Mannerist architecture  

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Mannerism in architecture was marked by widely diverging tendencies in the work of Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Peruzzi and Andrea Palladio, that led to the Baroque style in which the same architectural vocabulary was used for very different rhetoric.

Contents

Peruzzi

Baldassare Peruzzi, (1481–1536), was an architect born in Siena, but working in Rome, whose work bridges the High Renaissance and the Mannerist. His Villa Farnesina of 1509 is a very regular monumental cube of two equal stories, the bays being strongly articulated by orders of pilasters. The building is unusual for its frescoed walls.

Peruzzi’s most famous work is the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne in Rome. The unusual features of this building are that its façade curves gently around a curving street. It has in its ground floor a dark central portico running parallel to the street, but as a semi enclosed space, rather than an open loggia. Above this rise three undifferentiated floors, the upper two with identical small horizontal windows in thin flat frames which contrast strangely with the deep porch, which has served, from the time of its construction, as a refuge to the city’s poor.

Giulio Romano

Giulio Romano (1499–1546), was a pupil of Raphael, assisting him on various works for the Vatican. Romano was also a highly inventive designer, working for Federico II Gonzaga at Mantua on the Palazzo Te, (1524–1534), a project which combined his skills as architect, sculptor and painter. In this work, combining garden grottoes and extensive frescoes, he uses illusionistic effects, surprising combination of architectural form and texture and the frequent use of features that seem somewhat disproportionate or out of alignment. The total effect is eerie and disturbing. Ilan Rachum cites Romano as “one of the first promoters of Mannerism”.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was one of the creative giants whose achievements mark the High Renaissance. He excelled in each of the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture and his achievements brought about significant changes in each area. His architectural fame lies chiefly in two buildings: the interiors of the Laurentian Library and its lobby at the monastery of San Lorenzo in Florence, and the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome.

St Peter's was "the greatest creation of the Renaissance", and a great number of architects contributed their skills to it. But at its completion, there was more of Michelangelo’s design than of any other architect, before or after him.

The plan that was accepted at the laying of the foundation stone in 1506 was that by Bramante. Various changes in plan occurred in the series of architects that succeeded him, but Michelangelo, when he took over the project in 1546, reverted to Bramante’s Greek-cross plan and redesigned the piers, the walls and the dome, giving the lower weight-bearing members massive proportions and eliminating the encircling aisles from the chancel and identical transept arms. Helen Gardner says: "Michelangelo, with a few strokes of the pen, converted its snowflake complexity into a massive, cohesive unity."

Michelangelo’s dome was a masterpiece of design using two masonry shells, one within the other and crowned by a massive lantern supported, as at Florence, on ribs. For the exterior of the building he designed a giant order which defines every external bay, the whole lot being held together by a wide cornice which runs unbroken like a rippling ribbon around the entire building.

There is a wooden model of the dome, showing its outer shell as hemispherical. When Michelangelo died in 1564, the building had reached the height of the drum. The architect who succeeded Michelangelo was Giacomo della Porta. The dome, as built, has a much steeper projection than the dome of the model. It is generally presumed that it was della Porta who made this change to the design, to lessen the outward thrust. But, in fact it is unknown who it was that made this change, and it equally possible, and in fact a stylistic likelihood that the person who decided upon the more dynamic outline was Michelangelo himself, at some time during the years that he supervised the project.

Michelangelo was at his most Mannerist in the design of the vestibule of the Laurentian Library, also built by him to house the Medici collection of books at the convent of San Lorenzo in Florence, the same San Lorenzo’s at which Brunelleschi had recast church architecture into a Classical mold and established clear formula for the use of Classical orders and their various components.

Michelangelo takes all Brunelleschi’s components and bends them to his will. The Library is upstairs. It is a long low building with an ornate wooden ceiling, a matching floor and crowded with corrals finished by his successors to Michelangelo’s design. But it is a light room, the natural lighting streaming through a long row of windows that appear positively crammed between the order of pilasters that march along the wall. The vestibule, on the other hand, is tall, taller than it is wide and is crowded by a large staircase that pours out of the library in what Pevsner refers to as a “flow of lava”, and bursts in three directions when it meets the balustrade of the landing. It is an intimidating staircase, made all the more so because the rise of the stairs at the center is steeper than at the two sides, fitting only eight steps into the space of nine.

The space is crowded and it is to be expected that the wall spaces would be divided by pilasters of low projection. But Michelangelo has chosen to use paired columns, which, instead of standing out boldly from the wall, he has sunk deep into recesses within the wall itself. In San Lorenzo's church nearby, Brunelleschi used little scrolling console brackets to break the strongly horizontal line of the course above the arcade. Michelangelo has borrowed Brunelleschi’s motifs and stood each pair of sunken columns on a pair of twin console brackets. Pevsner says the “Laurenziana… reveals Mannerism in its most sublime architectural form”.

Giacomo della Porta

Giacomo della Porta, (c.1533–1602), was famous as the architect who made the dome of St Peter’s Basilica a reality. The change in outline between the dome as it appears in the model and the dome as it was built, has brought about speculation as to whether the changes originated with della Porta or with Michelangelo himself.

Della Porta spent nearly all his working life in Rome, designing villas, palazzi and churches in the Mannerist style. One of his most famous works is the façade of the Church of the Gesù, a project that he inherited from his teacher Vignola. Most characteristics of the original design are maintained, subtly transformed to give more weight to the central section, where della Porta uses, among other motifs, a low triangular pediment overlaid on a segmental one above the main door. The upper storey and its pediment give the impression of compressing the lower one. The center section, like that of Sant'Andrea at Mantua, is based on the Triumphal Arch, but has two clear horizontal divisions like Santa Maria Novella. See Alberti above. The problem of linking the aisles to the nave is solved using Alberti’s scrolls, in contrast to Vignola’s solution which provided much smaller brackets and four statues to stand above the paired pilasters, visually weighing down the corners of the building. The influence of the design may be seen in Baroque churches throughout Europe.

Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio, (1518–80), "the most influential architect of the whole Renaissance"', was, as a stone mason, introduced to Humanism by the poet Giangiorgio Trissino. His first major architectural commission was the rebuilding of the Basilica Palladiana at Vicenza, in the Veneto where he was to work most of his life.

Palladio was to transform the architectural style of both palaces and churches by taking a different perspective on the notion of Classicism. While the architects of Florence and Rome looked to structures like the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine to provide formulae, Palladio looked to classical temples with their simple peristyle form. When he used the “triumphal arch” motif of a large arched opening with lower square-topped opening on either side, he invariably applied it on a small scale, such as windows, rather than on a large scale as Alberti used it at Sant’Andrea’s. This Ancient Roman motif is often referred to as the Palladian Arch.

The best known of Palladio’s domestic buildings is Villa Capra, otherwise known as "la Rotonda", a centrally planned house with a domed central hall and four identical facades, each with a temple-like portico like that of the Pantheon in Rome. At the Villa Cornaro, the projecting portico of the north facade and recessed loggia of the garden facade are of two ordered stories, the upper forming a balcony.

Like Alberti, della Porta and others, in the designing of a church facade, Palladio was confronted by the problem of visually linking the aisles to the nave while maintaining and defining the structure of the building. Palladio’s solution was entirely different from that employed by della Porta. At the church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice he overlays a tall temple, its columns raised on high plinths, over another low wide temple façade, its columns rising from the basements and its narrow lintel and pilasters appearing behind the giant order of the central nave.




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