Character of Renaissance ArchitectureMoore, Charles Herbert
History
Character of Renaissance Architecture
Moore, Charles Herbert
Architecture, Renaissance
Other peculiarities of design are found in some of the early
Renaissance palaces of Bologna, where in the Palazzo Bevilacqua the
windows of the principal story have the mediæval form of two small
arches under a larger arch, modified by the omission of the central
shaft which gives the middle of the tympanum the form of a pendant. But
it is not worth while to follow these aberrations of early northern
Renaissance design further. The palace architecture of the later
Renaissance in north Italy has no distinctive character that calls
for particular comment. It is for the most part based on the art of
Palladio and Vignola which we have already enough considered. While
it exhibits many more of those misadjustments of structural members,
and other vagaries of design, in which Italian architects have been
at all times fertile, it has no great importance to justify special
remark. To point out in detail many such meaningless caprices as those
introduced by Pellegrini in the court of the Palazzo Brera in Milan,
where the arches of the superimposed arcades are sprung from pairs of
columns connected by short entablatures, making it necessary to double
the transverse arches of the vaulting behind them, or such novelties
as occur in the windows of the basement of the Palazzo Martinengo
of Brescia, which are adorned with small Doric columns carrying
architraves without the other parts of an entablature, while an upright
block with a ball on it rises over each column (Fig. 95), would be
tiresome and profitless. We may therefore pass on in the next chapter
to a brief consideration of the carved ornament of this architecture,
before taking up the architecture of the Renaissance in France and
England.
CHAPTER X
ARCHITECTURAL CARVING OF THE RENAISSANCE
All effective sculpture on buildings, including that of the human
figure, is architectural carving; but it is in Gothic art only
that sculpture of the human figure, as well as that of subordinate
ornamentation made up of the other elements, has at once an appropriate
architectural character and a high degree of excellence in the
development of form. In the best Greek art the carving of the human
figure has, indeed, a grandly monumental quality; but the Greek
sculptor did not seek primarily to give his work an architectural
expression. He wrought it with a kind of perfection that is not
compatible with the fullest measure of such expression. Greek
sculpture, though placed on a building, is in a measure independent of
it, and thus it not only loses nothing, but may even gain in value,
when taken from its place on the building and set up in a museum where
it can be viewed by itself.
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