Renaissance architecture

Style of architecture that began in 15th-century Italy, based on the revival of classical, especially Roman, architecture developed by Brunelleschi. It is characterized by a concern with balance, clarity, and proportion, and by the external use of columns and fluted pilasters.

Italy Many Roman buildings were still in existence in Renaissance Italy and artists and scholars studied their proportions and copied their decorative motifs. The architectural books of the Roman Vitruvius (1st century AD) were popularized by Leon Battista Alberti in his influential treatise De re aedificatoria/On Architecture (1486) but the first major work of the age was the successful construction by Brunelleschi of a dome (1420-34) on Florence Cathedral. Alberti himself designed a new facade (front facia) for Santa Maria Novella (completed 1470) in Florence, and redesigned a church in Rimini subsequently called the Tempio Malatestiano (c. 1450). Bramante came closest to the recreation of classical ideas with works such as the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome (c. 1510) and the new basilica of St Peter's in Rome (begun 1506). Other Renaissance architects in Italy include Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Palladio, Vignola, Sangallo, and Raphael.

Rest of Europe As Renaissance architecture spread throughout the rest of Europe it often acquired a distinctively national character through the influence of a country's own styles. Renaissance architecture in England is exemplified by the Queen's House at Greenwich, London, built by Inigo Jones in 1637 and in France by the Louvre Palace built for François I in 1546. In Spain, a flamboyant style called Plateresque emerged, known also as ‘Manuellian’ in Portugal, which was a mixture of Renaissance and Gothic architectural forms; a typical facade was that of the university at Salamanca, completed in 1529.