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Renaissance

The Renaissance began in Italy early in the fifteenth century, and lasted throughout the sixteenth into the first decades of the seventeenth century. It was marked by a return to the classic Orders of Architecture, treated with much freedom, which we may describe as an extension of the Corinthian and Composite with very florid decorations. So we witness an era of wonderful boldness in the carving of wood, sculpture of stone, working of metal, modelling of plaster, and the application of decorative painting.

While there is a’ reappearance of the acanthus leaf, the anthemion, the palmette and Lotus, these are given exuberant outlines and play but a minor part amidst the great mass of ornament which covers thickly all surfaces. These comprise scrolled foliage, volutes, grotesques, as well as beautiful, slightly conventional forms of leaves, flowers, and fruit, in sprays occasionally, but mostly in light festoons, heavy swags and drops, wreathed about with ribbons. In the arabesques we see heads and busts springing from calyces, volutes expanding into animal forms, while round about them hover birds and butterllies. There are rosettes and paterae, small panels and cartouches filled with scrolled foliage, latticework, tracery, and diaper. Much of this is painted on the flat, or reproduced in mosaics, or modelled in plaster and afterwards painted and gilded. Mouldings and friezes are masses of such gorgeous scrolls and flowers, with heraldic enrichments, portrait medallions, resting on voluted consoles. In the panels of walls, spandrels, and coffers of ceilings are paintings, in oil or fresco, of religious or mythological subjects. Carving is usually in high relief and strong, though some of the surface ornamentation on pilasters and borders, which are used for dividing panels, is very little rounded, treated more or less in the spirit of diapering, and often gilded on a background of vivid colour.

Colouring is nearly always brilliant and in strong contrasts, with a lavish use of gold, while architectural contours are rectangular, modified by arches, arcading and vaulting and the carving of ceilings, and by circular and oval windows. Ornamentation is largely in flowing lines and graceful curves, the surfaces broken to increase the effect of light and shadow.

As the years advanced this decoration became excessive, in quantity, mass, and projection. Then came the period of decadence, of interminable interlacings, of involuted volutes, of endless curves and grotesques at every point; but while strong colours were retained, with the addition of tertiaries, lines became thinner and in much lower relief.

The Renaissance style found its way to England only slowly, at first direct from Italy, later by way of Flanders and Germany. It always had an insular stamp, as seen in the Tudor period, never having the same influence as the Neo-Classic in the eighteenth century.

Palladian.-Andrea Palladio, about the middle of the sixteenth century, introduced in Italy a reform movement in Renaissance architecture.He advocated a return to the strict observance of the Classic Orders as laid down in theory. His style was austere, characterised by restrained ornamentation and rather dull colouring, arabesques were practically not used and pictorial decoration restricted. The Palladian style soon degenerated into rather cold formalism. It had rather more influence in England than. the more florid Renaissance movement, though in the matter of decoration there was rather more freedom in the use of ornament and colour than was common in the orthodox Palladian School. Inigo Jones, Wren, and Kent may be cited as disciples and exemplars of the Palladian teaching in this country. It led to the Neo-Classic or Neo-Gré~k, of which the Adam brothers were exponents.