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214 RENAISSANCE OF ART IN ITALY.
became architects for the occasion, and improvised grand Renaissance facades to |
the unfinished churches, and made multitudes of triumphal arches, as Andrea
del Sarto, Granacci, and others, did on the entry of Leo X. into Florence.
W i So, though the two arts, architecture and sculpture, at first inseparable, were [
P| parted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, each having its own especial j
mission, we now find them again united. The architects are, with one or two
exceptions, all sculptors. The chief exception is Bramante of Urbino (born
i | , : 1444?, died 1514), the perfector of the Renaissance style of building, of which
i ih Brunellesco and Leon Battista Alberti were the founders.
! The style is quite in accordance with the spirit of the times—a revival of
classicism—but it was unfortunately late Roman, and therefore not the pure
classic. No more round or pointed arches, with their shafts and archivolts covered |
with eloquent sculpture! No more groined roofs, whose lines interlace in an i
I airy network of geometric curves! No more cusped windows filled with a web
of delicate tracery! In place of the curve of beauty we have the straight line;
| instead of the arch, the pediment; in lieu of the porch, the portico; instead of
the groined roof, the crossbeam and frescoed plaster. The flying buttress has
given place to the square outer pier, the monolith shaft to the pilaster; the tender
grace of the Gothic is dead, but a solid magnificence, well defined and decorous,
| remains. In Rome the palaces preserve almost intact the Roman forms, but in
| Florence a certain traditional Etruscanism survives, and there is a Doric grandeur
in the basements and doorways of huge stones which gives an antique beauty to
their massiveness. The Roman Vitruvius was the author from whom all the
Renaissance architects took their inspiration, and Bramante was no less a student
of the classic author than Alberti had been. He was led to the study, perhaps, by
his early friendship with the Milanese architect Cesare Cesariano, who published
a commentary on Vitruvius, and—by-the-bye—was not well treated by his /
publisher. It is certain that on his return from Milan before 1500, Bramante,
though brought up as a painter, decided to devote his life to architecture.
While engaged in painting the Pope’s arms in San Giovanni in Laterano, in
Rome, he employed his spare time in that city by taking the measurements and
making plans of all the ancient buildings, even of Tivoli and Hadrian’s Villa.
Some of his first works were the fountain of Trastevere, and that of the Piazza
San Pietro, now demolished. Then the Cardinal Adriano da Corneto employed
him to build his palace in Borgo Nuovo, after which, his reputation being esta-
blished, Bramante became the Papal architect. For Pope Julius IE. he, in 1503, |
designed—in two orders, Doric and Ionic—the Loggie which connect the Belve-
dere with the Vatican, and built the chamber the niches of which contain the |
Apollo and the Venus. Bramante instructed Raphael in the principles of architec-
ture, and moreover built him a house in the Borgo made of red brick with stucco
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