Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [74]
The rise of the Habsburgs was also a prime factor in the spread of the Renaissance. Charles V, ruler of Austria and the Netherlands, emperor of Germany and king of Spain and its dependencies, was something approaching a world ruler and an art patron on a magnificent scale. To him, art had no frontiers, Europe was a cultural unity, and artists of all kinds were recruited wherever they lived, and sped at his bidding. In the heart of the old Moorish palace of Granada, acquired by Spain in 1492 when the Moors were expelled, he set the stamp of the Italian Renaissance by erecting an incongruous classical building, a columned circle within a square, to show he was master. And, later, in the Palace of the Escorial outside Madrid, he created an enormous complex in which ideas imported from Renaissance Italy were transmuted into dramatic Spanish forms.
Italian ideas penetrated central and eastern Europe, in some cases well before the sixteenth century. It was in Hungary, for instance, that buildings in the style of the Renaissance made their first appearance outside Italy. King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (reigned 1458–90) was a warrior and conqueror and an enthusiast for the antique. He looked back to the Roman Empire for inspiration and to Italians to serve him in re-creating some of its aspects. In 1467 he imported Rodolfo Fioravanti, known as “Aristotle,” who had worked on the Vatican obelisk with Alberti and was “skilled in moving heavy objects.” He was an engineer and military architect, and he built a bridge in Buda, the Hungarian capital. Corvinus got Pollaiuolo to design the drapes for his throne room, Caradosso to produce gold altarpieces for the cathedral at Esztergom, and Filippo Lippi to supply two beautiful panels, according to Vasari. Many Italian artist-craftsmen were active in Hungary in the years after Corvinus’s death. Thus the Bakócz Chapel at Esztergom Cathedral (built from 1506) is one of the most dazzling examples of High Renaissance architecture outside Italy.
The expatriate Italian artists, who were immensely adaptable, proved able to work successfully in alien vernaculars, adapting them to Renaissance models. Thus Fioravanti went on from Buda to Russia in 1474, and began work on the Dormition Cathedral inside the Kremlin. Earlier efforts by local craftsmen to erect this building had failed. Fioravanti produced a mason’s level, a compass and drawing tools, and by superior science, as well as art—he used brick and cement instead of sand and gravel for wall filling, as well as modern stonecutting techniques and hoisting machines—he had completed the building by 1479. A generation later, another Italian, Alessio Novi, built the church of St. Michael the Archangel, also within the Kremlin walls (1505–9). The Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland likewise imported Italians, and had local artists trained in the Renaissance manner. Thus in the cathedral of Wawel Castle in Kraków, the splendid Renaissance tomb of Jan Olbracht (1502–5) is the joint work of Francesco Fiorentino and Stanislas Stoss, and the grand courtyard of the castle, built a little later, is also by Francesco working with a local “Master Benedikt.” These are only some of many examples of the early penetration by the