The sixteenth century certainly produced an exceptional number of
masterpieces in architecture. While the first decades of the century
were marked by the same optimism that had characterized the fifteenth
century, the later decades were not. The years after 1520 were marked
by intense conflict on a religious, political, and social basis. The
mercantile powers, predominantly Protestant, in the North ranked
themselves in opposition to the Catholic, aristocratic, agricultural
states of Southern Europe. The Protestant Reformation, beginning in
1517, led to religious and political wars in Germany and Netherlands
and the English defeat of Spain in the aborted Armada expedition of
1588. The temporal power of the Papacy were eclipsed in wars against
Francis I of France and Charles V, head of the Holy Roman Empire. The
traumatic event in Italy was the Sack of Rome by imperial troops in
1527. Henceforth the century was marked by reactionary causes and the
rise of rigid political and religious absolutism. The mid-century
Catholic Counter-Reformation was dominated by Spain and implemented by
the Inquisition. The Medici family (for whom Michelangelo worked)
reestablished itself in Florence under the autocratic Grand Dukes of
Tuscany. The state and individual magnates of Venice (for whom
Palladio worked) quite successfully kept aloof from these conflicts,
though change was threatening the ancient republic as well. (Only
recently we have learned that several of Palladio's clients were, or
were accused of being, secret Protestants.)
Mannerism in the arts appears to have been an expression of the
social tensions enumerated above. Both Michelangelo and Palladio were
certainly touched, at least, by this current. It was a variant of Late
Renaissance style that used a classical vocabulary to create an anti-
classical ambiance of conflict and doubt. Tensions are created by
means of spatial ambiquities, contrasts of open and shut or rough and
smooth, conflict between architectural, or disintegrating forms. Axes
show new interest in movement in space towards a goal. Use of
colossal order. Sometimes tensions are ignored in favor of a
deliberate, cold, classicistic perfection. This disturbing style
reflects the unresolved political, philosophical, social and religious
conflicts of the sixteenth century.
At St. Peter's, Michelangelo completed the work of his three
predecessors with a mastery of scale and organizing powers--
characteristic of all High Renaissance artists--and in addition
returned to architecture some of the expressionistic qualities that
had been downplayed in the Early Renaissance.
The extent to which Michelangelo was able to impose his
personal style upon St. Peter's without essentially altering the
interior is astonishing. We can see in comparing his plan to
Sangallo's that a few strokes of the pen were sufficient to change a
complex and confused form into a simple and cohesively organized unit.
Sangallo, in taking from Bramante the scheme of a major cross echoed
in four lesser crosses at the corners, had expanded the later to
constitute isolated pockets of space. . . . Michelangelo, by merely
walling off the entrances to each of Sangallo's disconnected spaces,
made one church out of many; he surpassed the clarity that he admired
in Bramante's plan in substituting for the concept of major and minor
crosses a more unified one of an integrated cross-and-square, so that
all circulation within the Basilica should bring the visitor back to
its core. The solution was strikingly simple, and far more economical
than any proposed before: it even seems obvious, once it is familiar;
but in a generation distinguished for great architects, it took one
trained as a sculptor to discover a form that would express the
organic unity of the structure. Unity was Michelangelo's contribution
to St. Peter's; he transformed the interior into a continuun of
space, the exterior into a cohesive body. James Ackerman,
The Architecture of Michelangelo,1961
In chronological terms, Michelangelo is also highly important as a
bridge to Baroque architecture. Seventeenth-century Rome would be
unthinkable without his precedents a century earlier. From
Michelangelo, Gianlorenzo Bernini took the scale and grandeur of his
piazza and colonnade at St. Peter's. Francesco Borromini was inspired
by Michelangelo's sculpted surfaces and molded interior volumes as he
designed S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, a design so "alive" that it
suggests (in the words of critic Siegfried Gideon) an architecture
that has mastered not only space but time.
Key works:
1. Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564): substitute plan for St.
Peter's, 1546, built through 1590 [
085 plan, compare
083 Antonio
Sangallo proposed substitute plan;
111 exterior view,
099 and
100
interior views, as modified after Michelangelo]; figs. 502, 503.
2. Michelangelo: Laurentian Library at S. Lorenzo, Florence, 1524ff
[
086 exterior view, left;
104 plan and
102,
103,
105 interior views of
reception room;
107 library plan and section;
106 interior of reading
room]; figs. 498, 499.
3. Michelangelo: New Sacristy at S. Lorenzo, Florence, 1524ff [
108
detail of door surrounds]
4. Michelangelo: piazza del Campidoglio, Rome, designed 1538; [
090
original state before Michelangelo;
112 Michelangelo's plan;
114 view
today;
088 aerial view as rebuilt;
113 painted view as built]; fig.
501
Works in context:
