Renaissance Architecture: Harmonious Grandeur

Florence Cathedral

          Architects were once viewed as skilled laborers, an even lower level than common artists.  However, the designers of Renaissance structures were hailed as artists and were appreciated as much for their accomplishments as painters, sculptors,

Villa Medici

and other intellectuals.  While the rest of Europe was more reluctant to move on from Gothic architecture, the Italian states, due to residing over the ruins of the Roman Empire, were willing to experiment in order to resurrect their culture.  The poor condition of most ruins and the lack of Roman-age commentary led to heavy reliance on Vitruvius, an ancient Roman architect, ingenuity, and imagination to try to recapture the glory of the classic years.  The other art forms had already began to emphasize harmony, balance, and symmetry, but architecture soon joined them.  Domes, columns, niches, and round arches replaced the unbalanced and proportionally distorted hallmarks of the architecture of the Middle Ages.  Churches were not modified as much as other buildings due to the need to accommodate many people before a separated group of priests.  Church styles over Europe

Corinthian Architecture (Maison Caree)

St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

continued to vary more from each other, especially after the Protestant Reformation.  Residential villas were revived and architects ornamented homes accordingly to social class, following the perception of the Renaissance being an elitist movement.  Perfect geometry was sought by urban planners for a sense of order.  New cities were centrally designed and old ones were revised, albeit with little success, for similar balance.  Urban planning continued, but on a smaller scale, focusing on sections rather than entire metropolises.  Italian architects wrote treatises to explain their methodology to scholars and to teach it to their successors.  Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building, the seven volumes of Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), and  Andrea Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture (1570) were among the most famous of these new manuals.   Academies of design were established throughout Italy to give architects a place to discuss and teach, as well as have a professional identity.  These societies demonstrate that architects sought to unite their craft with other art forms by practicing the same Renaissance ideals.  This was accomplished through a focus on antiquity and also through attaining geometry and balance similar to that of other artists.   Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was considered to be the first Renaissance architect.  He is best known for constructing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but also was instrumental in classic architectural revival by regularly incorporating the Greek orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, to his work.  His work appears simple because he used a repeated unit of measurement for each building to achieve harmony.  Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was a well-rounded humanist who wrote numerous treatises on art.  His essays explained the fine techniques of painting, sculpting, and designing.  He and Brunelleschi were both enamored by Roman architecture and the works of Vitruvius, the mind behind da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.  Andrea Palladio (1508-80) was the most famous architect of the Venetian Republic and is known for his villas and treatise, Four Books on Architecture.  Palladio designed his villas after those of Rome, which were centrally oriented through symmetry and axiality.  This simplicity made them easy to be imitated in England, and later in the plantations of the American colonies.

Gothic Architecture (Laon Cathedral)

Palmanova, designed as an ideal Renaissance city