Renaissance architecture
What you're looking at - and what it means
When I first travelled to Italy I was shocked by Renaissance architecture. I’d been brought up on the English Gothic style – pointed arches, complex spaces, straining for height and lightness. What I saw was churches built like classical Roman architecture, with domes, round arches, the classical orders. It was strange, and it was shocking.
I like to think that’s the effect Renaissance art and architecture would have had on its contemporaries. That Florentines of the quattrocento would have been as shocked by Brunelleschi’s or Donatello’s work as we are by Damien Hirst’s chopped up cows or Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.
Because the Renaissance marked in many ways a decisive break with the past. It was Florentine historian Leonardo Bruni, around 1400, who was the first to coin the term ‘the Middle Ages’, and to separate it firmly from the modern world of which he was a part. That’s a significant dividing line.
The Renaissance really begins in Florence, with a generation of sculptors, painters and architects who started looking back to classical forms. (Arguably, the Pisanos had begun to use classical exemplars much earlier – but let’s not confuse the issue.)
The new influence of classical art is easy to see. Perspective begins to be used in painting, and architecture adopts classical forms such as the rounded arch and Corinthian capital. What’s less easy to see is a concern with regularity and proportion, creating a townscape that is modelled on the underlying rhythms and patterns of nature in order to provide a reasonable, rational background for daily life. Architects and theorists such as Alberti explain how architecture moulds social life; the Renaissance builds not so much for the glory of God as for the enjoyment of man.
There are, I think, two opposing trends in the early Renaissance. Artists such as Masaccio and Donatello propose realism as the way we should look at the world, and both created statements of great dramatic force. But more commonly, despite the commitment to realism, the Renaissance artist is dedicated to creating beauty, through the use of harmony and proportion. Art and architecture have an ethical duty to show us the divine harmony which, according to Renaissance social theory, we should also employ in both private and public life.
That can make Renaissance buildings quite boring at first sight.Unlike Gothic buildings, full of picturesque detail, or Baroque buildings which impress with their size and drama, the Renaissance palace or church has no immediate pull on our attention. Lighting is even, diffuse – there’s none of the focusing of light on a single point that makes baroque churches so effective.
However, wait a few minutes
and the geometrical harmony of the architecture begins to sink in. For instance
the Pazzi Chapel in Florence, where every detail of the architecture –
even the decoration of the wooden doors – is based on the interaction
of circles and squares. Or Brunelleschi’s San Lorenzo, in which the
grid lines of the pavement reflect the fine perspective of the arcades.
This is architecture that needs leisure to appreciate it; it’s architecture
for living with, not for impressing the passer-by.
In northern Italy the pure Renaissance traditions of Florence became diluted;
instead of working purely with volumes and geometry, Venetian architects
created buildings rich in surface detail and expensive materials. The Lombardi
family were the first Renaissance architects here, but the outstanding master
was Mauro Coducci (or Codussi), whose strongly articulated facades use quadrants
and circles to create a characteristic outline and décor.
The Italian Renaissance spread to other countries, but the full flush of humanistic and classical work is mixed with local gothic and vernacular styles.
France
In France, King François I, who ascended the throne in 1515, became
the first of the great Renaissance builders. He created the Chateau de Chambord
and rebuilt the Louvre, until his reign a gloomy fortress, and the chateau
of Fontainebleau. He invited Leonardo da Vinci and other Italian artists
to France. The chateaux of the Loire valley, in particular, embody the French
Renaissance spirit – combining Gothic features such as round turrets
and steep roofs with italianate ornamentation. Architects were clearly able
to work in both styles – Roulland Le Roux’s fine Renaissance Bureau
des Finances stands opposite his Gothic work on the facade of Rouen cathedral!
Later, the French Renaissance becomes more classicising and manages to free itself from Gothic influence. For me, the best of the French chateaux isn't one on the Loire – it’s Anet, on the borders of Normandy. Here Philibert Delorme, an Italian-trained French architect, created a fantasy of pure geometric forms. The chapel, in which the radiating floor pattern reflects the shape of the dome above, is particularly fine.
Spain
In Spain, too, Renaissance ornament was grafted on to the Gothic style.
Here, though, the style becomes remarkably decorative; facades are encrusted
with intricate ornament. This ‘Plateresque’ style picks up the
late Gothic love of open filigree work and panelling, and creates an exuberant
architecture that found great success in Latin America as well as in ‘Old’
Spain. The Seville town hall, San Marco in Leon, and the Palace of Monterrey
in Salamanca are magnificent examples of the style.
Only a few architects followed a more austere tendency, notably in Salamanca where some of the university buildings resemble nothing so much as huge barracks.
England
In the north, Gothic traditions lasted longer than in France and Spain.
In England and Scotland, Renaissance and Gothic influences overlap in the
sixteenth century, creating turreted houses with pinnacles and highly reticulated
surfaces, but using Italianate ornamentation. The new square, mullioned
windows that were introduced at this time enabled houses such as those built
by Robert Smythson to replace much of the wall by huge expanses of glass.
The first purely Renaissance architect in England who owes nothing to Gothic influence was Inigo Jones, working in the early 17th century. His Queen’s House at Greenwich is an elegant pavilion, but he could work in a rougher way, too – his church of St Paul, which he allegedly called “the handsomest barn in England”, is a simple rectangular form with a huge, bare pediment and austere Doric order columns and capitals. From Jones’s fine Banqueting House in Whitehall, Charles I stepped out on to the scaffold to meet his death in 1649.
Whereas Spain, France and Italy are full of Renaissance churches, there are very few in England – the 16th century was still Gothic, and the 17th century, affected by a strong Puritan movement, was not a period of major church building. The Renaissance style remained largely a secular one, and it’s not till Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor brought in the baroque style in the 1660s that England saw churches being built in a non-Gothic style.
Germany
Germany was even slower to recognise the Renaissance than England –
and Gothic forms, particularly the characteristic gables of German houses,
remained current much longer than in the rest of Europe. That’s largely
the case in Eastern Europe, too, where many of the builders were emigre
Germans.
None the less some of the buildings are stunning. Augsburg, for instance, has a fine Renaissance town hall, while Heidelberg Castle is probably the most visited example of work of this period. Many smaller, vernacular buildings also feature Renaissance decoration. But this architecture remains in many ways derivative - Germany had to wait for the baroque to create its own new, original style.