the aforementioned classical elements in his own powerful manner on the new facade of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. The library also had a great bear upon on a young builder from Vicenza, Andrea Palladio, who proclaimed it "the richest and most ornate" building since antiquity.

Palladio

Probably born in Padua, Andrea Palladio began his career every bit a stonecutter. Later on moving to Vicenza, he was hired past the noble humanist scholar and amateur architect Giangiorgio Trissino (1478-1550). Trissino made him a protege and nicknamed him Palladio, a proper name derived from Pallas, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and the fourth-century Roman writer Palladius. Palladio learned Latin at Trissino's small academy and accompanied his benefactor on iii trips to Rome, where Palladio made drawings of Roman monuments. Over the years he became involved in several publishing ventures, including a guide to Roman antiquities, an illustrated edition of Vitruvius, and books on compages that for centuries were valuable resource for architectural design.

Monastery Church of San Giorgio Maggiore (Palladio)

By 1559, when he settled in Venice, Palladio was 1 of the foremost architects of Italia. About 1566 he undertook a major architectural commission: the monastery Church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Venetian islet of San Giorgio. His pattern for the Renaissance facade to the traditional basilica-plan elevation - a broad lower level fronting the nave and side aisles, surmounted by a narrower forepart for the nave clerestory - is the height of ingenuity. Inspired past Leon Battista Alberti's solution for Sant'Andrea in Mantua, Palladio created the illusion of two temple fronts of unlike heights and widths, 1 set up within the other. At the centre, jumbo columns on high pedestals, or bases, support an entablature and pediment that front end the narrower clerestory level of the church. The lower "temple front", which covers the triple-aisle width and slanted side-aisle roofs, consists of pilasters supporting an entablature and pediment running behind the columns of the taller clerestory front. Palladio retained Alberti's motif of the triumphal-arch archway. Although the facade was not built until later on the architect's expiry, his original design was followed.

The interior of San Giorgio is a fine example of Palladio'due south harmoniously balanced geometry, expressed here in strong verticals and powerful arcs. The tall engaged columns and shorter pairs of pilasters of the nave arcade echo the two levels of orders on the facade, thus unifying the exterior and interior of the edifice.

Villa Capra (La Rotunda) (Palladio)

Palladio's diversity can all-time be seen in numerous villas congenital early in his career. In 1550 he started his virtually famous villa, simply exterior Vicenza. Although most rural villas were working farms, Palladio designed this ane as a retreat for relaxation. To afford views of the countryside, he placed an Ionic gild porch on each face up of the building, with a wide staircase leading upwards to it. The main living quarters are on the 2nd level, and the lower level is reserved for the kitchen and other utility rooms. Upon its completion in 1569, the villa was dubbed the Villa Rotonda because it had been inspired by some other rotonda (round hall), the Roman Pantheon. Later its buy in 1591 past the Capra family, it became known as the Villa Capra. The villa programme shows the geometrical clarity of Palladio's conception: a circle inscribed in a small square inside a larger square, with symmetrical rectangular compartments and identical rectangular projections from each of its faces. The use of a central dome on a domestic building was a daring innovation that effectively secularized the dome. The Villa Rotonda was the first of what was to get a long tradition of domed country houses, especially in England and the United States. Run into, for instance, works by Palladio's greatest English disciple, the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652).

List of Famous Italian Renaissance Buildings

Filippo Brunelleschi
- Duomo of Florence Cathedral (1420-36)
- Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence (1420-69)
- Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence (1424-45)
- Pazzi Chapel, St Croce, Florence (1429-61)
Michelozzo di Bartolommeo
- Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence (1445-1460)
Leon Battista Alberti
- Palazzo Rucellai, Florence (1446-51)
- Tempio Maltestiano, Rimini (1450-68)
- Church of St Maria Novella, Florence (1458-71)
Friar Giovanni Giocondo
- Palazzo del Consiglio, Verona (c.1470)
Giuliano da Sangallo
- Church of Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato (1485-1506)
- Palazzo Gondi, Florence (1490-94)
- Palazzo della Rovere, Savona (1496)
Donato Bramante
- Church building of St Maria delle Grazie, Milan (1492-98)
- Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio, Rome (1502)
Raphael
- Church building of St Maria, Chigi Chapel, Rome (1513)
- Palazzo Pandolfini (facade), Florence (1517)
- Villa Madama, Rome (begun 1518)
Jacopo Sansovino
- St Marker'southward Library, Venice (1536-88)
- Loggetta di San Marco, Venice (1537-40)
- Palazzo Cornaro della Ca Grande, Venice (1542-61)
Giulio Romano
- Villa Lante, Rome (1520-4)
- Palazzo del Te, Mantua (1525-34)
- Casa Romano, Mantua (1540)
Michelangelo
- Tomb of Pope Julius, Rome (begun 1505)
- Laurentian Library, Florence (1524-71)
- Dome for Saint Peter's Basilica (1546-64)
- Church building of St Maria of the Angels and Martyrs, Rome (1563-66)
Baldessare Peruzzi
- Villa Farnesina, Rome (1508-11)
- Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Rome (1532-vi)
Michele Sanmicheli
- Petrucci Chapel in St Domenico, Orvieto (1516-24)
- Villa Soranza, Padua (1520)
- Palazzo Bevilacqua, Verona (1534)
- Palazzo Grimani, Venice (1540-62)
Giacomo Barozzi (Vignola)
- Villa Giulia, Rome (1550-53)
- Church building of St Andrew, Via Flaminia, Rome (1552)
- Villa Farnese, Caprarola, About Rome (c.1560)
- Church of the Gesu (Jesuits) Rome (1568-73)
Andrea Palladio
- Villa Polana, Vicenza (1545-l)
- Villa Cornaro, Treviso (1552-54)
- Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice (1562)
- Villa Capra (La Rotunda) Vicenza (1566-91)
- Basilica (Medieval town hall), Vicenza (1617)
Pirro Ligorio
- Casina Pio Iv (Villa Pia) Vatican (1559–1562)
- Villa D'Este, Tivoli (1572)
Antonio Contini
- Bridge of Sighs, Venice (1600)
Giacomo della Porta
- Church of the Gesu (Jesuits) Rome (cross-vault, dome, apse) (1568-84)
- Palazzo Senatorio, Capitol Hill, Rome (1573-1602)
- Fountain of Neptune, Rome (1574)
- St Peter's Basilica, Rome (completion of dome) (1588-ninety)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Nosotros gratefully acknowledge the use of material from "Art History" (Stokstad; Harry Due north. Abrams. 1995 NY).

• For more nigh compages in Renaissance Europe, see: Homepage.

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