Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [36]
PART 4
THE BUILDINGS OF THE RENAISSANCE
To the ordinary citizens of late medieval Florence or any other town in Italy, architecture was visually far more important than any other art, let alone writing. They might not penetrate to the treasures housed in the palaces, but they could see the buildings from the outside, and they were familiar with the churches and the cathedrals, even being allowed on occasion into the sacristies, where the most precious art objects were kept. Building, even more than public sculpture, was a matter of civic pride. Italian citizens were also conscious of the architecture of antiquity, for its ruins were still there in many cases, not yet entirely looted for stone, tidied up or cleared away. In a sense, large parts of medieval Italy were still one vast architectural ruin, a constant reminder of the gigantism and glory of Rome, so that when increasing wealth encouraged the leading cities to glorify themselves in turn, it was to the example of their Roman past that artists naturally looked, and the public could compare the results. In architecture, then, the Renaissance was a natural event; it went with the grain of the country.
We have here a marked contrast between southern Europe, Italy in particular, and the north. Gothic had evolved in twelfth-century France out of Romanesque, itself a primitive, bastard form of the architecture of the late Roman Empire. But it had evolved into a style of its own, a truly original creation, eventually of great majesty and subtlety, embodying considerable engineering achievements, overwhelming decorative effects and impressive power. The major Gothic cathedrals of France, England, Germany and Spain are some of the largest and finest buildings ever constructed, and they became depositories of artistic treasures only a fraction of which now remain. They were a wonder of the world, but they did not impress the Italians—even those who were aware of their existence or, a far smaller group, those who had seen them. Gothic was a habit, an impulse, not a system. It had no theory and no literature. It was a sophisticated evolution from a primitive instinct. Very few cathedrals were conceived and built as a whole, according to a master plan (Salisbury in England was a rare exception, and even in its case the spire was not added until two hundred years later). Some, like Cologne, remained unfinished until modern times. The Italians, particularly in their northern plains, built Gothic cathedrals, such as that in Milan, but without enthusiasm or relish. The Gothic spirit, as opposed to forms, never settled upon them. There was something organic about it that Italians found unreasonable, so that one senses they adopted it only in an aberrant form and longed, perhaps unconsciously, to replace it with something better, derived from the roots of their culture.
In Florence, where the architecture of the Renaissance properly began, those roots were deep and went back to Roman times. The cathedral was originally a building of the fifth or even the fourth century, which had twice been reconstructed in early medieval times. It was, then, a Roman-Romanesque work. The Baptistry, which is part of the complex, was modeled on the circular Pantheon in Rome, in the sixth or seventh century, though it was altered and reconsecrated in 1059. So it too could be called a Roman work. The third building in the complex, the campanile or bell tower, was designed by Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337), more celebrated as a painter, who was made master of the Cathedral Works in 1334. His plans survive, but he died three years later, and the actual building, constructed in turn by Andrea Pisano, the sculptor, and Francesco Talenti, is rather different. It does not look Gothic. But