by Paul Johnson
Brunelleschi used the same vocabulary, with his own additions, and amplified his original concepts, in his superb sacristy added to San Lorenzo in Florence, and in the Pazzi Chapel he designed for another great Florentine church, Santa Croce. These airy, elegant, harmonious and wonderfully proportioned creations, with (in the case of the Pazzi Chapel) roundels by the ingenious Della Robbia and delicate color schemes of gray and white, together with the natural colors of marble and brass, stone, iron and wood, delighted all who visited them, exuding as they did a princely simplicity in contrast to the Gothic clutter. To the artist who saw them for the first time, it was truly the shock of the new, not so much a revivification of antiquity as a realized beauty that he had never conceived and that made him itch to get out his pencil and work.
There are the unspoken elements of a theory behind Brunelleschi’s creations: a simplification of parts, so that an orderly repetition becomes the norm, rather than an endless variety of inventions, a single system of lighting where possible and a balance between the elements so that there is no dominant feature but a pervading style that brings the whole together. Moreover, in rejecting the Gothic and building upon the classical, he invented a new vocabulary of devices—curved entablatures as arches over columns, alternations of pillars and pilasters, scroll buttresses, alternations of flattened curves and flattened triangles, volutes and pendentives as punctuation marks—which made up a great part of the new vernacular that architects eagerly embraced, first in Italy, then everywhere. All this was presented by examples.
The theory was left to an intellectual of Florentine origins (though born in Genoa), Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). Twenty-seven years Brunelleschi’s junior, he got a university education in Bologna—as well as a classical grounding at Padua. He was indeed much closer to the humanist writers than to the artist-craftsmen trained in goldsmithery, and was and remained a prolific writer all his life: comedies, philosophy, religion, ethics, various sciences, the care and riding of horses—these and many other matters he studied and put into print. As a secretary first to a cardinal, then to Pope Eugenius IV in the 1430s, he learned the art of communication, and practiced it. Eugenius took him to Rome, and there he engaged in archaeology, made a detailed study of Roman antiquities and was emboldened by what he saw to write a monumental series of aesthetic treatises, the first of any significance since Roman times, on sculpture, painting and, above all, architecture.
De re aedificatoria—Alberti usually wrote in Latin, which was later translated into Italian if there was a demand—was an elucidating, critical appraisal and reformulation of the great work of Vitruvius, On Architecture, the only work on the subject to come down to us from ancient times. (Alberti’s treatise reached printed form in 1485, a year before Vitruvius’s book was printed.) It is in every respect an improvement on Vitruvius, being clear, orderly, well written and good on theory and practice alike. He begins by giving the reader definitions, moves on to concepts and discusses materials, construction methods, town planning and the plans of different types of buildings. Then he goes on to consider the nature of beauty in architecture and how it applies to religious, domestic and public buildings. He had an inquisitive and in some ways encyclopedic mind, so a great many matters are dealt with, including water supply, archaeology, restoration and cost. It is the kind of book that every budding builder and would-be architect wanted to get his hands on, and could not until Alberti wrote it. And it has lasted: the way in which we approach architecture, distinguishing for instance between its basic, functional design and its ornamental superfluities, is still Albertian.
Alberti also practiced architecture, though not as a rule in the customary sense. He produced plans and designs that were executed with another architect in charge of the site. Thus the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence was built on his instructions but with Bernardo Rossellino in charge (c. 1450), and the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, also by Alberti (c. 1447), was built by Matteo de’ Pasti. He engaged directly in a number of important projects in and around the Vatican and Old St. Peter’s, but usually his plans and instructions for buildings, in places as diverse as Ferrara and Mantua, were sent by messenger. In some cases Alberti never even saw the creations for which he was ultimately responsible. His influence was nonetheless wide and pervasive, perhaps even more so than Brunelleschi’s. Not that Alberti ever underrated the older master. On the contrary, his admiration overflowed. His first sight of the great Florence dome was the central aesthetic experience of his life, and he wrote, “Who could ever be so cold or envious as to fail to recognize the genius of an architect capable of creating such an enormous structure, rising into the sky, big enough to cover all the people of Tuscany with its shadow—and all done without the aid of centering or even much scaffolding?” Alberti cited the dome as an example of how modern Florentine artists—and others—could not merely imitate the ancients but surpass them. That, he maintained, was the object: to build on the past even finer and more audacious structures. However, the study of the past came first. Alberti saw Brunelleschi’s work as in some respects only a superficial departure from medieval barbarism—his ground plans still tended to be nonclassical.
Alberti altered all that, and his designs were classical in inspiration from start to finish and from top to bottom. After his instructions were followed and his plans, as well as his book, circulated throughout Italy, it became rare for any architect, creating a church ab initio, to use a simple east-west axis. The old west front became a classical façade, created around a door that led into a space, usually circular or octagonal, the east end choir disappeared, and all the activities of the edifice revolved around a central point. However, Alberti was not a man who preached rigid uniformity. He also used the Greek cross as a floor plan, and he sometimes combined a circular rotunda with a short nave. His façades divided into three main prototypes. He rang the changes with the different classical orders, and he formulated alternative schemes of fenestration. But in doing all this he was merely, as it were, completing the architectural vernacular of the new style. Brunelleschi introduced it; Alberti turned it into a complete system, which students could absorb until it became second nature to them. Thus Alberti set patterns in the visual appearance of buildings, especially their main façades, that were replicated in essentials for centuries, and are still with us.
We must not think, however, that the newly emerging architectural face of Italy was entirely the work of one or two men of genius. In fact there were hundreds of journeyman architects, and one or two massive wheelhorses whose contributions were truly monumental. The outstanding example of this group was Michelozzo di Bartolommeo (1396–1472). He eventually became personal architect to Cosimo de’ Medici and a favorite among rich patrons because he was willing to tailor his designs to suit their views (he was in fact the son of a Florentine tailor). He had all-around talent and experience, working first in the mint, on coin design, then in Ghiberti’s shop, then in a collaborative sculptural practice with Donatello. Indeed, he designed and made bronze fittings, marble-and-precious-metal tabernacles and other church furniture, and elaborate tombs, all his life. When Brunelleschi died, he became master of the Cathedral Works—in effect head of the architectural profession in Florence—and set up the magnificent lantern that Brunelleschi had designed to cap his dome.
Michelozzo had no architectural theories. He loved the antique. He had no objection to medieval styles. A lot of his work was patching up or extending or rebuilding existing edifices, so he had to respect the past, whatever it was. He merged Gothic elements with the new Renaissance patterns. The monastery he built at Bosco ai Frati is essentially medieval. His façade for the town hall at Montepulciano is almost a replica of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. He remodeled the Medici’s beautiful villa at Trebbio with Renaissance touches, but it still looks like a castellated medieval fortress. There are medieval touches and irregularities in another villa he built at Cafaggiolo, though it is notable that building and garden are delightfully integrated
in a way that would not have been possible in a fortified, moated medieval country residence, but that was to be characteristic of Italy from about 1440 on (and soon of all civilized Europe).
But Michelozzo was also an innovator. In the monastery of San Marco, Florence, he built the first Renaissance library—a long, elegant room entirely designed to house and display books. Here again he took the idea of the layout, with its aisles and recesses, from a medieval source, a typical fourteenth-century monastic dormitory, but with books resting where monks once slept. He built a chapel for the Medici at Santa Croce that is simple, neat, elegant and in the Renaissance vernacular, so that many other architects copied it, but it still had a bit of medieval-style vaulting. The town palace he built for the Medici in Florence, with its central courtyard on classical arches, its huge external cornices frowning onto the street, and its delightful garden and loggia, became one of the most popular buildings of the entire Renaissance, to judge by the number of times it was copied or looted for ideas. It was supplemented by another Medici country house, which was the first attempt to revive the Roman villa, with no pretense at fortification, and the garden as integral to the design as the walls. This too was replicated again and again. Michelozzo was also daring in taking ideas from the Temple of Minerva in Rome and using them for the tribune of the Annunziata in Florence, built as a circle with nine chapels leading off it.
In short, he combined old and new, as a good architect should, to please his clients. But he had no genius, as such, and his amiability and desire to please changed to irritability and moodiness as his busy career progressed. That is the life pattern of many architects, who have the difficult job of standing between exigent and changeable clients and tardy and often incompetent workmen, while the costs soar and bills are unpaid. He was very skilled at dealing with water, so that anything to do with moating, hydraulics and damp coursing was his delight. He had to fall back on this after 1460, when he lost his key job in Florence and ended up in remote Ragusa, supervising its sea-girt city walls—a sad declension. But most of the architects of the Renaissance saw a tailing off in their popularity as they aged and new men with fresh ideas pried their fingers from the raft of success.
An exception was Donato Bramante (1444–1514), whose most important and innovative work was done toward the end of his life. He came from Urbino, which was part of the Papal States, and his achievement reflects the way in which in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the architectural center of Italy was shifting from Florence to Rome. As soon as he could read and write he was put to painting and perspective, and may have been taught by Mantegna. He was close to the high-powered artistic court of the great Federigo da Montefeltro, where Alberti was a visitor, and he witnessed the construction of the duke’s tremendous palace by Luciano Laurana, where Piero della Francesca was also at work. He came to architecture via a fascination with perspective drawings, one of which survives as an engraving. By the time he started work designing buildings, first for the Sforza dukes of Milan, and elsewhere in Lombardy, he was already developing a taste for the monumentally gigantic, which was quite new, and was closer to the hugeness of ancient Rome than the elegant creations of the Florentines, with their stress on slender columns and graceful arches. Bramante’s first important work, the miracle church of Santa Maria Presso Santo Satiro, Milan, though small in itself, has a novel grandeur based on massive piers and pilasters. In 1492, he did a new east end or tribune for the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, a monumental concoction of apsidal recesses based on huge square piers, which carries his ideas of an awe-inspiring structure enclosing vast spaces much further. He got additional practice in the monumental by helping in the rebuilding of Pavia Cathedral, which was recast as a Greek cross forming the center of a vast octagon—obviously Bramante’s idea, though others were involved. The Duke of Milan also gave Bramante the opportunity to design a stunning courtyard, with ingenious use of a variety of Roman-style columns and pilasters, for the Abbey of Sant’Ambrogio, and, perhaps more important, the layout of a new square in the nearby town of Vigevano. This involved the demolition of an old quarter and its replacement by a vast open Renaissance space as a setting for the cathedral—a critical step forward in a process that was soon to cover the capitals of Europe with monumental squares and oblongs.
By this point in his career it was evident that Bramante’s work was dominated not so much by the erection of buildings in itself as the function they served—enclosing huge areas of internal space in a way that staggered the beholder. By a fortunate coincidence, the collapse of Sforza rule in Milan in 1499 drove Bramante to Rome, where there were better opportunities for him to express his grandiose ideas, first under the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, then under the great Julius II (pope 1503–13). Julius was obsessed by power, which he expressed both in building up the Papal States as a major force, militarily and financially, and in reviving the glories of Rome, as an imperial city, by an enormous program of building. Even before Julius received the tiara, Bramante made his mark by creating impressive courtyards and palaces, and by producing carefully measured studies of major buildings from antiquity, not only in Rome but at Tivoli, Caserta and Naples. The fruits of his efforts to understand and express the antique were seen in what is now called the Tempietto di Sant’Andrea, the one building of the entire Renaissance that comes close to perfection. This is a circular stone chapel, with columns and dome, covering the exact spot where, it was thought, St. Peter was martyred in Rome. It is a combination of features based upon a number of Roman prototype temples. It follows strictly the Vitruvian rules of proportion, the measurements of the elevations and units being multiples of the diameter of the columns, which is the modal norm. It uses the Doric order and is the first Renaissance building to be decorated with metopes and triglyphs in a regular Doric frieze. But it is at the same time an entirely original building, for the outer columns are echoed by the pilasters supporting the inner drum, something the Romans would never have done, and the building as a whole is not Roman in appearance at all—it is unmistakably Renaissance. It has the further quality that, though small, it exhibits all the dignity of a building of vast dimensions: in short, it is the architect’s dream of monumentality achieved by minimal means.
With Julius II on the papal throne, Bramante was soon able to realize his soaring ambitions in earnest. He began work on the prodigious extension of the Vatican Palace known as the Cortile del Belvedere. This has grand terraces and breathtaking internal and external vistas, some of them designed to delight the ambitious eye of the pope as he peered at them from his bedroom window as soon as he woke in the morning. Part of the complex incorporates an ingenious and grand spiral staircase or ramp, which takes the visitor from top to bottom of the building, through its various floors. Near the base, the columns are Tuscan; then they become Doric and, in ascending order, Ionic and Composite, and these gradations are repeated in the various floors of the palace. Thus Bramante had hit on a new way of emphasizing the variety of the decorative forms of antiquity by allowing each to dominate a particular floor. He used the same device in the façade he designed for the superb Palazzo Caprini (1510), where the ground or street floor is heavily rusticated in massive stone blocks, with curved archway windows, as though for a fortress, and the piano nobile above it is held up with slender Doric twin columns framing elegant palatial windows. This delightful trick of having two building designs in one, another instance of grandeur and profusion achieved by modest means, was later imitated in thousands of formal buildings all over Italy and Europe—indeed, it became one of the most common architectural clichés of all time. It was a sign of the times, and of the increased fame, prominence and wealth of individual artists in the Italy of the High Renaissance, that this wonderful creation was bought by Raphael in 1517 as his town house.
Bramante worked on many churches in Rome, notably Santa Maria del Populo, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, like the church of Santi Celso e Giuliano, but his principal efforts were con
centrated on Julius II’s plans for a new St. Peter’s. His ideas and Bramante’s coincided: that it was time to wipe the slate clean and replace the old basilica, which both thought barbarous, with one embodying the principles of the new antique-based architecture; that this project should be completed on the largest possible scale, to show that the new Rome now arising was superior to its imperial, pagan past; and that the building should exhibit the space enclosure now made possible by engineering experience, and that it be most calculated to impress vast congregations during the pontifical services. For inspiration, Bramante looked to what had been the largest roofed buildings in ancient Rome, the enormous public baths, especially those of Caracalla, whose piers and circular openings supported roofs enclosing spaces that even Renaissance man found unimaginable.
Actually, the ambitious Bramante had no need of inspiration from antiquity, since most of his ideas for the new St. Peter’s had already been adumbrated by his work in Lombardy, notably in Santa Maria delle Grazie and Pavia Cathedral. The chief difference was the increased size. Size may not be the most important element in architecture as a rule, but it is in buildings aiming to awe. Many people worked numerous modifications to his original plan. But it was he who gave the church its salient element, both inside and out—sheer size. Whether seen from ten miles away, in the Rome skyline, or glimpsed from across the city or nearer to from the space between the enclosing arms of its vast colonnade, or goggled at from within, St. Peter’s is the crowned monarch of ecclesiastical architecture. There is nothing else like it anywhere, and scale is the key to its uniqueness.