Essentials of Renaissance Architecture

This course looks at the development of Renaissance Architecture in Italy, primarily through the lens of Florentine and Venetian contributions from the late-fifteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries. We will explore the revival of Greco-Roman antiquity in building theory and forms and how this led to an entirely new appearance of architecture in Western Europe. The revival of Greco-Roman art and philosophy manifested itself in the painting, sculpture, and contemporary architecture of the Renaissance. These new buildings were imagined in an entirely different key from the Romanesque or Gothic styles which had come before, and they would transform the subsequent appearance of a variety of architectural forms of Western Europe thereafter: not only the church, but also the palaces of the most wealthy and powerful patrons in Italy and beyond reflected this shift in taste and built environments. Many of the accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance in architecture were "firsts" which had no parallel in even the feats of Gothic Medieval building; the most well-known example of this triumph of the revival of antiquity is the dome of the Florence Cathedral, which became the largest dome built since the Pantheon in Rome. Renaissance architecture in Italy, whether as churches or palaces, resurrected many of the latent ideas which had begun to surface in two-dimensional artworks of the fifteenth century. The lag time might be attributed to the considerable differential in labor and expenses in order to realize the monumental counterparts to the artists’ dreams of a revived Classical cityscape. We see the Greco-Roman temple figuring prominently in the architecture of Christian churches for the first time, to varying degrees of fidelity to their original components and compositions. In elite domestic architecture, we see a return to selected conventions of antiquity- the central open courtyard and the variegated registers of the exterior façade- reinterpreted through the lens of Florence’s weighty tradition of stone masonry. In the countryside of the Veneto, we find instead the architectural language of the antique temple being used to elevate the idea of the villa to the rarefied stratosphere of the sublime. Not only the infusion of Classical elements but the Renaissance willingness to combine them in novel invenzioni resulted in the explosion of new architectural forms and theories which proliferate in the architectural history of Western Europe for centuries to come.