• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2881 0

two massive wheelhorses whose contributions were truly monumental. The outstanding example of this group was Michelozzo di Bartolommeo (1396–1472). He eventually became personal architect to Cosimo de’ Medici and a favorite among rich patrons because he was willing to tailor his designs to suit their views (he was in fact the son of a Florentine tailor). He had all-around talent and experience, working first in the mint, on coin design, then in Ghiberti’s shop, then in a collaborative sculptural practice with Donatello. Indeed, he designed and made bronze fittings, marble-and-precious-metal tabernacles and other church furniture, and elaborate tombs, all his life. When Brunelleschi died, he became master of the Cathedral Works—in effect head of the architectural profession in Florence—and set up the magnificent lantern that Brunelleschi had designed to cap his dome.

Michelozzo had no architectural theories. He loved the antique. He had no objection to medieval styles. A lot of his work was patching up or extending or rebuilding existing edifices, so he had to respect the past, whatever it was. He merged Gothic elements with the new Renaissance patterns. The monastery he built at Bosco ai Frati is essentially medieval. His façade for the town hall at Montepulciano is almost a replica of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. He remodeled the Medici’s beautiful villa at Trebbio with Renaissance touches, but it still looks like a castellated medieval fortress. There are medieval touches and irregularities in another villa he built at Cafaggiolo, though it is notable that building and garden are delightfully integrated in a way that would not have been possible in a fortified, moated medieval country residence, but that was to be characteristic of Italy from about 1440 on (and soon of all civilized Europe).

But Michelozzo was also an innovator. In the monastery of San Marco, Florence, he built the first Renaissance library—a long, elegant room entirely designed to house and display books. Here again he took the idea of the layout, with its aisles and recesses, from a medieval source, a typical fourteenth-century monastic dormitory, but with books resting where monks once slept. He built a chapel for the Medici at Santa Croce that is simple, neat, elegant and in the Renaissance vernacular, so that many other architects copied it, but it still had a bit of medieval-style vaulting. The town palace he built for the Medici in Florence, with its central courtyard on classical arches, its huge external cornices frowning onto the street, and its delightful garden and loggia, became one of the most popular buildings of the entire Renaissance, to judge by the number of times it was copied or looted for ideas. It was supplemented by another Medici country house, which was the first attempt to revive the Roman villa, with no pretense at fortification, and the garden as integral to the design as the walls. This too was replicated again and again. Michelozzo was also daring in taking ideas from the Temple of Minerva in Rome and using them for the tribune of the Annunziata in Florence, built as a circle with nine chapels leading off it.

In short, he combined old and new, as a good architect should, to please his clients. But he had no genius, as such, and his amiability and desire to please changed to irritability and moodiness as his busy career progressed. That is the life pattern of many architects, who have the difficult job of standing between exigent and changeable clients and tardy and often incompetent workmen, while the costs soar and bills are unpaid. He was very skilled at dealing with water, so that anything to do with moating, hydraulics and damp coursing was his delight. He had to fall back on this after 1460, when he lost his key job in Florence and ended up in remote Ragusa, supervising its sea-girt city walls—a sad declension. But most of the architects of the Renaissance saw a tailing off in their popularity as they aged and new men with fresh ideas pried their fingers from the raft of success.

An exception was Donato Bramante