| Religious Architecture in Florence after Brunelleschi |
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With the exception of Brunelleschi's works, no religious
building in fifteenth-century Florence could be compared to the
great undertakings of the preceding centuries. However the new
tenor of life in the religious communities where individual cells
were allowed for the first time led to an important typological
innovation. The traditional two-story dormitories were replaced
by rows of cells which opened onto the loggias of the internal
courtyard, determining the evolution of cloisters in a double
tier with arcading. The earliest examples of this
characteristically Renaissance type of monastery were in
Florence.
Brunelleschi's architectural revolution led to "a certain
conservative resistence" and his rival Ghiberti is often
cited as an example although he converted in the doors of
Paradise, with his perspectives of classicizing buildings marked
by a new humanistic spatiality. Michelozzo, who studied with
Ghilberti and later worked with Donatello, made a name for
himself as an able and concrete interpreter of Brunelleschi's
difficult concepts in terms that were more acceptable to the
local Florentine culture of the time. Brunelleschi's calculated
linear designs are reduced to a synthetic simplicity: the
surfaces of Brunelleschi's walls treated as unsubstantial screens
once again acquire a sober and yet substantial solidity. In any
case some of the most interesting aspects of Michelozzo's work
derive from a genuine adhesion to some of Brunelleschi's specific
types. The square module flanked on one of the sides by a smaller
square with lateral service premises (Old Sacristy, Pazzi Chapel) is adopted by
Michelozzo in the small church of Trebbio, in the chapels of the
Noviziato in S. Croce and in Palazzo Medici in Via Larga (now
Via Cavour), in the sacristy in S.
Marco, in the convent church of S. Maria Maddalena in Val di
Mugnone, and the use of the barrel vault over the connecting
spaces in the internal sequences of complex structures reappears
in S. Croce and in S. Marco.
Throughout the fifteenth century one of the Medici objectives was
that of organizing the northern area of the town to their
advantage. In the two preceding centuries this spacious zone
between the last two circles of walls had developed into a
network of regular and parallel streets. It was decided to turn
Via Larga into the fundamental thoroughfare and about halfwav
down the street, at the intersection with the crossing
corresponding to S. Lorenzo,
the grandiose Medici palace was built as an alternative to the
public center of the Palazzo dei Priori, symmetrically placed
with respect to the cathedral square. S. Lorenzo became a crucial
center of Medici strategy; the church was completely rebuilt
(Brunelleschi) and the convent remodeled and enlarged
(Michelozzo). The convent of S. Marco, on Piazza S. Marco at the
end of Via Larga, went beyond its strictly religious aims and
became a cultural center of primary importance in the ambit of
the 'Medici organization'.
Pursuing a new type of policy in which the prestige associated
with noble cultural deeds tended to consolidate political power,
Cosimo, the 'universal man', founded the first modern libraries
in the West in his palace and in S. Marco. Another library was
built in the complex of SS.
Annunziata around 1450 by Michelozzo. His work in S. Marco, which mirrors his
professional and cultural capacity of relating to the new Medici
patrons, is without doubt one of his masterpieces, in the general
conception of an organism seen as a sure play of exactly defined
but freely articulated masses; in the new aedicule type of church
altar set against a continuous whitewashed wall; in the
luminosity of the cells covered with barrel vaults, and the
library, all Brunelleschian themes personally interpreted which
harmonize so well with Fra Angelico's painting. But it was above
all Paolo Uccello and Domenico Veneziano who were to realize a
sense of space constructed with light and line in harmony with
Brunelleschi's poetical idiom in Florentine painting of the time.
Michelozzo also put his hand (1459 and ff.) to the Loggia of the
Spedale di S. Paolo, in Piazza S. Maria Novella, reproposing
Brunelleschi's model of the loggia of the Innocenti both in terms
of architectural qualification and of town planning implications.
The style of Michelozzo is also reflected in the geometry and
regularity of the pietra forte facade of S. Felice in Piazza, on
Via Romana.
In comparison to Michelozzo's pragmatic concreteness, the
presence in Florence of Leon Battista Alberti is of quite
different signifiance. Alberti was the first to set himself the
theoretical problem, in a modern sense, of on the one hand
drfining the artistic experience in the general context of
universal humanism, and on the other, the laws of artistic and
architectural creation. Alberti's Florentine works can so also be
seen as the development of wath was implied in Brunelleschi's
oeuvre, a quest for an urban orderthrough an in-dept stydy of
rational typological solutions in the light of a classical
method: the great dome (SS. Annunziata), the palace facade
(Palazzo Rucellai), the chapel in a church organism (S.
Pancrazio), the open loggia in an urban context (Loggia
Rucellai). Designed in 1440, executed between 1458 and 1470, the
facade of S. Maria Novella
is a clear example of the practical results of Alberti's theories
of an awareness of the value of history and consequently of the
monument in the urban context. Indeed Alberti does not refuse the
elements of the unfinished medieval facade but he uses them as
part of his design and makes them harmonize coherently with
contemporary culture, bestowing new dimensions and a new meaning
on the great medieval piazza. In this sense Alberti's facade is
an example for the centuries to come of the reconfiguration of an
urban context.
An original reinterpretation of Brunelleschi's church model is to
he found, at the end of the century, in the architectural
solution of the convent church of Santa Maria Maddalena delle
Convertite (known as dei Pazzi after 1699) on Borgo Pinti, in
which Giuliano da Sangallo proposes an interesting new type with
a nave only. Round arches on pilasters set into the continuous
wall of the nave lead into rib vaulted chapels.
Michelangelo's architecture has as its point of departure a
profound intellectual interpretation of Brunelleschi's models, as
in the New Sacristy or the Biblioteca Laurenziana in San Lorenzo.
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