How to Study ArchitectureCaffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
History
How to Study Architecture
Caffin, Charles H. (Charles Henry)
Architecture -- History
And, already, in both these designs the imitation of the antique results
in cold and rigid formalism. Compare, for example, Vignola’s façade with
one of the Tuscan Romanesque, for instance, Pisa cathedral. The
architects of the latter borrowed from the Romans the use of applied
arcades of arches and columns; but used the device frankly as a
decorative sheathing, subordinated in scale to the constructive mass,
and maintained the rich simplicity of effect by repetition of the same
decorative motive.
Vignola, however, treated his sheathing as if it had actual constructive
meaning; and, moreover, multiplied the motives. Big, coupled columns,
mounted on pedestals, supported an entablature, the cornice of which
becomes the support of another series of big, coupled columns, which
make a great display of supporting a little pediment. Comparing this
Renaissance example with the Pisan, one may be reminded of a circus
incident. At first there enters a performer who with delightful agility
and grace keeps a number of balls moving lightly in the air. He is
followed by another, who, assuming the attitudes of an Atlas supporting
the world, labours with a cannon ball, which, when it is finally tossed
aside, proves to be no heavier than a football.
Scarcely less incongruous is the Palladian design, with its colossal
framework of columns, entablature and pediment, and the paltry scale of
its doorway and windows. And then the enormity of the broken pediment,
the two parts of which form the front of the series of side-chapels that
flank the interior of the nave. Of course there is a sort of callous
logic represented. The pediment is the end of a sloping roof; therefore,
if the roof be separated into two parts, why not separate the pediment?
But what about the taste which, as we have seen, always tempered the
logic of the Greeks? Could the Greek taste have tolerated the cleavage
in half of a little temple design and the swaggering intrusion between
them of a giant design and persuaded itself that the domination of the
latter produced a harmony of relations?
S. PETER’S
The culminating achievement of the Italian Renaissance was the new
Church of =S. Peter’s=, the erection of which, dating from 1506 to about
1626, covers the whole period of the rise and decline of the Classic
movement in Rome.
The original plan, as laid out by Bramante, was a Greek cross,
comprising, that is to say, four equal parts. On this he proposed to
design a building that should combine the three great barrel-vaulted
halls of the Basilica of Constantine with the dome of the Pantheon. In
1514, the year preceding Bramante’s death, Sangallo the Elder, Raphael,
and Fra Gioconda da Verona were associated with the work; but the
advanced age of the first and third and Raphael’s preoccupation with
painting and his early death caused little to be accomplished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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