Renaissance architecture can be hard to love. It may be respected or admired, or even understood on an intellectual level, but these days it rarely evokes the impassioned response of the great medieval cathedrals or the awe of the vast Baroque palaces. In his book on Renaissance Architecture in Italy (1963), Peter Murray said that we have to take Renaissance buildings on their own terms, that we need to have the knowledge of ancient culture and Renaissance learning in order to see the architecture as it was meant to be seen. This is a tall order. Many of the patrons responsible for the most famous buildings of the period were great scholars, often with vast libraries and a deep knowledge of ancient cultures. They understood architecture, along with the arts of poetry, music, painting, and sculpture, to be a part of that learned culture. Architects too understood that architecture could participate in these elevated discussions.
Certainly a knowledge of ancient philosophy, Renaissance literature, theological debates, and recent scientific discoveries can all contribute to an understanding and deep appreciation of architecture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This book brings in that background to the discussion of the buildings. Yet the same intellectual context of Renaissance architecture that helps us to understand the fascination with particular forms, such as the column as a sign of ancient Roman culture, can also inhibit the very physical and material pleasures of the buildings. For all their scholarly seriousness and detail, architectural treatises that emerged during this period provided an enveloping theory that only tells part of the story. These buildings were meant to be enjoyed, and at many levels. The rich and sensuous details of a classical capital, the extravagance of polished marbles on the façade of a Venetian palace, the brazen display of the woodcrafter’s art in panelling, were all intended to astound the viewer. It is a curious thing, therefore, that this period of intense intellectualism in the arts was also one of profound sensual delight. Aesthetic experiences, through the mind as well as through the body, were thought to increase the efficacy of a building, whether its purpose was to display the power of a great ruler or to enhance religious practice. Further, architecture was intended to fulfil the agenda of beauty, and beauty had a purpose; the choice of ornament, material, and style could make a building more effective, better able to fulfil its function in the world. This book addresses both the sensual appeal and the intellectual and historical context of Renaissance architecture. While modern scholars have shied away from acknowledging the emotional impact of architecture, Renaissance craftsmen, like their medieval predecessors, found ways to move the viewer to delight or wonder. What was the point of the time and expense of building if like eloquent language it did not affect the viewer?
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The history of Renaissance architecture has primarily been the story of architectural classicism as it developed in central Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Often beginning with the work of Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence and culminating in the buildings of Andrea Palladio in Venice, the overarching narrative describes a growing interest in the ancient architecture of Rome, the emergence of the architect as the controlling force of design, and the increasing sophistication of architectural theory. The focus is on the dominant individuals, architects and patrons, who jointly created the major works of architecture in a select group of cities and court centres. The dominance given to central Italian traditions can be traced back to the sixteenth-century author Giorgio Vasari, who famously condemned Gothic architecture (what he called ‘German’) as debased.
We come at last to another sort of work called German, which in both ornament and proportion is very different from both the ancient and the modern. Nor is it adopted now by the best architects but is avoided by them as monstrous and barbarous, and lacking everything that can be called order. Nay, it should rather be called confusion and disorder. In their buildings, which are so numerous that they sickened the world, doorways are ornamented with columns which are slender and twisted like a screw, and cannot have the strength to sustain a weight, however light it might be. Also on all the facades, wherever else there is enrichment, they build a malediction of little niches one above the other, with no end of pinnacles and points and leaves, so that, not to speak of the whole erection seeming insecure, it appears impossible that the parts should not topple over at any moment. Indeed they have the appearance of being made of paper rather than stone or marble. In these works they made endless projections and breaks and corbellings and flourishes that throw their works out of all proportion; and often, with one thing being put on top of another, they reach such a height that the top of a door touches the roof. This manner was the invention of the Goths, for, after they had ruined the ancient buildings, and killed the architects in the wars, those who were left constructed buildings in this style. They turned the arches with pointed segments, and filled all Italy with these abominations of buildings, so in order not to have any more of them their style has been totally abandoned.1
Vasari’s condemnation of the Gothic bolstered his own belief, at the centre of his book, that important and noble architecture was the product of great individuals. His book is organized around biographical studies of artists, sculptors, and architects, culminating in the singular figure of Michelangelo.
If the term ‘Renaissance’ has subsequently become a shorthand for the history of architectural classicism in the post-antique period, it has also become synonymous with architecture in central Italy. In Florence, Rome, and the court cities of Mantua, Urbino, Ferrara, and other centres historians have been able to compose a narrative that was forward moving and developmental. The story goes something like this: architects and patrons increasingly used classical architectural forms for a wide variety of building types, transforming their ancient architectural models to suit contemporary needs and in a desire to create an ever more sophisticated and refined language of classical design. The protagonists in the story were the enlightened patrons as well as the educated architects. For an English-speaking audience, this history of Renaissance architecture has been best presented in the translations of books by the German scholars Ludwig Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, and more recently, Christoph Frommel.
The difficulty with this canonical history of Renaissance architecture lies in what is excluded. The central Italian experiments with architectural classicism were only one area of interest during this period. For others Gothic architecture continued to be a vital and relevant style of building, infinitely adaptable to new buildings and fully expressive of the material wealth of urban centres. Other communities assimilated the architectural traditions of older groups, as in southern Spain with the Islamic traditions from the south and east. For some, the political and religious turmoil of the period provoked a return to local styles and traditions as a way to reiterate the strength of the past. From our vantage point, certain moments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries may seem prescient of today’s architectural situation: ever more complex theoretical discussions, an increasingly sophisticated professional class of architects, and a public ever more willing to see architecture as a vehicle of political and social messages.
If the narrative of classical buildings produced by great architects in central Italy has the dominant place in most histories of Renaissance architecture, a second theme has been the dissemination of these ideas throughout the Italian peninsula and Europe as artists emigrated due to war and greater opportunities abroad. Architectural tourism, often a sideline activity for pilgrims or political emissaries, developed as popular interest in architecture grew, and those travellers helped to disseminate information throughout Europe and beyond. The printing of books and images, as well as drawings and even models, helped architectural ideas to travel.
The great variety of architecture in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries makes it impossible to designate any one area as the stylistic centre out of which all good architecture emerged. There are too many interesting and complex buildings across Europe to cling to any idea that architectural style flowed from central Italy alone. Such a model of architectural history marginalizes the importance of local traditions that continue alongside classical practice. Rather it might be possible to locate a number of places where rich and well-developed local traditions produced architecture of exceptional interest and inventiveness. From the notion of one centre there might instead be many. Wherever Italian ideas found a new home, they were always understood in the light of local practice. Classical architecture, the modern style in Vasari’s terms, might be included on a palace façade as a sign of a new and exotic style. Columns in particular were a reference to humanist learning and education, appropriate for architectural patrons seeking to display their status and family antiquity.
Recent work on the continuity of the Gothic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has explored the continuing vitality of that mode of building throughout Europe, perhaps with the exception of central Italy where classicism was dominant. The Gothic that was used in castles, churches, domestic buildings, and civic structures was not the same as what had been developed in the Middle Ages. This new style adapted its forms and references to account for cultural and social changes, as well as the presence of classicism itself. Gothic architecture absorbed a range of other elements including vegetal imagery, or the incorporation of columns and classical forms, as well as exotic forms derived from the east.2
This book takes a broad view of architecture, and includes buildings from across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While historians may not agree on the precise time period of the Renaissance, what connects the buildings included here is their response to a series of economic, political, religious, and cultural changes of the period. The design of religious architecture, for example, responded to the great upheavals in liturgical practice and belief brought about by the Reformation. New church plans were developed to allow for an increasing involvement of the laity in worship in those places where the reforms were adopted, such as the German princely states. Elsewhere there was an entrenchment of old patterns of building as a way to ensure spiritual fealty to the canonical faith. Similar varieties of architectural response can be seen in the changing political and social circumstances. It would be misleading to present only those buildings that had the greatest long-term effect on the centuries following. Within the limits of one volume, I have thrown the net wide, including buildings that are significant as milestones in the long history of architecture in Europe as well as relatively unknown examples that demonstrate the tremendous variety and vitality of architectural traditions of the time. This approach is a conscious corrective to the dominance of Italy in existing scholarship. Following the lead of historians such as Peter Burke who have written about the cultural variety of Europe in and outside of Italy, I too have given a great deal of space to places and buildings that are rarely discussed, and almost never in a book of this kind.
Readers will find unexpected architecture from places far beyond the central Italian cities that are the usual monuments in books on Renaissance architecture. At the same time, my choice of buildings was shaped by a series of new questions that have arisen in recent years, such as issues of gender and class. While architects were almost without exception men in this period, women had an important role as patrons of buildings on a grand and smaller scale. Their ideas about architecture directly affected the design of buildings from the layout of houses, cityscapes, gardens, and estates to the smaller-scale arrangement of interiors and domestic settings. Women’s own labour can also be seen in all aspects of architecture, as they worked in parallel with their male counterparts on the construction and maintenance of buildings.
Issues of gender are only one of the new approaches to architecture. Other scholars have similarly looked at architecture developed for working classes that may have little of the visual splendour of the great palaces but is no less important for the people it served, its effect on the urban scene, and its attention to the actual social demands of the period. If Renaissance architecture has traditionally been a history of building by and for elites, this book offers a broader story that is more representative of the types of buildings constructed in cities and towns.
The diversity of conditions and precedents throughout Europe, from Denmark to Sicily, Portugal to Moscow, may seem to allow for no points of convergence. And yet one theme that does tie the buildings in this book together is the ways in which architecture in this period is used as a way to structure relationships between people and their world. Each chapter in the book addresses a building type, or typology, a kind of structure that serves a particular function. Religious architecture offered a means to connect man and God in a very real and operational way. A new villa or country residence substantiated land ownership with all of its economic and seigneurial privilege. Renaissance architecture, in a thousand different ways, was the medium of connection and dialogue, a mediation between people and things that increasingly seemed to have their own identity and to be less part of a cosmic whole held together under a divine rule. Usually the Renaissance is seen as a period of strong individuals, consciously seeking to establish their identity on a local and sometimes international scale; architecture can be seen as an active participant in this playing out of power.
The development of new modes of architectural drawing and the development of the architectural treatise as a practical and literary genre changed the practice of architecture in this period. In fact, the complex dialogue between theory and practice is one of the central themes in any history of Renaissance architecture, as it is here. I use the design and construction of St Peter’s in Rome as a case study to explore some of these issues—although it would have been possible to look at, for example, the building of the great mosque of the Süleymaniye by Sinan in Istanbul as an equally rich example of a complex design process and the resulting monument.
Renaissance princes used architecture, unabashedly, for their political ends. Building was a means to display power by displaying their ideals and aspirations for their family, their empire, and themselves. One generation of courtly families flowed into another, and their buildings often reflect their ancestors and their building projects. In the chapter on architecture and politics I look at a series of European courts, with special attention to the buildings around the Spanish monarchies and the Hapsburg kings. Powerful female patrons come to the fore in this chapter, and allow us to see what women were building with their money, time, and power.
A common trope in the history of the Renaissance, as we have noted, is that it saw the rise of the individual as a powerful force in the world. Individuals rarely operated alone, however, and groups of people commissioned architecture to serve their collective needs. In the chapter on corporate architecture, I present a group of buildings that would rarely be discussed: housing for the elderly and lay religious organizations, schools and universities, hospitals and halls for trade companies and guilds. Although sometimes grand, more often modest, these buildings show the various ways groups achieve communal goals by building.
Cities were the engines of economic growth, much as they were in the Middle Ages, and they were the sites of much of the building in the Renaissance. Chapter 6, however, looks at urban architecture as the product of (and stimulus for) the economic activities of trade and exchange. Goods flowed into and out of cities, and the rich palaces of the merchants as well as the small houses of the artisans all depended upon this tide of material wealth. Cities could not function without an adequate infrastructure of water and streets that allowed for the expansion of populations and the movement of people and products through what was, in most cases, a dense urban fabric that had been established in an earlier period.
Although most of the population of Europe lived in cities, it was the countryside that provided the raw materials for the production of goods, wool for textiles for example; the food for the city’s inhabitants; and the raw stuff for the making of architecture. Chapter 7, ‘Architecture in the Natural World’, examines buildings in the country, some built for protection, others for pleasure, all for the exploitation and use of nature.
The final chapter takes us forward, in and out of Europe and towards a new age. For the Renaissance is also the beginning of the age of exploration, and the discovery of a world beyond Europe.