Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [46]
Many of these wonderful decorative devices were eventually to find natural homes in Venice, where Michelangelo’s exuberance was the norm, though he never, alas, worked there. Venice came only slowly to the Renaissance, perhaps because it was by history and instinct a profoundly Gothic city (and, if Ruskin could have had his way, would have remained exclusively so). Indeed it is Italy’s only genuine Gothic city. But, by a curious paradox, the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which should have extinguished its prosperity, actually increased it, initially at least, and led Venice to expand inward, thus linking it more firmly to Renaissance developments at a time when it was anxious to spend money on its visual aggrandizement. Renaissance architecture was brought to the city in the 1470s from outside, chiefly by Pietro Lombardo and Mauro Codussi, who were responsible for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (Lombardo), San Michele in Isola (Codussi) and Santa Maria Formosa (Codussi), as well as many palaces, such as the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli and the Palazzo Loredan.
In 1527 the brilliant Florentine artist Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570) settled in Venice. He had begun life as a sculptor, but had formed contracts with the ramifying Sangallo family, who provided no less than five prominent Renaissance architects. Sansovino reconstructed the entire San Marco area, providing the mint or Zecca, the Loggetta at the bottom of the campanile, completing the piazza, clearing the piazzetta and building opposite the Doge’s Palace the beautiful St. Mark’s Library (Libreria Marciana). He also built one of the grandest Renaissance palaces, the Palazzo Dolfin (1538), which shows the influence of the treatise published the year before by Sebastiano Serlio, Venice’s contribution to architectural theory. By this point, architects were thriving in the city. They included Antonio Scarpagnino, who built the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fabbriche Vecchie and the Palazzo dei Dieci Savi, and Michele Sanmicheli, responsible for the magnificent Palazzo Grimani as well as the Palazzo Corner at San Polo. The contract to design the new Rialto Bridge was won by Antonio da Ponte (1588), in competition not only with Sansovino but with a proposal made earlier by Andrea Palladio (1518–1580).
Palladio (originally Andrea di Pietro della Gondola) ranks as Venice’s greatest architect, indeed one of the greatest in Italian history. But he actually came from Padua, where he was trained as a stonemason. At the age of sixteen he broke his contract and went to Vicenza, where he worked on decorative sculptures and formed contacts with the local rich—he was, says his first biographer, Paolo Gualdo, “an extremely social man.” He did villa work for the poet Giangiorgio Trissino, who gave him the name “Palladio,” the angelic messenger in the epic he was writing, and he also met the Paduan theorist Alvise Cornaro, whose palace had an odeon and a loggia designed by Giovanni Maria Falconetto, among the earliest Renaissance buildings in the area (1524–30). Trissino took him to Rome (1541) to study antiquities and see what was being built there, and he returned to the city on similar expeditions on four more occasions. Though not formally educated, then, Palladio was the scholar type of architect, who knew all the treatises available and helped to translate Vitruvius, providing beautiful illustrations. Indeed, his drawings are central to his work.
Palladio believed in drama; he believed in settings. He placed his buildings in their surroundings in his mind’s eye before he set to work designing them, so that they all have a geographical and spatial context. He was an architect who not only drew but who painted his buildings into the scene. The mind