Character of Renaissance Architecture/Chapter 8

by Charles Herbert Moore

Plate V

SAN BERNADINO
Perugia

CHAPTER VIII

CHURCH ARCHITECTURE OF THE RENAISSANCE IN NORTH ITALY

While the architecture of the Italian Renaissance assumed the two principal phases that are broadly classified as Florentine and Roman, from the localities in which the conditions and influences that gave rise to them chiefly prevailed, it is also true, as is well known, that other influences became active in various parts of Italy, leading to the production of phases of design that cannot be strictly classed as either Florentine or Roman. No exact classification of these can be made, but the most marked types having distinctly local characteristics are those of Lombardy and Venice.

But before we examine the church architecture of the Lombard and Venetian Renaissance, one small building of exceptional character in central Italy is worthy of special notice, namely, the façade of the church of San Bernardino of Perugia, dating from the second half of the fifteenth century. This work is remarkable for delicate workmanship, and affords a rare instance of the use of colour in the architecture of the Renaissance. It is made up of red and white marble, with points of dark green and turquoise blue, arranged with quiet harmony of effect. But it is a combination of members put together with no regard to structural consistency. The designer appears to have had not the slightest idea that arches and columns, pilasters and entablatures, have any meaning save as elements of abstract ornamental composition to be played about according to his fancy. The front (Plate V) is an upright rectangle, crowned with an entablature and a low pediment. A broad pilaster is set on each angle, and the space between is filled with a wide and deep recess having a splayed arch reaching to the entablature on splayed jambs. A smaller entablature at the arch impost crosses the entire front, breaking around the jambs and pilasters, and dividing it into two nearly equal parts. The smaller details consist of panellings and medallions in the splays of the jambs and archivolts, of sculptured reliefs on the tympanum and on the panels, and of shafted and gabled niches sheltering statues on the pilasters. The panels of the splays are flanked with diminutive pilasters which are superimposed with only a narrow fillet between those below and those which rest upon them, and the ornamental framing of the niches is made up of colonnettes carrying rectangular stilt-blocks on which small pediments are set. The elaborate richness of this façade is unusual in the Renaissance architecture of central Italy, except in the smaller compositions of tombs and pulpits, which in treatment it resembles. But profusion of ornament is a marked characteristic of the architecture of the Renaissance in north Italy, to which we may now turn. In Milan and Venice the neo-classic influences were, even more than in Florence and Rome, confined to ornamental details, and in these details the designers of the North had still less regard for classic correctness and consistency than those of central Italy had shown; while the larger structural forms of their buildings still remained essentially Lombard and Venetian. Much of the architecture of the North was, it is true, the work of architects from central Italy, but these architects were so far influenced by local tastes and conditions as to produce designs very different in character from those of Florence or of Rome.

A characteristic early example of this Northern Renaissance design in its most florid form is the well-known façade of the church of the Certosa of Pavia, dating from the close of the fifteenth century. The effect of this front is in its larger parts much like that of a late mediæval Italian one, but the details are pseudo-classic with strange admixture of mediæval elements. The general scheme is a reproduction of the pseudo-Gothic façade of the neighbouring cathedral of Milan, having nearly the same general proportions, and being divided into five bays by deep buttresses. The steep gable, however, which in Milan embraces the whole front, is omitted, and in its stead a horizontal cornice crowns the three central bays, and this, together with the strongly marked horizontal lines below, greatly modifies the general effect of the composition. In the smaller details there is no likeness between the two façades, that of Pavia showing a survival of Lombard Romanesque forms with the pseudo-classic elements ingrafted on them. A prominent feature of the Lombard Romanesque architecture is the diminutive open arcade. This feature is extensively employed in the mediasval portions of the church to which this façade is the western enclosure, and it is reproduced, with neo-classic modifications, at the top of each of the two principal stages into which the façade is divided. The arches are here carried on small piers, and are framed with diminutive pilasters and entablatures. The portal has a pair of free-standing Corinthian columns on each side, bearing a ressaut of an entablature which spans the opening, and from these ressauts an arch is sprung with spandrels in relief crowned with a classic cornice. In each one of the other bays of the ground story a rectangular window, with classic mouldings and a cornice of classic profile, is subdivided in the mediæval manner with two small arches on a central column and jamb shafts. These last have a tapering form, with a profusion of carved ornament in high relief, and are like the shafts of candelabra (Fig. 78). The mediæval feature of a large circular opening over the central portal is enclosed within a rectangle surmounted by an entablature and a classic pediment, while this compound is flanked on either side by a pair of arches opening beneath a larger arch. To all this mixture of Romanesque and neo-classic features a pseudo-Gothic character is superadded by statues set in niches of the buttresses, and spiky pinnacles over the lateral bays. The details of this overelaborate composition, the work of several successive architects, have no merit in themselves, and the work as a whole is trivial and unmeaning.

Fig. 78.—Certosa of Pavia.

Among the monuments of the early Renaissance in Milan are several of importance, and of these the church and sacristy of San Satiro are of special interest because they are said to have been designed by Bramante.^[1]

The church bears, I think, unmistakable marks of Bramante's authorship, being a reflection on a reduced scale of St. Andrea of Mantua by Alberti, which there is every reason to believe had been studied and admired by Bramante during his travels in the north for improvement in his art, and a foreshadowing of the great scheme which he subsequently prepared for St. Peter's in Rome. Like St. Andrea, it has a barrel-vaulted nave and transept, with a dome on pendentives over the crossing. The aisles have groined vaulting, and the piers are square and are faced with pilasters. The dome is raised on a very low drum moulded in stucco into the form of an entablature, and the vault surfaces are elaborately coffered in stucco. The church has no eastern arm, since a wall with a much-venerated painting of the Virgin is said to have stood so near the site that space for such an arm could not be had without demolishing it ; and as this was not to be thought of, Bramante made a semblance of an eastern arm in the form of a sunk panel with splayed sides, on which he wrought in stucco relief the elaborate perspective which is so noticeable a feature of the interior.

The sacristy (Fig. 79) was built immediately after the church, in the form of an octagon about eight metres in diameter. It is covered with an octagonal dome lighted by a circular opening in each of its sides just above the springing level. The walls of the interior are divided into two stages, the lower one having segmental niches alternating with shallow rectangular recesses, one on each side of the polygon except that of the entrance, while the stage above has a gallery, like a triforium, in the thickness of the wall, with a pair of round-arched openings in each bay. The dome is enclosed within a drum of brick which is covered by a low-pitched timber roof. The ornamental details of the interior are all of stucco, and consist of two superimposed false orders of pilasters set in the angles, and broken on plan so as to fit them, the entablature

Fig. 79.—Sacristy of San Satiro.

of each order having a ressaut over each pilaster, and the surfaces of the friezes and pilasters being profusely enriched with ornaments in relief. But these details are said to have been extensively worked over in later times, so that it is doubtful whether any correct idea of the original character of this interior can now be formed, except as to its larger features.

The monument is a diminutive adaptation, in simplified form, of a local mediæval type of building of which San Vitale of Ravenna appears to have been the original example, and San Lorenzo of Milan an offshoot. There are points of similarity between the sacristy of San Satiro and the church of the Consolazione of Todi (Fig. 36, p. 76) that go far to determine their common authorship. The superimposed pilasters broken into the angles of a polygon, the niches in the lower bays, and the ribs on the surfaces of the vault rising from the pilasters ^[2] are similar in both.

A curious domed structure of the early Renaissance in Milan is the east end of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The dome is hemispherical, and is raised on a drum resting on pendentives over a square area. The most noticeable part of the composition is the exterior, which completely masks the inside. The drum (Fig. 80) is a polygon of sixteen sides, and is in two stages, the lower one of which is solid, and rises above the springing of the vault, while the upper stage, in the form of an open arcaded gallery, with an attic in retreat, reaches far above the haunch of the dome which is covered with a low-pitched roof of timber crowned with a lantern. The lower stage has an order of pilasters with a nondescript entablature, having an enormously high frieze ornamented with an engaged balustrade. A pair of square-headed windows with mullions, surmounted with pediments, opens through each face of the polygon, except the four which fall over the piers of the interior. Against each of these sides a turret rises, forming an abutment. A panelled podium crowns the entablature of this lower stage, and upon it the shafted arcade of the top story rests. The north and south sides of the square beneath have each a low apse, while on the east is a rectangular choir with an apse like the other two.

The architectural treatment of this exterior is not expressive of the inside. The square parts are divided into four stages answering to nothing within, and the lower three of these Stages are carried around the apses. The wall surfaces are broken into rectangular panellings by mouldings and pilasters, every alternate pilaster in the third stage having a tapering

Fig. 80.—Santa Maria delle Grazie.

ornamental member, like the window shafts of the Certosa of Pavia, worked in relief on its face; and the panels are adorned with disks and medallions. Like most of the early Renaissance architecture of Milan; this building is entirely of brick with ornaments of terra-cotta. The design is attributed to Bramante,^[3] and it has features that lend support to belief in this authorship. The encircling arcade at the top suggests the encircling colonnade of the same architect's subsequent design for the dome of St. Peter's. It may not be unlikely that this arcade, wrought while the author was under the influence of the local Lombard Romanesque, suggested the idea of the encircling colonnade after he had come under the severer classic influence in Rome. The alternation of pilasters in the top story of the apses, with the two inter-columns over each interval in the stage below, corresponds to the design of the interior of the sacristy of S. Satiro.

In the chapel of St. Peter Martyr of the church of Sant' Eustorgio, attributed to the Florentine architect Michelozzi, we have a circular celled vault on salient ribs, like Brunelleschi's vault of the Pazzi. This vault is enclosed within a drum carried on pendentives, and is lighted by a circular opening in the drum under each alternate vault cell. The drum is polygonal on the outside, is carried up far above the haunch of the vault, and is covered with a low-pitch roof of timber crowned with a tall lantern. The lower walls of the interior of the square beneath this vault have an order of pilasters, and over the entablature of this order are arched windows, one on the north and the other on the south side, each of which has a mullion and jamb shafts of the Certosa tapering type, and pseudo-Gothic tracery. Most of the details of this interior are of stone, which give it a more monumental character than the buildings before noticed have. The outside is of brick, the square part being plain, with simple angle buttresses, and crowned with a cornice of classic profiling. Pinnacles made up of neo-classic details rise from the angles, and the drum is adorned with an order of pilasters, and with moulded circular panels alternating with circular openings. The building as a whole has the moderation of the works of the early Florentine Renaissance, and is in noticeable contrast to the more florid designs of this region already noticed.

A somewhat later example of ecclesiastical architecture of the Renaissance in Milan is the church of the Monastero Maggiore, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and said to have been designed by Dolcebono, a pupil of Bramante. This is a rectangular structure without aisles, having roundarched pseudo-Gothic vaulting, and divided into two parts by a screen across the middle, and into two stories by superimposed orders of pilasters. In each bay of the ground story is a deep round-arched rectangular recess in the thickness of the wall, and over each of these an open gallery with two colonnettes and two small jamb pilasters carrying an entablature over each of

Fig. 81.—East end of Como.

the lateral spaces so formed, and an arch over the central one, an early instance of a form of compound opening that was much used in the architecture of the later Renaissance.^[4]

The cathedral of Como affords further illustration of the style of early Renaissance design that is peculiar to north Italy. The building, however, has parts which belong to ferent periods ranging from 1396 to the early part of the eighteenth century. The features most worthy of attention are chiefly those of the exterior, — the east end and the sides of the nave. It is said that Bramante worked here also, and certainly as viewed from the east the composition bears a striking likeness to the church of the Consolazione at Todi (pp. 74-77). It is, however, in the larger features alone that the likeness holds. The details of Como are not, as at Todi, of purely neo-classic character ; they are mediæval Lombard modified by neo-classic elements. Instead of superimposed orders of pilasters we have here (Fig. 81) Lombard Romanesque buttresses reaching from the ground to the cornice. The cornice has the neo-classic profiling, and is broken into ressauts over the buttresses, and at a lower level a subordinate band of mouldings is carried along the wall and around the buttresses, the whole forming a likeness to an entablature. The traditional Lombard features peculiar to this region are further reproduced in the arcades of each bay just beneath the pseudo-entablature; but instead of mediæval colonnettes these small arches are supported by diminutive pilasters. The walls are divided into three stages by string courses of classic profiling, and a rectangular window with plain classic jambs and lintel opens in each bay of the middle stage, while the basement wall is unbroken by openings. Disks, one in each bay, adorn the frieze of the simulated entablature, and a sculptured figure is worked on the corresponding part of each buttress. The bases of the half domes over the apses are, as at Todi, treated like attics, but the central dome, with its high drum, is not by Bramante. It is of a later period, and has a more advanced neo-classic character. The scheme of the Lombard buttresses is extended along the walls of the nave, but the details of the window openings, and of the portals here are very different from anything in the apses, and are in a more florid style.

The ornaments of these openings are composed in a manner which appears to be peculiar to this region. The portal, (Fig. 82) of the south side, for instance, has the mediæval scheme of a shafted round arch of two orders reproduced in neo-classic details, with an entablature for a lintel passing through the imposts, and another entablature with a pediment placed over the crown of the arch on spandrels in relief. To associate the entablature with the arch in any way is unreasonable, but to put one entablature under the arch and another one over it in this manner is childish composition. Yet illogical and

Fig. 82.—Portal of Como.

puerile as the scheme is, I believe it is derived from a common form of Lombard Romanesque porch which is entirely reasonable in design. A comparison of this portal with the porch

L

of San Zeno of Verona (Fig. 83) will illustrate this. In San Zeno we have a sheltering porch and a portal, and each is

Fig. 83.—Porch of San Zeno, Verona.

reasonable in itself, while they are equally reasonable in combination. But if the porch were eliminated, with exception of its façade, and this façade were drawn back into the plane of the wall, so as merely to frame in the portal, the result would resemble, in composition of lines, the portal of Como, and would

Fig. 84.—Portal of San Pietro in Cielo d' Oro, Pavia.

be as illogical. The first, or encompassing, order of the portal of Como is like the façade of such a mediæval porch wrought in relief against the wall as an ornamental framework. For the Lombard columns the Renaissance designer has substituted pilasters, for the plain lintel an entablature, and for the mediæval gable a classic pediment with an entablature.

A curious instance of a somewhat similar composition of lines in a Lombard Romanesque portal without an overhanging porch occurs in the façade of the San Pietro in Cielo d' Oro in Pavia (Fig. 84). Here the arched opening is flanked by tall engaged shafts which carry a narrow string course surmounted by a gable over the crown of the arch, while another string course, on short colonnettes resting on the capitals of the larger shafts, passes over the apex of the gable. But in this case it is only the childish association of members without structural meaning that offends the eye. There is no introduction of forms, like the classic pilasters and entablatures of the portal of Como, that are foreign to the architectural system.

Fig. 85.—Window of nave of Como.

This scheme, with various modifications, became a characteristic one in the Lombard and Venetian Renaissance, and was extensively applied to windows, as in the nave of the same cathedral of Como. The windows of this nave are splayed, and are flanked with pilasters from the capitals of which their archivolts spring, while in some of them diminutive pilasters rise from the same capitals and carry an entablature and pediment over the crown of the arch (Fig. 85).

A variety of forms occur in these openings of the cathedral of Como, like so many experiments in fanciful composition without any basis of reason. The window, for instance, of the bay adjoining that here represented, seems to show that the designer felt dissatisfied with the small pilaster set upon the larger one, and accordingly omitted it, a moulding on the edge of the spandrel, profiled like the lower member of the crowning entablature, taking its place. But again, as if he now felt that the entablature required a more architectural support, he has in another window reproduced the small pilaster, but instead of a large single one below he has employed two narrow ones, thus giving separate support to the arch and the entablature. The doorway on the north side of the nave presents a further modification of the scheme. Here the jambs and the arch are splayed as before, and a tall column of the ornamental tapering form, already noticed in the windows of the Certosa of Pavia and in the chapel of St. Peter Martyr, is set on either side of the composition. This portal, like the one on the south side, has two entablatures with an arch between, and these columns reach to the upper entablature of which they carry ressauts. No great pediment crowns this doorway, but a tall niche, framed in with an order of diminutive pilasters and surmounted with a small pediment, rises over the centre of the upper entablature. This niche shelters a statue of the Virgin, and is flanked by a statue on either side. Many variants of this ornamental scheme for door and window occur in Lombardy and Venice, and it was reproduced in many other parts of Italy, occurring, as we have seen, even in Rome as in the palace of the Cancelleria and the Palazzo Torlonia.

In the fifteenth century, as in the Middle Ages, the architecture of each principal locality developed peculiarities of style in accordance with its peculiar tastes and conditions. Thus the Renaissance design of Venice has a general character of its own, though it drew some of its materials from Florentine and Lombard sources. Michelozzi had followed the exiled Cosimo de' Medici to Venice, and Vasari tells us^[5] that he made there many drawings and models for private dwellings and public buildings. On the other hand a family of architects and sculptors from Lombardy, known as the Lombardi (Pietro Lombardo and two sons, Santo and Tullio), had come to Venice in the fifteenth century and introduced features from the Lombard Renaissance.

Among the churches of the Venetian Renaissance San Zaccaria is one of the earliest, and its interior exhibits a singular mixture of those mediæval and pseudo-classic forms of which the Italian architects produced such an astonishing variety. To an apse with a half dome and pseudo-Gothic substructure is joined a nave of three square bays, the first of which is covered with a dome on pendentives, while each of the others has a plain groined vault. These vaults spring from an entablature which crowns the great arcade, and is returned on the ends of the building, with ressauts on corbels at the imposts. The aisles have oblong groined vaults on pointed transverse arches springing from corbels on the wall side, and tied with iron rods. The main proportions conform with those of the so-called Italian Gothic churches, the great arcades of the nave, and consequently the aisle vaulting, being relatively very high. The most singular feature of this interior is the column (Fig. 86) of nondescript character, and a variant of the tapering Lombard Renaissance shaft of Pavia and Como. It consists of a shaft of pseudo-Corinthian form raised on a high octagonal pedestal, with a very wide and richly moulded base.

Fig. 86.

The church of San Salvatore, dating from the close of the fifteenth century, and attributed to the architect Tullio Lombardo, though begun by Spavento,^[6] has a modified Byzantine structural scheme applied to a long nave with three domes on pendentives separated by short sections of barrel vaulting. The supports (Fig. 87) of this vaulting are peculiar, and are like the piers of the nave of St. Andrea of Mantua modified by piercing them both transversely and longitudinally so as to leave four slender solid parts at the angles (two of which are engaged in the aisle wall), the void being covered with a diminutive dome on pendentives. The plan of the structure as a whole suggests this comparison with St. Andrea, but the character of the supports suggests their derivation from the piers of the church of St. Mark. These last are square masses of masonry pierced longitudinally and transversely so as to leave four heavy solids as in Figure 88, the void in this case being covered with a diminutive groined vault. In San Salvatore the solids are greatly reduced in volume, and are faced with neo-classic pilasters, above which the pier is solid, and is faced with an entablature surmounted by an attic from which the vaulting springs. The use of an attic in an interior, and especially as a support for vaulting, is one of those architectural aberrations with which the Renaissance has made us familiar. I know not when or where it first occurred, but there can be few earlier instances than this. It was not seldom introduced by the architects of the later Renaissance, and, as we shall see, by Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's cathedral. It is worthy of notice that the system of San Salvatore is that of the church of St. Mark modified by lightening the piers in the way that we have seen, and by the application of neo-classic details.

Fig. 87.

Fig. 88.

The nearly contemporaneous church of S. Fantino has the same general character, except that groined vaulting takes the place of domes on pendentives in all but the easternmost compartment of the nave, and the attic story is omitted.

No work of the early Renaissance in north Italy exhibits more refinement in its details than the small church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, the design of which is ascribed to Pietro Lombardo (Fig. 89). The plan is a simple rectangle with a rectangular sanctuary. The plain walls of the nave are covered with a round timber roof, and the sanctuary has a small dome on pendentives. The interior is richly incrusted with marble and relief carvings of the utmost delicacy, and of unusual beauty of design. The walls of the exterior are divided into two stages by superimposed orders of pilasters on podiums. The pilasters of the upper order carry archivolts instead of an entablature, thus recalling the mediæval Lombard blind arcade, and the walls above this are crowned with an entablature. Over the portal a curved pediment is set against the entablature of the lower order, and the whole façade is crowned with a semicircular pediment pierced with a large round opening and five smaller ones ranged on its semicircumference. The wall

Fig. 89. — Santa Maria dei Miracoli, Venice.

surfaces are incrusted with marble panelling set with disks and lesser panels of cruciform and rectangular shapes in faintly coloured marbles, and the whole building is a marvel of excellence in mechanical execution. But the use of the inappropriate superimposed orders falsifies the design by giving it the appearance of two stories while in reality it has only one.

The façade of Santa Maria Formosa exhibits another phase of early Renaissance design in Venice. This façade is noticeable as reproducing some of the larger features of Alberti's west front of St. Andrea of Mantua with details having the character of the works of the Lombardi. The great central arch of St. Andrea is omitted here, and the existing portal is an alteration of a later time in a style that does not agree with the rest of the design. The three compartments into which the front is divided are treated as sunk panels flanked by half pilasters set against the larger ones, over which last the entablature is broken into ressauts. In each lateral compartment over a podium connecting the high pedestals on which the pilasters are raised is an opening of the Lombard type. The main lines of the composition correspond with the internal divisions of the building, except that the entablature of the order, which is carried across the entire front, divides the nave compartment into two stages.

The foregoing examples are enough to show the leading characteristics of the church architecture of the early Renaissance in north Italy. In the later period the local peculiarities give place for the most part to the measurably uniform style of which Vignola and Palladio were the leading masters, and which has been already considered under the heading of Church Architecture of the Roman Renaissance.

1. Cf. Casati, I Capi d’ Arte di Braniante da Urbino nel Milanese, Milan, 1870, p. 24 et seq. That the design of San Satiro was made by Bramante, Casati gives the evidence of a document printed in the year 1500 by the deputies of the church in which it is said, "... Come vi si diede principio dopo P anno 1470 con disegno del celebre Bramante." And he finds further confirmation of Bramante's authorship in a commentary on Vitruvius by Cesare Cesariano, printed in Conio in 1521, where this author states that the church and sacristy of San Satiro were designed by his preceptor, Donate of Urbino, called Bramante.
2. Salient ribs of stucco are carried up in the angles of the dome of the sacristy as they are in the vaulting of the apses of Todi.
3. Cf. Casati, op. cit., p. 44.
4. Cf., p. 134, the window sometimes called that of Scamozzi.
5. op. cit., vol. 2, p. 434.
6. Melani, Architettura Italiana, vol. 2, p. 154.