Toward the close of the fifteenth century men’s minds and tastes were
ripening for a change. The beautiful Gothic, in its most improved
characteristics, did not satisfy. The change first took place in Italy,
and was closely connected with the revival of letters. There all the
characteristics of the middle ages were rapidly thrown off. The old Roman
blood in the Italians asserted itself, and almost at a bound literature
and the arts put on the old forms they had displayed fifteen hundred
years before. In the schools there was a rage for classic Greek and
Latin; and among architects old Roman or Græco-Roman forms were applied
to buildings with much freedom and spirit.
The revival of classic taste in art was appropriately called the
Renaissance.
In other countries the change came slowly, and people were not prepared
to welcome it unreservedly. In France and England there was a transition
period, during which most buildings were designed in a mixed style.
This in England lasted almost through the century. It was indeed a
picturesque and telling style, in its earlier stages called Tudor, and
later Elizabethan. In its mixture of classic and Gothic forms there are
often incongruities, and even monstrosities; but it allowed unrestrained
play for the fancy. Some of the best mansions of the time, such as
Hatfield, Hardwick, and Audley End are unsurpassed in their pleasing
picturesqueness. The wide oak staircase, with its carved balusters,
ornamented newel-post, and heavy hand-rails, the old wainscoted parlor,
with its magnificent chimney piece reaching to the ceiling, are all
essentially English features, and full of vigor and life, as the work
of every transition period is likely to prove. The period in France
produced exquisite works, more refined and elegantly treated than those
in England, but not so vigorous. No modern buildings are so finely
ornamented and yet not spoiled.
In Italy Renaissance churches, magnificent secular buildings, and palaces
of wealthy families abound, as in Naples, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Venice,
and indeed in every great city.
The plan of Renaissance buildings was uniform and symmetrical; not
widely different from those in Italy before the revival of classic art;
but it will be remembered that they were by no means so picturesque or
irregular, at any time, as were the plans of French and English churches.
The mediæval use of small materials for external walls, involving many
joints, has disappeared, and they are universally faced with stone or
plaster, and consequently smooth. The principal feature to note is the
great use made of that elaborate sort of masonry, in which the joints
of the stones are carefully channeled or otherwise marked, and which is
known by the singularly inappropriate name of rustic work. The basements
of most Italian and French palaces are thus built, and in many cases, as
the Pitti Palace, Florence, the rustic work covers the whole façade.
Towers are less frequently employed. In churches they sometimes occur;
none more picturesque than those designed by Sir Christopher Wren for
many of his parish churches. But in this style the dome takes the place
of the tower, both in churches and secular buildings.
The dome is the glory of Renaissance architecture, as it had been of the
old Roman. It is the one feature by which Renaissance architects had a
clear and defined advantage over those of the preceding century, who had,
strange to say, almost abandoned the dome. The mouldings and all other
ornaments of this order are much the same as those of the Roman. The
sculptures and mural decorations were all originally drawn from classic
sources. But these attained very great excellence—the decorative painting
of Raphael and his scholars at Rome, Genoa, and elsewhere, probably far
exceeding anything which the old Roman decorative artists ever executed.