Gothic versus Renaissance architecture

No contrast in Western art is more overdetermined than that between Gothic and Renaissance architecture. The two styles have been set against one another since the seventeenth century as a clash of worlds — verticality against horizontality, light against mass, the cathedral against the temple, the Christian middle ages against the rebirth of classical antiquity. The story is too tidy to be quite right. The architecture of the Italian Quattrocento was not the opposite of the Gothic, but its heir and rival; the first great Renaissance buildings were built by men who had been trained in the workshops of the late Gothic, and the new classical vocabulary was assembled, building by building, by humanists and masons who had read Vitruvius and Leon Battista Alberti in the same weeks in which they were measuring Santa Maria del Fiore and San Lorenzo in Florence. To understand the change, it has to be reconstructed from the ground up.

What late Gothic could do

By the time that Filippo Brunelleschi won the competition for the dome of the cathedral of Florence in 1418, the Gothic style had been in continuous development for nearly three hundred years. The pointed arch, the ribbed vault, the flying buttress, the great traceried window and the structural reduction of the wall to a thin stone skeleton were the gifts of the Île-de-France of the 1140s — Sens, Noyon, Laon, Paris, Chartres — and they had been adapted, in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to a range of buildings, climates, and stone traditions across Europe. Notre-Dame de Paris was begun in 1163, Chartres rebuilt after the fire of 1194, Amiens begun in 1220, Reims begun in 1211, Canterbury rebuilt from 1174, Cologne Cathedral begun in 1248, Milan Cathedral begun in 1386 and not completed until 1965. The late Gothic of the Baugerüst tradition in the German lands and of the English Perpendicular had extended the technical possibilities of the system beyond anything the Île-de-France had foreseen — fan vaults at Gloucester, an octagonal lantern over the crossing at Ely, the enormous net vault of the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick.

Italian Gothic was, by contrast, always a thin, almost reluctant presence. The mendicant orders — Franciscans and Dominicans — built a generation of small, galleried, timber-roofed hall churches across the peninsula in the thirteenth century, of which Santa Croce in Florence and Santa Maria Novella are the most important in their respective cities; the Italian cathedral façade, from Siena to Orvieto to Florence itself, was an exercise in coloured marble and inlay rather than in the structural revolution of the North. Brunelleschi grew up in a city whose most ambitious current building, the cathedral of Florence, had been standing incomplete for more than a hundred years with a 45-metre octagonal hole at the crossing waiting to be roofed. The challenge, as the Arte della Lana and the Opera del Duomo understood, was not a matter of style at all: it was a matter of whether the medieval Republic of Florence was rich enough, and clever enough, to finish what the late Duecento had begun.

Brunelleschi’s revolution

The scale of Brunelleschi’s achievement only becomes clear when the dome is read against its precedents. The Pantheon in Rome, completed under Hadrian around 126 AD and the largest dome in the world for the next thirteen centuries, was a self-supporting concrete shell of nearly 44 metres internal diameter but very nearly hemispherical, and it depended on a thick, continuous mass wall for the management of its lateral thrust. The cathedral of Florence required a dome nearly as large — about 45 metres internal diameter — over an octagonal drum whose width was so great that the lateral thrust at the springing of a self-supporting dome would have burst the drum; the medieval solution, a timber structure or a stone vault of the same class as the English Perpendicular, would have been a third the size of the one Brunelleschi proposed. What Brunelleschi actually built, between 1420 and 1436, was a double-shell dome of nearly 4 million bricks, herring-boned for the inner shell and laid in neat courses for the outer, with the lateral thrust resisted by four massive stone chains and by the profile of the dome itself. The result was, in Arnaldo Bruschi’s phrase, the first building in the history of the world to make the dome, structurally, a work of compression rather than of mass.

That technical revolution, on which the engineering historians Piero Sanpaolesi (1977), Eugenio Battisti (1976) and Giuseppe Millosovich have written so richly, was accompanied by a stylistic one. The lantern, designed in part by Brunelleschi and completed after his death by Michelozzo, and the three tribunes of the apse, designed in part by Brunelleschi and partly by Antonio di Luca Filarete and Antonio di Giovanni Bonaiuti (the Filarete of the bronze doors of the old St. Peter’s), were treated as a classical order. Brunelleschi had spent the years between 1402 and 1417 in Rome, measuring the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Temple of Castor and Pollux, the Tabularium, and the surviving basilicas of the Forum; what he had brought back to Florence was not a recipe but a vocabulary, the language of pilasters, entablatures, capitals, and the human-scale articulation of the wall. That vocabulary was, in the next ten years, translated into an architecture that the workshop had never built before.

The Ospedale degli Innocenti, San Lorenzo, and the new Florence

The Ospedale degli Innocenti (the Hospital of the Innocents), a foundling hospital on the piazza della Santissima Annunziata in Florence commissioned by the Arte della Seta and begun in 1419, is the first public building in which Brunelleschi’s classical vocabulary is fully articulated. The loggia of nine arches across the façade, each bay carried on a column with a composite capital at the Roman scale, with a level entablature and a regular rhythm of clear cubic proportions, is the prototype of the arcaded civil façade that the next century of European architecture was to imitate. Alberti would later say, in a famous passage of De re aedificatoria (drafted in the 1440s, first printed in 1485), that Brunelleschi’s loggia “deserved to be counted among the works of antiquity”; Vasari would call it the first Renaissance building. Both judgements are right.

The church of San Lorenzo (begun 1421, with the nave and aisles designed by Brunelleschi and the façade and cloister extended by Michelozzo) and the Pazzi Chapel (begun c. 1429, almost certainly to a design by Brunelleschi) repeat the same modular system, each bay a Greek-cross of equal arms, the entablature running continuously, the pilasters articulated as a system. The transformation of the Florentine Republic’s sacred architecture is the most complete in the history of Western art: Brunelleschi and his immediate successors replaced the system of the Tuscan Gothic with a measured, classical, rational building in a single generation.

Alberti and the theory of the orders

The system that Brunelleschi had built was articulated theoretically for the first time by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), the humanist, mathematician, architect, painter, and Latin prose writer who had known Brunelleschi since the 1430s. De pictura (1435), De re aedificatoria (1440s, published 1485), and De statua (drafted in the 1430s) together constitute the first coherent theory of Renaissance art in the Latin language. Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, in ten books, draws on Vitruvius but organises the whole body of architectural knowledge around a principle that is essentially Aristotelian: the concinnitas of the building, the concord of its parts, which is beauty, and which is grounded in the rational proportion of its members. The building is, on this view, not a matter of structural ingenuity (Vitruvius had said that too) but of a properly reasoned analogy between the proportions of the human body, the proportions of the building, and the proportions of the city. Joan Gadol’s Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (1969) and Cecil Grayson’s standard translation of De re aedificatoria (MIT, 1988) make the implications of the treatise for the theory of the city and the role of the humanist architect clear.

Alberti built, in the years in which he was drafting these treatises, a series of buildings that translated the theory into stone. The Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (begun 1450, with the unfinished façade carried out by Matteo di Pasti); the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1458–1470, with the volutes of the upper and lower cornices designed by Alberti to reconcile a Gothic trefoil upper storey with a classical lower one); and the church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua (begun 1470, the last and most ambitious, with a single barrel-vaulted nave, a façade of classical pilasters, and a triumphal-arch approach that would influence the Roman High Renaissance for a generation). Alberti’s buildings make explicit the principle that Brunelleschi’s had left implicit: that the Renaissance architect is, before he is a builder, a humanist.

The dome and the city

The dome of the cathedral of Florence was finished in March 1436, and the consecration of the cathedral on 25 March of that year, the feast of the Annunciation, was treated by the Florentine chroniclers as a civic event second to none. The dome, which the Arte della Lana had funded and which the Opera del Duomo had built, was not only the technical solution to a problem that had defeated every previous generation but the visible argument that the Florentine Republic was the legitimate heir of ancient Rome. Hans Baron (The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 1955, 2nd edn. 1966) and the historiographical tradition that grew out of his work have shown that the very meaning of the rinascita was reshaped, in the half-century after the Arte della Lana’s decision, by the identification of the Fiorentina libertas with the Roma libera of the humanists. The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, more than any single painting or treatise, is the architectural document of that identification.

The dome’s afterlife confirms the point. Bramante studied it in the 1490s and took from it the model for his design for the new St. Peter’s (begun 1506); Michelangelo studied it in the 1520s and modified Bramante’s design in 1546 so that the dome of St. Peter’s would have a profile closer to Brunelleschi’s. The Piazza del Duomo itself, opened up by the demolition of the medieval bishop’s palace in 1298 and remodelled by the early Quattrocento, makes the dome the centre of the modern city.

Historiography and the long shadow of Brunelleschi

The historiography of the contrast between Gothic and Renaissance is itself a story of the modern reception of the Renaissance. Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance und Barock (1888) and his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915) framed the contrast as one of five formal oppositions — linear against painterly, plane against recession, closed form against open form, multiplicity against unity, absolute against relative clarity. Erwin Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) argued that the opus modernum of the Île-de-France was, in its structural principles, the stone form of the scholastic method, and that the rinascita of the Quattrocento was the rejection of both. John White (The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 1957, 3rd edn. 1987) read the same contrast as the abandonment of the medieval aedificatio of the scholastic in favour of a new, empirica, pittoresca classical architecture; the rinascita of the building was, in White’s argument, the model of the rinascita of the painting.

What the contemporary scholar adds is a tighter awareness of what the patrons and the workshops actually wanted. The Florentine Opera del Duomo and the Arte della Lana were not, in 1418, in the market for a manifesto of classical civilisation: they needed a roof. Brunelleschi, who had spent the years between 1402 and 1417 in Rome measuring the Pantheon and drawing the temples, gave them a roof, and he did so in a vocabulary that his contemporaries could read. The Quattrocento was, in that sense, the moment in which technical solution, civic programme, and humanist theory happened to coincide. The dome of Florence and the De re aedificatoria are two sides of the same event.