The Quattrocento: The domain of the classical language
Window Rucellai palace.
Brunelleschi, therefore, be in art history as responsible for having paved the way nearly all Renaissance architects continue to perform their works. As mentioned earlier, however, the Florentine architect did not have full knowledge of the various orders systematized in the classical language, which becomes apparent when just creating an architectural language itself, in which classical elements appear but do not respond old style.
The architects who followed the method outlined by Brunelleschi were nevertheless responsible for the full recovery of the classical language. The dominance of classicism in fact achieved during the fifteenth century (though its final systematization was not until the publication of the treaty of Sebastiano Serlio in the next century) and found in Donato Bramante its paradigmatic figure. By then (especially after Alberti expounded his theory of architecture in his treatise De re aedificatoria) already knew of more reliable forms architectures constitute Greek and Roman as possibilities of composition, and therefore their specific solutions such as synthesis own space of classical architecture were generally known. So the architects of the Renaissance had at their disposal all the creative potential offered by the language and the classical technique and the spirit of his age. The Renaissance architectural language expressed through, not copies of the classics, but overcoming it.
They also stressed at this time two architects of Florentine palaces: Michelozzo (Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, 1444) and Bernardo Rossellino (Rucellai Palace, 1446-1451-on an initial design-Alberti), and others around the nucleus of Venice, as Pietro Lombardo .
Bramante and the mature phase of the Renaissance
It is in the work of Donato Bramante where this spirit is a more concrete full, making it the figure that represents the passage of the Quattrocento the Cinquecento, in the mature phase is often called the Renaissance. Bramante was able to demonstrate, through their projects in palaces or churches, who not only knew the possibilities of the classical language, but also understand the characteristics and environment of its time because it was able to apply the ancient knowledge to a new way , unpublished, outstanding and above all, classical. Your Tempietto or Temple of San Pietro in Montorio, in Rome (1502-1510), is practically a re-reading (though not a copy) of the temples of central plant, circular, in turn derived from tholos Greek, typical of a certain period of Roman architecture (eg, the Temple of Vesta, in the city of Rome). The modest tempietto is almost a model base of the gigantic project (under construction since 1506) of the dome of St. Peter, with a dome (42.5 meters) of a size comparable to that of the Pantheon (43.44 meters), that of Hagia Sophia (32 meters) and Brunelleschi in Florence (41 meters). Later, at age baroque, English architect Christopher Wren would turn a rereading of the work of Bramante and Michelangelo, and propose a new way in St. Paul's Cathedral in London (32 feet, 1676), and the same made in time neoclassical Francisco Cabezas and Francesco Sabatini in San Francisco el Grande (Madrid, 33 meters, 1760-1784), demonstrating the potential of the Renaissance building process (ranging from the aesthetics of buildings to architectural thinking), to adapt to new styles in later times.
Bramante also popularized classical otherwise deeply that was developed and explored later. It is inspired by the triumphal arches of Rome and was brilliant compositional characteristics applied to projects of palaces and villas, key pieces of the Renaissance in civil architecture.
The main image of this style is in Bramantino triads openings adorned with arches, two of which are at the same height and the larger center, called the arc of a more system based on a combination of classic architectural order and the arch. Faced with the problem, then, to connect into a single unit similar but spatially two entities of different dimensions, the solution was to employ two systems of a more different arch dimensions following the rule that the top surface of the arc of smaller system was tangent to the bottom of the entablature molding of higher order.
Overcoming the classics, always keeping the typical classical search of the period, she especially as the architects suggested that classical space solutions for new projects (as in the great palaces, different from the Roman buildings, or new cathedrals or basilicas). Elements such as vaults and domes were used in a new way, and were used commands (Ionic, Corinthian, etc.). Characteristic of the architecture of antiquity.