Quattrocento: Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture
Quattrocento Architecture
The Quattrocento architectural Renaissance saw the use of traditional building and decorative elements. The round arch, columns and pilasters with the classical orders, barrel vaults decorated with moldings, and domes are used extensively, although with some freedom, especially decorative. Thus, the most complete fantasy reigns in the decoration of grotesques, which merges plant forms, animal, and human. In the facade and the plants, calculations for effects of perfection are made. It seeks to resurrect the central plant and looks for the clearness of the spaces, as opposed to the colored shadows of the Gothic church.
Florence
In the previous century, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiori had stood in the distinctive Italian Gothic style. This gave ample space to cover the dome. The work was entrusted to Filippo Brunelleschi, who was familiar with the technique of lifting Byzantine domes. But in the Gothic domes there, so it was probably motivated by the Roman domes, especially the Pantheon. Brunelleschi throws a graceful dome also is enhanced with an octagonal drum, unlike the Roman and Byzantine domes, which were encased in thick walls.
Brunelleschi is also the true innovator of style. In the churches of San Lorenzo and the Holy Spirit, he takes all the classic architectural elements, drawing especially on the Roman basilicas. This building has drawn the Old Sacristy. In 1429, for designing the Pazzi Chapel Florence bankers’ funerary use, outside on the portico columns and the interior dome turned on scallops, he plays with the color of the stone material to the gray architectural elements and lime for the walls.
Another architect is Alberti, who represents the knowledge of the Renaissance genius. He excelled in all arts, dedicated treaties to painting, sculpture, and architecture, estimated that homes of wealthy merchants’ private entities must have the same dignity as public buildings. His second goal is the temple. His early works include reshaping medieval buildings, the Gothic church of Santa Maria Novella. He put a perfectly proportioned facade endowed with musical sense. Alberti marble box with the Franciscan monastery. His most important religious building was San Andres in Mantua.
Sculpture
The first great sculptor of the Renaissance is Lorenzo Ghiberti, which begins its formal style with many vestiges of the International Gothic world. In 1402, he won the tender for the execution of the doors of the Baptistery in Florence. Distributed even the Gothic mode, such as those above had Andrea Pisano, with twenty-eight-lobed medallions, enclosing a few characters, show, however, a considerable novelty in the anatomical perfection and a highly original decorative fringes. In 1425, he was responsible for the other door of the Baptistery, called the Gate of Glory, who decides to organize totally different way, with ten large rectangular boxes, with scenes of complex composition with many figures, treated in an almost painterly, giving great volume to elements of the first and only body to the remoteness, resources applied to sculpture in perspective.
The most important sculptor of Quattrocento Florentine is undoubtedly Donatello. He is the creator of the high Renaissance style, ranging from finding classic balance and beauty, and cultivation of a certain expression, supported by the fact underscores the dramatic values. His main reason is human, studying man from infancy to old age, sparing none of the deformities of aging. Their youthful figures are the most typical of the artist, especially his versions of David, of extreme delicacy and grace. The St. George, standing, armed, solidly planted, is the representation of the full manhood. In their relief, technical subtlety in the way of carving marble or preparing the molten bronze, you get effects of great refinement.
Donatello also performs one of the first and most important equestrian statues around the Renaissance, inspired by the Roman Marcus Aurelius: the Gattamelata, the first statue in honor of a warrior of the modern world. He also occasionally painted wood sculpture, drawing on the Gothic tradition, and accentuating features strong expressive realism that do not reject the representation of the ugly and deformed.