Early Renaissance Architecture in Italy: from Alberti to Bramante

Early Renaissance Architecture in Italy: from Albertito Bramante

WhenLeon Battista Alberti completed histreatise about architecture around 1452, his initial study of texts andmonuments of Antiquity was based on mathematics and geometry as a reflection ofnature, with a belief that architecture was a part of a man's civil duty.

This attitude wouldcondition the architectural principles of the early Renaissance and architectsdid not apply themselves to textual imitations of individual antique monuments.In Florence, they preferred to accept and articulate the rational “system” ofBrunelleschi, either transforming it, like Alberti, or breaking with it in a return to tradition, likeMichelozzo. In north and south Italy, the battle between innovation and resistancewas increasing in strength and substance because it not only encompassedimmediate questions of decorative language (antique forms and architectural orders) but also the problems ofconceiving and constructing an architecture that could replace the gothicstructural membering with the continuous masonry of the Antiquity. At first,the new decoration was frequently adapted to the existing architectural system,and only later did it find a partner in the different spatial and structuralconceptions that descended from Florentine exempla. The tendency to see normsand models in antique architecture, which must be rigidly replicated, firstaffirmed itself at the beginning of the XVI century in Rome.

Through some of the most celebrated examples of the early Renaissance architecture and the most important statements of the early Renaissance theories, the course will examine problems of the architectural spaces, technology and forms in the XV century in Italy, from Leon Battista Alberti’s to Francesco di Giorgio’s and Bramante’s proposals.