CHAPTER VII
PALACE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ROMAN RENAISSANCE
Among the first of the great Roman palatial houses of the Renaissance is the so-called Cancelleria, which together with the Palazzo Girand Torlonia of similar design, has been attributed to Bramante. The building is believed, however, to have been begun before Bramante had settled in Rome, but it is not impossible that he may have had a hand in its design and construction at a later time while he was at work on the church of St. Peter. Some ground for belief in his authorship of the façade is found in some of its leading features which resemble, on the one hand, those which are characteristic of the early Renaissance architecture of the north of Italy, where Bramante received his early training, and on the other, the work of Alberti under whose influence it is reasonable to suppose that he had come while in Mantua. The north Italian features[1] are the windows of the principal story (Fig. 61), which are undivided and flanked with pilasters carrying archivolts surmounted with cornices on panelled spandrels, and the disks in the wall over the windows, while the features bearing likeness to the work of Alberti are the orders of pilasters applied to the walls, as in the Rucellai of Florence. But Bramante, if this be his design, has gone a step farther in conformity with the Roman antique in introducing a podium beneath each order, as in the Flavian Amphitheatre. He has also extended Alberti's arrangement of the pilasters of the clerestory of Santa Maria Novella, setting them in pairs across the whole front instead of spacing them equally. He thus established a mode of treatment that was afterwards extensively followed, with many variations, in palatial façades. Among Renaissance innovations in the use of the orders this is one of the most marked. In ancient Greek usage the columns of an order were equally spaced, save in
- ↑ Cf. p. 144.
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