Character of Renaissance ArchitectureMoore, Charles Herbert
History
Character of Renaissance Architecture
Moore, Charles Herbert
Architecture, Renaissance
The façade of the Palazzo Farnese, by Antonio da San Gallo the younger,
the grandest of these Roman palaces, again has its wall surfaces
unencumbered with orders. The basement is comparatively low, and all
three stories are in effect of nearly equal height. The walls are of
brick with rusticated quoins of stone, and a rusticated stone portal
in relief, of the simple early Florentine type, occupies the centre
of the basement. The quoins suggest the influence of the rusticated
pilasters on the angles of the Bartolini palace in Florence, and San
Gallo has followed Baccio d’Agnolo, the architect of the Bartolini,
further by introducing small orders with pediments to frame the windows
of the upper stories. But for pilasters he has substituted engaged
colonnettes on high pedestals, and in the principal story has made
angular pediments alternate with curved ones. This mode of designing
doors and windows has since become so common that it generally passes
without question of its propriety. It is, however, justifiable only
on the principle, universally accepted by the architects of the
Renaissance, that structural members may be used for ornamental
purposes without any structural meaning or expression in harmony with
the character of the building to which they are applied. But this is
a principle which finds no support in any thoroughly noble system of
architecture--Greek, Byzantine, or Gothic. Structural members may be
used properly enough with a primarily ornamental purpose when they have
a character in keeping with the real structural system in which they
are used. The blind arcades, and shafted archivolts of the portals, of
Romanesque and Gothic architecture, are largely of this nature;[93]
but to surround the windows of a walled structure, like the Farnese,
with columns and entablatures applied to the surface of the wall, is an
architectural solecism. A further barbarism occurs in the windows of
the top story, which are said to have been designed by Michael Angelo,
and the fact that they are like the upper windows of the church of St.
Peter lends support to the attribution. These windows of the Farnese
are arched, and the crowns of the arches rise above the capitals of the
flanking colonnettes so that an entablature resting on these capitals
cannot pass over them. Complete entablatures are therefore omitted,
entablature blocks being set upon the capitals to support the raking
cornices of the pediments (Fig. 63). This makes a bad composition,
because the structural system simulated would in reality be an
insecure one in consequence of the absence of a tying member which the
entablature should form in such a scheme. The eye instinctively feels
that the pediment cornices are tending to thrust so as to overthrow the
supporting colonnettes. It is true that in the windows of the principal
façade (the figure is taken from a window on the side of the building)
the cornice of the entablature block is returned against the wall over
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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