Renaissance to Contemporary Architecture - AP Art History

Renaissance architecture made use of attributes of Ancient Roman architecture. Namely, Renaissance architects utilized Ancient Roman column types, such as Doric, Ionic, Tuscan, Composite, and Corinthian, often used decoratively rather than structurally.

The "voussoir" is a wedge-shaped block that makes up a true arch.

Neoclassical art and architecture came about in Europe hand in hand with the philosophical era known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Just as the Enlightenment reacted against Catholic Christianity and embraced reason over emotion, Neoclassical artists sought to go back to antiquity, to a "pre-Christian" era. Thus, Neoclassical architecture brought back the chief elements of Roman architecture, like columns, domes, and collonades.

Until the late nineteenth century, buildings had serious vertical size restrictions due to the weight placed on them by bricks and other traditional materials. With the introduction of steel, an alloy of iron, new possibilities were available to builders. In particular, the use of steel-frame construction, which built a "sheet" around steel beams, allowed for buildings stretching taller than ten stories.

The Washington Monument, in the center of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is the world's largest memorial obelisk. Obelisks, four sided pillars that originated with the ancient Egyptians, have long been used in Western culture as memorial markers. The Washington Monument was conceived in the 1840s as more than just the obelisk, but ran into funding problems and was only completed in its simpler form in 1885.

Palladio lived and worked around Venice in the mid-sixteenth century, constructing a series of large villas and important buildings. Much of Palladio's work harkened back to styles prominent in Ancient rome, as he created buildings with lots of columns, large colonnades, and domes. His influential architectural textbook, The Four Books of Architecture, helped spread these ideas in the architectural movement known as neo-classicalism.

The Italian architect Andrea Palladio was well known for his own buildings in his native Venice, but gained greater fame for the work of architectural theory he composed in 1570, The Four Books of Architecture. Drawing on Greek and Roman influences, Palladio called for symmetry, domes, columns, and grand spaces. Each of these elements would become hallmarks of neoclassical architecture during the eighteenth century.

Protestant theology greatly changed church architecture in Northern Europe after the sixteenth century. Catholic churches, even for the tiniest, poorest parishes, featured ornate statuary and imagery before the Reformation. The Protestant-built churches, by contrast, were much less ornate, featuring fewer images, with altars creating less of a barrier between clergy and congregants.

An arch is able to remain in its appropriate position because of the way that pressure is placed throughout the entire arch. Pressure can only be appropriately distributed because of the placement of the keystone. The keystone is the central stone in an arch, which is shaped in order to push the weight down through every piece of stone.

The rediscovery of concrete was the key to completing the dome atop Il Duomo. Filippo Brunelleschi found the lost recipe for concrete, a recipe that was lost in the Middle Ages; prior to the Middle Ages, concrete was used often by the Ancient Romans.

The Baroque movement was superseded by the artistic and architectural movement Rococo in the eighteenth century. Rococo was a deviation from the grandeur and strict symmetry of the Baroque movement, which dominated western and central Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some describe Rococo as delicate and intricate.

Neoclassicism was inspired by both ancient Greek and ancient Roman civilizations. This can be seen in its use of columns and other characteristics commonly associated with Greek and Roman art and architecture. Neoclassical sculptures also greatly resemble ancient Greek and ancient Roman sculptures.

The main building of Monticello, pictured here, sat in the middle of Thomas Jefferson's plantation. As such, it was both a grand house and the administrative center for the plantation, which housed and worked hundreds of slaves in various agricultural projects. The building's remote location from other settlements was key to its size and situation in its surroundings.

Image accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons. Author: YF12. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monticello\_2010-10-29.jpg

The Great London Fire of 1666 destroyed many of the buildings in the city, including the original St. Paul's Cathedral, and necessitated massive architectural projects. The largest beneficiary of this was Sir Christopher Wren, a mathematician as well as an architect, who created over fifty churches and rebuilt St. Paul's. Wren's legacy found its way throughout baroque architecture, and his St. Paul's design influenced the Pantheon in Paris, the U.S. Capitol, and many other buildings.

When Inigo Jones, who created this plan of a new Palace at Whitehall in 1638, first became an architect, the field was only newly springing up as a separate artistic discipline. There was no training in architecture or building design, and many seventeenth-century architects were self-taught artisans who came from related fields. Jones began as a stage designer, where he built sets and costumes for shows at the English court, and was typical of his era of architects for starting off in an artistic field that required knowledge of structures and fabrication.

Image: Plan for A New Palace at Whitehall by Inigo Jones (1638). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ingo\_Jones\_plan\_for\_a\_new\_palace\_at\_Whitehall\_1638.jpg

The Federal style of architecture refers to the buildings designed and constructed in the first few decades of the United States' independence, roughly 1785 to 1815. The Federal style was closely related to the "Regency style" in Britain, which took place under the Regency of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) during 1811 to 1820. Both styles were developments of Neoclassicism, which borrowed elements from Roman architecture like columns, domes, and white marble.

The term neoclassicism can be broken down into two parts: "Neo" and "Classic." This refers to the fact that is a new ("neo") interpretation of classic architectural and artistic concepts pioneered by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Art Deco and Art Nouveau are movements firmly planted in the twentieth century, and Mannerism and the Renaissance are much too far in the past to even be considered for a question that is about an eighteenth-through-twenty-first-century artistic movement.

The Rococo artistic and architectural movement and style, also known as "Late Baroque," surged in the late 18th century as a more intricate, delicate, light and asymmetrical approach to architecture than the Baroque style that came before it. Neoclassicism, which came as a direct opposition to Rococo, had replaced the asymmetrical, graceful architecture and art of the Rococo with its own focus on symmetry and simplicity by the end of the 18th century.

The building pictured in the drawing is Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in then rural Virginia, which he began building in the late eighteenth century. The location of Monticello is at the top of a hill, on the relative frontier of the continent, making it a building challenge. Nonetheless, Jefferson largely succeeded at building a European inspired grand home that still fit into the American landscape.

Image accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons. Author: YF12. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monticello\_2010-10-29.jpg

Thomas Jefferson was the principal designer, architect, and builder of Monticello, but his plans and designs were heavily influenced by the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Palladio not only built a number of impressive works of his own, but also wrote an influential treatise on architecture, The Four Books of Architecture. Jefferson was self-taught as an architect, largely from the writings of Palladio.

Image accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons. Author: YF12. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monticello\_2010-10-29.jpg