Character of Renaissance ArchitectureMoore, Charles Herbert
History
Character of Renaissance Architecture
Moore, Charles Herbert
Architecture, Renaissance
Another northern Renaissance building of the broletto type is the
Palazzo Comunale of Brescia, in which we have a basement arcade of
three arches on heavy piers, with an engaged Corinthian order adjusted
in the Roman manner, and over this a single story in retreat divided
into three wide bays by pilasters carrying a heavy entablature. A
square-headed window in each bay is framed by an order of smaller
pilasters the entablature of which reaches to the soffit of the
crowning entablature. In those parts of the Ospedale Maggiore of
Milan which were designed about the middle of the fifteenth century,
by the Florentine architect, Antonio Filarete, the larger features
are of mixed and debased mediæval character with no application of
classic orders. The building is of brick with elaborate ornaments
of terra-cotta, and has but two stories including the basement. The
basement has a blind arcade of round arches on stumpy columns with
Corinthianesque capitals, and a compound opening of two pointed
arches under a larger pointed arch is set in each bay (Fig. 94).
The faces of the jambs and archivolts of these openings are heavily
adorned with mouldings and foliate ornaments in terra-cotta relief,
while the archivolts of the arcade above have more simple neo-classic
profiling, and more refined and conventional foliate ornamentation.
The window-sills are on coupled corbels of heavy and inelegant form,
and the whole arcade is raised on a high base with ressauts under the
columns. Medallions with busts in high relief are set in the tympanums
of the windows and in the spandrels of the arcade, while a wide frieze
somewhat like an entablature crowns this part of the composition. The
upper story has a plain brick wall with windows like those of the
basement enclosed within rectangular panels.
[Illustration: FIG. 95.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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