Victoria Charles - Renaissance Art

The earliest traces of the Renaissance are found in Florence. In the fourteenth century, the town already had 120,000 inhabitants and was the leading power in middle Italy. The most famous artists of this time lived here at least at times Giotto (probably 1266 to 1336), Donatello (1386 to 1466), Masaccio (1401 to 1429), Michelangelo (1475 to 1564), Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 to 1455).

Brunelleschi secured a tender in 1420 to reconstruct the Florentine Cathedral, which was to receive a dome as a proud landmark. The foundation of his design was the dome of the Pantheon, originating in the Roman Empire. He deviated from the model by designing an elliptical dome resting on an octagonal foundation (the tambour). In his other buildings, he followed the forms of columns, beams and chapters of the Greek-Roman master builders. However, owing to the lack of new ideas, only the crowning dome motif was adopted in the central construction, in the form of the Greek cross or in the basilica in the form of the Latin cross. Instead, the embellishments taken from the Roman ruins were further developed according to classical patterns. The master builders of the Renaissance fully understood the richness and delicateness, as well as the power of size in Roman buildings, and complemented it with a light splendour. Brunelleschi, in particular, demonstrated this in the chapel erected in the monastery yard of Santa Croce for the Pazzi Family, with its portico born by Corinthian columns, in the inside of the Medici Church San Lorenzo and the sacristy belonging to it. These buildings have never been surpassed by any later, similar building in so far as the harmony of their individual parts is in proportion to the entire building.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404 to 1472), who like Brunelleschi was not only a master builder, but at the same time also a significant art historian with his writings About Painting (1435) and About Architecture (1451), was probably the first to articulate this quest for harmony. He compared architecture to music. For him, harmony was the ideal of beauty, because for him beauty meant nothing other than the harmony of the individual limbs and parts, so that nothing can be added or taken away without damaging it. This principle of the science of beauty has remained unchanged since then.

Alberti developed a second type of Florentine palace for the Palazzo Rucellai, for which the facade was structured by flat pilasters arranged between the windows throughout all storeys.

Andrea della Robbia,
The Madonna of the Stonemasons, 1475-1480.

Glazed terracotta, 134 x 96 cm.

Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

Donatello, Virgin and Child, 1440.

Terracotta, h: 158.2 cm.

Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

In Rome, however, there was an architect of the same standard as the Florentine master builders: Luciano da Laurana (1420/1425 to 1479), who had been working in Urbano until then, erecting parts of the ducal palace there. He imparted his feeling for monumental design, for relations as well as planning and execution of even the smallest details to his most important pupil, the painter and master builder Donato Bramante (1444 to 1514), who became the founder of Italian architecture High Renaissance. Bramante had been in Milan since 1472, where he had not only built the first post-Roman coffer dome onto the church of Santa Maria presso S. Satiro and had also erected the church Santa Maria delle Grazie and several palaces, but had also worked there as a master builder of fortresses before moving to Pavia and in 1499 to Rome. As was common in the Lombardy at that time, he built the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie as a brick building, focusing on the sub-structure. Using ornamentation covering to cover all parts of buildings had been a feature of the Lombards style since the early Middle Ages.