Classical Architecture by Andrew Ballantyne

Author:Andrew Ballantyne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crowood Press

Fig. 56 Michelangelo’s dome for Saint Peter’s, Rome, seen from across the city.

Sixteenth-Century Italian Work: Mannerist

The reason for dwelling on Michelangelo’s works in some detail is that they had great authority and were admired by others, so they established ways of thinking about architecture that would be developed much further by later generations when their style might be called ‘baroque’. The other term that comes into use among architectural historians to describe sixteenth-century Italian work is ‘mannerist’ – when it seems that the architects are reaching for something more turbulent than the repose and harmony of the classic Renaissance artists of the fifteenth century.

The term is used in different ways by different people. Sometimes it seems to suggest that the work is mannered or deliberately exaggerated for expressive effect. Sometimes it refers simply to the period. So for example the architect Andrea Pietro della Gondola, whom we know as Palladio, who was born thirty-three years after Michelangelo and who lived his whole life in the sixteenth century (1508–80), is often called a Mannerist, but his work is as serene and harmonious as any fifteenth-century architect’s. There is nothing mannered about it, but he lived at a time when Mannerist artists were around, so he is bundled in with them.

He designed grand houses for the aristocratic estates on the mainland near Venice (the Veneto). The houses were typically the administrative headquarters for an agriculture-based estate, and would include some fine rooms for the landowners while increasing the bulk of the buildings with ancillary accommodation such as barn space for storing the harvest. The owner of such an estate might have a palace on the Grand Canal in Venice for the winter months, while the villa on the mainland would be occupied by the estate’s managers and workers through the year, and visited during the heat of the summer until the harvest was brought in.

Palladio was also responsible for some churches in Venice, which will be discussed with the baroque, and most importantly for his subsequent reputation, he also wrote a treatise on architecture – The Four Books on Architecture (1570). Like Serlio, he presented drawings of authoritative ancient monuments (such as the Pantheon and the Maison Carrée at Nîmes), but he also included specimens of his own designs, noting proportions as well as sizes. It would have its widest influence in the eighteenth century in northern Europe, but the ideas that went into it came from the culture of sixteenth-century Italy.

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