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Brunelleschi’s wet dream

Not only did Brunelleschi come up with Florence’s famous dome, make the first one-point linear perspective paintings and design theatrical machinery, he also devised and built a huge ship, Il Badalone (The Monster), to carry marble from Pisa to Florence on the River Arno. It sank on its maiden voyage in 1427. Even genius has its limits.

“IT’S AS THOUGH THE SKY IS ENVIOUS, AS IT KEEPS ON SHOOTING THUNDERBOLTS DOWN

Brunelleschi starts something big

Unlike art, the architecture of the quattrocento didn’t evolve gradually from Gothic. Rather, its instigators sought a deliberate change of direction, recalling the symmetry, proportion and harmony of Classical buildings. Gothic’s pointed, ill-disciplined shapes were updated with semi-circular arches, Classical columns and, if at all possible, a whacking great dome. Even so, in his finest hour, the Florentine genius who initiated the change, Filippo Brunelleschi (he of the artist’s perspective – see section 3.1.3), introduced Classicism to an essentially Gothic building. He designed the dome for Florence Cathedral (1418-36), solving the old problem of how to span the cavernous space between the building’s pillars. In researching the past (he patented a hoisting machine for the masonry based on Vitruvius’ texts), and adding his own 15th century ingenuity, Brunelleschi set the standard for Renaissance architecture.

Karma by design

Bramante’s original designs for St Peter’s swallowed up so much money that the pope was forced to sell indulgences to maintain cash flow. This, apparently, led somebody called Martin Luther, in Germany, to his first public protest. Whoops.

Another Florentine, Leon Battista Alberti, was

Brunelleschi’s most notable immediate successor. He was faithful to Classical forms, but like Brunelleschi modified the principles to suit contemporary

requirements. His masterly facade for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446-51) in Florence mixed Gothic window forms

and Classical proportion without the slightest hint of awkwardness. It was one of various Renaissance palaces built in Florence in the mid 15th century.

Three key architects of the High Renaissance

In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the focus of Renaissance architecture moved from Florence to Rome, drawn by the popes’ deep coffers. Three architects stood out:

Donato Bramante moved on from the pick ’n’ mix of

Brunelleschi and Alberti to unadulterated Classicism, intent on creating perfect structures to mirror the

ambitions of the age. With its dome and Doric colonnade, the Tiempetto (first decade of 16th century) of San Pietro in Montorio Church, Rome, is small but perfectly formed; the high point of the High Renaissance no less. Bramante’s most famous designs, commissioned for St Peter’s Basilica in Rome by Pope Julius II in 1506, were on a different scale altogether – the eventual build was actually a scaled down compromise. Bramante’s plan for a church with a dome resting on gigantic arches was too expensive, even for the papacy.

Antonio da Sangallo, the youngest in a family of Tuscan

architects, became chief designer on St Peter’s Basilica after the death of his tutor, Bramante. Like Bramante, da Sangallo employed a simple, monumental Classicism, as seen in the church of Santa Maria di Loreto, Rome. His fanciest build was the Palazzo Farnese in Rome; his most beguiling, a well, 62 metres deep and surrounded by a double spiral staircase, cut into the rock of Orvieto, Umbria.

Michelangelo took over the St Peter’s job in 1547, when

he was 72 years old (12 successive designers, painter Raphael among them, worked on the building in all). He didn’t dismiss his predecessor’s designs but drew on them, and the basilica, with its massive, confident sense of order (it’s the biggest in the world), became a signal precursor of Baroque grandeur.

Stretching the Classics: Mannerist architecture

Bramante’s honest simplicity was overtaken by the manipulation of Mannerism in the 1520s. While Michelangelo stuck closely to the Classical rules for St Peter’s (albeit contorting the dome slightly), his earlier buildings often joyfully disregarded convention in pursuit of capricious invention. The vestibule he designed for the Biblioteca Laurenziana (c.1524) in Florence messed around with the order and spacing of Classical motifs, grafting false windows and columns onto the interior. Giulio Romano did something similar in Mantua, using blind windows and stretched, irregular columns in the Palazzo del Tè (1524-34). Giorgio Vasari (see section 3.1.3 for more), president of the Michelangelo fan club, also used Mannerism’s exaggeration in his design for the Uffizi (1560-80) buildings in Florence.

Palladio goes in search of perfection

Like other Renaissance masters, Andrea Palladio dallied with Mannerism, lining up the columns for purely aesthetic affect, but his was a cooler, more assured approach, one that trusted to knowledge (no one studied Roman architecture, the temples in particular, so intently) and built on Bramante’s sense of serene Classical order. He lived and worked chiefly around Vicenza, near Venice, where his palaces and villas, symmetrical and perfect, soak up the light of northern Italy and the praise of generations of architects. Three great Renaissance buildings outside Rome Ospedale degli Innocenti (1419-27), Florence. Brunelleschi’s best secular building was an orphanage. After the years of Gothic, here was an elegant loggia of ordered proportion, with semi-circular arches, round columns and pediments. Unwanted children were deposited in a basin at the front of the building.

Santa Maria della Consolazione (begun

1508-1607), Todi, Umbria. Probably the work of Bramante (although some credit an architect called Cola da Caprarola), this simple but large-scale church, a dome atop a serene and ordered Greek Cross, may well be how St Peter’s in Rome was originally supposed to look.

Villa Capra (or La

Rotunda) (1566-71), Vicenza. The exemplar Palladio building. Inspired by Roman temples, with a portico on each of four facades, the villa is completely

Palladio was the most persuasive architect of the Italian Renaissance; some say the most influential Western architect of all time. Although his work is concentrated on a few Italian acres – including the Venetian island on which he squeezed the large Church of San Giorgio Maggiore (1566-1610) – his reputation spread, helped by the publication of his architectural treatise I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (1570). Palladio set the Neoclassical standard that would

dominate European architecture for centuries; his influence can be seen in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and in the Louvre, Paris.

Palladio’s Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice

Praise be, it’s Baroque

The decoration that began appearing on buildings in Michelangelo’s day – the embellished facades, faux windows and coloured marble – became the industry standard by the 17th century. In Italy, at least, Palladio- derived restraint would have to wait its turn. This was Baroque, a dazzling, unrestrained assault on the senses designed to reinforce the majesty of heavenly pageantry. Curvy and audacious, Baroque architecture was the Catholic Church Counter-Reformation PR drive realised in stone. Rome was the epicentre. Indeed, the Rome of today is fundamentally a Baroque city. The rest of Italy struggled to keep up (even while Baroque journeyed around Europe and the New World with remarkable success), although certain regions produced their own version, from the showy style of Naples and Lecce, in Puglia, to the elegant palaces and hunting lodges of Turin.

The key Baroque architects

Giacomo della Porta. He got the Baroque ball rolling

with an action-packed facade (1584) for Il Gesù, the first Jesuit church in Rome. It brought a new fluidity to Classicism with its large volute scrolls on either side, and was duly copied the world over. As the prime architect in late 16th century Rome, della Porta also completed the dome for St Peter’s after Michelangelo’s death.

3.2.4The high drama of Baroque

Pearl of wisdom

The term Baroque (barocco in Italian) has its origins in the Portuguese word for a misshapen pearl. Like ‘Renaissance’, the term was only applied years after the period it describes was over.

Gianlorenzo Bernini. The theatrical genius of Baroque

sculpture (see section 3.1.4 for more) was also a fine architect. He worked extensively on St Peter’s, from the baldacchino (altar canopy) (1624-1633), a twisting bronze marvel, to the

tombs of successive popes and the vast, colonnaded Piazza San Pietro (1667) that still grabs worshippers approaching the basilica like a pair of giant forceps. However, the small elliptical church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale (begun in 1658), its facade bending this way and that, was Bernini’s personal favourite.

Francesco Borromini. The prime architect of Italian

Baroque did more to shape the look of Rome than any other. He didn’t quite share Bernini’s sense of theatre (nor his personality – they didn’t get on at all), but he did rival his talent for bending the rules, designing complex, curving, agitated buildings that smudged the distinction between sculpture and architecture. Despite the busy pediments, elliptical domes and tongue-like scrolls, each Borromini building was underlain with a strict geometrical plan. His facade for the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone (1653-66), in Piazza Navona, is quintessential Baroque, but Borromini’s masterpiece is the petite church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1638-67), on the Quirinal Hill.

This town ain’t big enough for both of us

Where Bernini was good looking, charming and popular with women, his rival Borromini was terse, depressive and possibly homosexual. Bernini’s growing fame was a contributory factor as Borromini slid into despair in the 1660s. He became housebound and was advised to give up work. Eventually, one torrid Roman night in 1667, it all got too much and he fell on his own sword. He did a good enough job to kill himself, but it took some time; during which he was able to repent and write a will. He was buried anonymously, as per his wishes.

Guarino Guarini. He was born in Modena, but the

priest, mathematician and architect Guarini made his impression in Turin. He built churches and palaces with complex domes, windows and arches almost Moorish in their delicacy. At the Palazzo Carignano (1679) he took Borromini’s love of a rolling, wavy facade to new levels. Guarini’s texts on architecture would help push Baroque out around Europe in the 18th century.

Been there, done that: Italy’s brush with Neoclassical building

Despite a love of both Palladio and good old Roman form (Pompeii had been recently discovered), Neoclassical architecture didn’t make the impression on 18th century Italy that it did elsewhere, perhaps because the movement’s Republican spirit was a long way from most Italians’ thoughts. When Neoclassicism did appear in the 19th century, urged on by the Napoleonic ‘Empire style’, it emerged in oversized trophy buildings. Giuseppe Mengoni’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1865- 1877), a polished shopping arcade in Milan, showed how modern construction methods (namely glass and steel)

could work with Classicism. Another building named for the king, the giant colonnaded marble monument, Il Vittoriano (1885- 1911), leering over Rome’s Piazza Venezia, has endured decades of general derision. A medieval neighbourhood was cleared to make

Going down with the shop

Giuseppe Mengoni designed the poised Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade in Milan. It was whilst he was on a platform at the top of the building, making final checks shortly before the building’s grand opening in 1877, that he slipped and fell to his death.

Dipping a toe in Art Nouveau

Industrial age architecture blended with the organic shapes of Art Nouveau at the turn of the 20th century. In Italy they called it Stile Floreale or Stile Liberty (after the London store that stocked Art Nouveau designers). Stile Floreale was concentrated in Italy’s northern cities. Turin set the pace with the Prima Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa Moderna of 1902, an exhibition of modern design resolute on killing off the past. The pavilions were designed by Raimondo D’Aronco, a key Italian exponent of Art Nouveau. In truth, Art Nouveau made only a modest impact in Italy (most of D’Aronco’s work unfurled in Turkey). The buildings that did appear in Milan, Genoa and Turin featured stone and wrought iron decoration (of lithe tendrils and listless women) rather than great architectural leaps. Giuseppe Sommaruga’s Palazzo Castiglioni (1903) in Milan is usually cited as Italy’s finest Stile Floreale building.

Function rooms: Italy does the International Style

The Modernist International Style, with its simple lines, functionality and craving for reinforced concrete (as championed by foreign ‘form follows function’ heroes Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius), appeared to Italian architecture after the First World War in the shape of Rationalism. The ‘rationale’ was that design should be based on the logical requirements of living. Seven Rationalist architects, led by Giuseppe Terragni, formed the Gruppo 7 in Milan in 1926 to pursue the aims. The movement got sucked into the rise of fascism and its members designed buildings for Mussolini.

3.2.5 In the shadow of greatness: