Sangallo and Antiquity

CHRISTOPH LUITPOLD FROMMEL

I The Study of Ancient Monuments before 1513

b runelleschi A n D AlberT i

Since the fourteenth century, and probably even earlier, artists had drawn and measured ancient monuments, and in so doing prepared the ground for the renewal of architecture.1 But the first artist reported to have measured Roman monuments systematically was Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446): “… levassono [together with the young Donatello] grossamente in disegno quasi tuttj gli edificj di Roma e in molti luoghi circustanti di fuorj colle misure delle largheze e alteze….”2 For Brunelleschi the architecture of the ancients was the only legitimate kind—it was architecture true and pure. He went to great efforts to secure a translation of the most important chapters of Vitruvius’s treatise, the only surviving text to present a systematic idea of ancient architecture, so that he might understand better the character, vocabulary, and syntax of ancient architecture.3 In Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) he found someone of equal stature, someone with similar humanistic and artistic convictions, who would lay the theoretical foundation for the future development of architecture.4 Even though architecture did not become Alberti’s main interest until the 1440s, his humanistic education and intensive study of the ancient monuments equipped him to understand Vitruvius fully for the first time since antiquity. He began collecting every available text on architecture ; studied the monuments of imperial Rome, which Vitruvius could not yet have known ; and in a systematic Aristotelian fashion developed his findings into his own treatise De re aedificatoria, which he presented to pope Nicolas V in 1452. In this work he sketched out the ideal image of an ancient city, which he and many another longed to revive, and by comparing Vitruvius’s theory with the actual monuments, laid the foundation for the studies of Francesco del Borgo, Giuliano da Sangallo, Francesco di Giorgio, Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi, Palladio and, last but not least, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.

Alberti criticised Vitruvius’s language and obscurities and did not hesitate to modify his norms whenever the monuments or other writers offered something more convincing. His persistent goal, in practice as well as in theory, was to assist in the rebirth of antiquity and thus to establish the preconditions for a new kind of life in the style of the ancients. His few buildings demonstrate that he was able to do this because he brought the habits and functions that had developed in the course of the Middle Ages into harmony with ancient types and forms. He found compromises that could, on the one hand, satisfy patrons and accommodate the changed artistic practices of his time and, on the other, transform these habits as far as possible into more antique ones.

Alberti’s drawing of a bath complex, probably a fragment of a villa project, already shows an attempt at such a compromise (Fig. 1).5 It corresponds only partially to the “balinearum dispositionum demonstrationes” in the tenth chapter of Vitruvius’s fifth book, but the archaic manner of the drawing, the many parallels with the De re aedificatoria and the shallow niches at the end of the ambulatory, which recall Brunelleschi, argue for an early date around 1450. Evidently, Alberti was trying to reawaken the appetite of his wealthy contemporaries for the benefits of bathing, sweating, massaging, and anointing by incorporating a few functional rooms in villas or palaces with open views and loggias suitable for all seasons.6 It was the start of a new bathing culture, which would afterwards be revived about 1480 in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino and a little later at the Rocca of Ostia, and which would culminate in Bramante’s project for the Cortile del Belvedere and Raphael’s design for the Villa Madama.7

At the same time, shortly before 1450, Alberti started to win over to his ideals some of the most important architectural patrons in Italy. The result was the onset of an age that gave itself as unreservedly as possible to the promptings of ancient art, trying wherever feasible to emulate it. As heir to Alberti and Bramante, as colleague of Raphael and as Palladio’s most important precursor, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger occupies a central place in this development. His rich store of almost two thousand architectural drawings affords perhaps the most complete idea that we have of the goals and problems of Renaissance architects and the astonishingly rapid changes that occurred in their understanding of antiquity.8 choice AnD mAnner of rePresenTATion before sAngAllo

The representation of architecture in plan, elevation, cross-section, and perspective views can be traced back as far as Villard de Honnecourt’s pattern book of around 1230 and is ultimately of antique origin.9 Brunelleschi learned these representational methods, which in the meantime had been perfected in the builders’ guilds, probably in the workshop of Florence Cathedral, and from him they were picked up by the young Alberti. Jacopo della Quercia’s project for the Fonte Gaia in Siena shows how far perspective had arrived in 1408,10 while Ghiberti’s drawing for the niche of St Stephen for Orsanmichele in Florence indicates that the combination of orthogonal elevation and perspective was already in use at the time.11 The drawings of the somewhat amateurish Ciriaco da Ancona, which we know primarily from copies and which must have been inspired by the more professional drawings of Brunelleschi, Alberti, Donatello or Ghiberti, convey an idea of how ancient buildings were drawn in the first half of the century.12 The use of wash for contrasts of light and shade, the employment of perspective, and the delight in such details as the figural elements and fragments of architecture in the foreground of his drawings all prepare the way for Mantegna, Bramante’s Prevedari engraving and Giuliano da Sangallo’s late drawings.

Although Alberti restricts himself in the plan of the bathing complex to a simple outline of the walls and omits all decoration, he works to scale and shows a professional knowledge of the proportions and wall thicknesses required for rooms undoubtedly meant to be vaulted (cf. Fig. 1). Alberti would eventually develop his graphic capabilities to such an extent that even from a distance he could direct building sites in detail. Filarete’s treatise from the early 1460s is also evidence that even before Alberti’s death Florentine architects were using highly sophisticated methods of representation, such as the perspective cross-section.13

Elevation drawings by Alberti from these years were probably similar to that of the project for cardinal Scarampi’s funeral altar in San Lorenzo in Damaso in Rome, which may be autograph (Fig. 2).14 Since Scarampi died in 1465, the drawing is datable to Alberti’s time and we do not know of any comparable example of the preceding decades. The drawing is orthogonal and drawn with ruler and compass. Only the altar table, the central opening with coffered vault, the lateral shell niches, and some pilasters are foreshortened. Though this combination of orthogonal and perspective drawing does not fully correspond to Alberti’s own principles of pure orthogonality, it goes far beyond Ghiberti’s niche for St Stephen. Both architecture and ornament are of the calibre of Alberti’s last years, and the drawings of his late projects may not have been very different.

Some of the few preserved drawings of this early period, and perhaps even some by Brunelleschi, could have ended up in the library of Piero de’ Medici, who already in 1456 had sent draughtsmen to Rome and owned three volumes of drawings after the antique.15

The “ l ibro Piccolo” A n D T he “TA ccuino s enese”

One of Alberti’s first direct followers in architecture was undoubtedly Giuliano da Sangallo (ca. 1445–1516).16 During his training as a carpenter and woodcarver, he had witnessed the completion of some of Brunelleschi’s and Alberti’s Florentine buildings. It is likely that the Medici took an interest in furthering the education of the young artist, who was to become the most talented Florentine architect of his generation. They may even have sent him to Rome to meet Alberti, with whom they had close connections and who had already inspired so many artists. Giuliano profited more than anyone else from Alberti’s understanding of ancient monuments, his methods of representation and his reconstructions. By his own testimony, Giuliano began surveying the monuments of Rome as early as 1465, and the studies of capitals, bases and cornices in the “Libro Piccolo” of the Codex Barberini, which are still similar to the drawings of the circle of Benozzo Gozzoli, may go back to these early years (Fig. 3).17 To most Quattrocento painters and sculptors such details of antique architecture were more important than surveys of entire monuments. In the “Taccuino Senese,” which is datable only after the late 1490s, Giuliano dedicated attention to entire surveys, such as those of ancient centralized buildings, above all mausolea in the environs of Rome and Naples, some of which Brunelleschi and Alberti had already discovered as important sources of inspiration and which Giuliano may have visited when presenting a model to the king of Naples in 1489, or even earlier (Fig. 4).18

The city-view panels in Berlin, Urbino and Baltimore from about 1480–1510 are probably Giuliano’s invention and demonstrate the evolution of his virtuosity, not only in representing architecture in convincing perspective and lighting, but also in combining the language and typology of antiquity with that of his own time in an urban context.19

As he did with wooden models, Lorenzo de’ Medici may have ordered them as gifts for prominent princes whom he wanted to encourage to build in the new classical style. In the Baltimore panel the plan of the Colosseum is already oval20 and the perspective is centred on one of Giuliano’s magnificent triumphal arches which appear only in his Taccuino Senese.21 Its rhythm seems to be inspired by the arch of Gallienus22 and is more complex than that of the arches which Botticelli and Perugino had painted in the early 1480s in the background of their Sistine Chapel frescoes.

Alberti must have already measured some triumphal arches when he designed the facade of the Tempio Malatestiano in around 1450, and some years later he probably also studied the triumphal centrepiece of the Castel Nuovo at Naples.23 In the interior of S. Andrea in Mantua he used the triumphal motif for the first time in sequence, the so-called “rhythmic travée,” and made it one of the most successful articulating devices in post-medieval architecture. Reflections of the rediscovery of the triumphal arch can be seen also in the young Mantegna’s frescoes in the Ovetari chapel at Padua, and in the work of Jacopo Bellini and Bonfili and others (Fig. 5).24 In the first two decades of the sixteenth century Giuliano, Gian Cristoforo Romano, Bernardo della Volpaia and Peruzzi strove to make increasingly precise drawings of triumphal arches.25 In the drawings of Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, however, they play a relatively minor role.26

Giuliano’s Taccuino Senese includes small surveys of his projects for the Piccolomini chapel of Siena cathedral (1481), the villa at Poggio a Caiano (1485), Santa Maria delle Carceri (1485) and the palace of the king of Naples (1489), which he must have copied from earlier drawings.27 On the last page of the Taccuino he mentions the completion of the dome of Loreto in 1500 and the death of a certain “Lorenzo di Pietro” in 1503, and as late as 1513 he added a measurement to the plan of the Colosseum.28 In view of these dates, the Taccuino thus provides what is probably the most concrete idea of the state of knowledge of antiquity at the time when Antonio da Sangallo moved to Rome. As in the earlier “Libro Piccolo” (Fig. 6) the methods of representation range from ground plans and orthogonal elevations with some perspective detail (Fig. 7), to perspective cross-sections and perspective exterior and interior views such as those of the Piccolomini chapel, the Colosseum or the “bagno di Viterbo.”29 Drawing the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders Giuliano also demonstrated a solid knowledge of Vitruvius and Alberti (Fig. 8). There he noted Vitruvius’s various intercolumniations, the tapering of the entasis, and the enlargement of the architrave with the increasing height of the orders.30 Like Alberti, he gave the Doric order a proportion of 1:8 and devoted special care to the Ionic order, whose proportions, as in Vitruvius, fluctuate between 1:8 and 1:9. He reconstructed its capital, base, and entablature ; and like Francesco di Giorgio in the same years, noted the translation into Italian of the Vitruvian terms.

According to Vasari, Giuliano’s pupil Simone Pollaiuolo, known as il Cronaca (1457–1508), was one of the most competent draughtsmen of ancient buildings.31 He started as a stonemason and may have collaborated in the eighties with Andrea Bregno at the Piccolomini chapel of Siena cathedral. Drawings of many details of Bregno’s executed work in the co-called Codex Strozzi by a hitherto unidentified draughtsman may have been copied after lost drawings of Cronaca.32

Only active as an architect in his own right from about 1490, Cronaca collaborated with Giuliano in 1493 on the vestibule for the sacristy of S. Spirito in Florence—perhaps the most classical building before Bramante’s Tempietto. In San Salvatore al Monte and the comparable church of San Pietro in Scrigno he was, however, more inspired by the detail of ancient prototypes than by their typology. The majority of his drawings after the antique are, in fact, limited to details and are clearly more akin to those in the Taccuino Senese of Giuliano, with whom he may have exchanged surveys, than to the mature parts of the Codex Barberini.33 Whatever the case, Cronaca was one of the pioneers of orthogonal drawing after ancient monuments. Thus, in his studies of capitals, like Giuliano in the Taccuino, he occasionally combines an orthogonal front view with a ground plan or side view (Fig. 9, Fig. 10).34 Orthogonal elevations of the Theatre of Marcellus and the Septizonium, and elevations of the Basilica Aemilia and the Arch of Constantine with perspective details in the Codex Strozzi and Raffaello da Montelupo’s sketchbook in Lille, have been also interpreted as copies after Cronaca. The latter was, however, much less able to follow Vitruvius’s more complex descriptions than Giuliano, as is shown by his reconstruction of the Doric portal.35

For a long time, the early architectural drawings of Peruzzi36 were attributed to Cronaca, whom he must have admired not only as both connoisseur and draughtsman of the antique, but also as architect.37 Peruzzi was however already inspired by Bramante not only in the orthogonal elevations with perspective details and strong chiaroscuro, which go far beyond Giuliano’s Taccuino, but also in wide-angle interiors such as the imposing drawing of S. Stefano Rotondo (Fig. 11).38 The fact that the influence of Giuliano and

Cronaca as well as Bramante can be felt in Peruzzi’s Farnesina, designed around 1505, also speaks in favor of dating these sheets to the beginning of Julius ii ’s pontificate.39

The surveys of the Roman sculptor Gian Cristoforo Romano (ca. 1460–1512), such as those of the arches of Constantine and Septimius Severus, are only known through copies.40 They are purely orthogonal and their combination with the plan, not drawn to scale, and their details without any perspective section recall Giuliano’s Taccuino. Gian Cristoforo was the son of Jesaia da Pisa, a sculptor who had been in contact with Alberti, trained in Rome and worked there until 1491. After having lived for many years in Milan and Mantua, Gian Cristoforo Romano was perhaps one of the sculptors—like Andrea Sansovino and Domenico Aimo da Varignana—brought to Rome by Bramante to fill the numerous niches in the Cortile del Belvedere with statues.41 When he was entrusted in 1510 with the execution of Bramante’s project for the basilica in Loreto, he must already have absorbed his method and vision.

In the 1480s, when Giuliano was at the height of his career, his brother Antonio the Elder (1460–1534) collaborated closely with him, and after Lorenzo il Magnifico’s death in 1492, when Giuliano had entered the service of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, Antonio the Elder became the preferred architect of the Borgias.42 In 1499 at the latest, he was commissioned to build the Rocca in Civita Castellana and must have gone there a number of times until the summer of 1503.43 He may sometimes have taken with him his promising nephew, Antonio the Younger, who would later direct the work after 1510 or even earlier. Antonio the Elder’s drawings of two castles, which may date from as early as the beginning of the 1490s, differ from Giuliano’s contemporaneous sheets, both in their less convincing bird’s-eye perspective and in their finely hatched modelling in ink.44 The orthogonal survey of the Hadrianeum on u 1407 A r with the solemn signature “… o DA s A ng A llo A rchi T e T.” is again reminiscent of Giuliano’s Taccuino and may be a copy after Antonio the Elder.45

b r A m A n T e’s D r Awings

In the pontificate of Julius ii the influence of Antonio the Elder, Giuliano and Cronaca on Antonio the Younger’s development was increasingly superseded by that of Bramante. When Bramante (1444–1514) moved to Rome late in 1499, he not only knew all the methods of representing