Renaissance architecture

Renaissance architecture began in early 15th-century Florence as a conscious revival of ancient Greek and Roman building, and spread from Italy across Europe over the following two centuries. Its opening act was Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral (1420-1436), a double brick shell laid in herringbone courses without temporary supports, still the largest masonry dome in the world.

You recognize the style by symmetry and measured proportion: the five classical orders, semicircular arches, hemispherical domes, and flat or coffered ceilings in place of medieval rib vaults. The city palazzo added rusticated stone facades and a heavy crowning cornice; Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, begun in 1489, is the model.

Leon Battista Alberti supplied the theory, writing the first architectural treatises since antiquity. Donato Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome and Michelangelo’s work on St. Peter’s carried the High Renaissance, and Andrea Palladio closed the period with Villa La Rotonda and his Four Books of Architecture (1570). The experimental late phase, Mannerism (c. 1520-1600), is treated as a style of its own.

North of the Alps the style took on local accents: the Loire châteaux such as Chambord (1519-1539), Antwerp City Hall (finished 1564), and the Flemish-gabled variant that shaped Scandinavia, with Kronborg in Helsingør and Frederiksborg in Hillerød. In the 19th century the vocabulary returned as neo-renaissance, covered on its own page. The originals remain the core of the canon: La Rotonda and the Palladian villas of the Veneto were inscribed as World Heritage in 1994.