Character of Renaissance ArchitectureMoore, Charles Herbert
History
Character of Renaissance Architecture
Moore, Charles Herbert
Architecture, Renaissance
The design is attributed to Bramante,[106] and it has features that
lend support to belief in this authorship. The encircling arcade at
the top suggests the encircling colonnade of the same architect’s
subsequent design for the dome of St. Peter’s. It may not be unlikely
that this arcade, wrought while the author was under the influence of
the local Lombard Romanesque, suggested the idea of the encircling
colonnade after he had come under the severer classic influence in
Rome. The alternation of pilasters in the top story of the apses, with
the two intercolumns over each interval in the stage below, corresponds
to the design of the interior of the sacristy of S. Satiro.
In the chapel of St. Peter Martyr of the church of Sant’Eustorgio,
attributed to the Florentine architect Michelozzi, we have a circular
celled vault on salient ribs, like Brunelleschi’s vault of the Pazzi.
This vault is enclosed within a drum carried on pendentives, and is
lighted by a circular opening in the drum under each alternate vault
cell. The drum is polygonal on the outside, is carried up far above the
haunch of the vault, and is covered with a low-pitch roof of timber
crowned with a tall lantern. The lower walls of the interior of the
square beneath this vault have an order of pilasters, and over the
entablature of this order are arched windows, one on the north and the
other on the south side, each of which has a mullion and jamb shafts
of the Certosa tapering type, and pseudo-Gothic tracery. Most of the
details of this interior are of stone, which give it a more monumental
character than the buildings before noticed have. The outside is of
brick, the square part being plain, with simple angle buttresses, and
crowned with a cornice of classic profiling. Pinnacles made up of
neo-classic details rise from the angles, and the drum is adorned with
an order of pilasters, and with moulded circular panels alternating
with circular openings. The building as a whole has the moderation of
the works of the early Florentine Renaissance, and is in noticeable
contrast to the more florid designs of this region already noticed.
A somewhat later example of ecclesiastical architecture of the
Renaissance in Milan is the church of the Monastero Maggiore, dating
from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and said to have been
designed by Dolcebono, a pupil of Bramante. This is a rectangular
structure without aisles, having round-arched pseudo-Gothic vaulting,
and divided into two parts by a screen across the middle, and into two
stories by superimposed orders of pilasters. In each bay of the ground
story is a deep round-arched rectangular recess in the thickness of
the wall, and over each of these an open gallery with two colonnettes
and two small jamb pilasters carrying an entablature over each of the
lateral spaces so formed, and an arch over the central one, an early
instance of a form of compound opening that was much used in the
architecture of the later Renaissance.[107]
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