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ARCHITECTURE

ARCHITECTURE. The monumental inventions of early modern European architecture still mark the modern built environment. Vast boulevards and formal gardens focusing on public buildings denote the capital city everywhere. Domes dominate the skyline in Rome, London, and Washington. Uniform palaces and house facades define the squares of Paris and London, the canals of Amsterdam and St. Petersburg. Churches modeled on imperial Roman baths and basilicas seem to reach outwards, with spectacular baroque facades and multiple columns extending into public space, like the twin columns (inspired by Trajan's Column in Rome) of Vienna's Karlskirche (Fischer von Erlach, 1715–1738), or the colonnades that define the piazza of St. Peter's in Rome (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1656–1667). The countryside, too, is transformed by villas and great houses in their landscaped grounds, and in the most famous case, Versailles (Louis Levau and J. H. Mansart, 1668–1689), the out-of-town retreat became the capital of an absolute monarch.

The language of all these buildings is classical, using the columns, arches, cornices, vaults, and triangular pediments still visible in the ruins of ancient Rome, integrating them according to the ancient treatise of Vitruvius, and in some cases directly imitating the few ancient buildings that survived, such as the Pantheon and the Colosseum. But this language was transformed in several ways, going beyond the accomplishments of the Renaissance. In its baroque form, space becomes more complex, and surfaces more agitated and ornate; straight moldings and flat walls curve and break apart, columns spiral, circles turn into ovals, ceilings dissolve into vast trompe l'oeil paintings that seem open to heaven, and solid ornament imitates the movement of angels or the sudden burst of light. Secular buildings undergo the same transformation, especially in their ceremonial staircases and uniform suites of reception rooms that create the impression of infinite power. The best of these designs is orderly and monumental rather than capricious or excessive, yet periodically architects reacted against the baroque, instigating a calmer and more rational classicism. A well-known example is Palladianism, a revival of the late Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) that came to dominate English country house design in the eighteenth century in reaction to the ornate formality of Versailles and its English baroque rival, John Vanbrugh's Blenheim (1705–1716).

Individual buildings and urban spaces conveyed a powerful message of confidence and control through new forms and crystalline geometry even when they were not very large. Thus Francesco Borromini's (1599–1667) church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome (1634–1667), though only the size of one of the piers of St. Peter's, created a stir among visitors and critics who praised its curved facade and oval dome—or execrated them in equal measure. Sant' Ivo (1642–1660), Borromini's Star of David–shaped chapel for the University of Rome, dazzled with its breathless spiral tower that altered the role of the adjacent Pantheon's dome. Borromini's fastidiousness for building materials and moldings was matched by his French contemporary François Mansart, but the latter's trademark at country houses such as Château Maisons near Paris (1642) and the Orleans wing of the royal palace at Blois (1635) was a limpid and austere classicism. Pietro da Cortona's (1596–1669) facade for Santa Maria della Pace (1656–1659) in Rome applied theatricality to urban design, placing a lavishly columned and curved portico in a small space that caught unprepared visitors by surprise. Paris, Turin, London, and Bath were endowed with geometrical open spaces framed with uniform porticoes and houses, to whose shapes the English word "square" fails to do justice: rather, they were triangular (Place Dauphine), circular (Place des Victoires, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 1685; the Circus, John Wood, 1754), rectangular (Piazza San Carlo, Carlo di Castellamonte, 1620), hexagonal (Place Vendôme, Mansart, 1698), and elliptical (Royal Crescent, John Wood, Jr., 1767–1777). Countering these residential "squares" were the public spaces of Rome, such as Piazza Navona (Four Rivers fountain by Bernini, 1647–1651), the Spanish Steps (Francesco de Sanctis, 1723–1726), and the Trevi fountain (Nicola Salvi, 1762), each animated by generous displays of statuary, water, terraces, and views. This festive quality of the best early modern urban design was enhanced with additional ornaments, including innumerable triumphal arches, imprinting the city with commemorative meaning.

THE ARCHITECTURAL CITY

The innovations of the Italian Renaissance provided an ample foundation for the developments in architecture of the late sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. This inheritance was enhanced by the innovations of military defense, altered social and political organizations, and new forms of organized religion. Yet despite significant research in church form and extensive construction of places of worship, the period is marked by a secularization of architecture and urban space.

The seventeenth century was an urban century, whose great cities—defined by the size of the population (according to Giovanni Botero) and the magnificence of their rulers—constituted its new wealth. A large population can be attained through prosperity and security, and the architecture of the early modern era defined the prosperity of the social order and ensured its safety in the face of enemies. Distinguished buildings, significant historical inheritance, artistic collections, and public safety attracted visitors to the great city. Thus consumerism and tourism developed in tandem with the early modern city and its architectural expression.

This was accompanied by the widespread acceptance and application of the revived classical style of architecture in places outside the Italian peninsula—in France, England, the Netherlands, the Germanic states, Sweden, Russia, and the British colonies in the Americas. A specifically Counter-Reformation style of classical architecture, emphasizing massive, ornate spaces and animated forms that propagate the faith by captivating the audience, was disseminated in the colonial towns of Spanish and Portuguese settlers, and in the missionary convents of religious orders in Central and South America, on the western coast of Africa, and on the Indian subcontinent.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, architecture became an instrument of state control and organization, not only signifying the cultural advantages of its sponsors (as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) but also assuming a defining role in the identity of nascent national states. Thus secularized, classicized, and politicized, architecture transformed the early modern city. The architectural product continued to be defined through three types of design—church, palace, and public square—but each underwent extensive refinement and redefinition. We have cathedrals, parish churches, and monastic churches as before, though now competing for attention through the offer of urban amenities such as colonnades, fountains, and elaborately decorated facades, transformed by the worldly social agenda of the Counter-Reformation. The palace building type came to encompass not only aristocratic town residences (called hôtels in France) and the communal homes of religious orders, but also the state agencies of control, management, and reform (such as prisons, almshouses, hospitals, and city halls). The open spaces of the city surrounded by this evolving set of buildings (housing new functions and organized into streets and squares more or less geometrically defined and ordered) became the principal sites of urban meaning. The definition of urban architecture was ultimately achieved through the enclosure of a city within a fortification belt (walls, bastions, outworks, and gateways) that effectively created the separation between town and country and allowed each to develop firm boundaries.

This defining separation was the major contribution of military urbanism. Other military-influenced architectural features were the triumphal arch, the pentagonal citadel, the wide, uniformly framed straight boulevard, and the equestrian statue of the victorious ruler placed at the center of squares used for parades and festivities. The pacification brought about by military architecture encouraged the development of the rural palace or agrarian villa. Palladio's urbane villas (such as the Rotonda outside Vicenza, 1566–1569, and the Villa Barbaro at Maser, 1554–1558) offered a residential type that resonates throughout early modern architecture. Modeled on the French royal château, the palaces at Blenheim, Tsarskoe Selo (Bartolomeo Rastrelli, 1749–1756), and Schönbrunn (Fischer von Erlach, 1696–1711) are among the most prominent examples of the "Versailles syndrome" that swept through eighteenth-century Europe.

This new understanding of architecture, urbane even in its country houses, was promoted through the burgeoning medium of print: illustrated books, single sheets, and specialized studies turned the newly defined city and its buildings into a subject of study, and were collected by all those with pretensions to learning: for the first time in the history of Western civilization, the achievements of architects could be appreciated, studied, and imitated without leaving home. Nonetheless, this graphic documentation stimulated travel in the pursuit of architectural education, making Rome—then Paris, London, and Amsterdam—the destinations for nonreligious pilgrimage.

BAROQUE ROME AND BEYOND

The issues involved in large building operations—budget, conflicting interests of patrons, and variable design talents of architects—can best be illustrated by the seemingly interminable reconstruction of St. Peter's in Rome. Its dome, completed (Michelangelo and Giacomo della Porta, 1590) after nearly a century of indecision and uncertainty, the much desired Renaissance plan of the ideal church as centrally planned—promoted by Bramante (1506) and Michelangelo (c. 1546), the two most acclaimed architects of the sixteenth century—was definitively abandoned. The extension of the church by Carlo Maderno (1607–1612), and the immense facade designed by him, completed the body of the church proper. This signified the coming importance of building elevations in a development that has been labeled facadism—countering the Renaissance's failure to complete the public front of important religious and secular buildings (the facade of San Lorenzo in Florence, for example, whose interior includes Michelangelo's Medicean library and chapel, remains unclad). The elliptical space before St. Peter's, defined by a carefully planted forest of columns, was not completed until the late 1660s by Bernini. The area framed by the facade and colonnade, where pilgrims to Rome were taken to the bosom of the church and whose center was defined by the largest Egyptian obelisk in Rome, represented the epitome of baroque space. The placement of the obelisk under the direction of Domenico Fontana in 1586 marks an important achievement in the history of engineering, considered by architectural historians to be the most influential moment of early modern city planning and a spur to later developments. Facadism then is a crucial element of the concern with the appearance of public space that dominates Western architectural design in the seventeenth century.

Like Florence in the fifteenth century, Rome in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an artistic hub of the highest order. The papal government (with its huge numbers of retainers and accompanying families), the missionary orders that made their headquarters in the city, and the large numbers of pilgrims constituted the elements of a varied and rich patronage system that attracted the best artists to the city. Milan and Naples, Rome's most important rivals in wealth and size of population, were dominated by the Spanish viceroys, whose cultural contributions were more modest; Spanish monarchs beginning with Philip II concentrated their architectural patronage on the remote palace-monastery El Escorial (Juan de Herrera, 1568–1584). Architects came to work in Rome, but they also came to study, forming "national" groupings lodged among their compatriots in distinct parts of the multicultural city.

By the end of the seventeenth century the Italian tour, though highly recommended, was no longer a requirement for a successful career in architecture. Thus Christopher Wren and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, unlike their predecessors Inigo Jones and Jacques Lemercier, built highly visible religious monuments—St Paul's in London (1675–1711) and the Invalides church in Paris (1679–1691)—modeled on St. Peter's without setting foot in the old city. Inigo Jones put his Italian experience to work designing the queen's house in Greenwich (1616–1635, outside London), a royal villa that later became the centerpiece of Wren's naval hospital (1696–1716), and the Whitehall Banqueting House (1619–1622), which emulated the urban palaces of Palladio in Vicenza. Although his buildings were few, he sowed the seeds of Palladianism, the single most significant classicizing movement in England, whose influence continued through the eighteenth century in the houses designed by John Wood in Bath and Lord Burlington, William Kent, and Robert Adam in the British countryside near London (Chiswick, Syon) and East Anglia (Holkham Hall).

The Dutch version of classicism turned Amsterdam into a Venice of the north and provided the stimulation for the design of St. Petersburg. Russian neoclassicism in the later eighteenth century was leavened by the presence of both Charles Cameron and Giacomo Quarenghi, whose cool white and stripped-down temples and pavilions for the empress Catherine were rooted in the more recent archaeology of the mid-century. Architects at the French Academy in Rome made an inestimable contribution to neoclassicism: they measured and drew antiquities, offering the most accurately reproduced illustrations for those unwilling to travel. By anatomizing antiquities, they acquired a familiarity with the classical forms that led to the transformation of this inheritance, stripping it of baroque accretions.

ARCHITECTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Architecture in this period solved problems that had been researched for centuries: how to express the status and ambitions of the patron and how to connect the buildings' public and private functions. Thus the formation of palace facades in Rome, Turin, Venice, Paris, and Vienna can be seen as billboards that explicate the position of their owners. This meant articulating the relation between the exterior (the street or garden facade) and the interior, which in turn must be divided into entry, passage, principal reception room, and private apartments.

While palace and church elevations had been recognized as essential areas of relation between public and interior space (and as carriers of meaning), the formal manipulation of these surfaces was determined by concerns for the appearance of dignity and sobriety. The baroque facade became strongly articulated and richly ornamented with the entire arsenal of architectural vocabulary available to designers. While the liveliness of church facades was meant to stimulate a Counter-Reformation participation, the facades of palaces became essential elements in the highly ritualized definition of power exchanges.

The major architectural innovations—St. Peter's in Rome, Palladio's villas, the Louvre in Paris (1666), and the palace at Versailles—soon acquired the authority earlier associated with ancient Roman and Greek buildings such as the Parthenon, the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the ancient theater. The new standards were serially emulated, though not always with distinguished results. Thus St. Peter's was the source not only for Mansart's Invalides in Paris and Wren's St. Paul's in London, but also for Jacques-Germain Soufflot's Panthéon (1755–1780) in Paris, stretching as far as the nineteenth-century capitol buildings in Washington and in Providence, Rhode Island. Versailles, itself distantly modeled on the Escorial, spawned numerous imitations in the German principalities and in Vienna, as well as in Sweden and Russia. Palladio's villa designs, capable of absorbing variations in scale, were the basis (through Inigo Jones) for innumerable British country houses, and for Thomas Jefferson's influential Monticello. Bernini's designs for the Louvre, and the realized version by Louis Le Vau and Claude Perrault, drew upon the Farnese palace in Rome, the grandest of Renaissance homes, and propagated countless urban houses, from Guarino Guarini's Carignano palace (1679–1683) in Turin to Viennese town palaces of the eighteenth century.

See also Baroque; Bernini, Gian Lorenzo; Borromini, Francesco; Britain, Architecture in; City Planning; Estates and Country Houses; France, Architecture in; Gardens and Parks; Mansart, François; Neoclassicism; Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism; Rome, Architecture in; Wren, Christopher.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, James S. The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses. Princeton, 1990.

Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture of France 1500 to 1700. New Haven, 1999. First published in 1953.

Botero, Giovanni. Della grandezza delle città. 1608.

Millon, Henry, ed. The Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture in Europe 1600–1750. Milan, 1999.

Millon, Henry, and Vittorio Lampugnani, eds. The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture. New York, 1994.

Payne, Alina. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.

Pollak, Martha. Turin, 1564–1680: Urban Design, Military Culture and the Creation of the Absolutist Capital. Chicago, 1991.

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——. The Classical Language of Architecture. London, 1980.

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Wittkower, Rudolf. Art and Architecture of Italy, 1600–1750. New Haven, 2001. First published in 1958.

MARTHA POLLAK