From the first years of the sixteenth century new inventions and approach-es had abounded in all fields – literary, scholarly, artistic and architectural – and followed one another in rapid succession. But their diffusion and implementation often proceeded slowly before the 1540s, above all in lit-erature and architecture.
What changes around 1540? Or to be more precise, in the few years following 1537, an important date marked by the publication in Venice of Serlio’s Regole generali di Architettura and of Tartaglia’s innovatory book on ballistics, La Nova Scientia, by the start of Sansovino’s renewal of the central area of Venice and in politics by the assumption of power in Flor-ence of the eighteen year old Duke, Cosimo I19. Among other important publications of these years are Biringucci’s De la Pirotechnia (1540) and Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543)20. This major contribution to medical science underlined the traditional analogy between the body and a building. It made use of architecture in its title page and ancient sculpture in its anatomical illustrations and generally set a new standard of beauty and lucidity of exposition in book illustration, emulated by Daniele Bar-baro and Palladio in the Vitruvio of 155621.
19 Noua scientia inuenta da Nicolo Tartalea. B[resciano](In Vinegia: per Stephano Da Sabio: ad instantia di Nicolo Tartalea brisciano il qual habita a san Saluador, 1537) 20 De la pirotechnia. Libri X. Doue ampiamente si tratta non solo di ogni sorte &
diuer-sita di miniere, ma anchora quanto si ricerca intorno à la prattica di quelle cose di quel che si appartiene à l’arte de la fusione ouer gitto de metalli come d’ogni altra cosa simile à questa. Composti per il S. Vanoccio Biringuccio Sennese, 1540 (Stampata in Venetia: per Venturino Roffinello: ad instantia di Curtio Nauo & fratelli, 1540);
Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis, scholae medicorum Patauinae professoris, de Humani cor-poris fabrica Libri septem (Basileae: ex officina Ioannis Oporini, 1543 Mense Iunio).
21 I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruuio tradutti et commentati da monsignor Barbaro eletto patriarca d’Aquileggia […], In Vinegia: per Francesco Marcolini, 1556 (In Venetia: per Francesco Marcolini, 1556). See also the entry by L. Cellauro on the book (with bibliography) at <http://architectura.cesr.univ-tours.fr/Traite/Noti-ce/Barbaro1556.asp?param=en>; M. Tafuri, “Daniele Barbaro e la cultura scientifica veneziana del ’500”, in Cultura, scienze e tecniche nella Venezia delCinquecento, ed.
The 1540s: a turning point in the development of European architecture
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To discuss the 1540s is like making a film where the murderer is known right from the start. There are no big surprises: one can only try and under-stand exactly what happened and why it happened. We know who were the figures most responsible for change: they were the creative giants of the previous generation, the real founders of a sixteenth-century culture which was distinct from that of the Quattrocento, as Vasari and other contempo-raries underline. Thus Raphael, Serlio, Vasari and Palladio all see Braman-te as the founder of a new archiBraman-tecture. Some of these founders were dead by 1540, including Bramante, Giorgione, Raphael, Peruzzi, Falconetto, Castiglione, and Ariosto (who died in 1532). Others died in the 1540s, in-cluding Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Giulio Romano (both in 1546), and Pietro Bembo (in 1547). Others remained very much alive: Tit-ian, Michelangelo (who in 1550 still had fourteen years to live and much to achieve) and the architect and sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, who died in 1570. Living or dead, all projected from previous decades the long shadow of their revolutionary works. They remained, whether dead or still active, vital presences in the 1540s. The writers Castiglione (Il Cortegiano ap-peared in 1528), Ariosto (the second edition of Orlando Furioso was pub-lished in 1532) and Bembo remained of central importance, not only be-cause of the innate quality of their works but bebe-cause they had been slow in consigning them for publication or revising them for a second edition. Pie-tro Bembo’s literary manifesto, the Prose della Volgar Lingua appeared initially in 1525, while the second edition came out in 1532. His final revi-sions only appeared in the third, posthumous edition of 154922. The book was relevant for artists and architects as well as for writers, as Bembo sug-gests in the famous passage at the start of the third book of the Prose23.
A. Manno, Venezia, 1987, pp. 55-81; Vitruvio, I dieci libri dell’architettura, con un saggio di Manfredo Tafuri e uno studio di Manuela Morresi, tradotti e commentati da Daniele Barbaro, Milano, 1987.
22 P. Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, ed. C. Dionisotti, Milano, 1993; Prose della volgar lingua: l’editio princeps del 1525 riscontrata con l’autografo Vaticano latino 3210, ed. crit. a cura di Claudio Vela, Bologna, 2001.
23 “Questa città, la quale per le sue molte e riverende reliquie, infino a questo dì a noi dalla ingiuria delle nimiche nazioni e del tempo, non leggier nimico, lasciate, più che per li sette colli, sopra i quali ancor siede, sé Roma essere subitamente dimostra a chi la mira, vede tutto il giorno a sé venire molti artefici di vicine e di lontane parti, i quali le belle antiche figure di marmo e talor di rame, che o sparse per tutta lei qua e là giacciono o sono publicamente e privatamente guardate e tenute care, e gli archi e le terme e i teatri e gli altri diversi edificii, che in alcuna loro parte sono in piè, con istu-dio cercando, nel picciolo spazio delle loro carte o cere la forma di quelli rapportano, e poscia, quando a fare essi alcuna nuova opera intendono, mirano in quegli essempi, e di rassomigliarli col loro artificio procacciando, tanto più sé dovere essere della loro HOWARD BURNS
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The case he makes for a common Italian literary language and his emphasis on grammar and vocabulary as the basis of style and literary effect could easily be applied to the visually arts, above all architecture, and indeed once a “grammatical” architecture had been established in theory and practice, architecture itself could provide a paradigm to apply to writing and literature. Bembo himself was on close terms with leading architects including Raphael and Sansovino24.
Painters, through their pupils and assistants, the relative accessibility of many of their works and the development of woodcuts and engravings as a means of reproducing works of art, had a more immediate impact than architects. New architecture took longer to communicate a general under-standing of its principles and procedures. In general the larger and more important a project, the longer it took to build. We tend to assume that buildings were known and influential from the very moment when the foundations were dug; in fact it could take years before a structure grew to a point where it was fully comprehensible. As Christof Thoenes has ob-served, the audacious projects of Bramante, and above all St Peter’s long remained vast ruins, as [were] hard for laymen to conceive in their finished state as it was for the uninstructed visitor to imagine the original appear-ance of the Baths or the Imperial fora25. Michelangelo’s Sacrestia Nuova at San Lorenzo remained until 1546 in the state which we see in contem-porary drawings, with some of the sculptures still lying on the ground26.
fatica lodati si credono, quanto essi più alle antiche cose fanno per somiglianza ravi-cinare le loro nuove; perciò che sanno e veggono che quelle antiche più alla perfezion dell’arte s’accostano, che le fatte da indi innanzi. Questo hanno fatto più che altri, mon-signore messer Giulio, i vostri Michele Agnolo fiorentino e Rafaello da Urbino, l’uno dipintore e scultore e architetto parimente, l’altro e dipintore e architetto altresì; e hannolo sì diligentemente fatto, che amendue sono ora così eccellenti e così chiari, che più agevole è a dire quanto essi agli antichi buoni maestri sieno prossimani, che quale di loro sia dell’altro maggiore e miglior maestro. La quale usanza e studio, se, in queste arti molto minori posto, e come si vede giovevole e profittevole grandemente, quanto si dee dire che egli maggiormente porre si debba nello scrivere, che è opera così leggia-dra e così gentile, che niuna arte può bella e chiara compiutamente essere senza essa.”
24 P. Davies and D. Hemsoll, “Sanmicheli’s architecture and literary theory”, in Archi-tecture and Language. Constructing Identity in European ArchiArchi-tecture, c. 1000 -c. 1650, ed. G. Clarke and P. Crossley, Cambridge 2000, pp. 102-117; G. Beltramini,
“Pietro Bembo e l’architettura”, in Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione…, 2013, pp. 12-31.
25 C. Thoenes, St. Peter’s as ruins: on some ‘vedute’ by Heemskerck, in Sixteenth-cen-tury Italian art, 1, ed. M.W. Cole, Oxford, 2006, pp. 25-39.
26 R. Rosenberg, “The reproduction and publication of Michelangelo’s Sacristy: draw-ings and prints by Franco, Salviati, Naldini and Cort”, in Reactions to the master:
Michelangelo’s effect on art and artists in the sixteenth century, ed. F. Ames-Lewis and P. Joannides, Aldershot, 2003, pp. 93-113.
The 1540s: a turning point in the development of European architecture
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Fig. 5. Sebastiano Serlio, the exedra by Bramante of the upper court of Cortile del Belvedere, in Il terzo libro di Sabastiano Serlio bolognese, nel qual si figurano, e descriuono le antiquita di Roma …, In Venetia: Impresso per Francesco Marcolino da Forli, 1540, p. CXLVII. © author.
HOWARD BURNS
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Only insiders knew what form the Cortile del Belvedere (fig. 5), the Palazzi dei Tribunali or the Villa Madama had been meant to take, because they had known the architects – or at least their assistants – and had seen and been able to copy the projects. The same was true even of important designs for new buildings by Sangallo, Sansovino and Peruzzi. Until 1546, when Pietro Lauro’s inadequate Italian translation appeared, Alberti’s wonderful treatise, unillustrated and untranslated, remained a closed book to all but the most cultivated of architects, among whom, on the basis of his surviv-ing copy, one can include Giulio Romano27.