Architecture-Building & Construction

Italian Renaissance Architecture

Tempietto The Tempietto (1502) was designed by Donato Bramante, one of the greatest architects of the Italian Renaissance. The building, with a domed rotunda and surrounded by columns, was commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to commemorate St. Peter’s crucifixion. It is located in Rome, in a convent called San Pietro in Montorio.Art Resource, NY

The families who governed rival cities in northern Italy in the 15th century—de Medici, Sforza, da Montefeltro, and others—had become wealthy enough through commerce to become patrons of the arts. People of leisure began to take serious scholarly interest in the neglected Latin culture—its literature, its art, and its architecture, whose ruins lay about them.



From Lives of the Artists: Brunelleschi
Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi played a key role in the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. One of his crowning achievements was the design and construction of the enormous dome on Florence’s cathedral (1294-1436), which is dedicated to Santa Maria del Fiore and is also known as the Duomo. Many historians consider Brunelleschi’s double-shelled dome, spanning 39 m (130 ft) at its base, to be the most impressive architectural work of the 15th century. In this passage from Italian writer and artist Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, revised 1568), Vasari told how Brunelleschi won the commission for the construction of the dome.

Early in the 15th century the city of Florence was in the process of completing its cathedral. Piers had already been erected to support a dome almost as large as that of the Pantheon in Rome. A proposal for its completion was submitted by Filippo Brunelleschi, who had studied Roman structural solutions. His constructed dome (1420-1436) is derived from Rome but is different; it is of masonry, is octagonal, has inner and outer shells connected by ribs, is pointed and rises higher, and is crowned with a lantern. Its drum with circular windows stands alone without buttressing, for the base contains a tension ring—huge stone blocks held together with iron clamps and topped with heavy iron chains. Two additional tension rings are contained within the dome’s double shells. Brunelleschi stood at the threshold between Gothic and Renaissance. His Pazzi Chapel (begun 1441?), also in Florence, is a clear statement of new principles of proportion and design.

A new type of urban building evolved at this time—the palazzo, or city residence of a prominent family. The palazzi were several stories high; rooms were grouped around a cortile, or courtyard; the outer walls of the palazzo were on the lot lines.

The Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his design for the Palazzo Rucellai (1446-1451), employed in its facade three superposed classic orders, much as in the Roman Colosseum, except that he used pilasters instead of engaged columns. They seem to have been engraved in the... wall plane; the resulting compartmentalization of the facade provides a logical setting for the windows.

Alberti also published in 1485 the first book on architectural theory since Vitruvius, which became a major influence in promoting classicism.






From Lives of the Artists: Giulio Romano
Sixteenth-century Italian painter and architect Giulio Romano was one of the chief initiators of Mannerism, an art style that departed from the harmonious proportions of the Renaissance artists, and added discordant, overly stylized, and ambiguous elements. Giulio’s greatest architectural achievement was the Palazzo del Tè (begun about 1525) in Mantua, Italy. In his Lives of the Artists (1550; revised 1568), Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari discussed the works and life of Giulio, including his famous room in the Palazzo del Tè depicting the fall of the Titans. In this room, the illusion of architectural collapse in his murals and in the structure of the room itself merge to give an overall impression of tumult and destruction.


In the 16th century, Rome became the leading center for the new architecture. The Milanese architect Donato Bramante practiced in Rome beginning in 1499. His Tempietto (1502), an elegantly proportioned circular temple in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, was one of the earliest Renaissance structures in Rome.

Saint Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican is a masterpiece of 16th century Italian architecture. Some of Italy’s finest artists of the time, including Michelangelo, worked on its design and decoration. Notable features include the central dome, designed by Michelangelo, and the high altar, which according to church tradition stands over the tomb of the apostle Peter. Only the Pope may conduct mass at the high altar.Denis Tremblay Labtex Inc.

The erection of a new basilica of Saint Peter in Vatican City was the most important of many 16th-century projects. In drawing the first plan (1503-1506) Bramante rejected the Western basilica concept in favor of a Greek cross of equal arms with a central dome. Popes who came after Julius II, however, appointed other architects—notably Michelangelo and Carlo Maderno—and, when the church was completed in 1612, the Latin cross form had been imposed with a lengthened nave. Michelangelo’s dome, ribbed and with a lantern, is a logical development from Brunelleschi’s in Florence. It rises in a high oval and is the prototype not only for later churches but for many state capitol buildings in the United States.

Toward the middle of the 16th century such leading architects as Michelangelo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, and Giacomo da Vignola began to use the classical Roman elements in ways that did not conform to the rules that governed designs in the early Renaissance. Arches, columns, and entablatures came to be used as devices to introduce drama through depth recession, asymmetry, and unexpected proportions and scales. This tendency, called Mannerism, is exemplified by Giulio’s sophisticated Palazzo del Tè (1526-1534) at Mantua (Mantova).

The architect Andrea Palladio practiced in the environs of Vicenza and Venice. Although he visited Rome, he did not wholly adopt the Mannerist approach. He specialized in villas for gentleman farmers. These villas explore all the variations on the classical norms: governing axis defined in the approach, single major entrance, single major interior space surrounded by smaller rooms, secondary functions extended in symmetrical arms, and careful attention to proportion. They were immortalized by Palladio’s publication The Four Books of Architecture (1570; trans. 1738), in which drawings for them appear, with the dimensions written into the plans to emphasize Palladio’s harmonic series of dimensions that govern the major proportions. These books later enabled Inigo Jones in England and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia to propagate Palladian principles among the gentleman farmers of their times. In two large Venetian churches, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and II Redentore (1577), Palladio made important contributions toward the adaptation of classic ideas to the liturgical and formal traditions of Roman Catholicism.

Northern Renaissance Architecture

Renaissance ideas had spread rapidly to France by 1494. French royal policy was to attract Italian artists (beginning with Leonardo da Vinci in 1506) while at the same time encouraging and developing native talent. It is believed that the Italian architect Domenico da Cortona designed the extraordinary Château de Chambord that Francis I built (1519-1547) in the Loire Valley, which retains outward characteristics of a medieval castle. The French architects Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder and Philibert Delorme worked at Fontainebleau, and Delorme was architect for the Château d’Anet, where Benvenuto Cellini was employed as sculptor. In Paris, work on the Louvre was undertaken by Pierre Lescot in 1546.

Philip II of Spain engaged Juan de Herrera and Juan Bautista de Toledo as architects for his colossal Escorial (1563-1584) near Madrid—half palace, half monastery. England was somewhat slower to change. Inigo Jones, its principal early Renaissance architect, visited Italy and emulated Palladio in such works as the Banqueting House (1619-1622) in Whitehall, London. See Renaissance Art and Architecture.

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