The standardisation of architectural forms and language is connected with the redefinition of the map of Europe, and the emergence of a new Euro-pean elite, composed of rulers, great nobles, cardinals, ambassadors and indispensable administrators like Charles V’s minister Francisco de los Co-bos, who had accompanied the Emperor to Mantua. These personages fre-quented each other, fought each other or fought side by side, travelled wide-ly (Philip for instance was in Mantua in 1548), stayed or dined or hunted at each other’s residences and sometimes intermarried across national boundaries – as in the case of the Dukes of Ferrara linked by marriage both to the French royal family and to the house of Guise70. They also were often innovatory patrons, transplanting new architectural modes from city to city and even from country to country, with appropriate adaptation to the local context as Ippolito d’Este did at the Grande Ferrare, designed by
Ser-69 Galeazzo Alessi e l’architettura del Cinquecento, ed. W. Lotz, Genova, 1975; Basilica di S.M. Assunta in Carignano, ed. G. Algeri, Genova, 1975 (Guide di Genova, 6);
A. Coppa, “Un disegno ritrovato dell’Alessi per S. Maria di Carignano”, Il disegno di architettura, 6.1996, 13, pp. 65-67; A.W. Ghia, “Il cantiere della Basilica di S. Maria di Carignano dal 1548 al 1602”, Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria, N.S. 39, 1999, 1, pp. 263-380.
70 Alfonso II d’Este in 1528 married Renée of France, daughter of Louis XII and Anne de Bretagne; Anna, daughter of Alfonso II and Renée, in 1548 married the powerful François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise (assassinated in 1563).
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lio for a site opposite the royal palace at Fontainebleau, or Francisco de los Cobos in the buildings commissioned for his town of origin, Ubeda, includ-ing a masterpiece, the church of San Salvador71. Cardinal Jean du Bellay commissioned an innovatory small château at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés based on avant-garde Italian models (fig. 13)72. This is Philibert’s earliest thor-oughly Italian design, with a single main living floor and at the lower level a portico which seems to reflect a knowledge of Poggio a Caiano and/or ancient Roman villas. As Blunt observed, the high attic (an import from Italy which had considerable impact in France) is probably inspired by the now lost attic of Palazzo Te73. One can add that by the mid 1550’s the car-dinal, by then a permanent Roman resident, had completed a suburban villa for himself within the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian74. This impres-sive residence in its turn was probably influential on Italian developments, and would have been noted by Palladio and Daniele Barbaro when they visited Rome in 1554.
A particularly important development of the 1540s is thus the conver-gence between Italian and French architecture, symbolised by the presence and publications of Serlio in France, but also by the new level of sophistication and mastery of Italian vocabulary and methods in the work of De L’Orme and of Lescot, as well as the presence of cultivated cardinals in Rome and in Italy, studied by Flaminia Bardati, including Philandrier’s patron Georg-es d’ Armagnac, Jean Martin’s patron the Cardinal Robert de Lenoncourt (1510-1561; cardinal from 1538), and Du Bellay, who entertained François Rabelais in Rome (in 1534) as well as probably providing Philibert with introductions, and financial support there75. Philibert, as he relates in his treatise, studied and measured the antiquities in Rome in the mid 1530s76.
71 See H. Keniston, Francisco de los Cobos, secretary of the Emperor Charles V, Pittsburg, 1958, and the references to Ubeda in F. Marias, El largo siglo XVI, Madrid, 1989.
72 M. Kitaeff, “Le château de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés”, Fondation Eugène Piot, Monu-ments et Mémoires, 75, 1996, pp. 65-176; see also Y. Pauwels, L’ architecture et le livre en France à la Renaissance: “une magnifique décadence?”, Paris, 2013, pp. 79ff.
73 A. Blunt, Philbert de l’Orme, edizione italiana a cura di M. Morresi, Milano, 1997, pp. 23, 176-177.
74 F. Bardati, “Between the king and the pope: French cardinals in Rome (1495–1560)”, Urban History, 37, 2010, pp. 419-433.
75 Later, in 1553, Jean du Bellay was joined in Rome by Joachim du Bellay (whose father was a cousin of the cardinal).
76 Philibert, as he relates in his treatise, had studied and measured the antiquities in Rome in the mid 1530s: see Y. Pauwels, “Philibert de l’Orme et ses cardinaux: Mar-cello Cervini et Jean du Bellay”, in Les cardinaux de la Renaissance et la modernité artistique, ed. F. Lemerle, Y. Pauwels et G. Toscano, Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2009, pp. 149-156; R. Cooper, Roman Antiquities in Renaissance France, 1515-65, Ashgate, 2013, will appear this autumn.
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Fig. 13. Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, “‘La face du dedans du Chasteau de S. Mort sur la cour’.”, c.1570; pen and black ink with grey wash on vellum, 502 mm. × 742 mm., London, British Museum, 1972.U.870. The court is that of the innovatory Château de Saint-Maur, designed by Philibert De l’Orme for Cardinal Jean du Bellay, c.1541. © Trustees of the British Museum.
Fig. 14. Pierre Lescot, the wing of Henri II at the Louvre (1546-1551). © author.
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In addition to his contact with Marcello Cervini, which he mentions, one can imagine that he frequented leading artists and architects: there are signs in his work that he was familiar with Peruzzi’s work, and perhaps even with his ideas and unpublished drawings.
Lescot is not documented as having been in Rome and Italy. But his work at the Louvre (fig. 14), and soon after at the Château de Vallery (1548-1559) shows a confident and personalised mastery of Italian compositional method and vocabulary, which would have been difficult to achieve without direct observation of antiquities and recent buildings in Italy, as well as the sort of contact with connoisseurs and architects there which Philibert de-scribes in his treatise77. The criticism of Lescot by Blaise de Vignère for being a draughtsman rather than someone formed within the building world (“lequel ne s’estant jamais exercé qu’au crayon”), rings true in relation to an architect who not only was a gentleman and intellectual (his unpublished architectural treatise is unfortunately lost), but had probably also been in-fluenced by Italian ideas concerning the centrality of disegno78.
77 A first design for the Louvre was made by Lescot for François I in 1546; work on Lescot’s revised design is documented from1551; see L. Batiffol: “Les premières con-struc tions de Pierre Lescot au Louvre d’après de nouveaux documents”, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1930, pp. 276-303, and in Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art fran çais, 1930, pp. 86-90, and in Procès verbaux de la Commission du Vieux Paris, 1930, pp. 64-77; C. Aulanier, “Le Palais du Louvre au XVI e siècle. Documents inédits”, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, 1951, pp. 85-100; D. Thomson, Renaissance Paris, Architecture and Growth 1475–1600, Berkeley-Los Angeles- Oxford, 1985, pp. 79-96; V. Hoffman, “Le Louvre de Henri II: un palais imperial”, Bul le tin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art français, 1982, pp. 7-15; C. Grodecki, “Les marchés de construction pour l’aile Henri II du Louvre (1546-1558)”, Archives de l’art français, 26, 1984, pp. 19-38; J. Guillaume, “Le Louvre de Henri II: une architecture impériale”, in Henri II et les arts, actes du colloque international, Ecole du Louvre et Musée national de la Renaissance, Ecouen, 1997, pp. 343-353; J. Degageux, “Le pa lais du Louvre au XVIe siècle: les projets de Pierre Lescot pour François Ier et Henri II”, Documents d’histoire parisienne, 2007, pp. 9-46; Y. Pauwels, “Athènes, Rome, Paris:
la tribune et l’ordre de la Salle des Caryatides au Louvre”, Revue de l’art, 169, 2010, 3,pp. 61-69. On the château de Vallery, see S. Frommel, “Le portique du château de Vallery: un chef-d’œuvre de Pierre Lescot”, Revue de l’art, 131, 2001, pp. 9-24.
78 The passage, written in the 1580s, is quoted in its entirety by Thomson, Renaissance Paris, ch. III, n. 14, from Blaise De Vigenère: Suitte de Philostrate, Paris 1602, f°105r:
“Feu Monsieur de Clagny (Pierre Lescot) envers nous, lequel ne s’estant jamais exercé qu’au crayon, plustost encore d’un instinct naturel propre en luy et incliné à la pour-traicture (drawing) que par art acquise, a neantmois conduit assez heureusement le Louvre de fonds en comble tel qu’on le void, combien que ceux qui sont versez en l’art y remarquent tout plein d’erreurs tant par dedans que par dehors. A la vérité ces grands pièces méritent bien de passer par les mains de ceux qui ont fait leur apprentis-sage et coups d’essais en d’autres moindres suyvant le dire commun Italien ‘gastando s’impara’, qu’un tailleur avant que se randre bon maistre aura gasté assez de drap […]”.
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Another striking parallelism, the result both of fairly detailed reciprocal knowledge and a fierce spirit of rivalry, is that between Italian church archi-tecture – above all the new St Peter’s – and Sultanic mosques in Istanbul, beginning with that of the S¸ehzade complex built by Sinan between 1543 and 1548 in memory of Suleyman’s favourite son79. The basic layout, with central dome surrounded and supported by four half domes, recalls St Peter’s – and even Leonardo’s sketches and the church of the Madonna della Con-ciliazione at Todi. Some years later the crossing piers of the Süleymaniye mosque (1548-1559) seem to be based on those of Sangallo’s final design for St Peter’s, which could easily have been accessible to Sinan through the prints mentioned above. He would probably have sought out representations of the new St Peter’s and scrutinised them intently, given the keen spirit of rivalry with Christian architects which emerges from his autobiographies80.
Conclusions
The 1540s is a decade of architectural change and increased building activ-ity, spurred by peace, economic recovery and the ever greater role of illus-trated printed books. It is above all, one could say, the decade of Sebastiano Serlio, the only significant contemporary architectural writer, who by ac-cepting the invitation of François I and leaving Venice for France in 1541, where he published his next works (Books I and II in 1545 and Book V on churches in 1547)¸ linked the two countries in the architectural field in a way that had never occurred before. Serlio was the only effective modern expounder of the orders and their use (in the Regole Generali of 1537); the 1540s is the decade when the “canonical” orders became generally known and accepted by leading architects and patrons in Italy, France, Austria, Southern Germany and Spain, following the example already set in Rome, but now too by Sansovino in Venice, Sanmicheli in Verona, Palladio in
On drawing in France in the period see C. Occhipinti, Il disegno in Francia nella letteratura artistica del Cinquecento, Firenze, 2003.
79 On the S¸ehzade Mosque see G. NecipogÙlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire, London, 2005, pp. 191-207, and the contribution of C.L. Frommel in this volume.
80 On the Süleymaniye see G. NecipogÙlu, The Age of Sinan…, 2005, pp. 207-230; for Sinan’s autobiographies: Mimar Sinan, Sinan’s Autobiographies: Five Sixteenth- Century Texts, translated with critical editions by H. Crane and E. Akin, with a preface by G. NecipogÙlu, Leiden, 2006.
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Vicenza, Lescot at the Louvre, Philibert at Anet. It is also the decade in which references to local or Roman antiquities become frequent in new buildings, not only in Italy but also in France. Books and the movements of leading patrons and architects, rather than local building practice increas-ingly determined taste, a tendency encouraged by the new concentrations of political power, even though within the vast extent of Spain and France, where civic and noble semi-autonomies abounded, the taste of the ruler and those associated with the court might not coincide with local habits and preferences. The idea that modern invention and innovation (which left room for expressing civic or national distinctness) was compatible with good ar-chitecture also gained ground, encouraged by the work of Peruzzi, Giulio Romano and above all by the Florentine buildings of Michelangelo, whose contribution in freeing architects from the bondage of Vitruvian rules was praised by Vasari in a famous passage in his 1550 life of the great artist81.
The decade is characterised by the consolidation, codification, and dif-fusion of architectural and cultural models which had been gradually de-fined from the early years of the sixteenth century onwards. This process involved not only Italy, but France, and progressively other countries as well. It was already anticipated by isolated episodes of the late 1520s on-wards like the start of volume Palace of Charles V at Granada and the construction of the new Italianate palace at Landshut (1537-1543), basi-cally designed by Giulio Romano, and added to the new Ducal palace only just completed in the local Renaissance style82.
The creation of a broadly standardised European architecture was en-couraged by political transformations, by exchanges between the European elite and by the concern with language which characterises the period in both Italy and France. In architecture this found expression in the discus-sion and use of the architectural orders, not just as decoration, but as a means of expression. It is striking how rapid the assimilation of key Italian texts was in France. To appreciate the process one only has to look at the list of translations made by Jean Martin (c. 1507-1553), whose contribu-tion is amazingly strategic and underlines the posicontribu-tion which architecture had achieved in high culture: he translated not only Vitruvius (1547), Serlio
81 A convenient edition is G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scul-tori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri nell’edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1550, a cura di Luciano Bellosi e Aldo Rossi, presentazione di Giovanni Previtali, Torino, 1986, p. 901.
82 I. von Lauterbach und K. Endemann, Die Stadtresidenz Landshut: Architektur und Ausstattung, München, 1998; “Ewig blühe Bayerns Land”. Herzog Ludwig X. und die Renaissance, Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung, ed. B. Langer and K. Heinemann, Regensburg, 2009.
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(1545, 1547) and Alberti (1553), but also the Asolani of Bembo (1545)83, Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1544), and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1546), a work full of descriptions and evocations of ruins and buildings84. The 1540s is not just a decade in which earlier ideas and innovations were popularised and codified. New architectural approaches are developed: by Michelangelo after he takes over at St Peter’s, and by younger architects, who before the 1540s were unknown: Palladio, Alessi and Vignola, who were all connected in different ways with a new period in Vitruvian studies.
They chose different directions in their research and in their architecture.
Vignola favoured rules and standardisation of the orders and elevation schemes basically derived from Bramante85. Palladio was more experimen-tal and independent, and enjoyed the freedom offered by a small rich cen-tre, Vicenza, and the support of intellectuals, in a social world where there was no court or prince to determine taste: he tried to meet local needs, with notable success both in villa and palace design, and at the same time to understand and revive antique forms and typologies, adopting the freedom (ignored by Serlio and Vignola) with which ancient architects combined the basic elements of the orders86. By the later 1540s, after three visits to Rome and intensive study of the antique and Vitruvius, as well as direct contact with important modern works and probably with Antonio da Sangallo and his collaborators, Palladio’s approach matures. This can be seen in the pal-ace of Iseppo Porto in Vicenza, substantially completed by the later 1540s (fig. 15), in his final design for the Basilica (1549) and in the Villa Poiana, designed in the later 1540s, but finished only in the next decade87. Alessi embraced both Vitruvian orthodoxy and experimentation with the de co-rative language of Perino del Vaga (as seen for instance at the Massimo Chapel at Trinità dei Monti) and the Roman vocabulary of Michelangelo88.
83 Les Azolains de Monseigneur Bembo, de la nature d’Amour / traduictz d’italien en françoys, par Jehan Martin […] par le commandement de monseigneur le duc d’Orléans, imprimé par M. de Vascosan, pour luy et G. Corrozet (Paris), 1545.
84 Hypnerotomachie ou Discours du songe de Poliphile, deduisant comme Amour le combat à l’occasion de Polia. Soubz la fiction de quoy l’aucteur monstrant que toutes choses terrestres ne sont que vanité, traicte de plusieurs matieres profitables, et dignes de memoire. Nouvellement traduit de langage italien en francois. A Paris: pour Jacques Kerver, 1546.
85 A. Bruschi, “Introduzione a Vignola: ornamenti ‘antichi’ / architetture ‘moderne’”, in Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, a cura di R.J. Tuttle, B. Adorni, C.L. Frommel, Milano, 2002, pp. 9-23.
86 See note 10, above.
87 For a summary account of these works, with bibliography, see Palladio, ed. G. Beltra-mini and H. Burns, Venezia, 2008.
88 H. Burns, “Le idee di Galeazzo Alessi sull’architettura e sugli ordini”, in Galeazzo Alessi e l’architettura del Cinquecento, 1975, pp. 147-166.
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Fig. 15. Andrea Palladio, the façade of the palace of Iseppo Porto in Vicenza, c. 1544-1552. © author.
Alessi invented a new type of suburban villa/palace for the Genoese elite89. He also often worked for very rich patrons, most notably the banker To-maso Marino (in the 1550s), able to pay for the execution of decorative motifs and sculpture in stone, which before would mostly have been real-ised in stucco. In the 1540s generally, when money was available, as at the Library in Venice or at the Louvre, architects emulated that rich combina-tion of architecture and sculpture which they had seen in Roman triumphal arches. Among other architects who emerge in this decade is Pirro Ligorio, who had begun his antiquarian researches but was still painting architec-ture rather than designing it90. A painter who understood the language of
89 See note 16, above.
90 For an overview of Ligorio’s career see D.R. Coffin, Pirro Ligorio: the Renaissance artist, architect and antiquarian; with a checklist of drawings, University Park, Penn., 2004. See also R.E. Keller, Das Oratorium von San Giovanni Decollato in Rom: eine Studie seiner Fresken, Rome, 1976; J.A. Gere, “Some early drawings by Pirro Ligo-rio”, Master Drawings, 9, 1971, pp. 239-250.
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Sanmicheli, Sansovino, Serlio and Palladio, was Paolo Veronese, who used it to great effect, with a personal and synthetic touch from his earliest works onwards. At the same time Vasari in the later 1540s wrote the history of Italian art, indicating, as Serlio had done, the pivotal role of Bramante in creating a new antique-modern architecture. He also saw the highest post-antique architectural achievements as being in the present, not the past.
Cosimo Bartoli in 1550 published his skilful translation of Alberti, thereby providing much of the intellectual basis for Palladio’s approach to design.
The other great architect who emerges, or rather is re-activated in the 1540s, is Michelangelo. When Paul III entrusted to him the completion of Palazzo Farnese and formally on 1 January 1547 the future of St Peter’s he had still seventeen years of intensive architectural work ahead of him, in which he invented a new architectural vocabulary and a new architecture, appropriate to the past and present of Rome. The architectural career of Michelangelo offers a conclusive reminder that after the first decade of the sixteenth century, when Bramante invented a new architectural style, the 1540s was the most important decade for the construction of the architec-tural future of Italy and Europe.
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