Renaissance Architecture

By: Charles Araullo

The two leading Early Renaissance architects were Brunelleschi and Alberti.
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was an Italian architect, goldsmith, and
sculptor. The first Renaissance architect, he also formulated the principles of
linear perspective which governed pictorial depiction of space until the late
19th century.
His most famous work is the octagonal brick dome of Florence Basilica, an
engineering feat of such difficulty that he also had to invent special machine
to hoist each section into place. Brunelleschis dome was the largest the preindustrial world would ever see.
In 1420 Brunelleschi began to erect the great dome of the Florentine
Cathedral in collaboration with Ghiberti, who eventually withdrew from the
project. The dome has a skeleton of eight large stone ribs closed by two
shells, of which the lower portions are of stone and the upper parts of brick
laid in herringbone. In its rib construction and pointed arch form, the dome
still belongs within the Gothic tradition. With the closing of the oculus in
1436, Brunelleschi designed the lantern. Meanwhile he was consulted on the
project elsewhere: he was in Pisa during 1426 to work on the Citadel and in
Volterra in 1427 to advice on the dome of the baptistery.
Architects came to believe that the circle was the most perfect geometric
form and, therefore, most appropriate in dedication to a perfect God.
Brunelleschi also worked with the central plan. In the Pazzie Chapel (142960), constructed in the medieval cloister of Santa Croce at Florence, the plan
approaches the central type. On the inside it is actually a rectangle, slightly
wider than it.
In 1436 Brunelleschi designed another basilica church in Florence, Santo
Spirito, which shows a much greater concern for a unified composition than
S. Lorenzo does. The arcaded side aisles are continued around the transept
arms and choir and were intended to go across the interior of the faade,
which gives a very unified and centralized impression around the crossing
dome. The shallow chapels are curvilinear in plan and were to be so
expressed on the exterior, but after Brunelleschi's death a straight external
wall masked the chapels. The interior is carefully organized in simple
proportional relationships which result in a very harmonious space that is
the ideal of Renaissance architecture. In 1440 Brunelleschi returned to Pisa
for further work on the Citadel. On April 15, 1446, he died at Florence and
received the unusual honor of being buried in the Cathedral.