RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE. During the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries the structural and decorative elements of Roman architecture (q.v.), revived after long disuse, were adapted to the requirements of contemporary buildings throughout Europe. The column and the arch, the dome and groin vault, the arabesque and the rinceau, were conventions from which, in infinite com binations, architects developed their designs. The unity of cen tralized space and mass, the power of great scale and weight, the repose and completeness of definite and simple development of planes, passages and profiles, and the splendour of richly modelled and coloured surfaces, were the effects most often strived for. Yet Renaissance (q.v.) architects did not reproduce, even re motely, a single Roman building; the conditions of life had changed too much for Roman buildings to be practicable.
New Forms.—New and magnificent forms in structure, and in decoration applied to it, were developed. The dome raised on a drum, free from its abutments and crowned with a cupola, was one; when such a dome was raised, by means of pendentives, on four great arches, new and noble harmonies in spatial and mass composition resulted. Facades in which a classic ordinance is adapted to the basilican profile; barrel-vaulted or domed naves; campaniles which end in columned belfries ; and vertical spires, encrusted with delicately modelled classic forms, are among the striking inventions of the period. The public buildings of the 15th and 16th centuries—the libraries, town halls, theatres and civic monuments—were utterly different from those of Rome. New combinations of the arch and the column, new rhythms in space, new arrangements in mass, new variations in ornament, had con tinually to be invented in order to fit the discovered architecture of ancient times to these new uses. Country houses—chateaux and villas, with their gardens—offered another field for adaptation and development; the design of public squares and streets and of buildings in ensembles another; and the vast palaces of the mon archs of France and Spain and England, and of the pope and the princes of the Church another. After three centuries of experi
ment and growth the Renaissance architect, in the facades of pal aces, public buildings and houses, still expressed new ideas in the language of the column and the arch.
In the sixteenth century Europe was neither homogeneous nor centralized. Spain, Italy, Holland, England each had a native culture, a peculiar heritage from the mediaeval world, and each followed a course of development that was, at least in part, inde pendent of all others. Spain, which had defended the Catholic faith against the Moors and which was flooded with the gold of Mexico and Peru, placed on her Renaissance forms a stamp very different from that of commercial and insular England. Mon archical France, rich with the heritage of the 13th century cathe drals, gave necessarily a different metamorphosis to the Italian tradition from Protestant and democratic Holland. Climate, building materials, prosperity, intellectual growth and inherited types of architecture such as the patio of Spain and the timber roofed hall of England, the turreted chateau of the Loire and the balconied palace of Venice—these and many similar differences in civilization gave the Renaissance a distinctive colour, a special character in each locality.
Great Architects.—Finally there was the influence of indi vidual genius. No period is so crowded with great architects and at no time have architects been so free to impress on their designs the imprint of a great personality. The Roman tradition has been called a tradition of formula and of precedent, yet no tradition has proved so flexible in the hands of a master. It lent itself with equal facility to the requirements of Bramante and of Bernini, of Christopher Wren and Juan de Herrera, of Mansart and of Alessi. It embraced within the limits of a single convention the delicate and gracious lyricism of Lescot, the agitated and passion ate declamation of Churriguera, the clear and vigorous rhythms of Inigo Jones, and the mighty harmonies conceived in the illimitable imagination of Michelangelo.