Some cities grew up organically during the Middle Ages with buildings added as populations grew, taking up any available open space within the city and expanding outside the protection of the walls when necessary. The street pattern emerged as the city expanded, and into the Renaissance proved remarkably resistant to change. It is not surprising that this was so. Property owners had little incentive to sell buildings in order to accommodate a prince’s wish to regularize the city plan, which was understood by both the general populace and the city groups to provide the ruler with an easier time controlling crowds. The winding streets favoured the very local population in each quarter of the city, cities within cities, who maintained a great deal of autonomy over their local domain.
At the same time, the survival of Roman street layouts, as in Autun (France), provided a model for the shaping of new cities as well. New towns in southern France, bastides, established trade centres for rival lords in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.1 New towns in the territory controlled by Florence were organized around central squares and built to strict regulations. Buildings within the city followed hierarchical standards, larger houses along the main street and lesser buildings behind.2
Private houses were built out over the street on upper levels, taking advantage of every possible opportunity to create more usable (and rentable) space. The ground floor of artisan and merchant houses might include a shop front onto the street, opened up with the simple lifting of a large window that created a shelf for the display of goods [94]. Religious images were embedded into the fabric of buildings throughout the city reinforcing the everyday, and everywhere, presence of the divine. Although many cities today, such as Bruges, Siena, Venice, York, and Talinn, retain the essential footprint of their medieval origins, it is more difficult for the modern visitor to capture the fluidity of experience that the early modern city offered, where there was no clear division between public and private, sacred and secular, commerce and culture.
Detail of 104
94 Brunetto Latini, Le Livre du trésor, 1450–75
In this manuscript the ground floor of houses opens to the street, with wide shelves that could accommodate the display of goods. The upper storeys were usually the residence of the artisans shown in their shopfront. It is in this urban setting of goods and exchange that the women perform their good works and engage in their devotional practices.
One approach to cities in the early modern period sees them as primarily centres of trade and commerce, growing and changing as economic conditions shifted. Therefore, the consolidation of squares in the sixteenth century that we see in many cities, Venice, Seville, and London to name just a few, emerged from trade conditions rather than any abstract notion of perfect architectural form. Although writers such as Francesco di Giorgio and Filarete proposed ideal city plans, they proved almost impossible to implement in any existing city.
When John White, an Elizabethan gentleman, travelled to North America around 1580 he found a world rich with natural resources and inhabited by people with exotic habits. He tried to make sense of what he saw: the customs of dress and family life, the ways of hunting and agriculture, and even the curious habit of preserving the deceased elders of the community as part of their spiritual practice. In the architecture and villages of the Algonquian, he tried to reconcile their way of living with what he knew from his own experience. His drawings of the Algonquians in what is now North Carolina included views of two of the towns along Pamlico Sound, Secotan and Pomeiooc [95]. White showed how buildings were made of bark or reed mats, with rounded, arched roofs that gave the buildings stability. Although there were similarities to the layout of English villages, including the connection of the houses to the agricultural land around them, White seemed equally interested in showing how the houses were connected to the rituals of the people. Although the Algonquians were certainly thought to be exotic, he depicted their civic life in a way that would resonate for his audience with English customs.
The longhouses, a type common to the North American native peoples, all face into the centre, and were organized into two concentric circles. White showed the houses with some of the end walls removed in order to give a view into the interiors with their sleeping benches. The houses were organized around a central open space where White showed people gathered around a fire. Thus the orientation of the houses, differentiated according to their function or the status of the inhabitants, depended upon shared rituals. Fire was also the explanation the ancient writer Vitruvius had given for the origins of architecture. Whether or not White knew that text, he recognized what could be some common elements between the native organization of civic space, and what he knew back at home.
95 John White, Town of Pomeiooc, 1585
Pomeiooc, inhabited either by members of the Secotan or Roanoke tribes, was a palisaded village. In the inscription White records that the houses are ‘covered and enclosed some with mats, and some with barks of trees. All [en]compassed about with small poles stuck thick together instead of a wall.’
The houses were also ringed ‘about with small poles stuck thick together instead of a wall’. That is, the communal life and its buildings were protected by a stockade, much as a town in England or Europe would be encircled with a protective wall and fortifications.
For Europeans seeing native settlements for the first time, the wooden stockade fence was comparable to what they knew at home from city walls yet seemingly primitive compared to the new stone walls in European cities, designed to withstand the force of modern warfare. Cities varied greatly in size, but nearly all had walls that defined the boundaries of the city and protected its inhabitants. Although native settlements were vastly different from the stone-built architecture of Europe, the common currency of cities was the desire to distinguish the built space from the world outside and to offer protection from invaders.
It was walls, in fact, that defined a city, no matter its size. The town secretary of Eisenach (Thuringia) wrote in 1399 that ‘what has a wall around it, that we call a city’.3 The construction of walls was the most expensive public project for any city, and often took many decades or even centuries to complete. Civic leaders and courtly princes believed walls to be essential to a city’s existence, and therefore worthy of the time and expense. Massive stone walls discouraged attacks, and offered the city’s inhabitants a sense of security. Movement of people, goods, and potentially disease could be controlled, to some extent, through city gates. And walls defined the area of a city, limiting growth and creating an urban density that was important to both safety and commerce [96]. Venice is the exception that proves the rule. The Republic’s great navy protected the city from attack from the sea, and the long span of open loggias across the Ducal Palace asserted a confidence that attack was unlikely across the expanse of water.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the population of cities grew as trade and economic wealth increased. For some cities such as Paris and Florence, this growth required new walls that expanded the perimeter. In London, the two distinct centres of the city, Westminster as the court capital to the west, and London to the east, merged as growth filled in the open fields between them. Walls also remained even when populations shrank. In Rome, the ancient walls enclosed large tracts of empty land in the medieval era and into the sixteenth century as the popes worked to re-establish the size and magnificence of the city.
96 Dubrovnik, Croatia
The walls and bastions around Dubrovnik were extended in two campaigns during the Renaissance. Michelozzo di Bartolomeo and Giorgio da Sebenico designed the fortifications on the land side of the city in 1464–5 in response to the Turkish capture of Bosnia in 1463. New fortifications were added along the sea throughout the 16th century in anticipation of an attack by the Venetians.
In many cities walls are now destroyed or hidden behind buildings that give no hint of their importance. Medieval and early modern city walls were no match for modern warfare. And where they do survive, the suburbs have expanded and made the walls only an outmoded artefact that no longer carries the symbolic weight or civic function it once did.
Walls were the main form of protection for cities. Gates allowed for controlled access in and out of the city centre. From the Middle Ages they were often designed with complex twists and turns, over a series of ramps and bridges that were intended to prevent anyone (human or animal) sneaking through the gate undetected. This didn’t always work, of course. Walls and gates were highly permeable membranes that permitted a flow of people and goods, in and out.
Gates were an important part of urban control but they were equally signs of a city’s status and independence in their imposing size and symbolic decoration. The great Holstentor in Lübeck (1464–78) marked the western flank of the city [97]. It is the only surviving part of a complex gate system that was begun in the thirteenth century and extended by additional gate structures to increase the security leading into the city. The various interior spaces in the gates provided rooms for the toll collector and the city official in charge of the streets and fortifications. The desire for an impressive entrance became more important as Lübeck’s role in the Hanseatic League increased. The Holstentor has different façades to the interior and exterior, as did many city gates. The side toward the fields had few windows whereas the city side had rows of windows that link the two towers. The brick construction, conical roofs, and stepped gable in the centre were all distinctive to architecture along the Baltic generally, and typical of the buildings in Lübeck. The gate was thus a sign of civic and regional identity, immediately recognizable to anyone entering the city.
97 Holstentor, 1464–78, Lübeck, Germany
By the end of the Middle Ages, brick rivalled stone in its status as a building material in northern Germany. Lübeck, along with other cities controlled by the Hanseatic League, was developed in the 12th and 13th centuries with the construction of important religious and civic buildings in the local brick, finished with various glazes. The Holstentor incorporated the stepped gable façade used elsewhere in the city between twin towers and steep conical roofs, a Baltic version of the triumphal arch as gateway.
The importance of gates as a symbolic gesture in the city increased as new forms of urban protection were developed. In the sixteenth century, fortification design began to favour earthen ramparts, protected behind deep ditches. Walls, therefore, became a less important sign of civic status and authority and gates took on that role. The Porta Nuova in Verona (begun 1533), designed by Michele Sanmicheli (1487–1559), was an interpretation of an ancient Roman triumphal arch applied to a fortified gate [98]. The central opening had engaged Doric columns supporting a pediment, with classical ornament and Venetian coat of arms that spoke to the city’s identity as a modern version of ancient Roman ideals. The structure itself, however, was a fully realized defensive structure, strong enough to support guns on the roof.4
Soon after he was elevated to the papacy, Pope Pius II returned to his native town of Corsignano in Tuscany, about 30 miles south-east of Siena. Most of the residents of the small town made their living from agriculture, farming the rich landscape in the valleys below the town centre. When Pius II returned there in 1459, the ageing population and modest buildings evoked his own sense of time passing. By transforming Corsignano into his namesake Pienza, the town’s most famous native son could establish a lasting monument to his own cultural ideas and to the fame of his family.
98 Michele Sanmicheli, Porta Nuova, 1533, Verona, Italy
In addition to the technical innovations, Sanmicheli also introduced rustication and the simple Doric order as appropriate forms and ornament for civic fortifications. Both ancient and modern in inspiration, all of the details of the gate are carefully calculated to reinforce both the image of impenetrability and dignity appropriate for this building.
99 Pienza, Italy
The cathedral and the Palazzo Piccolomini, seen here, were largely completed by 1462 when Pope Pius II returned to Pienza. He then ordered additional buildings added to the square: a bishop’s palace, a town hall (through whose arches this photo is taken), housing for the canons, and housing for the poor. Each building was designed according to designs appropriate for its type. Together, however, they create a total architectural experience of variety within a defined architectural language of classical forms. The layout of the piazza, opening out toward the view behind the cathedral, creates a dynamic space that sets off each individual building.
Through his architect, Bernardo Rossellino (1409–63), Pius II created an open space in front of the cathedral, flanked by the family palace, episcopal palace, and communal palace [99]. Designed in a language that reflected the most current experiments by architects in Florence including Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, the buildings formed a unified whole that was greater than each of the individual parts. A single extraordinary building added into the urban fabric would not have had the same effect as the aggregate, whose effect seems to radiate out through the town.
Pius II elevated Pienza into a bishopric, vastly increasing its importance for him and his family, the Piccolomini. The transformation of Corsignano into Pienza was part of a much larger campaign to promote the family’s status through architectural projects, including numerous new palaces, loggias, and piazzas in nearby Siena. For the residents of Pienza, however, the transformation of the city into a cult centre honouring the Pope was far from painless. In three large buying campaigns from 1459 to 1464, the Pope and his associates acquired 12 per cent of the city’s property. Many residents did not want to sell, and had no hope of finding alternative residences in the built-up town. The effect of the rapid and massive urban gentrification was an economic and cultural shock to the stable pattern of life in Pienza. The ideal urban centre, as it was conceived by Pius II, required a brutal intervention, now subsumed in the clarity and elegance of what remains.5
In a fifteenth-century painting from Bruges, the Virgin and Child sit in a rose garden, surrounded by female saints [100]. Behind them is a walled city, and beyond that mountains that echo the shape of the city’s towers, extending into the distance. The city is unmistakably Bruges, identified by the church spire on the left belonging to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and the bell tower of the Halle on the right where boats were unloaded containing the goods that made the city rich in the Middle Ages. Both the city and the garden are perfectly enclosed spaces, holy places in a religious and perhaps also in a worldly sense, echoing themes explored in Augustine’s City of God (started 410).
At the end of the Middle Ages Bruges was indeed a blessed city in economic terms, enjoying all the advantages of wealth from foreign trade. Nearly a third of the city’s income was spent on civic infrastructure including walls, paved streets, water systems, and public buildings. The first bourse, or public trading market, in Europe was built in Bruges to corral and consolidate the great influx of merchants into the city.
By the time this painting was made, probably around 1485, Bruges had passed her economic and political prime. The Zwin, the river that allowed ships to come into Bruges, bringing goods from all over Europe and beyond, had begun to silt up. By 1460 the deep-water port of Sluys, near to Bruges, was no longer open to ships. The natural threats to the city were compounded by the political pressures exerted by Emperor Maximilian I. The independence of Bruges was a challenge to his authority and in 1488 Maximilian gave incentives for foreign merchants to move their business and trade to Antwerp.
100 Master of the St Lucy Legend, Virgin of the Rose Garden, 1475/80
Although clearly identifiable as Bruges, the view of the city was not an objective image of the city but an idealized rendering—much as the saints are depicted in the foreground. The specificity of the city also served as a type of proof of authenticity for the painting, a mark of its origins from a city renowned for the quality of its artistic production. The city of Jan van Eyck and other great early Flemish painters from the beginning of the century, the association with Bruges validates the artistic value of this painting.
Yet the painting gives no indication of any of those problems. The city is the mirror of the holy scene in the foreground, as timeless as the female saints in their walled garden. All of the attributes that make Bruges recognizable, including the cathedral tower and belfry, identify the city as unchanging even though everything in its recent history told a very different story.
In this painting Bruges appears like a model, placed in a diorama. City models were in fact made in order to represent a specific place, often for a royal patron. The craftsman Jakob Sandtner (fl. 1561–74) made a group of city models for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria (1528–79) [101].6 Carved from limewood, the same material used to make religious sculpture, and painted to convey the sense that here was the city in miniature, the models offered a unique view into the city space. Reproductions of the streets and buildings, enclosed within the fortified walls, allowed the Duke to view his Residenzstädte, or seats of government, from within his palace in Munich. The models were part of his collection of marvels. The perfectly ordered model cities affirmed his quixotic sense of complete political power.
101 Jakob Sandtner, Model of the city of Munich, 1570
Models offered Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria a bird’s-eye view of the cities under his control. Crafted out of limewood, and painted to enhance the realistic effect, these models allowed for effective military strategizing. Many of these cities had newly built fortifications, prominently displayed in the models. As immediately useful as these models may have been, they also offered a unique and god-like view of the Duke’s territories that reinforced his sense of political and military control.
City views could give less idealized views, historical snapshots, in an age before the camera, of distant and exotic urban environments known only through travellers’ accounts. Prints and even paintings were transportable. Images of the Holy Land were a specific type of these images, often including important pilgrimage sites such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem that few would have seen in person.
As a city grew in wealth and importance, there was a need for an architectural presence that would serve the political and judicial needs of the city as well as marking, in a permanent way, the city’s increasing status. The origin of town halls owes much to the rising strength of the guilds in towns after the thirteenth century. While some town halls, especially in the north, may have included an open loggia on the ground floor to be used as a market, as trade increased and greater space was needed for government and trade, city officials as well as guilds separated these functions out into different structures.
New town halls, or major renovations to existing ones, seem to have spawned in clusters. There was competition between neighbouring towns for the most richly decorated exterior, with the grandest interior meeting rooms. And it is because of these inevitable rivalries that groups of extraordinary town halls, all built around the same period, are found in cities of the southern Netherlands, for example, with lavish buildings in Leuven, Brussels, Ghent, and Middelburg. This series of buildings culminates in the Antwerp Town Hall (1561–5), designed by Cornelis Floris and Willem Paludanus, which dwarfs the surrounding houses of the square [102]. As with many town halls, throughout Europe, there was a desire to incorporate lavish decoration with traditional and regional aspects. In Antwerp, there was a classical frontispiece at the centre, breaking up the long façade along one side of the square, with classical columns. The use of antique ornament, recognizable by the educated elite of the city as a reference to widely held humanist cultural ideals, was juxtaposed with the steep roof and tall, rectangular windows characteristic of the local Flemish architecture.
102 Cornelis Floris and Willem Paludanus, Town Hall, 1561–5, Antwerp
As Antwerp grew in population, wealth, and importance in the 16th century, there was a clear need for a new town hall. One attempt was made to build in the 1540s, but that was delayed and the materials used for new city fortifications. The sculptors Floris and Paludanus worked on the design of the façade, formulating the design that had been agreed upon by a committee convened for the purpose. Classical architectural forms, anticse wercken, are annexed onto a relatively traditional form. The specific details of the orders come from the recent translation (1539) of Sebastiano Serlio’s Book IV on the architectural orders from Italian into Flemish by Pieter Coecke van Aelst.
The wealth from goods, flowing in and out of cities, or transformed from raw goods into marketable products, shaped the urban space. In a desire to regulate and control market activities, some cities constructed more grand and permanent buildings to house trade. The Royal Exchange in London (begun 1565) and the Cloth Hall in Ypres (completed 1304) are just two examples of monumental buildings that brought merchants and their customers together in an architectural space that could be better regulated.
103 Granaries, 15th–18th centuries, Grudziaądz, Poland
These granaries are built into the high embankment alongside the Vistula River. From the city side they are two or three storeys high. From the river, they project an image of the city that is both prosperous and secure, serving as protective defences and evidence of the city’s role as a centre of trade.
The vast quantity of goods could require buildings to store them until they went to market, or were transported on to their final destination. In Venice, a series of fondaci, or warehouses, were operated by various trade groups within the city. These large, often regularly built structures were placed close by the market, and with ease of access to transport. Towns along the Vistula River in Poland grew from the grain trade as it was shipped by boat northward towards the port at Gdańsk. Granaries in the town of Grudziaądz rise up from the river to the town centre, high on the bank [103]. In Venice, the warehouses to hold the salt stores adjoined the Piazza San Marco and are along the Giudecca Canal. Such functional, semi-industrial buildings are often overlooked in the attention on the palaces of the wealthy, the civic monuments, or the towering church spires. Yet these buildings defined cities as centres of wealth and prosperity, and with an importance that extended far beyond their own borders.
Almost all of the buildings that survive from the pre-modern era were intended to be permanent structures, built out of solid materials. But we must also imagine the city as a changing landscape, periodically transformed by temporary buildings erected for festivals and pageants. Saints’ days and the ecclesiastical calendar dictated religious celebrations which often included the erection of banners, display of relics, and the decoration of buildings which transformed the city with a new costume of religious garb. Religious plays, enacted in public squares and in front of major public buildings, recast those sacred dramas in the everyday space of the city. What was unremarkable became extraordinary when the story of Christ’s Passion came to life in the same space as the market or the city hall.
When rulers visited cities within their domain, their arrival was described in the printed accounts as ‘joyous’, though the imagery was closer to that of a military triumph. Civic groups erected temporary arches made of painted canvas at important points along the parade route. These temporary arches recalled ancient Roman arches and marked a political fealty of the city to a ruler. King Henry II (1519–59) and his wife Marie de’ Medici (1519–89) entered Paris on 16 June 1549 as one part of an elaborate celebration that included the coronation of his wife as queen, a mock naval battle on the Seine, and a tournament. The events and decoration were recorded in a book that included woodcuts of the temporary architecture [104]. For Henry II’s entry into Paris (and a year later into Rouen), the temporary arches were decorated with classical figures representing the King as wise, the nobility blessed by his patronage, and the people loyal to his power.
Most festival architecture was never intended to be permanent. Accounts for payment to craftsmen include details about the installation and removal of the object after the event ended. If the event lived on in the descriptions and woodcuts of publications, the actual materials were recycled whenever possible. The lumber could be reused and the canvas cut up and distributed to artists for another festival or purpose. Festivals did have a lasting effect though on the design of more permanent buildings. Not only were the designers often the very best architects and artists of the day. Almost every architect of note in the Renaissance was involved in the festivals for their court patrons and their native cities. Temporary architecture offered the opportunity to invent decorative schemes and visual effects that were perhaps too unconventional, impractical, or simply extravagant to be made out of more permanent materials. Festivals were thus a kind of experimental laboratory for art, architecture, and craftsmen that moved projects from the drawing board to the urban theatre.
Triumphal entries were also the opportunity to embellish existing buildings, and transform them for the event as well as an urban benefit. An existing fountain in Paris at the corner of the rue Saint Denis and the rue aux Fers had already served as an important focus for processions through the city. When the sculptor Jean Goujon collaborated with the architect Pierre Lescot, they transformed the Fontaine des Innocents into a celebration of the city. The water emerged from the ground level of the pavilion; the upper storey was an open loggia where the Parisian elite could watch the procession as it passed through the city and be watched by the citizens and royalty alike [105]. Goujon’s low-relief sculptures of water nymphs, dressed in ancient costume, reinforce the allegorical theme of the fountain as a mark of the city’s bounty and sanctification. As the historian Henri Zerner suggests, however, given Paris’s paltry supply of water, the theme of water was a hopeful one for the citizens.
104 Arch of the Saint-Denis Gate for the entry of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici into Paris: C’est l’ordre qui a este tenu a la nouvelle et ioyeuse entrée, que … le roy treschrestien Henry deuxieme de ce nom, a faicte en sa bonne ville [et] cité de Paris (Paris, 1549)
Most temporary decorations for triumphal entries have been lost; they were intended to be destroyed after the event. However, this remarkable small book is one of a handful of printed and published records of the arches and fountains for a royal entry. The sculptor Jean Goujon designed this arch, and its classical form and details reflect the style of the new buildings at the Louvre, just being built at this time. The designer of this plate for the book, possibly Goujon himself, also shows how the arch would have appeared in situ, set against the existing and well-worn wall.
The Fontaine des Innocents was also as much a work of urbanism and architecture as it was of sculpture.7 The platform at ground level, with the loggia above, articulated an important intersection in the city. Lescot framed Goujon’s sinuous sculpture with a composition of finely wrought classical architecture, making the ornament usually reserved for temporary architecture a permanent part of the urban scene.
105 Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Fontaine des Innocents, 1550–75
The fountain was added to an existing building; one can see how Lescot connected the mouldings into the adjacent building. From the elevated viewing platform, in the open arcades, the privileged spectators could view the royal procession as well as the city that served as the all-important backdrop for the event. The fountain no longer exists though some of Goujon’s sculptural panels have been preserved in the Louvre Museum.
Landmarks from afar, and marvels close up, the great spires of churches announced the wealth of urban centres. If other buildings such as markets, town halls, and walls served a growing population, spires were not the product of an immediate spatial or functional need. Churches could get by with shorter or less ornate towers. Yet the tallest and most ornate spires expressed the ambitions of a city in the impossibility of their construction, the sheer excess of labour, resources, and skill in attempting so much.
The view of Strasbourg by Hartmann Schedel in the Liber chronicarum (1493) is dominated by the north tower of the cathedral, rising far above the rest of the church and the city [106].8 The cathedral was begun in the twelfth century, and the tower completed up to the platform level in 1399. A master mason from Ulm, Ulrich von Ensingen, moved to Strasbourg to complete the tower. His design was remarkable for its octagon shape and interlaced vaults, and the corner stair turrets that run up the full length of the first storey of the tower. After Ulrich von Ensingen’s death in 1419, the mason’s lodge was put under the control of the Cologne mason Johannes Hultz. The pinnacle and spire, in the shape of a pyramid, were covered with fifty-six smaller towers. By drawing on a sequence of earlier, late medieval, towers, and condensing them into a strict geometrical regularity, the masons at Strasbourg created a tower that is both a fitting completion to the church below and a sculptural object in its own right. The tower at Strasbourg was the tallest masonry structure of its time, and remained so for several hundred years.
106 Strasbourg from Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum, 1493
Rising high above the body of the church and projecting even into the block of the text, the spire of the Strasbourg’s cathedral was the city’s dominant feature in the woodcut for Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle. This chronicle of the world combined religious history as a part of a comprehensive history played out in specific locations. Strasbourg is just one of the modern cities included alongside biblical sites. The interest in city views, of known and exotic locations, was part of a wider fascination in cosmography and geography.
Like the churches and public buildings they rose above, great spires were the ultimate sign of a local identity.9 They marked the specificity of a place, identifying its uniqueness in an age increasingly fascinated by the knowledge of distant worlds.
The experience of the early modern city engaged all the senses. Massive stones, rough to the touch, marked out the towers of the important family. Bells ringing from the local church measured out the day in the hours of prayer. Statues of the Virgin embraced by small shrines on many street corners reinforced the presence of the sacred in public space. Location, time of day, identity: these were all aspects of the city that residents understood with all of their senses.
Smell was one of the most profound experiences, and Alberti advised where artisans should be located within the city depending on the nature of their craft.
The charm of a city will be very much enhanced if the various workshops are allocated distinct and well-chosen zones. The silversmiths, painters, and jewellers should be on the forum, then next to them, spice shops, clothes shops, and, in short, all those that might be thought more respectable. Anything foul or offensive (especially the stinking tanners) should be kept well away in the outskirts to the north, as the wind rarely blows from that direction, and when it does, it gusts so strongly as to clear smells away, rather than carry them along. (Alberti, VII, 1, p. 192)
Early industries polluted the air, just as did the everyday waste products of human and animal habitation. Manure from the night was often emptied into the street, and could make just walking a dangerous proposition. But not all cities took this approach. When Leonardo Bruni praised Florence in his Laudatio Florentinae urbis (1404) he began with a lengthy description of the city’s cleanliness. ‘Now what is more marvellous in a populous city than never to have to worry about filth in the street?’10 The streets had adequate drainage, Bruni goes on, and your feet never got wet, even after a great rainstorm. The streets and squares of Florence were equal to the rooms of great palaces in other cities, and the first evidence of the city’s magnificence and importance. Bruni’s account of Florentine sanitation was also a metaphor for a praiseworthy civic culture. Cleanliness is essential for urban harmony, Bruni states, and one part of the Florentine political system that brings all members of the society together for the greater good. Clean streets are also a sign for Bruni of the high standards of Florentine language, the norms of self-presentation of her citizens, and the cultural supremacy that Bruni felt defined Florentine citizens.
If Florence was praised for her cleanliness, other cities did not fare as well. The Venetian ambassador Francesco Guicciardini condemned Spain, writing that her cities are not only filled with ugly buildings, but also full of ‘mud and filth’ (‘di fango e di bruttura’).11 Spanish cities may have been just as clean as those in Italy, and Guicciardini’s comments may well therefore reflect more his dislike of the foreignness of Spanish culture and the different customs and appearances he found there. What is not familiar feels unclean, an assault upon the senses.
In the warm climate of Italy, citizens spent a great deal of their time out of doors in the open piazzas or squares that served as the communal spaces for cities and towns. In any city of size, there might be several squares, some devoted more to markets, some connected with an adjoining church. In Florence, the Piazza della Signoria offered the citizens ample opportunity to gather in the shadow of the city’s great town hall. The Palazzo della Signoria loomed over the square; her great rusticated stone façade and tower were a dominant presence of the civic authority and political force that shaped the life of Florence’s citizens. In contrast to the dominant architecture, however, the square was inherently a less controlled arena where citizens might meet. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Florentine government was eager to show its increasing openness and even-handed treatment of its citizens. As with other moments of political change, these transformations appeared in aspects of the urban design. The construction of the Loggia della Signoria (1374–82) offered one such protected space within the square for the enactment of public ceremonies such as inaugurations and the reception of dignitaries [107].
107 Loggia della Signoria, 1374–82, Florence
The covered space of the loggia offered an appropriately dignified location for the governing body of Florence, or the Signoria, to welcome visiting dignitaries and perform ceremonial functions.
Benches around the loggia offered citizens a place to sit and watch proceedings.12 In the fifteenth century civic authorities also added three tiers of benches in the piazza itself, recalling the seating of both council halls and theatres. The seating in the Florentine piazza was the most extensive of any city on the Italian peninsula, perhaps reflecting the government’s desire to make a public acknowledgment of the importance of this square in the political life of the city.
Loggias in Venice, Verona, and other cities in and outside Italy offered a discrete space that was both public yet semi-removed from the general space of the square. The Florentine government found that as the political mood shifted in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the freedom of the piazza and the ability of the city’s citizens to gather could also result in a very public display of dissent that could not easily be controlled.
108 Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, Palazzo Medici, 1444, Florence
The arches at the corner of the Palazzo Medici were originally open and offered a loggia onto the street. Michelangelo designed the windows that were added to the palace in the sixteenth century. Unlike many other palaces of the time, the Palazzo Medici does not have shops on the ground storey to provide additional income for the family to offset the cost of building or upkeep.
When the Medici created a new palace that would affirm their status within the political sphere of Florence, their architect Michelozzo di Bartolomeo (1396–1472) appropriated the language of public architecture [108]. Massive blocks of stone recall the rustication of the Palazzo della Signoria, and benches along the Via Larga created seating along the streets. The great innovation at the Medici Palace was Michelozzo’s appropriation of aspects of civic architecture into a palace for a private family.
As cities came to take on an ever-greater role as the engines of economic wealth in the Renaissance, their prosperity often came from trade. Merchants increased in status as their financial power grew, and that income could then be used on the tangible signs of their status: clothing, household goods, civic patronage, religious endowments, and architecture. Soon after the French merchant Jacques Cœur was elevated to the ranks of the nobility in 1441, he began a series of architectural projects in his hometown of Bourges. In addition to the purchase of chateaux and the embellishment of churches, he began a great house that would also serve as the centre for his business [109].
Jacques Cœur made his wealth through trade, adding to the reputation of Bourges as a European centre of luxury goods.13 At the height of his company’s power, Cœur had six galleys that transported rugs from Persia, silk and porcelain from China, pearls from Ceylon, and spices from Sumatra. His knowledge of the Mediterranean, and personal wealth, encouraged King Charles VII to appoint him finance minister in 1434, adding further to his stature.
109 Courtyard, House of Jacques Cœur, 1443–51, Bourges, France
The tower with its blind arcades and tall dormer windows recalls a medieval chateau, including the castle of Mehun-sur-Yèvre (destroyed) that the Duc owned nearby. Staircases, in the tall narrow towers that project into the courtyard, connect the main public rooms on the ground storey, and the suites of personal chambers on the upper floors. Although the courtyard façade seems irregular, there is a careful alignment of the vertical elements in the window bays and in the horizontal mouldings that tie together each range of rooms.
His house in Bourges was both innovative in plan and conservative in imagery.14 The turrets, pinnacles, trefoil panelling, and irregular elevation recalled the late medieval chateaux of the area, especially those owned by Jean, Duc de Berry, the great noble of the previous generation. The aura of an ancient castle was consciously incorporated into Jacques Cœur’s house, built in one concerted building campaign from 1443 to 1451. His economic resources allowed him to build such a grand house so quickly; even nobles with more status than money usually had to build bit by bit, giving their houses the piecemeal look that Jacques Cœur consciously built into his new house.
The house sits atop the ancient Gallo-Roman wall that encloses the city, and bends in the middle to follow the existing street. The entrance to the house, on the city side, is through a large double door under a canopy where a statue of the King once sat (now destroyed). On the upper storey of the square entrance block is the chapel marked off by a large window with Gothic stone tracery. The ornament, sequence of windows, and tower turrets all create a public face, which firmly connects Jacques Cœur to the architectural ancestry of local French nobility. Throughout the interior Cœur pays homage to the King by including elements from the royal coat of arms, including fleurs-de-lis and hearts. Equally prominent are the marks of Cœur himself, his wife, his agents, and close friends and family. In this way the house was a sign of political connections, family fealty, and economic resources.
110 Plan, House of Jacques Cœur
The house was built into the city walls of Bourges, seen to the left of the plan, along the west. The round towers are incorporated into the house plan, and the main rooms are placed along this curve of the wall and entered through the courtyard. Access to the rooms is from the stair turrets, along narrow passageways. The experience, therefore, of the house plays off surprise and controlled movement from place to place. The main entrance to the house, from the city and under the main tower, offers a wider passage for horses and a narrower door for foot traffic.
Although the imagery of the palace recalled the great chateau of Jacques Cœur’s predecessor, Jean, Duc de Berry, the plan and scheme of the palace included several innovations [110]. The galleries, which were usually just passages from one suite of rooms to the next, became prominent rooms in their own right. Cœur, and his masons, gave more attention to these transitional rooms in the house, adding elaborate vaulting and fireplaces, which in later French architecture would take on a major role as spaces appropriate for decoration and ritual. The private apartments were set at the back of the house and accessible only through a series of antechambers (garde-robes) and up half-hidden stairs and passageways, offering an additional separation of public and private spaces in an urban palace.
Jacques Cœur’s profitable trade throughout Europe and the East provided the capital to finance his grand house in his hometown. For others, wishing to build grandly, their houses might have been financed through the lease of shops at street level. The Palazzo Caprini in Rome (completed 1510), designed by Donato Bramante for Adriano Caprini, the Bishop of Viterbo, incorporated an innovative design that used rustication on the ground floor and paired Doric columns for the residence level [111]. The palace, now destroyed and at one time the residence of the artist Raphael, sat on the busy via Alessandrina that led to St Peter’s Basilica. Palaces in Italian cities often included shops when their location offered enough traffic to ensure a steady flow of business.15 The lease from the shops supported the construction of the palace and ensured the family a steady income for its support.
111 Donato Bramante, Palazzo Caprini, 1510, Rome
This sketch, by an anonymous 16th-century draughtsman, shows the bold rustication of the ground floor and the Doric columns of the main level of the residence. Bramante’s design established a new type of palace façade, rich and sculptural, using the orders and ornament to project an image of the owner. The ground floor included spaces for shops, framed by rusticated voussoirs, and storage in the mezzanines for the shopkeepers’ goods. The palace was destroyed, and is known from drawings like this by architects who studied its design.
The economist and sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) observed that cities are mostly composed of the residences of their citizens.16 Weber certainly wasn’t thinking about the grand palaces that dominate by size though not in number. Most residences in the early modern city were those of the workers, merchants, and artisans. In all cities these houses varied greatly in size and comfort, though in each place they tended to follow local traditions [112]. The most important factor that determined their appearance was the available materials as well as locally established techniques and practices. These buildings reflected economic choices, but also the desire to identify with a place. Social and economic security grew out of the power of the group. Permission to work as a craftsman, for example, was contingent upon acceptance into the appropriate guild after years of training and loyalty to the group. That same sense of group identity was present in the choice of architecture that aligned, more or less, with the common practice in any city.
112 Sebastiano Serlio, City dwellings for artisans in the Italian and French manner
This page from Serlio’s book on domestic architecture shows houses for a ‘better-off’ artisan (the upper two examples) and those for a rich artisan or good merchant, below. On the left are houses appropriate for Italy, with smaller windows for the warm climate, hipped roofs, and loggia as a respite from the heat of the day. On the right are houses in the French manner, for colder and darker climates, with steep roofs and large windows.
In Lower Saxony, for example, one is struck by the continuity of materials: many of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century houses in that area of Germany are made using half-timbering, or fachwerk. Wood was easily available in the nearby Harz Mountain forests and local craftsmen developed expertise in transforming materials based on patrons’ economic wherewithal and preferences. The Latin School in Alfeld, for example, is an elaborate example of the local type, built from wood but decorated with a highly elaborate series of images of the Christian virtues. As with painted façades, common in Trento (Italy), for example, fachwerk allowed builders to easily incorporate figural imagery and text into the building’s decoration [113]. Entire streets survive of fachwerk houses in Einbeck, especially along the Tiedexerstrasse, where most of the houses were made in the years around 1540–60. Wood, painted to emphasize the geometric carved patterns, allowed for variety on all levels of social and economic status.
113 Latin School, 1610, Alfeld-an-der-Leine (Germany)
The fachwerk on this school building is combined with brick. On each level, the polychrome panels are carved with scenes that were meant to be instructive to the students: scenes of the virtues, arts, and senses along with evangelists and saints from the Bible and modern times. The inscription that runs in between the first and second floors refers to the story of Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28) but also asks for God’s blessing on this school, built by the town but with the Church’s support.
Houses must be appropriate to their owners, according to Andrea Palladio in his architectural treatise I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture; Venice, 1570). Architects should take special care to build a house that is suitable (commodo) to the patrons, choosing the form and ornament that best represents the ‘status of the person who will have to live in it and of which the parts will correspond to the whole and to each other’. Houses represent their owners in the public domain, and are therefore active agents in projecting their builders’ wishes and desires. The power of architecture to shape public perception, building grandly to appear grand, is a dangerous proposition and one which the architect would do well to avoid yet may be powerless to stop. For as Palladio writes, ‘the architect is frequently obliged to accommodate himself to the wishes of those who are paying rather than attending to what he should’.17
As cities grew in size and population, officials sought to control the display and sale of foodstuffs.18 One concern was hygiene and cleanliness. The sale of fish in particular was organized into open areas, with limited days and times for the market to be in operation. In the Low Countries, where fish was an important staple of the diet of all social classes because of its ready availability, market areas were under open porticos or temporary stalls that could serve a large number of people and allow for easy cleaning after the market closed [114]. Markets for meat required a cool and dark location to preserve the freshness as long as possible. Butchers could slaughter the animals on their own property but the division of the meat into smaller, retail-size portions had to be done under the control of the butcher guild and in a centralized place. Butchers could rent a board in the meat hall, where only beef or mutton were sold. Pig was considered unclean and sold elsewhere. Meat halls in the Low Countries were often part of a multifunctional guildhall, as in Bruges where the vast Halle was an economic centre for a variety of civic and merchant purposes.
114 Hendrick Martensz. Sorgh, De Vismarkt, c.1650
Fish markets were often outside to minimize odours. Some cities even kept domesticated storks with clipped wings in order to clean the market spaces after they closed for the day. One stork can be seen at the far left in this painting of an open-air fish market.
115 Groot Vleeshuis, 1409, Ghent
As guilds and towns sought to regulate trade, they built large and prominent halls. The control of foodstuffs was especially important, given their role in the peaceful functioning of the city.
The availability of high-quality meat was an important marker of a prosperous city, however, and buildings devoted to that purpose testified to the prestige of a city and its people. The Groot Vleeshuis (Great Meat Hall) in Ghent was begun in 1409, one of the several new guild houses built during this period [115]. Its central location, stone façade, and great open wooden hall all marked its civic and economic status in the city.19
Uncontrolled trade could threaten the authority of a city. In major ports like Venice, Antwerp, London, Gdańsk, and Dubrovnik, urban authorities sought to regulate trade to ensure a fair and orderly market. New buildings were designed to oversee trade by collecting tariffs, regulating goods, and ensuring standard weights and measures.
Dubrovnik’s political independence, political stability, and strategic location promoted its role as an important trading centre in the Adriatic.20 In 1516, the Senate there accepted the design by Paskoje Miličević for a new customs house. The rectangular building included galleries around the interior courtyard, recalling the fondouks of Ottoman architecture, one of their major trading partners [116].21 Around the central open space were offices for the collection of duties for goods transported through the city as well as the mint, treasury, and weigh hall that verified standard units of measurement for the Republic. This centralized all these activities in one civic building, prominently located within the city and with an elaborately decorated façade onto the square.
As with many buildings in Dubrovnik, Miličević combined Gothic and classical ornament in the design of the Divona Palace. Round-headed arches resting on composite columns formed the loggia on the ground storey, but the windows on the piano nobile had pointed arches with quatrefoil tracery in the central, three-light opening. The upper storey had square-headed windows with a pedimented aedicule holding a statue of St Blaise, the patron saint of the city.22
As goods came in and went out of the city, they travelled with their agents, the merchants, ambassadors, pilgrims, and soldiers from places as close by as the world outside the walls and as distant as the other side of the earth. The density of the early modern city placed these diverse people side by side with the more permanent residents and fellow travellers. As in modern times, to speak of the inhabitants of Paris one must include not only native ‘Parisians’ but also all those who were in Paris for a brief or lengthy visit [117].23
116 Paskoje Miličević and Nikola and Josip Andrijić, Sponza Palace, 1516–21, Dubrovnik, Croatia
At the centre of the city, the Sponza Palace served as the customs house, and an inscription on an inner courtyard attests to the accuracy of the city’s measurements (‘Our weights do not permit cheating or being cheated. When I measure goods the Lord measures with me’). Stylistically, the palace is a combination of Venetian Gothic designs, in the windows of the second floor, and classical forms in the ground-floor loggia and upper storey. This combination was typical in Croatia, as in many places throughout Europe, and spoke to the varied international community present in this important city.
Inevitably, the close proximity was at times uneasy as much as it was inevitable. In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church had decreed that Jews should live alongside Christians, although in practice few local authorities made legislation that enforced that ruling. Specific circumstances, however, forced governments to act. When the War of the League of Cambrai threatened Jews who were living on the mainland of the Veneto, they fled to the city of Venice to seek refuge. In 1516 the Senate required them to live together, on a separate island, called the Ghetto Nuovo. The term ghetto, which came to be more widely used, referred specifically to the nearby copper foundry (gettare means to pour or cast). Yet the reality of a specific, restrictive area where Jews were required to live was expanded in the wake of the Counter-Reformation.24
The sense that Jews were imprisoned, under surveillance, is confirmed by the description of the ghetto by Zaccaria Dolfin in 1515:
Send them all to live in the Ghetto Nuovo which is like a castle, and to make drawbridges and close it with a wall; they should have only one gate, which would enclose them there and they would stay there, and two boats of the Council of Ten would go and stay there at night, at their expense, for their greater security.25
117 Houses of foreign merchants, Bruges, from A. Sanderus, Flandria illustrata, 1641
Foreign merchants were usually well organized, seeking connections with local religious groups or civic organizations in order to facilitate their trading activities. Bruges was one of the most important trading cities in the north, and merchants from Italy, Spain and Portugal, England and France, Germany, Turkey, and Armenia all operated there. While many foreign traders stayed in inns, some nations had designated houses, such as these facing onto the central bourse, or market. The two houses marked out here belonged to the delegations from Genoa and Florence.
In Venice about 700 Jews were moved into the Ghetto in 1516, enclosed on the island by drawbridges, and restricted from leaving the area at night. Windows facing out from the island were shut up, and balconies on the exterior side of houses removed.
In his treatise, Filarete describes Sforzinda, an ideal city laid out within strict geometrical lines and designed for Francesco Sforza, the lord of Milan. Each aspect of city function was represented in the design, including churches, royal palaces, markets, and merchants’ shops. The design represented a tenuous balancing of civic and political powers, each given a precise designation within the urban landscape. Filarete’s scheme laid out the problem of urban design that would occupy theorists and builders into the modern age: how to reconcile urban experience with the possibility of urban reform. Ideal urban schemes appear in numerous architectural writings throughout the sixteenth century. The absolute quality of Sforzinda and the geometrical exercises by Francesco di Giorgio would eventually inspire a burgeoning industry in the design of cities that incorporate the latest in defensible design and military architecture [118].
Few new cities were built in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Yet the desire to improve existing cities did take place. The older, medieval part of Ferrara stretches along the banks of the Po River in northern Italy. Ferrara was a court city, ruled by the Este family. The city reached a political and artistic height in the fifteenth century, expanding its residences in the Palazzo del Corte (begun 1242) and the moated castle in the city centre. It was the city itself, however, that received the most important additions by the Este. Borso d’Este (1413–71) enclosed open land to the east, along the river, in 1451. His brother Duke Ercole I (1435–1505, reg. 1471–1505) transformed Ferrara beginning in 1492 by more than doubling its area, adding new walls designed to resist the latest in military attacks [119]. Streets were added across the enclosed lands that extended the medieval city to the edge of the walls. The Este castle, originally on the northern boundary, was now in the centre of the city and streets were planned to radiate out from its place in the realigned urban fabric. The Corso Ercole I, running north from the castle, and the Corso Porta Po met at almost right angles. Ercole, in consultation with his architect, Biagio Rossetti (1447–1516), included a new open space just to the east. The Piazza Nuova (now Piazza Ariostea) created a new urban focus in the ‘addition’ around which new houses would be built and public space given over to markets and shops.
118 Zamosc, founded 1580, Poland
Located on the important trade route between L’viv and Lublin, Zamosc was intended to capitalize on the movement of goods and people through the eastern regions of the Polish empire. Jan Zamoyski (1542–1605) engaged the Italian architect Bernardo Morando in developing the design, based on city plans known in treatises and widely recognized as optimal plans for defence and commerce. As Royal Secretary and Chancellor, Zamoyski envisioned the new city as a benefit to the King and a personal triumph in honouring his own name and reputation. The grid of streets extended out from the central square (planned to be 100m × 100m), all protected with the latest developments in fortifications.
119 Plan, Ercole additions, Ferrara
The darker lines show the additions to Ferrara by Borso d’Este in 1451 (to the lower right, along the river) and by Ercole d’Este (beginning in 1492) to the north. Ercole’s additions included major streets that linked up with the existing roads, and extended the residential quarters of the city to the new city walls.
Visually, the Addizione Ercole achieves much of its effect because of the contrast with the earlier part of the city [120]. The wide, open streets of the new section give an uninterrupted vista out to the walls, making the city seem even larger than it is. Movement feels unimpeded and nearly aristocratic. Walking through this part of the city has the aura of a procession, as if the princely characteristics of court life were extruded out into the public sphere.
The new architecture continued Ferrarese building traditions. Brick was the dominant material for the two- to three-storey houses. Ornament was mostly moulded terracotta friezes. The colour of the city overall, therefore, is a warm red-brown, repeated in the small-scale buildings and used throughout in the consistent pattern of decoration. Rossetti embraced the dominant local style in planning the ‘addition’, using that vernacular building practice as the backdrop against which to craft a new urban language of accent and emphasis. At the intersection of minor streets, for example, are white Istrian stone pilasters, with classical flutings and capitals at street level. As a practical matter, the stone pilasters protected the more fragile brick from damage from carts. As part of the urban experience, however, the white stone serves as a form of punctuation in the long straight streets. They mark out the edges of the urban grid, relieving the repetition of the brick façades, and add a dignity to the city that was to embody the refinement of the Este court.
120 Corso Ercole I, 1492, Ferrara
This main street moves out into the new sections of the city from the d’Este castle. Although most buildings are brick and terracotta, the architect Biagio Rossetti included finely carved marble pilasters at important intersections. These white, refined details are elegant moments in the streetscape, and tie the disparate buildings together, creating a common language which is based on local precedent and classical architectural forms.
Along with the new square, churches, and the wall embracing the subsumed land, important palaces were planned in significant places. Four related palaces were to have been placed at the major road junction. Only the Palazzo Diamanti was completed to any extent [121]. In stone, not brick, the faceted masonry blocks recall glittering gemstones as much as they do fortified military architecture. Classical grotesque images on the corner pilasters on both levels of the palace, and the projecting balcony, all address the palaces on the other three corners of the intersection that were planned but only ever partially completed.
Much of the urban ‘addition’ in Ferrara remained empty at the end of the sixteenth century. Not all streets had been built out to the plan enacted by Ercole d’Este and his architect. In contrast to the urban schemes of Filarate and Francesco di Giorgio, Ferrara was planned as a flexible and open-ended solution to a specific urban condition. It derived from existing building traditions, amplified and reinvented in order to create a new city built on the principles of existing practice.
121 Biagio Rossetti, Palazzo Diamanti, begun 1493, Ferrara
Built for Sigismondo d’Este, the Palazzo Diamanti was intended to work with palaces on the other corners in order to mark this important intersection within the city. The faceted stonework and delicately carved corner pilasters, and even the overhanging balcony on the upper floor, all contribute to the scenographic effect on the street.
In sixteenth-century Genoa, on the Ligurian coast, a group of old patrician families put away their long-standing rivalries, and joined together to develop a street of palaces.26 Genoa was a famously feudal city-state, with each of the major families holding onto areas within the walls, marked out by towers and palace groups. In the late Middle Ages, new noble families and middle-class merchants had challenged the political power of the more established families. Under the leadership of Andrea Doria (1466–1560), the older families once again asserted their dominance in the city. Their decision to create a new residential enclave of palaces presented a unified front in architectural terms [122].
They petitioned the Senate of the Republic to clear land for a monumental street on the north edge of the city. The location was significant. High on the Valletta di Soziglia, directly over the port, the Castelletto area was visible throughout the city. It was also the site of a ruined twelfth-century fortress that was associated for the Genoese with domination by French troops, overthrown by a revolt led by Andrea Doria in September 1528. A new street, planned and occupied by the ancient families of Genoa, was to be a political statement of the city’s liberty and independence. By the middle of the sixteenth century, a street lined with classical palaces, all of a type, was also understood by its patrons to be a type of urban stage, a theatre on which to enact their own sense of seniority and ancestry. Ideal city views, sometimes presented as stage sets as in Sebastiano Serlio’s L’architettura, equated scenery appropriate for different types of theatre with varying architectural styles [123]. Classical architecture was tied to tragic drama that made for ‘great personages’. Originally the Strada Nuova was a closed-off street, reinforcing the residents’ desire to create a distinct neighbourhood, a district for the city’s nobility. From the moment they were completed, the palaces along the street served as the setting for both private opulence and public ceremony. Architects responsible for the individual palaces looked back to traditional, medieval Genovese palace types, adapting them within a very narrow band of variety. While individual differences are clear in each palace, they used a similar vocabulary of classical ornament and layout that identify them with local traditions. In the seventeenth century, urban entrepreneurs and princes would go on to shape the city by developing areas for particular social groups, as in Paris at the Place Royale for the French aristocracy (1612) and in London at Covent Garden for merchants and rural gentry (1630s).
122 Strada Nuova, 1550–8, Genoa
The transformation of the Castelletto, an area of Genoa with important historical significance, gentrified a disreputable part of the city into a fashionable urban enclave. The regular street is lined with palaces, several by Galeazzo Alessi (Perugia, 1512–72), whose restrained designs captured the sentiments of his prominent patrons.
123 Sebastiano Serlio, Tragic Stage Set, from his De perspective: Il secondo libro di prospettiva, Paris, 1545
The ancient Roman writer Vitruvius had described three different types of stage sets: comic, tragic, and satiric. Serlio included illustrations of these in his book on perspective. Serlio’s teacher, Baldessare Peruzzi (1481–1536), created stage sets for festivals in Rome, recorded in his drawings. In the Tragic Stage Set, Serlio shows a street in perspective lined with a variety of classical buildings. Obelisks and gates like triumphal arches further define the space. If architecture modelled on antiquity was appropriate for historic drama, it was also thought to be fitting for noble patrons and heads of state.
All cities needed a regular supply of clean water. Their growth was dependent upon it. If the supply to the cities was destroyed, as happened in Rome when Goths attacked the aqueduct system in 537, the populace could not survive. Businesses such as tanneries and potteries required a steady supply of water for their production. And the cleanliness and sanitation of the city depended upon water for washing and waste removal. For a millennium, from 537 until the middle of the sixteenth century, Romans used the Tiber River as the major source of water. But the river flooded regularly, and was overused and subsequently seriously polluted. A few natural springs provided better drinking water but most of the fountains and collecting pools in the city had been destroyed by centuries of neglect and war.
The restoration of Rome to her former glory of antiquity required the restoration of the water supply. Pope Pius V (reg. 1566–72) continued the renovation begun by Pope Nicholas V in 1453 of the aqueduct called the Aqua Virgo (now called the Acqua Vergine) in 1570 to bring water to the Campus Martius in the centre of the city. He established the Congregazione cardinilizia super viis pontibus fontibus, the Congregation of cardinals in charge of streets, bridges, and fountains, to supervise the enormous project, with the city architect, Giacomo della Porta, as technical adviser.27
The restoration of the Acqua Felice (in ancient times called the Aqua Alessandrina, restored in 1587) and the Acqua Paola (1612) brought water to the hills of the city, and supported the rapid urban growth sought by the Vatican as part of its programme to consolidate power in Rome. Water moved from the springs in the Roman countryside along the raised stone aqueducts, a marvel of engineering. From the hills the water flowed into fountains that were built or restored as central distribution points [124]. Water was a commodity in the city, as important as food, and more difficult to provide in sufficient measure. If in Rome the popes initiated the restoration of the ancient aqueduct system, this also stimulated economic entrepreneurship further down the economic ladder. Watersellers, in Italy called acquaroli, were licensed to collect water from the newly built fountains to sell door to door.
The availability of water in Rome spearheaded urban development. Pope Sixtus V followed the restoration of the aqueducts with the establishment of new thoroughfares throughout Rome. The Via Felice, opened in 1585, linked the church of Sta Maria Maggiore with the church of Trinitá dei Monti, and marked the important intersections of streets with obelisks. This was just one of a series of new routes through the city that created a practical and visual order in the urban landscape.
124 Domenico Fontana, Fontana dell’Acqua Felice, 1587, Rome
As papal architect to Sixtus V, Fontana took on the full range of urban projects including work at the Vatican and throughout the city of Rome. The extraordinary feat of moving obelisks to mark new street junctures and the piazza in front of St Peter’s was recorded in Fontana’s books Della trasportatione dell’obelisco vaticano (1590 and 1604). Equally important in his career, however, were his works in consolidating the urban infrastructure of Rome, encouraging new residents to reside in less desirable areas and setting out what would become the modern city.
Abundant, pure water was a sign of a city’s prosperity and greatness; and rulers understood the public and personal benefits of promoting urban infrastructure projects. In the epic poem The Lusiad (1572), the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões (c.1524–1580) praised the Água de Prata (Aqueduct of Silver Water) in Évora for ‘Two hundred arches, stretch’d in length, sustain | The marble duct, where, glist’ning to the sun, | Of silver hue the shining waters run’ (Bk. III). The aqueduct in Évora was ancient in origin, built when Rome founded the city, and just one of several important Roman monuments that testified to the city’s ancient and noble past. King João III restored the aqueduct in 1531–7, employing the military architect Francisco de Arruda who had built the Belém Tower at the mouth of the Tagus River, at the entrance to the harbour in Lisbon, and near to the Monastery of the Jerónimos [92, 93, 145, 148].
