Italian Renaissance architecture
The architecture of the Renaissance is that phase of European architecture, and Italian in particular, which developed at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Florence, mainly thanks to the work of some artists and intellectuals such as Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti.
Among the political and cultural factors that influenced this new direction of the arts there were undoubtedly the affirmation of the lordships and the development of Humanism, with the consequent antiquarian and philological taste, which in architecture translates into the study of the beautiful forms of buildings ancient, that is, Romans.
Although the movement is temporally well defined, inside it is possible to identify different stylistic moments, which critics identify in the “early Renaissance”, belonging to the fifteenth century, in the “Classical Renaissance” and in Mannerism, the latter both coinciding with the sixteenth century. If the early Renaissance marks a turning point with respect to the Gothic architecture, the second phases are placed in continuity with the previous one, though enriched by numerous volumetric and decorative motifs.
Features of Renaissance architecture
The term Renaissance was used already by the treatises of the time to highlight the rediscovery of Roman architecture, which in the fifteenth century survived several vestiges. Main index of this rediscovery was the resumption of the classical orders, the use of elementary geometric forms for the definition of the plants, the search for orthogonal and symmetrical articulations, as well as the use of the harmonic proportion in the single parts of the building.
The use of vaults on a square plan (for example in the Spedale degli Innocenti) and barrel vaults (as in the covering of the Sant’Andrea basilica in Mantua by Leon Battista Alberti) was privileged, without the use of ribs and of the Gothic buttresses. However, the sensitivity of the Renaissance artists not only exhausted in the rediscovery of Roman architecture: in fact, the first Tuscan architects embraced the Roman style referring essentially to the Romanesque early Renaissance, seen for example in the clear forms of the Baptistery of San Giovanni andBasilica of San Miniato al Monte, whose classical legacy had in some way influenced the Florentine gothic style.
Moreover, the art historian Bruno Zevi defined the Renaissance as a mathematical reflection on the Romanesque and Gothic metrics, highlighting the research by architects of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of a spatial metric based on elementary mathematical relationships. In other words, the great conquest of the Renaissance, compared to the past, was that of having created in the interior spaces what the ancient Greeks had created for the exterior of their temples, giving life to environments governed by immediately perceptible laws and easily measurable by the observer.
The study of perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi certainly played a decisive role in this; Brunelleschi introduced a totalizing interior vision, elevating the perspective to a global spatial structure.
The palace and the villa
The new buildings built around the middle of the fifteenth century had to reconcile the needs of life of the inhabitants to the renewal of the urban face of the city, approaching, at the same time, the prototypes of antiquity. However, unlike some temples, in the fifteenth century no ancient palace had survived intact, so that the knowledge of the plans was opposed by the lack of models related to the articulation of the facades. Not even Vitruvius and the other authors of the Roman period had given precise indications, concentrating their attentions above all on the layout in the plan and not on the raised.
The introduction of the courtyard at the center of the building, derived from the planimetric models of the past, therefore became the main element characterizing the new old-fashioned layout. This type included a building complex closed around a courtyard, with small openings on the ground floor and regular windows, larger in size, in the upper registers.
The parietal lining, in the early Renaissance, consists of ashlar and semi-pilasters; for example, in the first case, linked to the tradition of Palazzo Vecchio and Bargello, is the Palazzo Medici Riccardi of Michelozzo, while the second is attributable to the prospect of Palazzo Rucellai, designed by Leon Battista Alberti.
A particular case is represented by the Venetian palaces, whose construction was first and foremost conditioned by the scarce surface of the available lots. This led to the formation of single-block buildings without an open central courtyard. The palaces were influenced by the late-Gothic model of Palazzo Ducale and were equipped with elegant fretworked facades, starting with Ca ‘d’Oro, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, until arriving at the later Corner Spinelli and Vendramin Calergi buildings.
In Rome Bramante (Palazzo Caprini) and Raffaello proposed new models in which they were combined ashlar on the ground floor and scanning the façade with orders in relief. Palazzo Farnese in Rome, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Michelangelo, was a further evolution, which will give life to a very durable model, characterized by the refusal of both the ashlar and the orders in favor of a smooth façade crossed by horizontal walls (marcapiano, marcadavanzali), on which stands newsstand windows, with timpanitriangular and curvilinear alternates, which on the ground floor become kneeling. In the full Renaissance, influenced by Vitruvius, more attention was paid to symmetry, as well as to the façades and the internal courtyard, also to the planimetric configuration, as in the case of Palazzo Valmarana, built by Andrea Palladio around 1565.
In the country residences, the centralization of the house became a fundamental principle. A first example is the Villa medicea of Poggio a Caiano, built on a project by Giuliano da Sangallo towards the end of the fifteenth century. Here, the layout of the interior rooms, distributed crosswise around a central hall, follows basically what was illustrated by Leon Battista Alberti in the treatise De re aedificatoria, in the tome dedicated to “stately homes”. Another peculiarity of the villa is the insertion of a classical pediment on the façade, which anticipates the Palladian solutions of the following century.
In fact, the 16th century scene is dominated by the villas that Palladio created in Veneto; among these, an intense fortune had the project of the so-called Rotonda (villa Almerico Capra), which was imitated by several artists belonging to the current of international Palladianism.
The church
The predilection for the elementary geometric forms and for the harmony between the parts led to the construction of numerous central-plan churches. Between 1420 and 1436, Filippo Brunelleschi raised the dome of the Florentine cathedral, the largest central-floor organism from the Pantheon era; to the same architect are several centralized buildings, such as the Old Sacristy, the Cappella dei Pazzi and the Rotonda di Santa Maria degli Angeli. In this trail, for example, the basilica of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato, diGiuliano da Sangallo, and some theoretical projects by Leonardo da Vinci.
The round temple of Bramante in the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome expresses a new concept in the typology of complexes with a central plan, showing a greater derivation from the models of antiquity. Also in Bramante is the original design for the basilica of San Pietro in Vaticano, an imposing complex with a Greek cross, dominated in the middle by a colossal hemispherical dome. From it, and from his version of Michelangelo descended for example Santa Maria di Carignano in Genoa of Galeazzo Alessi, the Gesù Nuovo in Naplesand the church of the Escorial Monastery in Madrid.
The longitudinal plant was not set aside. In the first half of the fifteenth century, Brunelleschi designed the Florentine churches of San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, using, in both cases, a Latin cross scheme. The development of the Basilica of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, of Leon Battista Alberti, and of the Venetian churches of the Redeemer and of San Giorgio Maggiore, by Andrea Palladio, is also longitudinal. Instead, in Venice the ecclesiastical architecture was conditioned by the forms of the basilica of San Marco: for example, the longitudinal plan ofSan Salvador is composed of three independent bays covered by four minor domes, according to a pattern that can be traced back to Byzantine models.
The facades rediscover the motifs of antiquity, such as pronaos, pediments and triumphal arches. Among the first examples are the facades of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome and Santa Maria Novella, the latter always designed by Alberti. Otherwise, the Palladio raised some elevations merging together two facades derived from the classical temples, placed respectively to close the central nave and before the side ones.
The library
The solution with three naves with vault, adopted for the Malatestiana of Cesena and that of San Marco in Florence, became a model for the subsequent construction of renowned Italian monastic libraries; to name a few, these are the libraries of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (1469), of San Domenico in Perugia (1474) and of the Benedictine monastery of San Giovanni in Parma (1523). The success of this form continued until the moment when the evolution of the renaissance canons imposed, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, a solution that privileged the unity of space and the uniform diffusion of enlightenment, with consequent renunciation of the distribution in aisles (Laurentian Library of Michelangelo in Florence).
The city
In the medieval period the town planning had a very pragmatic approach; instead, in the Renaissance it assumes a scientific-theoretical character, striving to unite human needs, defensive ones (see the voice on modern fortifications), aesthetics, symbology and noble centralism.
From the fifteenth century, in Italy and gradually throughout Europe were designed numerous fortified cities with regular plants and triangular bastions. The stellar plant, derived from the centralized structures of the Renaissance, is present in the design of Sforzinda, the ideal city described by Filarete in his treatise on architecture. The basic figure is a star with eight points inscribed in a moatcircular; from the center of the inhabited area there are sixteen streets, joined by an intermediate ring road, while the main square is still linked to the medieval tradition, with the castle and the church facing each other in a rectangular space.
In 1480, Francesco di Giorgio Martini presented a design for an ideal city placed symmetrically around a rectilinear channel; the complex is due to an elongated octagon, with two massive bastions used to defend the town. In each part of the city there is a rectangular square, closed on each side and without any direct view of the river. Few cities fortified according to the model sforzindo were built in a strict sense (star shape etc.): among these it is worth mentioning the city of Palmanova, of the late sixteenth century.
A fusion between the utopian Renaissance vision and a more functional scheme is recorded in Amsterdam only at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, around the old city, a series of polygonal canals were built, around which arose narrow houses and warehouses, protected from a fortified wall about eight kilometers long.
The artists and the paradigmatic works
The first Renaissance
Filippo Brunelleschi and linear architecture
The turning point, which marks the transition from Gothic to Renaissance architecture, coincides with the construction of the dome of the Cathedral of Florence. Yet the work can not be considered truly Renaissance, since at the basis of its conception are present a large part of those constructive principles inherited from the previous century.
The octagonal dome had to complete the Florentine cathedral, whose reconstruction began in 1296 under Arnolfo di Cambio; however, the impossibility of having sturdy ribs and wooden beams capable of supporting the enormous weight of the vault during the construction phase, prevented the completion of the work for a long time.
Filippo Brunelleschi, who had practiced as a goldsmith and worked as a sculptor, began to take an interest in the question as early as 1404, when he was first called to reflect on the construction of the cathedral, but it was only in 1417 that he devoted much of his studies to solve the problem. The analysis of Roman architecture and the direct knowledge of Gothic construction techniques allowed Brunelleschi to complete, between 1420 and 1436, the largest masonry dome ever built.
The dome structure is constituted by a series of ribs ogive vertical, transversely joined by eight horizontal ribs; in order to lighten the weight of the masonry, the entire organism is formed by two overlapping caps, which were executed horizontally, circle after circle, according to a technique taken from the observation of Roman ruins.
In 1446 work began on the lantern, for which Brunelleschi had won a competition ten years earlier. The work, completed after the architect’s death, is in some way inspired by that of the nearby Baptistery of San Giovanni, but has a decidedly more classical appearance: the ribs of the dome are connected to the octagonal body of the tower by means of a sort of flying buttresses surmounted by scrolls. Brunelleschi also owes the small exedras built between 1439 and 1445 at the base of the drum.
The first fully Renaissance opera is however the Spedale degli Innocenti of Florence, designed by Brunelleschi himself and begun in 1419. The façade, which vaguely resembles that of the Spedale di Sant’Antonio of Lastra a Signa, is composed of a light colonnade on the lower level, with Corinthian columns supporting, with rounded arches, the upper floor, where they open windows surmounted by gablesmolded. The need to ensure adequate lighting of the rooms on the ground floor resulted in the reduction of the supporting structures of the loggia, according to a span module based on the cube and the use of vaults. If the tympanums of the upper register show a derivation from the Roman repertoire (but also from the Baptistery of San Giovanni), the slender proportions of the columns and arches are very distant from those of the Colosseum, although distinctly different from the gothic arches; their origins can be traced back to the Renaissance models of San Miniato al Monte, the Baptistery of San Giovanni itself or the church of the Santi Apostoli, which, in the middle of the Middle Ages, had already accepted some characters attributable to the Roman era.
The scheme adopted in the portico of the Spedale degli Innocenti is also repeated along the aisles of the Florentine basilica of San Lorenzo, performed under the direction of Brunelleschi at the same time as the annexed Old Sacristy. The San Lorenzo plant derives from the medieval models of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella; it is a Latin cross, with three naves and shallow side chapels, ending in a square choir flanked by other chapels arranged according to Gothic use. Once again, the colonnades of the naves support a theory of vaults, which, being devoid of ribs on the diagonals, enhance the lightness of the supporting structure and improve the perspective view of the whole.
Directly connected to San Lorenzo is the Basilica of Santo Spirito, designed by Brunelleschi between 1428 and 1432. Here the plant is still a Latin cross, but classicism, based on a strict relationship between the parts, becomes more advanced. The side chapels take on a semicircular shape and extend uniformly until the church choir is closed, thus erasing every gothic trace. The sinuous internal structure should have been shown also on the outside, but after the architect’s death, it was hidden inside rectilinear walls.
An equally strong link exists between the Old Sacristy and the Pazzi Chapel, two central-plan systems that Brunelleschi conceived before dedicating himself to Santa Maria degli Angeli (incomplete). The Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo consists of a cubic basin, covered by a hemispherical dome and flanked by a sort of choir that takes the form, on a smaller scale, of the main space. A similar conformation can be found in the Pazzi Chapel, near Santa Croce, where the plant figure is however a rectangle. Despite this, the internal environment is led back to the square by the formation of deep side arches on which the dome is set on plumes. In both cases, the decorations are entrusted to elements in pietra serena, placed chromatically in contrast with the whiteness of the surfaces, in a style that refuses any contamination with painting and sculpture (except for the contribution of the glazed terracotta by Luca della Robbia) and that criticism has defined as “linear”.
The Rotonda di Santa Maria degli Angeli, begun in 1434 and left unfinished in 1437, should have been the first truly central building of the 15th century. Derived directly from the temple of Minerva Medica, presents an octagonal plan with radial chapels. The idea is completely new compared to the Old Sacristy and the Pazzi Chapel: while the two oldest works were designed in terms of flat surfaces related to each other, without any plastic play, Santa Maria degli Angeli was conceived as a solid mass excavated inside of.
Leon Battista Alberti
L ‘ Alberti, almost thirty years younger than Filippo Brunelleschi, was born in Genoa from a Florentine family in exile; a humanist and a profound connoisseur of Latin, he soon went to Florence, where he met the most important artists of the early Renaissance, such as Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio, so as to be able to write a treatise on painting. He studied Vitruvius and the ancient Roman ruins; this knowledge led him to begin, in 1443, his own treatise on architecture: the De re aedificatoria. It is not surprising then that the prospectus ofPalazzo Rucellai springs from the observation of the Colosseum, with three orders of semi- pilasters leaning against the wall that reproduce the succession of classical orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, in the Roman case). In reality, the pilasters on the ground floor are neither Doric nor Tuscan, while those on the upper levels can be traced back to the Corinthian period.
In the same period he worked on the reconstruction of the church of San Francesco, in Rimini, known as Tempio Malatestiano. Inspired by the arches of Constantine in Rome and Augustus in Rimini, Alberti applied the theme of the triumphal arch to the facade. The project was not executed entirely; the church should have been crowned by a large dome, not executed, and the works were interrupted when the upper part of the façade had just been rough-hewn. In the connection between the nave and the lower ones, Alberti would have applied two volutes, in a solution not far from the one the architect himself used for the completion of the facade of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence. Despite the complex construction events, Alberti’s prospect for the Tempio Malatestiano profoundly influenced Mauro Codussi (churches of San Zaccaria and San Michele in Isola, in Venice), which was among the protagonists of the Venetian Renaissance.
From 1460 Alberti took care of the construction of two Mantuan churches: San Sebastiano and Sant’Andrea. In the first he introduced a Greek cross, taken from the early Christian tradition and some Roman tombs; however, the building was not completed according to the Albertian design and the current façade is deeply altered. The building site of Sant’Andrea assumed greater importance, whose main façade was shielded with a triumphal arch surmounted by a pediment. The interior loses all references to the architecture of Brunelleschi and the early Christian one: the space is articulated by powerful side arches, where the chapels are located,covered barrel vault, in a configuration similar to those proposed in the spa buildings and the Roman basilicas.
The influence of Alberti in the field of civil architecture is evident in the buildings of Pienza, where Pope Pius II (born Enea Silvio Piccolomini) started, under the direction of Bernardo Rossellino, one of the first architectural and urban reorganizations of the history of the Renaissance (see the section Urban planning of Pienza). At the center of the inhabited area there is a trapezoidal square dominated on the main side by the cathedral (still Gothic); the Palazzo Piccolomini rises to its right, while on the other sides are the Palazzo Vescovile and the Town Hall. The Palazzo Piccolomini follows the model of the aforementioned Palazzo Rucellai, but with some differences, above all on the back, where a loggia on three orders opened on the garden and on the boundless landscape of the Tuscan hills was built according to the same pontiff. The internal court complies with the scheme adopted by Michelozzo in his Palazzo Medici, thus presenting windows too close to the corners.
The second half of the fifteenth century
A further evolution of the angular conflict can be observed in the Ducal Palace of Urbino, whose author was probably Luciano Laurana; here, the sides of the courtyard (1465 – 1479 circa) rest on “L” pillars, flanked by semi-columns from which the arches of the portico depart. Instead, the main front of the complex consists of two circular towers and a series of overlapping loggias.
We find this motif in the arch that Alfonso of Aragon wanted to erect on the facade of the Mastio Angioino in Naples. The work, still attributed to Laurana, had a notable influence on the Neapolitan architecture of the time, so much so that Giuliano da Maiano designed the Porta Capuana again using the theme of the triumphal arch. In the city of Naples, the Palazzo Como is still attributed to Giuliano, and above all the disappearance of Villa di Poggioreale, whose planimetric configuration, based on a square with a tower on each corner, was a paradigm for numerous villas, not only in Italy.
Another important figure of the last decades of the fifteenth century was Francesco di Giorgio Martini, who was inspired by Alberti and Vitruvio in drafting his treatise on military architecture and engineering. Among the few buildings attributed to him, the church of Santa Maria del Calcinaio, near Cortona, commissioned in 1484, deserves to be mentioned. It is characterized by a perfect correspondence between the inside and the outside; moreover, the Latin cross plan is a direct application of the anthropomorphic proportions exhibited by Francesco di Giorgio in his treatise.
The classical Renaissance
From Bramante to Michelangelo
If the early Renaissance was fundamentally Tuscan, the classical Renaissance became essentially Roman thanks to the work of Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo.
Among them the oldest was Bramante, who, before moving to Rome, had formed as a painter and had worked in Milan. Lombard architecture, until the mid- fifteenth century, was still influenced by the Gothic style, but the arrival of artists such as Michelozzo, Filarete and Leonardo da Vinci had led to a gradual turning point. For example, between 1461 and 1470, Filarete had carried out the project of the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan, a vast building with regular courtyards, in which there were still some medieval details; similar judgments can be formulated for some works ofGiovanni Antonio Amadeo, or the Colleoni Chapel of Bergamo and the Certosa di Pavia, where the architect had worked towards the end of the fifteenth century.
Bramante had come to Milan around 1477, dedicating himself therefore to the choir of Santa Maria near San Satiro (which shows him full master of the fifteenth-century perspectival language) and raising the Tribuna di Santa Maria delle Grazie (1492). The latter has a central plan and re-proposes, in different scale, the motifs of the Old Sacristy by Filippo Brunelleschi; however, the excessive development in height and the decorative exuberance of Lombard taste, the latter presumably imputable to the workers who carried out the works after the architect’s departure for Rome, contrasted with the rationality of the Brunelleschi’s system.
When Bramante moved to Rome, in 1499, his style, influenced by the ancient vestiges of the city, changed radically, assuming a more austere character, found in the early works, such as the Cloister of Santa Maria della Pace and the Tempietto di San Pietro in Montorio. The cloister, although deriving from the Milanese church of Sant’Ambrogio, presents, on the ground floor, pilasters with pilasters and round arches that refer to the Teatro di Marcello, while on the upper floor there is an architraved loggia supported by agile Ionic columns. Instead, the Temple of San Pietro in Montorio, built in 1502, is the “first monumumento of the High Renaissance in contrast to the early Renaissance, and is a true monument, ie a plastic realization that strictly architectural.” It was built in the place where, according to tradition, St. Peter had been crucified; the small building was therefore conceived as a sort of early Christian martyrium and designed on the model of the peripteri templeswith central plan of antiquity. The original design, not completed, provided for the formation of a circular porticoed courtyard, all around the temple, with a series of niches and chapels created along the perimeter of the colonnade.
These models include the churches of Sant’Eligio degli Orefici in Rome, San Biagio in Montepulciano and Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi. The first, to which the name Raphael is often connected, was probably begun by Bramante in 1509 with the help of the first, given the similarity of the subject with the School of Athens. Closely related to San Pietro is the church of San Biagio, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder and raised from 1518. Two bell towers would have had to rise on the sides of the facade, but only the first was completed and the second was only started. Also in this case the plant is a Greek cross, slightly elongated near the apse. Even more simple is the setting of the Temple of Consolation, whose plan is very similar to a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci; the building was built under the direction of Cola da Caprarola, but the paternity of the project was attributed, not without uncertainty, to Bramante. But the influence of the San Pietro Bramantesco can also be perceived in minor organisms, such as the Chigi Chapel, located in the Roman church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Designed by Raphael, it represents a small variant of the central nucleus of the Vatican basilica.
A mediation between the centralized and the longitudinal schemes appears in the drawing of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger for the completion of the Vatican basilica. Sangallo, appointed by Pope Paul III as the chief architect of the factory, grafted, in front of a centralized system, a forepart flanked by two very tall bell towers that framed the double- drum dome. The drawing, translated into a grandiose wooden model (1539), was not materialized. In 1546 Michelangelo Buonarroti took over the management of the works and, wanting to emphasize more the impact of the dome, he returned to the central plan, canceling however the perfect symmetry studied by Bramante. According to the presumed reconstruction of his project by Étienne Dupérac in a series of engravings, Michelangelo conceived a cross centered on a square ambulatory, thus simplifying the conception of the internal space; in this way the fulcrum of the new project would have been the dome, inspired in the conception of the double cap to that designed by Filippo Brunelleschi for the Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Nevertheless, the events related to the construction of the basilica found a solution only in the seventeenth century, in the Baroque era, when Carlo Madernohe changed the Michelangelesque plant into a longitudinal space.
Andrea Palladio
Some architectures by Andrea Palladio end the sixteenth century classicism. Born in Padua in 1508, Palladio became the most important designer of the Republic of Venice, where he built villas, palaces and churches in a highly personal style, based on the use of a rich classical repertoire that obscured Roman authority in the architectural field. He published the treatise The four books of architecture (1570) and its factories inspired buildings even in the following centuries, up to the nineteenth century (Palladianism).
Of its vast production it is useful to remember first of all the restoration of the Palazzo della Ragione of Vicenza, today known as the Basilica Palladiana. The building had been completed in 1460 and in 1494 an external portico had been added, similar to that of the Palazzo della Ragione of Padua. Following the partial collapse of the south-west side, the most important architects of the region were consulted for its restoration, until the project of Andrea Palladio was finally approved in 1546, which was limited to the remaking of the external loggia, leaving unchanged the pre-existing core. The solution proposed by Palladio, implemented by the1549, is a structure able to take into account the necessary alignments with the original openings and gaps; the system is based on two orders of serliane, composed of constant-light arches flanked by rectangular side openings of variable width and therefore able to absorb the differences in width of the bays, inherited from previous work sites.
Near the Basilica Vicentina is another work that Palladio raised in the same city in 1550: the Palazzo Chiericati. The façade is shielded by two overlapping colonnades, connected to the building by means of round-shaped side arches; in the original conception of the building complex, the central part of the upper loggia should have been empty, but in the building it was closed with a thin membrane, leaving only the voids for the gable windows. The Palladian invention is in the presence of a sort of forepart, obtained by doubling, in a transverse and longitudinal direction, the lateral columns of the central part.
As for the villas, the production of the Venetian architect originates from a residence designed by its patron, Gian Giorgio Trissino. Analyzing the numerous country residences designed by Palladio, the historian Ackermann has identified three types of villas: those without porticoes and unadorned, dating back to the early years (for example the villas Pojana, Forni Cerato and Godi); those with a two-storey high block, adorned with a two-part portico enclosed by a pediment (like the Pisani and Cornaro villas); finally, those consisting of a central building surrounded by wings for agricultural purposes (such as the Barbaro villas, Badoer and Emo).
Certainly, regardless of the classification, the most significant Palladian achievement is the Villa Almerico Capra, built in Vicenza in the second half of the sixteenth century. It is a building with a square plan, perfectly symmetrical and inscribed in a circle. It was among the first profane constructions of the modern era to have as its front a front of a classical temple; in fact, each of the four elevations is equipped with a pronaos with an exastyle loggia on a high podium, so as to make the villa assume the shape of a Greek cross.
In the last years of his life Palladio dedicated himself to the design of two large Venetian churches: the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Church of the Redeemer. To these works are added the design for the facade of San Francesco della Vigna and the church, then extensively remodeled, of the Zitelle. The characteristics of these religious buildings are the so-called “double temple” facades, which offer a solution to the double problem of adapting an ancient basilica to a place of Christian worship and connecting the side aisles to the higher central one. As previously noted, in the early Renaissance some solutions were indicated byLeon Battista Alberti in the basilicas of Sant’Andrea and Santa Maria Novella. Later, in the project of Santa Maria near San Satiro, Bramante proposed to merge the aisles by means of two tympanums, according to a scheme that is still very different from that designed by Palladio; the latter carried out a greater fusion between the parts, placing the front of a first classical temple in front of the central nave and a second temple, of a lower height, in front of the side aisles. This pattern is particularly evident in the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and San Francesco della Vigna (1562); instead, in the Redeemer the high height of the central nave and the presence of buttresses along the sides determined the presence of an attic on the top of the façade.
Source from Wikipedia