XI.

THE RENAISSANCE.

A not uncommon error is made in applying the name Renaissance only to the delicately treated style of revived Classic art, such as was prevalent in France during the reigns of Francis the First, and his immediate successors.

The word—derived from the verb _renaître_, signifying in French the rebirth (of the classics understood)—cannot, however, be confined to any such narrowed limits, for no new style having been substituted since, it is as correct a term to-day as it was in the sixteenth century. There is certainly a distinction between the first brilliant productions of the revival, and the more ponderous buildings which succeeded them, but Early and Late Renaissance express this satisfactorily. It did not always follow, however, that all the work which, from its characteristics, would be classified under the first head, necessarily antedated that belonging to the later period.

In Italy, where the works of the Romans were too colossal to be utterly destroyed, and too conspicuous to be easily forgotten, the first movement naturally took place to reawaken the long dormant art, by which they had been produced.

In the fifteenth century Orcagua built the Loggia dei Lanzi, in Florence, and boldly substituted round arches for the pointed ones then in vogue. This was the turning-point in the tide of Gothic architecture, for it needed but little more to induce the delighted Italians to throw off the yoke of an art which they had adopted but unwillingly, and which had never been sympathetic to their taste. Consistently with their impetuous nature, the change was effected without hesitation in a marvellously short period, and with scarcely any of the usual intervening transitional stages. The ancient forms reappeared and replaced the dying Gothic as rapidly as in the days of the French monarchy the cry “Le roi est mort. Vive le roi!” heralded at once the king’s death and his son’s succession to power.

It is strange that there should have been so little to connect the succeeding styles, that the revival should have been so completely independent of and uninfluenced by a style which had been steadily growing for four centuries, and which men must have become accustomed to consider the only one suited to their times. Delicate workmanship was, however, the only Gothic legacy the Renaissance architects accepted, and this was the chief characteristic of the work of the early period. The proportions and scale of their buildings were small; a whole order: pedestal, column, and entablature generally occupying and marking the height of an ordinary story of fifteen or twenty feet, and the ornament used, while profuse, was executed in the lowest relief and with most minute detail.

If the revolution in art was great, it had proportionately great exponents: Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, Sangallo, Vignola, Michael Angelo are names as prominent in history as those of much-lauded victors in the battlefield.

Brunelleschi, architect of the dome of St. Mary’s in Florence, was one of the earliest innovators. He designed the Strozzi and Pitti Palaces in that city, with the horizontal lines and round arches of the Classic school, although still retaining the feudal traditions in their massive stonework and in the austerity of their exteriors. The great palaces of Rome which belong to this period partake also of this external severity, and confine their brilliancy to interior display. The palaces of the Cancelleria by Bramante, the Palazzo Massini by Balthasar Perruzzi, of Sienna, the Sacchetti and Corsini Palaces by Sangallo, the Barberini designed by Bernini, and the Farnese Palace upon which Sangallo, Vignola, and Michael Angelo devoted their labors in turn, are a few among the most celebrated.

Most of these buildings, while varying in size and in accordance with the character of their sites, are rectangular in plan, and enclose quadrangular courts, the different stories being marked by superposed orders and arcades. They are planned on a liberal scale, with broad proportions and with great deference to symmetry. The beauty of the plan was, in fact, one of the best features of the new style, not only in domestic, but in ecclesiastical architecture, for the arbitrary Gothic arrangements being once discarded, it became possible to combine the circle and straight line in many novel and beautiful ways, for which the older Roman buildings furnished admirable examples. The study of these plans forms one of the most important elements in an architect’s education, and their examination in these days of iron props and twelve-inch walls is fraught with much pleasure and profit.

The light and brilliant creations of the early period are abundant in Northern Italy, and were models with which the French were readily impressed. The façade of the church in the Certosa of Pavia, with its elaborate detail and delicate ornament, and such buildings as the Spinelli Rezzonico and Vendramin palaces, the church of St. Zachariah, the Logetta and Library of St Mark’s of Sansovino, in Venice, and farther South the Palazzo Fava in Bologna, the Capella Pazzi attached to the older Sta. Croce in Florence, and the monument to Julius II. in Sta. Maria del Popolo in Rome are a few beautiful examples of the early treatment which has so much affinity with the works produced in France under the Valois.

[Illustration: PLAN OF ST. PETER’S AS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED BY MICHAEL ANGELO.]

The great Italian cathedral upon which nearly all subsequent churches were modelled was commenced upon the site of the old basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome in the year 1506, upon plans by Bramante, and occupied a century and a half in completion. After Bramante, Giocondo, Julian Sangallo, Raphael, Perruzzi, Antonio di Sangallo, Michael Angelo and Carlo Maderno each worked upon it in turn.

Michael Angelo, who designed the dome, wished to adopt the plan of the Greek cross, that is, with equal arms, as shown in the accompanying plan. The result would have been much more monumental and would have given the dome its due effect within a moderate distance, while now it can only be properly judged from afar, and the high façade terminating the nave is both poor in composition and detrimental to the general conception. The building is essentially Classic in all its details, but differs from the general design of any particular Classical building. The nave is formed by a Corinthian arcade similar to those of ancient Rome, though on a vastly larger scale, supporting a tunnel-vault, which is decorated with sunken panels like those of the ancient Baths. The dome is supported on a circular drum carried on four immense piers and improves on the Pantheon only in size, while it is surpassed by St. Sophia in scientific construction.

The cathedral is most richly, even gaudily, decorated within, with coloured marbles and mosaics and contains numerous tombs of great magnificence and an altar with twisted columns designed by Bernini. It is the largest church in the world, and yet its proportions are so harmoniously, or inharmoniously designed, that it does not produce a corresponding sense of its vastness upon the beholder. The single order occupying the height of two stories is a feature, the invention, or rather arrangement of which, is attributed to Michael Angelo. In subsequent buildings it was nearly always adopted in preference to the smaller orders marking each floor.

The life of this great artist forms of itself a chapter in the history of architecture. Michael Buonarotti, surnamed Angelo, the most brilliant architect of the sixteenth century, was born of noble parentage in Arezzo in the year 1575. He developed extraordinary talents at an early age, and after outstripping his first instructor, took up his residence in Florence, where he studied anatomy and the human figure until he became the most expert draughtsman of his time. In Rome, where he was summoned by Julius II., he produced several fine works in statuary, but owing to the jealousy of Bramante was forced to quit the city and return to Florence. There he aided the citizens to sustain a siege during a year, by his superior knowledge of fortification, and subsequently went to Venice, where he designed the famous Rialto bridge. At the earnest solicitation of the pope he returned to Rome and commenced the great paintings in the Sistine Chapel, to which work he had been assigned by the counsels of Bramante, who wished to prove his inferiority to his own nephew Raphael. The result of the work, completed in a marvellously short period, however, was so successful that all Rome ran to see it.

After the accession of Paul III. to the Papal see, Michael Angelo was definitely appointed architect of St. Peter’s and worked on the building during the remainder of his life, although he returned to Florence several times and there executed the splendid statues which adorn the chapel of the Medicis. In his later days he was assisted by Vignola in his work, but died before its completion at the advanced age of eighty-eight.

Giacomo Barrozio, called Vignola from his birthplace near Bologna, is known for his great works, the chief of which are the Jesuits’ church in Rome and the castle of Caprarolla at Viterbo, which he built for the Cardinal Alexander Farnese, and also, especially to architects, for the rules and measurements of Classical orders which he composed from the buildings of Rome with the aid of the manual of Vitruvius.

This work comprises the elements of design used in nearly all the buildings erected during the two following centuries, many of their elevations being simple combinations of different pages of Vignola’s book, which to this day is the best guide for Classical proportions and the architects’ A B C.

The discriminator between the various architectural styles is fond of drawing a marked distinction between Italian, French, and German Renaissance, and illustrating it by views of the typical Italian palace, with a flat tile roof and low pediments, and the typical French house, with immensely high slate roofs and pretentious dormers. Although the eye of the practised architect can distinguish between the representative work of Sansovino and Philibert Delorme, and between that of Bernini and Claude Perrault, yet such distinctions do not form separate styles, for they are but unimportant differences, caused by local influences.

The subject should be looked upon in a broader sense, for all these subdivisions tend to confuse the student and lead him to forget the sequence of the great historical style of which they form part.

The Jacobean, Queen Anne, and kindred so-called styles in England were merely eccentric streams flowing out of the one main channel, which were scarcely worthy of distinction and certainly not of revival in our times.

In France, under each reign, there was a slight difference of treatment, chiefly in the decoration of interiors, which permits of a classification most convenient to the modern upholsterer, but for our purposes it is sufficient to apply the two divisions—Early and Late Renaissance.

The Chateaux of Blois, Chambord, and Chenonceaux in the Valley of the Loire, the Palaces of Fontainebleau, St. Germain en Laye, the Tuileries and the old Louvre in Paris are splendid examples of the former, and monuments worthy of the great artists, Pierre Lescot, Philibert Delorme, Jean Goujon, and others, who laboured upon them. They are illustrative of the employment of the small orders and ornament in low relief, which characterized the corresponding period in Italy, though they are generally richer and more spirited in design than the Italian buildings, and the soft stone which is so abundant in France permitted more lavish ornament upon the exteriors.

The skeletons of each design, that is to say, the main architectural lines, stripped of elaborate detail, are much alike and can nearly all be brought back to the ancient method of superposing orders. This is no disparagement on the value of the work, for the plans of many buildings were excellent, and the variety of ornamental design was of a delicacy and imaginative beauty which has rarely been surpassed.

It is questionable, indeed, whether the change which took place in the century of Louis XIV., in the introduction of larger proportions and greater severity of ornament, was so much a gain as it was considered at the time. To this period belong some of the great churches modelled upon or rather suggested by St. Peter’s in Rome: St. Paul’s in London, rebuilt by Christopher Wren; the Val de Grace, the joint work of Lemercier, Leduc, and Mansart, and the church of the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, also by Mansart, are among the finest of the period and style. The plan of the last-named church is appended as a particularly happy example in general arrangement and symmetrical variety, doing great credit to Mansart, who also built the larger portion of the celebrated Chateau de Versailles.

The publication of Stewart and Revetts’ great work upon the antiquities of Athens called general attention in England to the beauty of Greek art, toward the close of the last century, and resulted in the erection of a number of buildings in imitation of Athenian monuments which were utterly inappropriate and unsuited to the English climate.

In France architecture went through two or three fashionable phases, from great extravagance of design under Louis XV. to extreme simplicity under Louis XVI., finally relapsing under Napoleon into the servile copying of entire Classic buildings: a great falling off from the principle of the sixteenth century work, which had always been original in conception although borrowing detail from the antique.

During the early part of this century, architecture sank to the lowest ebb all over the world, probably owing to the disturbing influences of the great Napoleonic wars. Within the last thirty years the spirited writings of a few enthusiasts and the liberal teachings of the French schools have caused a general revival, and better work is being done now than at any time during the century.

[Illustration: PLAN OF CHURCH OF THE HOTEL DES INVALIDES AT PARIS.]

Avaricious commerce and the predominance of the desire for display rather than quiet love of the arts are factors which stand much in the way of genuine progress, but it is not improbable that the spread of refined education will eventually succeed in planting the seeds of this love in the heart of the great masses, and enable architecture to resume its natural and elevating position in their midst.