Renaissance architecture: the orders come back

Gothic architecture is a structural argument: every pinnacle, buttress and rib exists to get a stone ceiling higher and a window wider. Renaissance architecture is an argument about rules. From the 1410s a group of Florentines decided that the ancient Romans had known something about building that the intervening thousand years had lost, and that it could be recovered by measurement — of ruins, and of the newly rediscovered text of Vitruvius. What you are looking at, when you look at a Renaissance façade, is a wall that has been reasoned about.

That is why the style is recognisable even at a distance and even in bad light. Its parts are separate, labelled and repeatable.

The three things that give it away

The round arch. Semicircular, struck from a single centre, springing from a column or a pier. If the arches point, you are in the Gothic or a Gothic Revival; if they curve sideways in plan or get squashed into ellipses, you have gone past the Renaissance into the Baroque.

The orders, used correctly. An order is the whole system of column, capital, and the horizontal entablature it carries — Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, in rising slenderness and elaboration. The Middle Ages kept columns but forgot the grammar. The Renaissance put the grammar back: a Doric column gets a frieze of triglyphs (grooved blocks) alternating with plain panels, an Ionic capital gets its paired scrolls, and where orders are stacked, the heavier one goes at the bottom.

A flat, ruled wall. The façade is a plane. Pilasters — flat, shallow versions of columns, attached to the wall — divide it into bays. Horizontal stringcourses (thin projecting bands) mark the floors. At the top sits a cornice, and the Renaissance cornice is proportioned to the whole building, so it hangs far out over the street.

Brunelleschi: the architect as draughtsman

Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome over Florence Cathedral (1420–1436) is the period’s founding feat, though it is not a good example of its style. The octagonal crossing was too wide for timber centring, so he raised two shells, laid brick in a self-supporting herringbone spiral, and tied the whole with stone and iron chains. The profile is still pointed: Gothic geometry solved by a new kind of mind.

His buildings proper — the Ospedale degli Innocenti (from 1419), San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito, the Pazzi Chapel — teach the look. Slender Corinthian columns carry round arches over square bays. The mouldings are cut in pietra serena, a grey Tuscan sandstone, and set against white plaster, so the structural lines read as a drawing pinned to the wall. Cool, light, weightless, mathematical.

Alberti: the theory

Leon Battista Alberti wrote De re aedificatoria in 1452, the first architectural treatise since antiquity, and defined beauty as concinnitas: a harmony of parts such that nothing could be added, taken away or altered without spoiling the whole. Proportion is the practical form of that idea. Ratios drawn from musical consonance — 1:1, 2:3, 1:2 — set room shapes and bay widths, so a hall is a double cube and a bay is a square.

Alberti also fixed two façade types. At Palazzo Rucellai (c. 1450) he laid the Colosseum’s superimposed pilaster orders over a Florentine palace front, one tier per storey. At Santa Maria Novella (1458–1470) he solved the eternal problem of the basilican church front — a tall nave with low aisles — by masking the join with a pair of great scrolled volutes. Every Baroque church front in Europe descends from that decision.

The palazzo type

The urban palace is the most quizzable thing in the period, because the formula is so consistent. Three storeys. Rustication — masonry with deeply recessed joints and a roughened face — at the bottom, grading to smoother courses above and often to flat ashlar at the top, so the building appears to lighten as it rises. Stringcourses at each floor. Round-arched windows, often two lights under one arch. A cornice out of all proportion to the top storey, because it crowns the whole. Palazzo Medici-Riccardi (Michelozzo, from 1444) sets the pattern; Palazzo Strozzi repeats it; Alberti’s Rucellai refines it with pilasters.

High Renaissance and Mannerism

By 1500 the centre of gravity had moved to Rome, where the ruins were. Bramante’s Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio (c. 1502) is the hinge: a circular peristyle of Doric columns with an archaeologically correct triglyph frieze, a drum, a balustrade and a hemispherical dome, all at miniature scale. It is the ideal centralised plan, and it fed directly into Bramante’s design for the new St Peter’s, begun 1506.

Michelangelo arrives as an architect with the vocabulary already perfect and proceeds to strain it. In the vestibule of the Laurentian Library (from 1524) the columns are recessed into the wall, brackets support nothing, blind windows taper upwards, and a staircase pours down like lava. At the Capitol from the 1530s he runs a giant order — one order spanning two storeys — up the palace fronts. This is Mannerism: correct grammar, wilfully misused, and it dates things usefully. A giant order means after about 1540. Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te at Mantua, where triglyphs slip visibly out of the frieze as though the building were failing, is the same joke played straight.

Palladio

Andrea Palladio worked in and around Vicenza from the 1540s and published I quattro libri dell’architettura in 1570, which is why his influence outran everyone else’s: he was portable. Three signatures:

The serliana, or Venetian window — a round-arched central light between two narrower flat-topped ones — which he ran the entire length of the Basilica at Vicenza, solving irregular bay widths at a stroke.

The temple front on a house. Believing that ancient houses had porticoes, he stuck a pedimented temple front onto the centre of a working farm villa, with low arcaded barns sweeping away on either side. Villa Barbaro at Maser, Villa Emo, and the four-porticoed Villa Almerico Capra, the Rotonda, begun in 1566.

The interlocking pediment church front, at San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore in Venice, where a tall narrow temple front for the nave is superimposed on a wide low one for the aisles.

Renaissance against Baroque

This is the confusion that catches people, because the two styles use exactly the same kit. Motif will not save you; behaviour will.

The traps

Palladianism is not Palladio. Eighteenth-century Britain revived him wholesale, and a Burlington or Kent house has porticoes, serlianas and rustication, but also sash windows, English brick and lead flashings. If the windows slide up and down, you are 200 years late.

Renaissance outside Italy lags and hybridises. The Loire châteaux carry Italian ornament on essentially Gothic bodies; English “Renaissance” before Inigo Jones is mostly Flemish strapwork pinned to a Tudor house. Jones’s Queen’s House at Greenwich (from 1616) is the first properly Italian building in England — about a century behind Florence.

Long careers cross styles. Michelangelo is High Renaissance and Mannerist in the same decade; the dome of St Peter’s as built by Giacomo della Porta in 1588–1590 is steeper than Michelangelo’s own hemispherical model, which is why it already looks half-Baroque.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Arch shape. Pointed means Gothic or revival. Round and semicircular keeps you in play.
2. Is the wall flat? Stand at the corner and sight along it. Flat plane means Renaissance; a wall that curves in plan means Baroque.
3. Are the entablatures straight and the pediments whole? Broken or scrolled pushes you after 1600.
4. Are the elements separate and countable? Evenly spaced pilasters and regular bays are Renaissance; columns crowding towards the centre are Baroque.
5. Graded rustication plus stringcourses plus a colossal cornice? Fifteenth-century Italian palazzo.
6. Does any order span two storeys? If yes, not before about 1540.
7. Serliana or temple-front portico? Palladio or Palladian — now check the windows.
8. Sash windows, brick, slate? It is a revival. Reprice by 150 to 250 years.