Original subtitles

Good afternoon. I want to talk to you this afternoon about architecture and

sculpture and their importance at the outset of the Renaissance, in the

formation of the Renaissance really. I have an image for you, a view of Florence.

I never seem to tire of views of Florence. This one is a detail of a fresco by the

artist and writer Giorgio Vasari, which was painted in the middle of the 16th

century and is in the Palazzo Vecchio. It is a fresco on the wall there. I'm not

going to spend a lot of time with it. You can see that the Duomo, the dome, the

great cathedral of Florence is even more prominent here than in reality. It seems

to me greatly enlarged, but it is symbolically the center of the city.

Palazzo Vecchio, which we have seen in the town hall down here closer to the river.

Those are the two centers of the city. I think of it as the sacred center and the

secular center, although the cathedral was of interest to the city

fathers as well, but there are these two centers of the city. This fresco, by the

way, showed Florence under siege. If you look in the foreground on this side of the

Arno in the hills, you see camps, the tents of the encampment of the armies, and

presumably Florence won this one or it wouldn't have been commemorated in the

fresco by Vasari. Vasari is a name known to most of you as less as a painter, he's

less known as a painter today, than as a writer. Really the first art historian or

at least the first art biographer of any sort. His lives of the artists are an

essential work for the study of Italian art. He lived in the 16th century, but his

lives go all the way back to Giotto, so he covered a lot of territory. Not always

reliably, one can understand, and not always historically accurate, but not to be

dismissed lightly either. In any case, very enjoyable reading, full of anecdotes, and

some very valuable information, and he'll be cited often in these lectures as he is

always in the course of Italian art. His paintings are, and by the way, those books

are shelf full. We see them in a volume or two or three in translation, but they're

many, much longer than we are aware of in English translation. His paintings are much

less well known today, but he was very admired and very busy, with a large

workshop and covered acres of walls in the Palazzo Vecchio, or at least it seems

that way when you are tired. Architecture is central to understanding the birth of

the Renaissance, and it was in Florence that the first great buildings of the

Renaissance were constructed. This is not an architecture course, but I must give you

enough of a feeling of the importance of architecture and its great innovators. And

one man, above all others, was the originator of the new style in

architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi, B-R-U-N-E-L-L-E-S-C-H-I. Brunelleschi, born in 1377,

and died in 1446. Brunelleschi went to Rome as a young man. Now, people went to Rome as

pilgrims, as tourists, but very few went to Rome to study the architecture, that is to say, the ruins

of Roman architecture, which were everywhere to be seen, as we have already mentioned. He did.

Brunelleschi went to Rome, accompanied by Donatello, and he went there specifically to study the remains

of Roman architecture. He measured them. He studied the construction techniques. He especially probed their

proportions, and the way in which the ancient Roman architects learned to mold space through the

innovation of the arch and the vault. Trabiation, the post and lintel system of Greek temples, for instance,

has distinct limitations in the space that can be covered, and in the space, in the way the space can

be shaped. The arch can cover, can span a much greater space, and the vault, which is simply an arch

turned on itself, on its own axis, can give a wonderfully enclosing space, or capping space,

to a, to a building. These were the Rome, this is the greatest Roman technical innovation, and it's one

which Brunelleschi learned to understand thoroughly, as we shall see. We can say, pardon me, that the rational

principles of Renaissance art were first clearly embodied in the Florentine buildings designed by

Brunelleschi in the second and third decades of the Quattrocento. The principles that he was using

weren't articulated in print until 1435, by another architect, Leon Battista Alberti, in his book On Painting,

that is the title of the book On Painting, which he wrote in Latin in 1435, and translated himself

into the vernacular, into Italian, the year after. That, to reach a wider audience, that in itself is a

Renaissance act, to move from Latin to Italian at that point. Alberti is an important architect, but he will

always, I think, be most famous because of his articulating the theories of architecture, of painting,

of sculpture, in his, in his books, and we'll have occasion to refer to him again. Brunelleschi had

multiple architectural projects going ahead simultaneously, and first, I want to briefly

examine his work in the Medici Family Church of San Lorenzo. Because it was the family church of the

ruling family of Florence, San Lorenzo was a very important church, and many important works of art

were commissioned for it after it was built, and while it was being built. I'm showing you the nave

of San Lorenzo, constructed principally between 1422 and 1428, but you must understand that almost all of

Brunelleschi's projects remained unfinished at his death. They dragged on and dragged on and dragged on.

They were usable, but they weren't complete. There is no facade, no finished facade on San Lorenzo,

they never did get that done. So, you were talking about projects which took a long time to complete,

often posthumously, and in this case I'm showing you the nave, which is principally a work of the 1420s.

I think you will agree with me that it is one of the most harmonious spaces imaginable. It is serene,

it has a quality of serenity and balance which is devised from the proportional system which Brunelleschi

was using. The rationality of this architecture is equated with humanism, and by that I mean

that when you, when I, when we human beings are in the church, in Brunelleschi's architecture,

we feel ourselves in the proper proportion to that architecture. It reflects, as Greek architecture

did, it reflects the scale of the human being, unlike medieval architecture, specifically Gothic

architecture, which soars above the human scale and doesn't reflect that humanism and rationality

are equated in the architecture of Brunelleschi. This church, which when you walk into it, simply

a feeling of release, a feeling of peace, a kind of hush falls over you. It has to do with those

proportions of the arches, of the spaces, of the kind of light that comes in. You can see the windows

over the side aisles and how much light is admitted into the church. Not dark churches, not stained glass,

but light flooding across the floor. And you can also see, can you not, the dove-gray stone that is

used for the arches and many of the other articulating elements. This dove-gray stone has the beautiful

name Pietra Serena, Serene Stone, and it is exactly that. And when enters San Lorenzo, and I, from speaking

strictly for myself, I have a greater sense of calm and comfort and well-being in that church than

any other Italian church until we get to the work of Palladio well over a hundred years later. It's an

extraordinary experience. I will turn from this to a chapel well known in the history of art, and I'm

showing you only the interior. The exterior was altered a great deal after the architect's death,

and it doesn't really reflect his intentions, but the interior certainly does.

This is the Pazzi Chapel, P-A-Z-Z-I. It is at the Franciscan Church of Santa Croce, a great church.

It is not in the church of Santa Croce. It abuts it. It adjoins it. It's in the garden next to it.

It is in fact the chapter house for Santa Croce. It's a very important building, but not in the

fabric of the church itself. It was begun about 1440, finished in 1461, and it is remarkable for its

geometric clarity, the proportions, the articulation of the wall surface, very clear here. These are not

just decorative arches, which he puts on here. These are rhythmic. They articulate the space and the

movement of the eye across the space. They reflect or seem to reflect the structure of the building,

and the wonderful dome, the luminous dome or cupola, which crowns this. We only see a part of it here,

but I think enough to get a feeling of its luminosity and of its lightness. A modern

modern analogy would be to a parachute. It just seems to be settling above or floating above this space,

and also because it is a dome, it shapes the space just as the arches along the walls shape the space and

mold the space and give a sense of the volume which is enclosed within the space. The Patsy Chapel is in

fact one of his very last works in terms of design, and now I turn back to a work which is much more famous

in the history of Brunelleschi's art because of its prominence, and that is his work on the huge dome

of the Cathedral of Florence. Here we see it from the air. We see the baptistry in front of it, and we'll

return to the baptistry later, but here it is immediately in front, the older Romanesque building,

and then the cathedral, moving on back from what is in fact a 19th century facade. They didn't get that on

until the end way after the rest of the cathedral was built. Oh, beside it, the Campanile, the bell

tower, a famous bell tower, and this one designed by Giotto, who was an architect as well as a painter,

and then you move on back, and of course the crowning achievement was this extraordinary dome.

Brunelleschi's work, most famous work here, was the completion of the Cathedral of Florence.

Santa Maria del Fiore is the name, Saint Mary of the Flowers, but in Italy, in Florence, it is commonly

called simply the Duomo, D-U-O-M-O. Duomo is the Italian word often used for any cathedral, but it's so

strongly associated with the Florentine Cathedral that they're practically synonymous in Renaissance art

history, but there's a complication because Duomo means dome, but Duomo can be applied and has been

applied to cathedrals which have no dome. Therefore, it has an alternative derivation, and that is from the

Latin word for house, domus, house of God. Here the two meet, dome and domus as house, meet in the great

dome of the Florentine Cathedral. That cathedral had been underway for over a century when Brunelleschi

assumed the post of architect. The church that preceded it on the site was Santa Reparata, a much smaller

church. Santa Reparata was a child martyr, and either martyred or buried there or near there,

and so the church had been built. It was destroyed in order to build the cathedral, but they've actually

excavated its foundations underneath the pavement of the present cathedral, and you can go down and

visit them as well. The original artist, pardon me, architect of the new cathedral, and I show you now the

east end, the apse end of it with the radiating chapels and the great dome above. The original

architect was a man named Arnolfo di Cambio, and Arnolfo di Cambio drew up his plans around 1300,

and on a vast scale, and they were further enlarged around 1360. The nave was complete,

and the foundations were in place in the east end, and that is to say the end you see in the image here,

unchangeable when Brunelleschi came on the scene as architect, and he had to solve the problem of

constructing a dome that could span the great space above the high altar, a space about 140 feet in

diameter. The problem of how to construct this dome, the highest and widest ever attempted in a church,

had been confronting the builders for 50 years. They had a model there, and they're just looking at it

thinking, what happens when we actually get to the east end of the church? And finally, with no solution

in sight, they announced the competition. The competition was announced on August 19th, 1418,

and the posting read as follows. Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main

dome of the cathedral under construction by the Opera del Duomo, which is to say the works of the cathedral,

for armature, scaffold, or other thing, or any lifting device pertaining to the construction and

perfection of said cupola or vault shall do so before the end of the month of September. They had

six weeks. If the model be used, he shall be entitled to a payment of 200 gold florins.

According to Ross King in the book Brunelleschi's Dome, which is on your reading list and which is

highly recommended both for the subject and for more about Brunelleschi and Florence,

according to King, 200 florins was more money than a skilled craftsman could earn in two years.

So this was quite a reward being offered and everybody, whether they had a good idea or not,

wanted to enter. One of the solutions, I think it's everybody's favorite and it's true,

was to fill the area beneath the proposed dome with a mountain of dirt. Go, you know, climb a higher

mountain of dirt to work off of this mountain and build the dome above it, rather than try scaffolding,

because how are you going to scaffold this vast space? Well, how are you going to get a mountain

of dirt out of the cathedral when you're done? Well, the idea was to scatter gold and silver coins among

it, and then the greedy populace of the city would be let in, and out they would go, carrying theoretically

the dirt along with the money. It's a big theory. It didn't take, it wasn't selected, needless to say.

Brunelleschi's solution to the problem is too complex to explain here, but it involved his own

methods of laying masonry and devising a double dome, an inner and an outer shell, which reduced the weight,

rather than having one solid shell, the very solution used much later in the United States Capitol building,

a double shell for the same reason. Not least of all, he invented a hoisting machine that was superior

to anything known in order to raise the building materials up to the great height needed to do the

work. These works, together with his many other projects, made Brunelleschi the most visible artist

in Florence. The fame which attended his engineering solution to the construction of the cathedral dome

has never waned, and the majesty of the vast cupola became a symbol of the city. It was very soon after,

after it was completed, it was very soon said that the definition of a Florentine was to be born in the shadow

of the dome. And that is one reason why it's even exaggerated, as great as it is in pictures like the

one I showed you by Vasari. It is the symbolic center of the city. Despite the fame of that dome,

Brunelleschi, it's in Brunelleschi's visual clarity, his expression of calm rationality in the work that

he did at San Lorenzo, or in the Pazzi Chapel, and other places. That's where he succeeded in embodying

the humanism of Renaissance art. Brunelleschi, through his architectural research and his experiments,

is also believed to be the inventor of the linear perspective method that was adopted by Renaissance

painters, and to have developed this system through his careful study of the mathematical principles

of architecture. And of course, it's linear or one-point perspective that radically altered the art of

painting during the Renaissance, and we'll have much more to say about it subsequently.

Sculpture was also of seminal importance to the development of the Renaissance style.

Because it echoed Roman sculpture, because it involved the three-dimensional representation of the human

figure, and because it was much used in the integral decoration of architecture, sculpture in the 15th

century was remarkably innovative. Sculpture influenced painters rather than the other way around, as has

sometimes been the case in the history of art. There were several great sculptors in the early decades

of the century, and Brunelleschi himself was an exceptional sculptor before he decided to concentrate

on architecture. We have already looked at the bronze doors for the baptistry designed and cast by Lorenzo

Ghiberti between 1403 and 1424. In the last lecture we discussed them, and I mentioned that they were the

result of a famous competition held in 1401. That competition of 1401 might almost be said to be the

prototype of competitions for public art commissions ever since, and it suggests the great importance of

sculpture at the outset of the Quattrocento. The 1401 competition for the design of bronze doors was for

the doors to the south entrance to the baptistry. This gets very confusing. The baptistry has three

entrances and already had a set of doors on the east, which had been completed in 1330, a century earlier,

by Andrea Pisano, so these were to go in the south. Of the seven entrants in this competition, the finalists

were Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, and the subject assigned them was the sacrifice of Isaac. This is Brunelleschi's

competition panel, which is preserved in the museum of the cathedral called the Museo del Opera del Duomo,

where many of the things that were in the cathedral and were in the baptistry

have been moved. Brunelleschi's competition panel was a startling interpretation of this subject.

As Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac, his son, the angel not only rushes in from the upper left,

from that cusp in the quatrefoil, but he grabs or grasps the arm of Abraham, the knife-bearing arm,

to physically prevent him from sacrificing his son. The style is rather abrupt. Look how angular Isaac

is in his pose on this altar, a sacrificial altar. There's a kind of raw brutality about this image,

which is unexpected in the treatment of the subject, and which certainly captures one's attention.

Ghiberti did the same subject, because they all were required to, and his is quite different. It's

more suave, more carefully balanced, less crowded, more curvilinear, more idealized. There's no

idealization really in the Brunelleschi, but a lot here. And simply put, I think we can say it's more

beautiful. It's true also of the nude body of Isaac, which is a true Renaissance creation,

small as it is one of the first Renaissance nude figures. Although the drama in Ghiberti's panel is

slightly less immediate than Brunelleschi's enactment, it is more legible, which is of great importance in

these very small narrative scenes. It is easier to read on the doors from some distance. The great success

of Ghiberti's doors, which resulted from his winning this competition, and getting to work for a quarter

of a century on those doors, not the only commission he had, of course, but the great success of that set

of doors, which we looked at, resulted in a commission without competition, this time for doors on the

north entrance, but now they're on the east, which I will explain. Ghiberti's east doors as they are now

for the baptistry, 1425 to 1452. His second set of doors here was the last commission for the baptistry,

since there are only three portals. And let me just quickly say that the subjects reading from the top are

all from Genesis. You read top left to right, like you'd read a book top to left, left to right from top

to bottom, and they are all from Genesis, the creation of Adam and Eve through their expulsion,

Cain and Abel, Noah, stories of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, all are treated here.

The three panels I will show you are the top left, which is the creation scene, creation of man,

down on the second down on the right, cross over and go down to the second on the right,

and you have one of the Jacob, one of the Abraham stories, pardon me, and then the third down on the

left, go diagonally there, you have the Jacob and Esau story. The design of the doors was radically

different from the earlier baptistry doors, since the 28 panels and the quatrefoil shape within which

the sculptural figures had to be fitted in the earlier doors was abandoned. Now the new doors

had ten panels, five in each valve, they were square, and much larger fields, similar to fields

used in painting, and allowed Ghiberti, allowed Ghiberti to develop a pictorial style of relief

sculpture with remarkable illusions of architectural and landscape space. Each of the panels was

completely gilded, creating an incomparably splendid appearance. I want to show you Ghiberti's creation of

man, which is to say, the creation of man and woman, because in this panel from lower left,

we have God standing there and giving a hand to his new creation, man, lifting him up. In the center,

we have Adam reclining asleep while God creates Eve from his side, and what a wonderful female nude he

has created there. Extraordinary, one of the, I dare say, one of the most beautiful female nudes of

the Renaissance in that figure, and the great grace as she glides up into the picture. But there's more

here. In the left, in the background, under the trees, we have the temptation. There's the serpent on

the tree, Adam and Eve, the temptation and fall, and on the right, they are expelled from paradise. God

the Father reappears in the sky above. An angel is sent down. They're driven through the door, the gate of

paradise, and out into the world, and they are here at the right-hand side. The panel that I show

you now, scenes of Abraham, are remarkable for their, for the landscape and for the atmospheric

illusionism of that landscape. At the bottom left, Abraham kneels, welcoming three angels who have

arrived. One of these angels is Yahweh, the Lord, disguised, and he and the other two have

arrived to confirm the Lord's earlier promise that the elderly Sarah and her more elderly husband,

he was supposed to be 100 and she 90, would have a child. She would bear his child, and the child,

of course, was Isaac. The angels appear. He kneels. There is his wife standing in the, standing in the tent,

and she is told to prepare a meal for the unexpected, unexpected guests. On the top right, we have the,

again, the sacrifice of Isaac, and look what has happened. There's Isaac kneeling on a rock or

perhaps an altar, and Ghiberti's taken Brunelleschi's idea from 25 years earlier, the idea of the angel

grasping the hand and physically restraining him, as Brunelleschi had imagined. Lower on the right, in this

wonderful landscape, are two figures, apparently two servants who, with their mule, accompanied

Abraham and Isaac to this site. But they're a wonderful genre scene, because they're having a very

earnest conversation. There may be more than meets the eye here, but we're not certain. All of the

atmospheric perspective here, the sense that the trees are moving in and out of the space, and the

rocks are, is quite a remarkable achievement. The last of the panels that I'll show you is too complicated

for words, really. And I, simply because of the story involved. The story of Jacob and Esau is a very

involved one, and I can only ask you to read Genesis chapter 25, chapter 26. But let me describe the scene

to you. First of all, architecture dominates, and it's linear perspective that creates the architecture.

On the roof, on the right-hand side, she, Rebecca, is kneeling. She is speaking to the Lord. She wants to

know why the twins within her are struggling so much, and she's informed that they will found two

nations, and that the younger, the elder shall obey the younger. A very complicated tribal story,

in a sense here. Then the scene goes on. Her confinement in the background, in the left, she's in bed,

expecting her children. In the center, in the background again, you have the two, the two twins,

and Esau is bargaining with his brother Jacob for food, and he bargains away his birthright for food.

Rebecca, over here in the background, is instructing Jacob what to do with the goat which he is holding,

while Esau goes off to hunt at the bequest of his father, who wants some game. Instead,

the mother supplies supplies a goat of their own, wraps Jacob's arm in fur, in the skin of the goat,

so that he will feel to the blind father, when he blesses him, feel like the hairy elder son, and so he

gives his blessing to the younger son. I said it was complicated. In the center, Esau returns from the hunt,

finds out that the blessing has already been bestowed on the wrong son. At the left, we have

no idea who these four women are, but they're wonderful. They are dancing, as it were. They seem

to be turning in space, beautiful both as single figures and as individuals. They may conceivably

refer to the daughters of Canaan, referred to later, whom Jacob was apparently going to take a wife,

choose a wife from, until forbidden by his father to do so. In any way, in any event, they're wonderful

group. In all of these panels, we've seen that Ghiberti retains the device, which is common in

medieval art of simultaneous narration. He shows a sequence of events in the same continuous setting,

but apart from that, his second set of doors are fully Renaissance, in their management of space,

and in their telling of the stories. This splendid second set of doors, known to history as the

Gates of Paradise, were a defining achievement of the early Renaissance, and a model for later

generations of sculptors. Their fame was instant. They were immediately installed on the east side,

and his own first doors had to be moved to the north from the east because of it. They're known as the

Gates of Paradise, because Michelangelo is said to have remarked decades later that Ghiberti's doors

were worthy to be the Gates of Paradise. He probably was making a pun. The east side faced

the cathedral doors, and on special occasions, the doors of both buildings were opened, and processions

went from the cathedral into the baptistry, and the baptism took place, and the area between,

the piazza between, was called the Paradise. So these are gates to the Paradise, and gates to Paradise,

as well. Ghiberti clearly understood their worth, and his own, since he included his own

self-portrait in the doors. In one of the frames, he puts his self-portrait. Self-portraits, like portraits

in general, became commonplace in the Renaissance, another mark of the new age, its self-confidence,

its humanism, and now the cathedral was given its dome. The baptistry had its last set of doors. The

ensemble of the sacred center of Florence was complete and magnificent, and here in an 18th century

engraving, you see a great procession around baptistry and church together. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you.