Western architecture

Western architecture

Introduction

      history of Western architecture from prehistoric Mediterranean cultures to the present.

      The history of Western architecture is marked by a series of new solutions to structural problems. During the period from the beginning of civilization through ancient Greek culture, construction methods progressed from the most primitive shed roof and simple truss to the vertical posts, or columns (column), supporting horizontal beams, or lintels (see post-and-lintel system). Greek architecture also formalized many structural and decorative elements into three Classical orders (order)—Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian—which, to a greater or lesser extent, have influenced architecture since that time. The Romans exploited the arch, vault, and dome and made broader use of the load-bearing masonry wall. In the late medieval period, the pointed arch, ribbing, and pier systems gradually emerged. At this point all the problems of brick and stone masonry construction had been solved, and, beyond decorative advances, little innovation was achieved until the Industrial Revolution. Not until the 19th century, with the advent of cast-iron and steel construction, did a new architectural age dawn and higher, broader, and lighter buildings become possible. With the advances of 20th-century technology, new structural methods such as cantilevering (cantilever) received more extensive use. By the turn of the 21st century, computers had further enhanced architects' ability to conceptualize and create new forms.

      For the purposes of this article, “Western architecture” signifies architecture in Europe as well as in regions that share a European cultural tradition. For example, this article discusses early architectural traditions in areas such as Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Jerusalem, which, beginning in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and continuing through the period of the Byzantine Empire, were closely tied to architectural developments in Europe. By the late 15th century, European architectural styles spread to the Americas. North American architecture is also treated in this article; for treatment of Latin American architecture, see Latin American architecture. (Native American architectural traditions were generally unaffected by European influence; for that history, see Native American art.)

      The technical and theoretical aspects of the medium are examined elsewhere; see architecture.

William Fleming David John Watkin Ed.

European Metal Age cultures

Aegean (Aegean civilizations) and eastern Mediterranean
      The islands of the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea form a natural link between the landmasses of the Middle East and Europe. A westward expansion from the civilizations of western Asia and Egypt began about 3000 BC and led to settlements in Crete, the Cyclades, and mainland Greece. The fundamental difference between these and the earlier, Neolithic (Neolithic Period) cultures is that stone tools and weapons were replaced by those made of copper and, later, bronze. The Chalcolithic (Copper-Stone) Age, lasting in the Aegean area from the early 3rd millennium BC to the beginning of the 2nd, is usually considered a part of the greater Bronze Age, which was superseded by the Iron Age from about 1200 BC.

      The hallmark of the Aegean civilizations was the facility with which Asiatic motifs and techniques were adapted to form original local styles. In architecture, by far the most important achievements were those of the civilizations of Minoan (Minoan civilization) Crete and Mycenaean Greece.

Minoan Crete
      The great maritime civilization of Crete crystallized around palaces such as those at Knossos, Phaestus, Ayía Triáda, Mallia, and Tylissos. The immensely important Palace of Minos at Knossos, excavated and reconstructed early in the 20th century by Sir Arthur Evans (Evans, Sir Arthur), offers evidence of unbroken architectural and artistic development from Neolithic beginnings, culminating in a brilliant display of building activity during the third phase of the Middle Minoan (Minoan civilization) period (1700–1580 BC) and continuing until the invasion of the Achaeans in the 12th century. The palace, however, is essentially a structure of the late two Middle Minoan periods (1800–1580 BC). It no doubt rivaled Middle Eastern and Egyptian palaces in monumentality. Following the example of such structures, the Palace of Minos is a quadrangular complex of rooms and corridors grouped around a great central court, roughly 175 × 100 feet (50 × 30 metres). At the northern end, toward the sea, a grand portico of 12 pilasters would have given access to the central court. At this end, also, is situated the grand theatrical area, a rectangular open-air theatre that was perhaps used for ritual performances. The east wing of the palace is divided into two parts by a long corridor running on an east–west axis; originally it rose four or five stories above the slope of the valley. The southeast portion of the palace contains domestic apartments, elaborately supplied with plumbing and flushing facilities, as well as a sanctuary. A wide stairway led to an upper story, which no longer exists. The northeast portion of the palace is occupied by offices and storerooms. The west portion is again divided by a main corridor, more than 200 feet (60 metres) long, running north and south. Behind this corridor, along the western side, was discovered a series of long narrow storerooms containing great numbers of pithoi, or human-size storage vessels for oil. On the other side of the corridor, facing toward the central court, are the rooms of state, including the throne room with its unique gypsum throne and world-famous griffin frescoes. Brilliantly hued frescoes played an important part in both the interior and the exterior decoration of the palace. Light was supplied from above by an ingenious system of light wells, and several colonnaded porticoes provided ventilation during the hot Cretan summers.

      The development of the other Minoan palaces (Phaestus, Mallia, Ayía Triáda, Tylissos) roughly parallels that of Knossos. Each is notable, and Phaestus is particularly fascinating, due to extensive Italian excavations. Maritime hegemony enabled the Cretan sea kings to build these palaces in low and unprotected places; consequently there is a conspicuous absence of fortification walls, as contrasted to the great walls of Mesopotamian palaces. Since Cretan worship seems to have been conducted largely in the open air, there are no real temples as in the Middle East. Yet, the disposition of the various parts of the palace around the central court and the avoidance of outside windows as much as possible are characteristics that seem to indicate an early contact with the Middle East. A taste for long, straight palace corridors, as well as a highly developed water-supply system, may also have been inherited from older civilizations to the east. The column made its first European appearance in the Cretan palace, where it is often employed individually to divide an entranceway.

      The development of funerary architecture in Crete proceeds from the old chamber ossuaries of the Early Minoan period (2750–2000 BC) to the developed tholoi (tholos), or beehive tombs, of the Mesara plain and the elaborate temple-tombs of Knossos that appeared at the end of the Middle Minoan period.

      On the crest of Minoan prosperity came a great crash. An invasion from the mainland about 1400 BC destroyed the palaces and resulted in the removal of power to Mycenaean Greece. Architectural remains in Crete of structures that are pre-Greek in design and yet were built subsequent to this catastrophe are very rare. Several country shrines belong to this post-destruction period, and at Prinias a unique temple building may date from as late as 700 BC. The doorway of this temple has low reliefs on its architectural members. The opening above the lintel is flanked by seated figures, while the lintel itself is carved on its underside with figures of a goddess and of animals. The column that seems to have stood in the middle of this doorway, as at the Palace of Minos, indicates that the Minoan tradition was not entirely extinct.

Mycenaean Greece
      The sudden architectural awakening of the Mycenaean Greek mainland is intimately connected with the zenith and decline of Minoan Crete and it can only be understood against the background of a long Cretan development. Unlike Minoan Knossos, the archaeological remains on the mainland are fragmentary. Knowledge of at least three sites—Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos—suggests a picture of Mycenaean architecture. The important architectural monuments visible today date largely from Late Helladic times (1580 to c. 1100 BC), and little earlier architecture is preserved.

      The tremendous building activity of the 14th century BC reflects an age of warfare, when powerful Greek-speaking kings built fortresses in key defensive positions on the mainland. The cyclopean wall (cyclopean masonry)s (walls utilizing great blocks of irregular untrimmed stone fitted together without mortar) of Mycenae and Tiryns and the strategically placed Lion Gate at Mycenae were constructed in this period. The latter consists of two colossal doorjambs that support a monolithic lintel. The wall above the gate is constructed to form a relieving triangle over the lintel, and this space is blocked with the famous relief panel of two heraldic lions, which gives the gate its name. This method of construction provides an ingenious substitute for the arch, which was unknown to the Mycenaeans.

      Also justly famed are the concealed galleries of Tiryns, where the primitive corbel vault (corbel) (constructed of rows of masonry placed so that each row projects slightly beyond the one below, the two opposite walls meeting at the top) makes its first appearance in mainland Europe.

      Mycenaean palaces have been unearthed at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Gla, and Phylakopi (Cyclades). The palace at Pylos is a typical mainland palace of the Heroic Age as described in the poetry of Homer. The characteristic plan comprises four elements: (1) a narrow court on which the structure fronts, (2) a double-columned entrance portico, (3) a vestibule (prodomos), and (4) the richly frescoed domos, or hall proper. The latter had a fixed throne at one end and a central fixed hearth between four wooden columns that supported an open towerlike structure rising above the roof for light and ventilation. Archives, comparable to those of the Hittite kings at Boğazköy, were associated with this palace. Private houses, such as have been discovered at Mycenae, exhibit similar features as well as the basement storage area mentioned by Homer.

Tombs (tomb)
      The earliest royal burials known from Mycenae are those of the two grave circles (shaft graves), the first discovered by Heinrich Schliemann (Schliemann, Heinrich) in 1876 and the second by Alan J.B. Wace in 1951. These grave circles have no architectural character, consisting essentially of vertical shafts cut into the bedrock.

      More important architecturally are the tholoi (tholos). The evolution of these family sepulchres began in Minoan Crete but culminated in the so-called Treasury of Atreus (Atreus, Treasury of) at Mycenae, now believed to have been constructed as late as about 1250 BC. This most impressive monument of the Mycenaean world is a pointed dome built up of overhanging (i.e., corbeled) blocks of conglomerate masonry cut and polished to give the impression of a true vault. The diameter of this tomb is almost 50 feet (15 metres); its height is slightly less. The enormous monolithic lintel of the doorway weighs 120 tons and is 29.5 feet (9 metres) long, 16.5 feet (5 metres) deep, and 3 feet (1 metre) high. It is surmounted by a relieving triangle similar to that over the Lion Gate and decorated with relief plaques carved in a variety of coloured stones. A small side chamber hewn out of the living rock contained the burials, whereas the main chamber was probably reserved for ritual use. Two engaged half columns (i.e., attached to the wall and projecting from it for about half their diameter) of the Cretan type were secured to the facade; this was approached by a dromos, or ceremonial passageway, riveted with cyclopean blocks of masonry and open to the sky. Other tholoi, not as well preserved, exist at Mycenae and Orchomenos.

Herbert Hoffmann Ed.

Western Mediterranean
Bronze Age cultures
      Metalworking improved and promoted the progress of the western Mediterranean lands, which developed maritime relations that joined them to one another and bound them to the eastern Mediterranean. Several great centres displayed considerable architectural activity, of which some splendid evidence remains.

      The Bronze Age was a brilliant stage of culture in the Iberian Peninsula; the culture that developed in the Almería region was designated El Argar, honouring the name of a great site of southeastern Spain. This culture, which stood well fortified on a plateau about 1,000 feet (300 metres) long and about 330 feet (100 metres) wide, enjoyed, from 1700 BC, several centuries of prosperity and exerted an influence that spread over the eastern coasts of Spain and over southern Portugal. A necropolis of about 1,000 burials has yielded goods of quality from the graves. The El Argar culture had continuing contacts with the Balearic Isles, Malta, and Sardinia.

Balearic Isles (Balearic Islands)
 In the Balearic Isles the Bronze Age corresponds to the 2nd millennium BC and is designated “talayotic” from the name of the talayot, a megalithic (megalith) monument in the form of a round or quadrangular tower. Majorca still has about 1,000 talayots, and Minorca has more than 300. These high numbers indicate the amplitude of construction activity during this period, implying precise architectural planning and the coordination of the efforts of human groups. The talayots' intended purpose varies: they may be defensive towers, places of worship, or funerary monuments. There are also other types of megalithic monuments in the Balearic Isles; examples include the naveta (naus), or collective tomb built in the form of a ship, and the Minorcan taula, a monolithic column topped by a slab and recognized today as a support for a place of worship. This megalithic architecture, which was imposing in conception and skilled in execution, continued into the 1st millennium BC, the early Iron Age, and made the Balearic Isles an exceptional ground for the study of the structures of the pre-Roman era.

      In Malta a magnificent flourishing of underground burial chambers, or hypogea, and megalithic temples occurred in the Neolithic Period. These Neolithic temples are among the first instances in Europe of buildings erected for a particular functional purpose. They have a trefoil plan and a roof construction of corbelled stone that is the earliest-known example of its kind. The arrival of Cycladic and Cretan influences in Malta stimulated the birth of a stone and terra-cotta statuary representing the deities and their worshipers. This continued brilliantly in the Copper Age, but the beginning of the 2nd millennium witnessed the appearance of a new people who conquered and destroyed; evidence of this destruction is the cremation burial ground of Tarxien. Small terra-cotta female idols there recall contemporary figurines of Cyprus; however, the culture became rapidly impoverished.

      It is necessary to go farther north—Sardinia and Corsica—to find an original and prosperous Bronze Age, the creations of which continue to pose certain problems of interpretation. The Sardinian bronze civilization is characterized by the nuraghi, round towers that may occur alone or form the centre of complex fortified arrangements. About 7,000 of them, dating from about 1500 to 1100 BC, have been discovered on different parts of the island. They are efficiently and skillfully constructed defensive fortresses, the interior arrangements of which give evidence of an art developed out of military architecture. Around the nuraghi press the round huts of villagers, which are, in turn, surrounded by solid ramparts. The complex thus constitutes an architectural unity, which arose from a patriarchal society in which families fearfully gathered around their clan chief. There is a kind of rough beauty in these fortified castles, with their compact and severe appearance. Tribal battles and the Phoenician (Phoenicia) conquest in the 7th century BC led to the decline and disappearance of the nuraghic civilization.

      On neighbouring Corsica, fine megalithic structures, such as dolmens and isolated or grouped menhirs, were made during the Neolithic Period. This megalithic architecture continued in the Copper Age and throughout the Bronze Age. Populated centres were provided with a fortified arrangement; Filitosa, for example, had an elliptical surrounding wall, menhir statuary erected in a place of worship, and defensive towers.

      From 1500 BC in Emilia (Emilia-Romagna), in northern Italy south of the Po River, the Terramare culture developed. This culture was characterized by a curious world of terramare, habitations built on pilings and protected by a vallum, or defensive wall, which screened them from floods (in the flat countryside, seasonal rains were violent). The name given to these habitations—singular terramara—comes from the word terra-marna (“rich land”) in the dialect of Emilia and refers to the considerable archaeological deposit that these dwellings left behind. The Terramare culture lasted until the early Iron Age. The society was peasant, and, once again, its art was limited to the construction of dwellings and to the production and ornamentation of weapons and vases.

Iron Age cultures

      Highly interesting artistic flowerings occurred in Spain at the end of the protohistoric era. First, in the southwest of the peninsula, near the town of Cádiz, there developed at the extreme end of the 2nd millennium BC a civilization, still poorly understood, that is attributed to the semi-historic, semilegendary state of Tartessus. Archaeology has not yet revealed evidence of the splendour ascribed by the ancients to the Tartessian culture, which was strongly influenced by early Phoenician commercial contacts from the southern coast of Spain. Along the coasts of the Levant and penetrating deeply into the interior of the peninsula, an indigenous population, the Iberians (Iberian), developed a truly original art under combined Grecian, Carthaginian, and Phoenician influences.

      Many Iberian dwelling sites have been discovered on the eastern coasts of Spain, where they were established on high places such as steep-sloped plateaus and protected by surrounding walls with round and square towers and doors. Their street networks did not seem to follow a regular plan. Great temples such as those of Castellar de Santisteban and Despeñaperros in the Sierra Morena have sacred storerooms where a great number (about 6,000 for the two sites) of votive statuettes have been discovered.

      The fate and art of the Etruscan people—who made their appearance in the heart of Italy between the Arno and Tiber rivers about 700 BC and vanished, under the legions' blows, in the last centuries of the Roman Republic—must be mentioned here because in the early years of their existence they were deeply involved in Italic protohistory. In antiquity the Etruscans were regarded as skillful architects and excellent builders. Precise ritual rules of town planning made it possible for them to construct cities on regular plans, the most beautiful remains of which are those of Marzabotto, near Bologna, and of Capua, in Campania. Nothing much remains of the Tuscan cities, which were, nevertheless, very splendid. On the other hand, there remain thousands of tombs that reveal the structure of the vanished houses. The tomb was the dwelling of the dead and simulated the appearance of one or several rooms, constructed in bedrock and built of stone. Thus well protected, Etruscan grave goods and artistic creations were preserved.

Raymond Bloch David John Watkin
      What little remains of Etruscan stonework has survived by virtue of its massiveness. Foundations of city walls survive at Volterra, Volsinii, and Cortona, but those of Perugia are more complete and have surviving vaulted gates. The tombs, themselves replicas of house interiors, show something of moldings, arches, and vaults. True vaulting and arching were known, and these enabled buildings larger than those of Greece to be constructed. Wood was the chief building material for domestic purposes and for temples, but only the terra-cotta decorations survive. Blocks of houses in carefully paved streets are known only from Marzabotto, although the layout of the tombs with paved streets in the Banditaccia at Caere and the Cuccumella at Vetulonia makes them veritable cities of the dead. The Latian hut urns show that houses of the Villanovan (Villanovan culture) period (8th century BC) were circular in plan with conical roofs, but a stone urn from Clusium is modeled in the form of a rectangular Etruscan house erected on a tall, stepped platform. The roof is a hipped gable and has a gabled gallery over it. In this connection it is interesting that the Romans attributed to the Etruscans the construction of the atrium house. Temples (temple) were rectangular in plan and divided into three cellae (chambers); ground plans and nothing more are known from Rome and Bolsena. Etruscan temples, such as those of which remains survive at Bolsena and Orvieto, were built of wood and brick upon high platforms of dressed stone and were consequently more perishable than their Greek equivalents. They were crowned and decorated by brightly painted statues and revetments of terra-cotta, many of which have survived.

William Culican David John Watkin

Ancient Greek
      The increased wealth of Greece in the 7th century BC was enhanced by overseas trade and by colonizing activity in Italy and Sicily that had opened new markets and resources. Athens did not send out colonists and did not engage in vigorous trade, and it declined as a cultural and artistic centre. Corinth, Sparta, the islands, the cities of eastern Greece, and Crete came to the fore with their diverse artistic interests and means of expression. At no other time were there such strongly differentiated regional schools of art in the Greek world. The cities demonstrated their wealth and power, particularly in temple building, which was to foster new architectural forms, and also in the decoration of the temples and of the national sanctuaries. These architectural arts in turn encouraged imaginative and ambitious forms in sculpture and painting.

The early periods
      Throughout the history of Greek (Greek religion) art, the architect's main role was to design cult buildings, and until the Classical period it was virtually his only concern. The focus of worship in Greek religion was the altar, which for a long time was a simple block and only much later evolved into a monumental form. It stood in the open air, and, if there was a temple, generally the altar was positioned to the east of it. The temple was basically a house (oikos) for the deity, who was represented there by his cult statue. Temple plans, then, were house plans—one-room buildings with columnar porches. To distinguish the divine house from a mortal one, the early temple was given an elongated plan, with the cult statue placed at the back, viewed distantly beyond a row of central pillar supports. The exterior came to be embellished by a peristyle, an outer colonnade of posts supporting extended eaves. This colonnade provided a covered ambulatory (roofed walkway), and it was also a device to distinguish the building from purely secular architecture. This plan can be seen in buildings on Samos and at Thermum in central Greece. The construction remained simple: well-laid rubble and mud brick, with timbering and a thatched or flat clay roof. By about 700 BC, fired-clay roof tiles made possible a lower pitched roof, and by the mid-7th century, fired- and painted-clay facings were being made to decorate and protect the vulnerable wooden upperworks of buildings. As yet, nothing had been constructed in finished stone.

The “Orientalizing” period
      From about 650 on, the Greeks began to visit Egypt regularly, and their observation of the monumental stone buildings there was the genesis of the ultimate development of monumental architecture and sculpture in Greece. The first step in architecture was simply the replacement of wooden pillars with stone ones and the translation of the carpentry and brick structural forms into stone equivalents. This provided an opportunity for the expression of proportion and pattern, an expression that eventually took the form of the invention or evolution of the stone “orders” of architecture. These orders, or arrangements of specific types of columns supporting an upper section called an entablature, defined the pattern of the columnar facades and upperworks that formed the basic decorative shell of the Greek temple building.

      The Doric order was invented in the second half of the 7th century, perhaps in Corinth. Its parts—the simple, baseless columns, the spreading capitals, and the triglyph-metope (alternating vertically ridged and plain blocks) frieze above the columns—constitute an aesthetic development in stone that incorporated variants on themes used in earlier wood and brick construction. Doric remained the favourite order of the Greek mainland and western colonies for a long time, and it changed little throughout its history. Early examples, such as the temple at Thermum, were not wholly of stone and still used much timber and fired clay.

      The Ionic order evolved later, in eastern Greece. About 600 BC, at Smyrna, the first intimation of the style appeared in stone columns with capitals elaborately carved in floral hoops—a pattern derived from Asian examples and used mainly on smaller objects and furniture but also enlarged for architecture. This pattern was to be the determining factor in the full development of the Ionic order in the 6th century.

The Archaic period (c. 750–500 BC)
      About 750 BC there began a period of consolidation of the diverse influences that had been entering Greek art at a rapid rate over the previous 100 years; it is known as the Archaic period. It was an age of preoccupation with domestic troubles brought on by the new prosperity rather than an age of reaching out to other cultures. It was also the age of tyrants (tyrant), whose individual rules were often supported by arms and by the allegiance of the merchant classes. The courts of these tyrants became the significant cultural centres, and there was an increase in the demand for art of all kinds; demonstration of the rulers' wealth and power took the form of temple building more ambitious than in almost any other period of Greek art, while in sculpture there was a growing use of expensive and elaborate statuary for dedication and for marking tombs.

      During this period the arts of sculpture, vase painting, and bronze working reached a level of technical mastery and imaginative freedom that brought narrative action and even emotion under the command of figural representation. Simultaneously, out of extensive experimentation with the architectural innovations of the later 7th century, the Classical Doric and Ionic orders were fully established and largely standardized.

      In the 6th century the western Greek colonies claimed a position of importance in the history of Greek art. The colonies in southern Italy and Sicily had grown as strong and rich as many cities in the motherland and had made demonstrations of wealth by dedicating treasuries in the national sanctuaries and by building many lavish temples at home. The temples were generally in the Doric style, but they often bore Ionic details. In their sculpture and architecture the colonies were handicapped by the lack of local sources for fine white marble, and they relied more on painted and stuccoed limestone; the lack of marble, however, stimulated their production of major sculptural works in fired clay to a degree not matched at home. The colonial art centres seem to have been Syracuse, Selinus, and Acragas in Sicily and Poseidonia, or Paestum, Sybaris, and Tarentum in Italy.

      Although the Greek colonies seem to have attracted artists from the homeland, all their art tends to a largeness of scale and of detail that often contrasts with popular notions of Greek monumental art. For example, the most striking ancient building on Sicily is the colossal Doric temple of Olympian Zeus at Acragas (Agrigento), begun in about 500 BC and left unfinished a century later. To carry the weight of the massive entablature, the outer columns were not freestanding but were half-columns engaged against (that is, partially attached to) a continuous solid wall. An earlier Sicilian variant of this use of the plastically molded wall mass with the orders applied decoratively can be seen in the columnar curtain walls of Temple F at Selinus, begun about 560 BC. The engaged columns of Acragas were echoed in the late 5th century by the architect Ictinus in the cella of the Temple of Apollo at Bassae and half a century later by the sculptor Scopas in the Temple of Athena at Tegea. All these buildings suggest that the 18th-century Enlightenment idea of Greek architecture as a system based solely on post-and-lintel (post-and-lintel system) construction, in which the columns carried the load, was erroneous.

      Because temples constructed entirely of stone were expensive, they were not replaced without a compelling reason; in many central and southern Greek cities, therefore, the robust Archaic forms of the Doric temples dominated the townscape through the Classical and later periods. The forms were heavy, with plump columns and capitals and brightly coloured upperworks. Although little change was made in the basic order in the 6th century, there was a gradual refinement of detail and proportion approaching the form of the Classical order.

      The more exotic Ionic order of eastern Greece was slower to determine its forms; the order developed through the so-called Aeolic capital with vertically springing volutes, or spiral ornaments, to the familiar Ionic capital, the volutes of which spread horizontally from the centre and curl downward. There were also several distinctive local methods of treating bases or entire plans. The Ionic order was always more ornate and less stereotyped than the Doric, yet it was still limited to monumental plans, and the Ionic temples of the 6th century exceed in size and decoration even the most ambitious of their Classical successors. Such were the temples of Artemis at Ephesus in Asia Minor and the successive temples of Hera on the island of Samos, all of which were more than 300 feet (90 metres) long and set with forests of more than 100 columns standing in double and triple rows around the central rectangular room (cella), where the cult image stood. At the same time, masons developed and refined the carved cyma (double curve) and ovolo (convex curve) moldings (molding), which are two profiles that have remained part of the grammar of Western architectural ornament to the present day.

The Classical period
Early Classical (c. 500–450 BC)
      The only significant architectural work of the early Classical period was at Olympia, where a great Temple of Zeus was built in about 460. This temple was the first statement of Classical Doric in its canonical form and one of the largest Doric temples of the Greek mainland.

High Classical (c. 450–400 BC)
      By far the most impressive examples of Greek architecture of the high Classical period were the buildings constructed under Pericles for the Athenian (Athens) acropolis. The Acropolis architecture, which is in several ways a clear display of civic pride, also exhibits considerable subtlety of design in its use of the Doric and Ionic orders. The ensemble of the major buildings—the Parthenon, a temple to Athena; the Erechtheum, a temple housing several cults; and the monumental gateway to the Acropolis, the Propylaea (propylaeum)—shows the orders used in deliberate contrast: the Erechtheum provides a decorative Ionic counterpart to the severe Doric of the Parthenon, which itself has an Ionic frieze; and in the Propylaea, columns of both orders complement each other.

      The Parthenon, designed by the architect Ictinus, is a broader, more stately building than most Doric temples, with an eight-column facade instead of the usual six. With the four-square Doric style there had always been the possibility of giving an impression of dull immobility, a danger that was partially avoided in the Archaic period through the use of bulging columns and capitals. In the Classical period—and best observed in the Parthenon—a subtle deviation from strict linearity accomplishes the same correction. The Parthenon was the display place for a great statue of Athena by the sculptor Phidias, a statue that honoured the city goddess. Such obvious implications of civic pride are enhanced by the unparalleled portrayal of a contemporary event on the frieze of the building: the procession of citizens in the yearly festival in honour of Athena.

      The Erechtheum was a more complicated building than the Parthenon; built on an awkward site, it also had to serve different cults, which meant that its architect had to design a building with three porches and three different floor levels. Its caryatid porch, with figures of women for columns, makes use of an old Asian motif that had appeared earlier, in Archaic treasuries at Delphi. The Propylaea was designed by Mnesicles, who had to adapt the rigid conventions of colonnade construction to a steeply rising site. In the precision and finish of their execution, which complements the brilliant innovation of their design, these three buildings had no rival in the Greek world.

      By this time, use of the orders was no longer confined to temple buildings. The marketplace (agora) at Athens was adorned with various public buildings in which the orders were applied to structures of different plans: the colonnade stoa, or portico, a council house, and even a circular clubhouse for state officials. The stage buildings of theatres (theatre) began to receive monumental treatment as well, although the action still took place on the flat circular orchestra and the seats were for the most part still wooden (or were missing—the audience sitting upon the bare hillside that was usually chosen for theatre sites) rather than stone. Several new Doric temples were also built in the lower city of Athens and in the Attic countryside. The Ionic order was used only for the smaller temples, as for the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis; but even though the Ionic was never to be used as the exterior order for major buildings on the Greek mainland, Athens did contribute new forms of column base to the order.

      At Bassae in remote Arcadia in the mountains of the Peloponnese, a Doric temple was built for Apollo incorporating unusual variants on the Ionic column in the interior and a new type of capital, which had two rows of acanthus leaves curling below the volutes—the first recorded Corinthian (Corinthian order) capital. This type was reputedly invented by the sculptor-architect Callimachus to provide an alternative for the Ionic order that could be viewed from any side and so placed at corners or in interiors. It was difficult to carve, however, and was slow to win favour in Greece.

Late Classical (c. 400–323 BC)
      With growth now concentrated in outlying areas, there was understandably less temple building in mainland Greece in this period than there had been in the 5th century, but the Doric temples at Tegea and Nemea in the Peloponnese were important, the former for admitting Corinthian capitals to columns engaged on its interior walls. In eastern Greece, on the other hand, there began a series of new temple constructions rivaling those of the Archaic period that consciously copied the Archaic in their plan and elaboration of detail. Some are simply replacements, such as that at Ephesus replacing an earlier temple destroyed by fire, or the rather later one at Didyma. Similarly, the town of Priene in Ionia, although built on a new foundation after the mid-4th century, was laid out as a grid of streets on a principle developed by the 5th-century architect Hippodamus, who had applied the same scheme to his home city, Miletus, and to the port of Athens, Piraeus. The new Athena Temple at Priene is the best example of classic Ionic known, with no eccentricity of plan or detail. The eastern Greeks had long worked for their neighbours in the Persian towns of Lycia and Caria, supplying monumental tombs (tomb) of native pattern decorated with sculpture in Greek style. At Xanthus, the capital of Lycia, a tomb resembling a Greek temple raised high on a platform had been built by the end of the 5th century; similar structures were made there in the 4th century, culminating in the great tomb built in midcentury at Halicarnassus (Halicarnassus, Mausoleum of) for King Mausolus of Caria, a king who has given his name to all such monumental mausoleums. The fine architectural detail and the sculpture executed by Greek artists of the first rank show a total Hellenization of local taste and exemplify the high quality that Greek art in foreign lands had attained at this time.

      The 4th century saw much greater diversity of architectural forms than ever before. Theatres received marble seats and elaborate stage buildings. Circular temples (tholoi) appeared in mainland Greek sanctuaries that were Doric in style but with the new Corinthian columns within. A small-scale tholos with Corinthian columns was also used for the choragic monument of Lysicrates in Athens. The two-storied stoa became an essential element in the planning of marketplaces or administrative areas. Architects were at pains to adapt the rigid orders to architectural forms and needs more complicated than those of the basic Greek temple plan.

Hellenistic (Hellenistic Age) period
      The successors to Alexander's empire split the new Greek world, which now ran to the borders of India in the east and the Sudan in the south, into separate kingdoms. The generals who ruled them established dynastic control and created a court life that provided a type of stimulus to the arts that had not been experienced in Greece since the Bronze Age. The Attalids, who had become the rulers of Pergamum in northwest Asia Minor, constructed there a new capital city in which influential schools of sculpture and architecture flourished. The Seleucids (Seleucid kingdom) ruled the Eastern world as far as Persia, and under them the art of architecture in particular evolved in forms that would have an effect on Roman architecture. In Egypt the Ptolemies, at the new capital city that bore Alexander's name and was founded by him, built the famous lighthouse and library, and another important sculptural school developed there. In the Aegean world, Rhodes proved an important centre and so, of course, did the Macedonian homeland in the north. By comparison, the great cities of central Greece declined in importance, with the exception of Athens, which had a hold on the imagination of Greeks everywhere for its former role against the Persians and the achievements of the Classical period; as a result it benefited from the gifts of the new kingdoms, especially in building.

      Alexander's aspirations and close knowledge of Eastern and Egyptian ways led the new rulers to take more seriously their roles of near divinity. This gave considerable impetus to the art of portraiture, since these rulers thus deserved commemoration as much as any god; in fact, even private citizens aspired now to some heroic status after death, so that portrait monuments for tombs and honorific statues became more common. Except for this growth of portraiture, however, the mood in the arts during the Hellenistic period was to intensify and elaborate styles developed by Classical Greece. Palatial architecture aimed at effects never contemplated hitherto; even domestic architecture for the first time had palatial pretensions. Trade and the newly acquired resources of the East opened up new possibilities for the artist, in both materials and inspiration; the results, however, generally tended to elaboration and grandeur such that the finer qualities of balance and precision characteristic of earlier periods are often difficult to discern in later works.

      The Classical form of the Doric (Doric order) temple was out of favour in the new age, and the few that were built are elaborate in plan and detail, impairing the sober quality of the order. This age appreciated the Ionic and the more flamboyant Corinthian forms, and at any rate most new temple building was done in the new eastern areas of the Greek world, where Ionic had been the usual idiom. The 3rd-century architect Hermogenes of Priene codified the Ionic order in his books, and his buildings popularized new features in plan, notably the broad flanking colonnades (“pseudo-dipteral”), where the earlier Ionic temples of eastern Greece had set ranks of columns. For the first time the Corinthian order was used for temple exteriors, and work was resumed on the great Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens, financed by an Eastern king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The two-storied stoa became an architectural form of importance, serving as hotel, emporium, or office block, and the design of central market and administrative areas depended largely on the disposition of such buildings. An Attalid king paid for a fine stoa for Athens's marketplace, recently restored; and his city of Pergamum seems to have been important in developing stoa design.

      Monumental tombs were naturally still required for ruling families, but nobles and the nouveaux riches could also aspire to them now, designing some as minor sanctuaries for the heroized dead. The finest Macedonian tombs of the period displayed a painted architectural facade below ground, leading to a painted and elaborately furnished vaulted underground chamber. The variety of administrative and court requirements for buildings led to original designs that broke still more decisively with the colonnade orders of Classical temples. A few important examples of particularly original designs are the famous lighthouse (Pharos) of Alexandria (Pharos of Alexandria) with its tiers of masonry 440 feet (135 metres) high; the library of Alexandria; the clock house Tower of the Winds at Athens; monumental fountains and assembly halls; and a new elaboration of stage architecture for theatres, in which for the first time the acting took place on a raised stage. (In the 1990s, as the city of Alexandria prepared for major construction projects, layers of the ancient city were uncovered, including what are thought to be remnants of the Pharos of Alexandria.) To the established decorative repertory of moldings and carved ornament was added a variety of floral and animal forms that enriched the surface decoration of buildings. In the East especially, these forms were combined in original ways that, together with compositions that defied the logic of the Classical orders, tended to a style that in many respects anticipates the Baroque. Slowly, too, the advantages of arch and vault, avoided hitherto by Greek architects, were exploited; architecture was still basically that of mass on mass, however, and it was left to Rome to make significant progress in construction methods.

Sir John Boardman David John Watkin

Roman and early Christian
       Rome before the Etruscan advent was a small conglomeration of villages. It was under the new masters that, according to tradition, the first public works such as the walls of the Capitoline Hill and the Cloaca Maxima were constructed. Considerable evidence of the Etruscan period in Rome's history has come to light in the region of the Capitol. That there were rich tombs in Rome itself cannot be doubted—they were probably similar to those found in the Latin town of Praeneste. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the 6th century BC the Etruscans had included Fiesole and Volterra in their northern limits and at the same time began to push southward into Campania. Capua became the chief Etruscan settlement in this region and Nola a second; a necropolis has been found in the Salerno region and Etruscan objects in low levels at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The coastal region was still, however, in Greek hands.

William Culican

Republic and empire (ancient Rome)
      Roman architecture was almost as complex as the Roman Empire itself; it was influenced by a multitude of geographic, climatic, political, economic, social, and cultural factors. The cohesive factor through all the differences, the Roman people possessed the talent and felt the necessity to organize in large and complex terms—politically, architecturally, or otherwise.

      Modern knowledge of Roman architecture derives primarily from extant remains scattered throughout the area of the empire. Some are well preserved, and others are known only in fragments and by theoretical restoration. Another source of information is a vast store of records, including dedicatory and other inscriptions on public works. Especially important is a book on architecture by the architect Vitruvius, who lived about the time of Christ. His book De architectura (c. 27 BC; “On Architecture”) is a handbook for Roman architects and covers almost every aspect of architecture, but it is limited because it was based on Greek models and was written at the beginning of a more creative phase of Roman architecture, in the period of the empire.

      The material employed in the earliest buildings constructed around Rome was tuff, a volcanic rock of varying hardnesses, some soft enough to be worked with bronze tools. Later, other harder volcanic stones were used, such as peperino and albani stone from the nearby Alban hills. Under the later republic and the empire the most important stone for building was travertine, a limestone quarried mainly at Tivoli. An example of the use of travertine is the exterior of the Colosseum in Rome. The use made by the Romans of marble was mainly decorative. It was set in cement and applied in slabs to brick and concrete walls. It was used for pavements either in slabs cut and arranged in patterns or as mosaic. Under the empire a great demand arose for coloured marbles and such stones as porphyry, granite, and alabaster, which were imported from various parts of the empire. The abundant use of these marbles is well illustrated by the remains of the Flavian palace on the Palatine Hill in Rome and of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.

      Unburned bricks (brick and tile) faced with stucco were used especially for private houses during the republic. Of these, naturally, very few remain. Under the empire, kiln-baked bricks and tiles were the most common facing for concrete. They were never used to build a whole wall in the modern manner but merely as a protective skin. These bricks or tiles were almost always used in triangular shapes. Large tiles about two feet square called bipedales were also employed.

      The use of stucco (stuccowork) over unbaked brick and over coarse stone was prevalent from the earliest times in Greece, Sicily, and Italy. It served as a protection against the weather and also as a finish. Later it was used over brick and concrete. It was often made of lime, sand, and fine marble dust, and some forms would take a high polish or fine molding. Thus, it became the usual ground for decoration especially in the interiors of houses, examples of which abound at Pompeii and Rome. Bronze (bronze work) was another material primarily used in a decorative manner; doors, grilles, panels of ceilings, and other details were made of it.

      For their concrete the Romans used pozzolana, a fine, chocolate-red volcanic earth, which when mixed with hydrated lime forms an excellent cement that will set well even under water; there are extensive beds of the substance at Pozzuoli, near Naples, and around Rome. With this cement was mixed an aggregate of broken tuff, travertine, brick, or even marble, with pumice stone being used in vaults after the 1st century AD to lighten the weight of the structure. Concrete was used in all great imperial buildings (for example, in the Pantheon, Baths of Caracalla, and Basilica of Maxentius in Rome). New forms of architecture that were developed by the use of this material spread throughout the Roman Empire, although in the provinces other, often weaker, kinds of concrete were used.

      Walls (wall) were built of ordinary masonry or of concrete (faced or unfaced). There are several examples of early stone walling without courses (continuous layers), especially in towns such as Norba and Praeneste. Most of the stone walls existing, however, were built of fairly large squared blocks laid in regular courses as headers (stones or bricks laid with ends toward the face of the wall) and stretchers (stones or bricks laid with lengths parallel to the face of the wall). This type of masonry was called opus quadratum.

      Concrete walls, except below ground, were always faced. They were divided into types according to the kind of facing used. (1) Opus quadratum—that is, ordinary stone walling—was used as a facing especially for important public buildings under the earlier empire (for example, the exterior of the Colosseum). (2) Opus incertum was the most common facing for ordinary concrete walls of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. The face of the concrete was studded with 3- to 4-inch (8- to 10-cm) irregularly shaped pieces of stone, usually tuff. (3) Opus reticulatum (reticulated work) came into vogue in the 1st century BC and remained until the time of Hadrian (AD 117). The construction was like that of opus incertum but the pieces of stone were pyramid-shaped with square bases set diagonally in rows and wedged into the concrete walls. (4) Brick- and tile-faced concrete (so-called opus testaceum) was by far the most common material for walling during the empire. Triangular tiles were used with their points turned into the concrete and their long sides showing, thus giving the appearance of a wall built of thin bricks. Bonding courses of bipedales were employed at intervals of 2 or 3 feet (60 or 90 cm). (5) Mixed brick and stone facing, called opus mixtum, was popular under the later empire and especially under Diocletian (AD 284–305).

      Other kinds of supports included columns and piers. Columns were usually of stone and often monolithic; occasionally, small columns were made of brick covered with stucco. Piers (solid blocks of masonry supporting either an arch or a lintel) were often made of stone, but those serving as primary support for large vaults were usually made of concrete.

       arches occurred in gates, bridges, and aqueducts, as well as in colonnades and doors. Not only round but also segmental (part of a circle but less than a semicircle) and flat arches were used freely. The discovery of concrete enormously facilitated the spread of arch construction. Concrete arches were faced with wedge-shaped stones or tiles called voussoirs.

      The vaults used by the Romans were simple geometric forms: the barrel vault (semicircular in shape), the intersecting (groined) barrel vault, and the segmental vault. By the 1st century BC, extensive systems of barrel vaulting were employed. The surfaces of the vaults were tile-faced or covered with stucco. A fine example of Roman vaulting is the Basilica of Maxentius in Rome. The construction of the dome naturally follows that of the vault. Characteristic of imperial Roman design was the elaboration of complex forms of domes to fit multilobed ground plans.

      Most monumental buildings were erected for public use, and income, if any, from rents or fees went to the public treasury. Many of these buildings, however, were erected by wealthy individuals and given to the community in a form of voluntary income tax. Construction was done by state agencies or private contractors, employing slave or free labour. Techniques and crafts were highly developed, though machines were simple and powered by men or animals.

      The pervasive Roman predilection was for clear composition—the organization of lines, surfaces, masses, and volumes in space. In this the Romans differed from their predecessors in the ancient Mediterranean world, and, however freely they used the elements of earlier styles, in Rome or in the provinces they recast them according to their own taste.

      Their most conspicuous inheritance were the orders. These were taken directly from Greek tradition, with little alteration of their major form, although the Romans did use them with little attention to their internal logic. There were five orders of Roman architecture: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite. Tuscan and Composite were modifications of the Greek Doric and Corinthian orders, respectively. In general, the proportion of the Roman order was more slender than that of the corresponding Greek order, and there was a tendency toward greater elaboration. Columns (column) were often unfluted, but the faces of the entablature, left plain in Greek work, were covered with decoration.

      Unlike the Greek Doric, the Roman Doric order almost invariably had a base molding that was probably taken from the Etruscan Doric or Tuscan (Tuscan order) column. Examples of Roman Doric are to be found in the Tabularium (78 BC), Rome, and in the lowest order of the Colosseum (AD 80), where it was used in conjunction with the arch. The Temple of Hercules at Cori, Italy (c. 80 BC), is one of the few known Roman Doric temples.

      The Ionic order was used in some temples and public buildings, and the number of isolated capitals found suggests that it had a certain vogue in private homes. Notable examples of this order are the Temple of Fortuna Virilis and Trajan's Forum at Rome.

      Because of its richness, the Corinthian order was by far the most popular with Roman builders. Columns removed by the conquering Roman general Sulla in about 86 BC from the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens were the model, but the whole order became progressively elaborated in detail and showed a tendency toward sharp contrasts of light and shadow. Examples of this order are seen at the temples of Mars Ultor and of Castor and Pollux in Rome and the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

      The Composite (Composite order) capital is formed from a Corinthian capital and an Ionic volute (spiral, scroll-shaped ornament) at each of the four corners. Examples of this capital are found in Rome on the triumphal arches of Titus and Septimius Severus and in the Baths of Diocletian.

      Although the orders were taken bodily from the Greeks, in Roman architecture columns carried arches as well as entablatures, permitting more varied linear patterns, wider intercolumniations, and greater freedom in articulating spatial forms. Moreover, as a development of Greek practice in temples at Acragas, Selinus, Bassae, and Tegea, columns were used not only as primary supports but also decoratively as detached columns and pilasters (flattened columns). Realistic or fanciful architectural compositions were even painted on some walls to give an illusion of the same effect.

      In terms of primary architectural forms, Roman design from its first emergence from Italic and Etruscan traditions favoured temples with spacious porches, like the Temple of Apollo at Pompeii. In imperial architecture the design of the temple precinct, forum, thermae (baths), and other public buildings was normally conceived as a complex of variously formed spaces related to variously formed masses. Even landscaping was incorporated, as at the imperial Roman villas at Tivoli and Capri. Interiors of smaller houses as well as of grand structures were designed around vistas through variously shaped rooms of varying qualities of illumination. There was a powerful, even rigid, final dominant of axial symmetry, but against this was exploited richly every kind of spatial form in a highly developed system of organization.

Types of public buildings
      Roman temples (temple) differed in many important respects from those of the Greeks. For a comparatively low stylobate (the foundation on which a colonnade rests) with three steps all around the structure, the Romans substituted a high platform or podium with a flight of steps on the entrance facade. Greek temples were isolated from other buildings and almost always faced east and west; those of the Romans were turned to all points of the compass, their orientation governed by their relation to other buildings. This resulted in the entrance facade being emphasized and the entrance portico being deepened. The cella was wider, and the colonnade that surrounded the Greek temple was often reduced to a row of engaged, or applied, columns or pilasters along the cella walls, except on the entrance facade. In some cases the cella was vaulted in concrete and might have an apsidal (semicircular) end, such as in the so-called Baths of Diana at Nîmes, France, and especially the double Temple of Venus and Rome in Rome. The best-preserved example of a Roman temple now existing is that known as the Maison-Carrée at Nîmes. Among the most important temples of which remains exist are those of Fortuna Virilis, Mars Ultor, Castor and Pollux, Concord and Antoninus, and Faustina in Rome; in Italy, the Temple of Minerva at Assisi and the temples at Pompeii; and in Syria, the Temple of Bacchus at Baalbek (now in Lebanon) and the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra.

 The Romans built many circular temples. Among the most important remaining examples of these are the temples of Vesta and Mater Matuta in Rome, Vesta at Tivoli, and Venus at Baalbek. The greatest surviving circular temple of antiquity, and in many respects the most important Roman building, is the Pantheon in Rome. It consists of a rotunda about 142 feet (43 metres) in diameter surrounded by concrete walls 20 feet (6 metres) thick, in which are alternate circular and rectangular niches. Light is admitted through a central opening, or oculus, about 28 feet (8 metres) across, at the crown of the dome. In front is a porch with an inscription commemorating an earlier building of Marcus Agrippa (12 BC–AD 14) but built with the existing rotunda (AD 120–124) under the emperor Hadrian. The rotunda and dome are among the finest examples of Roman concrete work. The interior was lined with precious marbles, the coffers (decorative recessed panels) of the dome were ornamented with bronze rosettes, and the dome itself once was covered externally with bronze plates.

      The large Roman tomb consisted of an earth mound or tumulus (barrow), surrounded by a ring of masonry rising usually to a considerable height. Few of the type now exist, the most notable being the Tomb of Caecilia Metella on the Via Appia and Hadrian's Tomb, now Castel Sant'Angelo. Smaller tombs, in particular those of the columbarium type (a structure of vaults with recesses for cinerary urns) are usually underground, though there is sometimes an upper story built of brick, from which steps lead down to the tomb proper. There is a line of such tombs just outside Rome along the Via Appia and also along the Via Latina, and such a cemetery has been found under St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica) in Rome. Examples of Roman funeral monuments of various kinds exist along the Street of Tombs at Pompeii and in the provinces (for example, at Jerusalem; Palmyra, Syria; and Petra, Jordan).

 The basilica was a large covered hall used as a court of justice and for banking and other commercial transactions. In the Forum at Rome are the Basilica Julia on the south side and the Basilica Aemilia on the north side, both of which had a central hall and side aisles. The Basilica Ulpia in Trajan's Forum was similar in plan but had at either end semicircular halls (apses), which served as law courts. The fourth and greatest of the basilicas was that begun by Maxentius (Maxentius, Basilica of) (AD 306–312) and finished by Constantine about AD 313. This huge building covered 63,000 square feet (5,850 square metres) and followed in construction and plan the great hall of the Roman baths. Vaults over the bays on the north side are still overhanging without support, a striking testimony to the marvelous cohesion and enduring strength of Roman concrete. A hall at Pompeii is an example of the simpler type of basilica generally constructed in the provinces.

      By the end of the republic, baths (bath) (balneae) had become a recognized feature of Roman life. Under the empire their numbers increased, until at the beginning of the 4th century AD they numbered 1,000 in Rome alone. Like the 20th-century Turkish baths, Roman steam baths had rooms heated to different temperatures. Remains of these establishments are common throughout the empire. The Stabian Baths at Pompeii are the best preserved of such structures.

      Imperial thermae were more than baths. They were immense establishments of great magnificence, with facilities for every gymnastic exercise and halls in which philosophers, poets, rhetoricians, and those who wished to hear them gathered. The earliest of these thermae were those built in Rome by Agrippa about 21 BC. Others were built by Nero, Titus, Trajan, Caracalla, Diocletian, and Constantine. The best preserved are the Baths of Caracalla (Caracalla, Baths of) (begun c. AD 217), which covered an area about 1,000 square feet (90 square metres), and those of Diocletian (c. AD 298–306), with accommodation for 3,200 bathers.

      Roman theatres (theatre) differed in several respects from those of the Greeks. The auditorium was not excavated and the walls surrounding stage and seating were continuous, entrance to the orchestra being by vaulted passages. As the chorus played no part in the Roman theatre, the orchestra or dancing space became part of the auditorium. The facade behind the stage was elaborately adorned with architectural fantasies.

      The only theatre in Rome of which any remains exist is that of Marcellus, built by Augustus (c. 11–10 BC), but there are numerous examples throughout the Roman Empire, especially in Asia Minor. The theatre at Orange, France, and Leptis Magna (near Tripoli, Libya) are among the best-preserved examples. The Odeum of Agrippa in Athens is a good example of a completely enclosed music hall.

       amphitheatres were arenas in which spectacles were held. The largest and most important amphitheatre of Rome was the Colosseum, built by the emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian in about AD 70/72–82. Covering 6 acres (2.4 hectares), it had seating for about 50,000 spectators, and its 80 entrances were so arranged that the building could be cleared quickly. The whole is built of concrete, the exterior faced with travertine and the interior with precious marbles that have long since disappeared. Other important amphitheatres are those at Verona, Italy; Pula, Croatia; and Arles, France.

      The circus was essentially a racecourse that was lined, ideally, with tiers of seats along each side and curving around one end, with the opposite end squared off and provided with arrangements for chariots to enter and draw up for the start. Down the middle ran a barrier, on which judges and referees might perform their functions. Since it was the largest facility for watching a function, the circus was also used for spectacles other than racing, such as, traditionally, the burning of the Christians by Nero. There are remains of one of these circuses at Perga, near the southern coast of Turkey.

       triumphal arches were sometimes erected to commemorate an important event or campaign. They were often isolated rather than built to span a roadway. The triumphal arch was usually decorated with columns and bas-reliefs of the chief events it commemorated and was frequently surmounted by sculpture. The most important of these arches are the Arch of Titus (c. AD 81), commemorating the capture of Jerusalem, and the arches of Septimius Severus (c. AD 203) and Constantine (c. AD 315) all in Rome, and Trajan's arches at Benevento and Ancona. There are several other triumphal arches in the provinces, notably those of Tiberius at Orange, of Augustus at Susa, and Caracalla at Tébessa.

      A monumental city gate, while sometimes serving a commemorative purpose, differs from an arch in being part of the defenses of the city. Of these gates the most famous are the Porta Nigra at Trier in Germany and the gate from Miletus in Turkey.

      The bridges (bridge) and aqueducts of the Romans rank among their greatest monuments. The most famous surviving examples of Roman aqueducts are the Pont du Gard at Nîmes and the aqueduct at Segovia in Spain.

      There are not many of the larger Roman bridges now remaining. The best preserved is that built by Augustus and Tiberius at Rimini, and perhaps the finest is that across the Tagus River at Alcántara in Spain.

Residential architecture
      Private houses, even palaces (palace), were usually of the style that emphasized interior courts and gardens rather than external facade; this tradition was even maintained so far as possible in Roman settlements in northern Europe and Britain, where elaborate arrangements for heating had to be added. In the native Mediterranean climate, however, construction tended to be light and open rather than compact and imposing.

      Even the palaces of the Caesars in Rome consisted essentially of series of gardens and, considering their purpose, relatively unmonumental buildings, spread somewhat casually over the Palatine Hill. Augustus himself bought and enlarged the house known as the House of Livia, which still exists. Tiberius built a palace on the northwest side of the hill. Another palace was built on the southeast corner of the hill by Claudius or Nero. The central space was covered by the palace of the Flavians: Domitian and his architect Rabirius were responsible for a magnificent suite of state apartments and for the sunken garden called the hippodromus. Hadrian extended the palace toward the Forum, and Septimius Severus raised a huge structure overlooking the Circus Maximus. Very little remains of the famous Golden House of Nero, which originally occupied an area of more than 300 acres (120 hectares) on the site now covered by the Baths of Titus, the Colosseum, and the Basilica of Maxentius.

       Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, begun about AD 123, was a sumptuous residence with parks and gardens on a large scale. The unevenness of the site necessitated large terraces and flights of steps. There are remains of great brick and concrete structures. All the buildings are Roman in style and method of construction, though with Greek names.

      The Palace of Diocletian (Diocletian, Palace of) at Spalato (Split) in Croatia, to which he retired on his abdication in AD 305, combined a palace with a fortress. It consisted of an immense rectangle surrounded on three sides with walls guarded by towers; on the fourth it was protected by the sea. The palace itself was on the south side with a great gallery 520 feet (160 metres) long with 51 windows overlooking the sea.

      The Latin word villa pertained to an estate, complete with house, grounds, and subsidiary buildings. Relatively modest villas were found around Pompeii; descriptions in literature, such as that of Pliny the Younger of his villa at Laurentum, and remains of the palatial residence of the 4th century at Piazza Armerina in Sicily, might represent the most opulent class. Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli is too elaborate and extensive to be taken as typical.

      In Roman architecture there were two types of houses, the domus and the insula. The domus consisted of suites of rooms grouped around a central hall, or atrium, to which were often added further suites at the rear, grouped around a colonnaded court, or peristyle. The atrium, a rectangular room with an opening in the roof to the sky, and its adjoining rooms were peculiarly Roman elements; the peristyle was Greek or Middle Eastern. There were few windows on the street, light being obtained from the atrium or peristyle. The domus, as exemplified by those remaining at Pompeii and Herculaneum, has long been regarded as the typical Roman house. In Rome itself, however, very few remains of the domus have come to light, the chief examples being the House of the Vestals in the Forum and that of Livia on the Palatine Hill.

      From Latin writers it has long been known that there were in Rome great blocks of flats or tenements to which the term insulae was applied. Excavations at Ostia, Italy, have revealed the design of these blocks. Planned on three or four floors with strict regard to economy of space, they depended on light from the exterior as well as from a central court. Independent apartments had separate entrances with direct access to the street. Since Ostia was a typical town of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD and was almost a suburb of Rome itself, it is supposed that insulae at Rome would have similar features. Shops might line the street front of either domus or insula.

Town planning (urban planning)
       Vitruvius clearly indicated that the Romans were keenly aware of the fundamentals of town planning. When a new town was established, such considerations as its function, climate, and geographic environment were examined. A characteristic Roman plan, either inherited from early Italic towns or developed in the discipline of army camp engineering, was used. The overall plan was square, with main avenues bisecting the sides and intersecting at the centre. The rest of the streets were in checkerboard grid.

      At or near the centre of the Roman town was the forum, the principal focus of Roman life. This was a space in which important business might be conducted. Gradually buildings were built on the periphery for particular civic, commercial, and religious activities, as at Pompeii or in the Forum in Rome. In late republican or imperial times a forum might be laid out as a single comprehensive architectural design including all the facilities, as in the Imperial Forums at Rome. In a very large and old city, such as Rome itself, there might be several forums, some devoted primarily to administrative, legal, or financial affairs, others to trade in particular commodities, including meat and vegetables. For the latter kind of commerce, however, structures architecturally distinct from the forum though superficially similar were developed. One is the macellum, which was not essentially an open square but a market building consisting of shops around a colonnaded court. Great warehouses, called horrea, served in wholesale commerce.

      Long-established communities, which had developed by accretion rather than by plan, were often gradually brought, under Roman influence, within some approximation of this scheme, sometimes with considerable subtlety. Often, however, as in Rome itself, the scale and topography prevented the achievement of any fully logical order. In general, colonnades lined the important streets; water (water-supply system) was conveyed to spectacular ornamental fountains or to practical neighbourhood basins from reservoirs fed by aqueducts (in some climates cisterns were necessary); many large sewers (sewage system) collected waste water from the street, if not from private homes; and building codes were devised and enforced.

      The layout of a whole town can be most easily seen in some of the towns in North Africa (for example, Timgad, Tébessa, Thuburbo Majus), where there has been little or no subsequent building to modify the original lines of the plan.

Stylistic development
      Roman monumental architecture emerged about the 6th century BC as an Italic style, closely related to that of the Etruscans. The Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome, built about this time, resembled Etruscan buildings in central Italy—at Signia, Orvieto, Veii, and elsewhere—in its podium (base or platform on which it rests), its triple cella, its broad low Etruscan porch, and its characteristic terra-cotta adornment. The Capitolium Temple at Cosa, a Roman foundation located northeast of Rome, was similarly conceived in the 3rd century BC. The forms, sculptural and spatial, had evolved locally in a tradition of wood and terra-cotta, though even at this time there was a slight Greek influence.

 From about 200 BC to about AD 50, the rise of republican Rome and the increasing contacts with Greece resulted in a Greek (Hellenistic Age) influence strong enough to control the sculptural forms and even to modify the spatial effects. A temple at Gabii, perhaps of the 3rd century, and the Temple of Apollo at Pompeii, of about 120 BC, had approximately the Greek single-cella, peripheral (having a single row of columns surrounding the building) plan; the latter retained the Italic podium and open porch, and it had pronounced modifications of the Greek Ionic order. Buildings such as the temple under the present church of San Nicola in Carcere (c. 31 BC) and the Temple of Fortuna Virilis (c. 40 BC), both in Rome, show the height of Hellenistic influence. But the slightly later Augustan temples of Concord, Castor, and Pollux in the Roman Forum, and Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus in Rome had a native freedom of arrangement of space and highly elaborated moldings, particularly in the entablature, where new forms, mostly floral, were lavishly displayed in finely worked, full masses, while consoles (projecting ornamental brackets) became increasingly important.

      During this period the more peculiarly Roman concepts developed chiefly in secular architecture. The Stabian Baths at Pompeii, built perhaps as early as 120 BC, were already composed of vaulted spaces, though quite compactly and with little of the later freedom and spaciousness. In some buildings—such as the Carcer and Tullianum (prisonlike structures of about 100 BC or earlier) and the Tabularium of about 78 BC, all just west of the Forum in Rome—arches and concrete were basic, though orders influenced by Hellenistic architecture were used for ornament. The Theatre of Marcellus (Marcellus, Theatre of) (c. 11–10 BC) was built with a high exterior facade where orders and arches blended—a type of theatrical design that became standard.

      The beginning of Roman influence outside Italy is evident in theatres and amphitheatres at Arles and Nîmes (perhaps as early as 30 BC), in a temple built about 12 BC at Nîmes called the Maison-Carrée, and in small buildings in Greece and Syria built shortly thereafter.

      About the middle of the 1st century AD there was a surge of development of spatial composition. The orders and other ornament inherited from Greece were increasingly modified and elaborated in nonfunctional perspective effects, and other kinds of ornament and spatial configurations gained importance. Buildings such as the Colosseum (AD 80) in Rome preserved a more conservative character, but with the baths and palaces of Nero began the series of imperial compositions of grand, elaborate spaces. The movement came to a climax under Trajan and Hadrian (c. 98–138), with Trajan's Forum at Rome, the great complex of buildings at Baalbek in Syria, the Pantheon in Rome, and Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli.

      Through the 2nd and 3rd centuries countless buildings were erected in cities and towns throughout the empire, in part under imperial patronage and in part by local enterprise. Provincial buildings had great individuality, but the more ambitious usually followed the influence of the capital. Forms evolved by about AD 140 were followed conventionally for the next 50 years (and longer), but from about AD 200 to the age of Constantine, there was a growing trend toward increased majesty and less emphasis on the material substance or appearance of a building. Even before the end of the 2nd century, deep cutting with sharply contrasting light and shadow had begun to detract from the impression of the solid forms in carved ornament. In the arches (arch) of Septimius Severus (Severus, Septimius) (c. AD 200), for instance, light and shadow—not the masses of the forms of the motifs—formed the design. Especially in Africa, illogical composition of the elements of entablatures robbed them of structural significance. In the Palace of Diocletian (Diocletian, Palace of) (c. AD 300), extensive use of arched colonnades emphasized movement rather than mass. The sheer faces of some wall surfaces, like those of towers flanking the gates, became austere geometric forms. Experimentation and elaboration in vaulting, as in the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica (c. AD 260) at Rome, was directed toward making the supports lighter structurally and aesthetically. Compared with the Baths of Caracalla (Caracalla, Baths of) (c. AD 217), the Basilica of Maxentius (Maxentius, Basilica of) (c. AD 310–320) was simpler in design and more concentrated, increasing its sense of elemental vastness and permanence, whereas in contrast to the Pantheon its shape and ornament are less tangible.

      Finally, evolving into the early Christian art to come, the Constantinian mausoleum of Santa Costanza, with its dome resting on a drum supported on arches on a circle of pairs of slender columns, already was striving to suggest the independence of roof and space from material support.

Robert L. Scranton David John Watkin

Early Christian (Early Christian art)
      Early in the 20th century it was thought that Christian art and architecture began after the death of Christ or, at least, in the second half of the 1st century AD. But later discoveries and studies showed that a truly Christian style did not exist before the end of the 2nd or beginning of the 3rd century. The terminal date of this period is even more difficult to establish; it may be placed in the 4th, 5th, or 6th century. Early Christian architecture penetrated all the provinces of the Roman Empire, adapting itself to existing pagan architecture. It subsequently created its own forms, which varied according to local stylistic evolution. The new capital at Constantinople (ancient Byzantium), founded by the emperor Constantine the Great (306–337), was to be an important centre. The art and architecture of this city henceforth became known as Byzantine (Byzantine art) and extended throughout the entire Christian East.

      It is customary to distinguish early Christian architecture of the West, or Latin part of the Roman Empire, from the Christian architecture of regions dominated by the Greek language. It is also customary to consider the latter as proto-Byzantine, while acknowledging, however, a certain latitude in the initial date of this separation: 330, the foundation of Constantinople; 395, the separation of the Greek part of the empire from its Latin sector; or, finally, the reign of Justinian (527–565). For the purposes of this article, monuments shall be treated as early Christian mainly on the basis of their style, as distinct from the genuine Byzantine style of Constantinople; since the transition from the earlier to the later architecture discussed in the next section took place at different times in different locations, this section has no precise chronological boundary.

      Only after Justinian's reign did many Eastern regions submit to the ascendancy of Constantinople, as they followed the paths traced by Christian architecture in its beginnings until the 6th and even the 7th century. In the West the end of early Christian architecture is easier to determine. Closely tied to Roman architecture, it finished with the collapse of the empire at the end of the 5th century. Then, transformed into a multitude of regional styles, it assimilated various influences from the East and from the barbaric peoples who superseded their Roman masters.

      Early Christian architecture is divided into two periods, quite unequal in length and in importance. During the first—which preceded the Edict of Milan (Milan, Edict of), by which Constantine the Great in 313 decreed official tolerance of open practice of the Christian religion—Christianity was often persecuted, while in the second it soon became the state religion. The monuments of the first period were modest and few in number, while those of the second phase were numerous and splendid.

First period, to AD 313
      Little is known about Christian places of worship before 313. By bringing together the relevant texts and the results of excavations, one can, however, succeed in forming an idea of them. These domus ecclesiae (“meeting houses” [ecclesia, “assembly, meeting”]) were private homes placed at the disposal of communities by well-to-do members. A spacious room, already existing or fitted out for the occasion, served as chamber of worship (church), while other rooms were allotted for various activities of the community: charity work, study, funeral services, and living quarters for the clergy. This was the arrangement of the only extant domus ecclesiae from the 3rd century, that in the Syrian caravan city of Doura-Europus (Dura-Europus), on the west bank of the Euphrates. A Syrian home of the common type, it contained a longitudinal sanctuary, a baptistery, and four smaller rooms grouped around an interior courtyard. The sanctuary, stripped of decoration, was distinguished only by a small dais at the western end, probably the seat of the bishop, and by a small cupola, the use of which is unknown, set in the ground near this platform. The general character of these meeting houses seems to have been the same everywhere. They must have been rather numerous; the tituli (“titles”) of the 25 Christian basilicas in Rome today are, in fact, the names of the private houses in which these congregations were first established.

      The double church of Bishop Theodore of Aquileia marks a step toward the creation of a monumental edifice of the Christian religion. Standing within the enclosure of a Roman villa, it occupied all the space of the earlier building and more. Two sanctuaries of considerable size, 121 by 66 feet (37 by 20 metres) and 121 by 56 feet (37 by 17 metres), were rectangular rooms subdivided by pillars into three longitudinal aisles that outlined the naves of the standard Christian basilica plan.

Second period, after AD 313
      It was this kind of plan that architects adopted when Constantine officially recognized the church in 313 and was converted to Christianity. Whether in Rome or in other cities of the empire, Constantine's architects took their inspiration not from pagan temples, old-fashioned in the 4th century, but, rather, from a secular building type of utilitarian character, the basilica, which had served as a hall of assembly, commerce, reception, or lawmaking. Of Hellenistic origin both in form and in name (stoa basileōs, or “royal room”), the basilica under the Romans varied in plan and size according to use and to the importance of the social group to which it belonged. It could be either a simple hall or one divided by columns into three longitudinal aisles, or surrounded on three sides by one- or two-story arcades with a dais on a short or long side.

      The first Christian basilicas, built in Rome, were variations of secular basilicas adapted to the new cult. St. John Lateran, superficially transformed in the 17th and 19th centuries, is the oldest, begun about 313. It was followed by St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica) (replaced in the 16th century by the present church) in the last years of the reign of Constantine and his sons. San Clemente, Santa Pudenziana, St. Paul's Outside the Walls, San Sebastiano, Santa Sabina, and others belong to the late 4th and to the 5th century.

      These were, in most cases, halls with five longitudinal aisles, the central one raised and lit directly by windows piercing the high walls. A semicircular protrusion of the wall, or apse, on the short side opposite the entrance, first on the west side but later on the east side, was covered over with a half-dome vault, while the so-called hall itself usually had a wooden frame roof. The side aisles were separated from the central nave by rows of columns. These supported a rectilinear entablature, or solid horizontal section; later this entablature was replaced by a series of arches resting on capitals (San Clemente, 360; St. Paul's Outside the Walls, 385; Santa Sabina, 422–432), but at Santa Maria Maggiore, still intact under its 17th-century Baroque facing, Pope Sixtus III (432–440) returned to the Classical form of the straight entablature.

      Whereas St. John Lateran and San Clemente were used entirely for the eucharistic service, St. Peter's and St. Paul's Outside the Walls were also martyria, buildings commemorating the martyrdom of their titular saints. This commemorative function influenced the plan: in front of the apse a large transept, sheltering the site of the relics, facilitated the presentation of the liturgy and the circulation of the faithful around the sacred place.

      The churches built under Constantine at Constantinople (Byzantine architecture) and in Palestine were more complex in plan and structure. The destroyed church of the Holy Apostles at Constantinople, known only through a description by Eusebius of Caesarea, was begun in 333 and completed by Constantius II (337–361). It was cross-shaped, and a drum—a cylindrical or polygonal wall that usually supports a dome—rose above the crossing, probably covered by a conical wooden roof. The sarcophagus of Constantine stood in the centre, surrounded by memorials to the 12 Apostles. It was less a church than a mausoleum in honour of the first Christian emperor, who was made to appear in that church as the 13th Apostle. In the sanctuaries in Jerusalem and in the church of Bethlehem, the commemorative building and the hall of worship (basilica) were united. At Jerusalem several structures combine to form the church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Anastasis (the Resurrection), a rotunda approximately 131 feet (40 metres) in diameter whose foundations and remains of the walls have been discovered under later additions, was built about 340 on the “tomb” of Christ, the funeral place hewn into the rock and surmounted by a small temple. Two levels of galleries surrounded the rotunda, and the whole was covered by a wooden cupola. The site of Golgotha, open to the sky, was preceded toward the east by a martyrium, a five-aisled basilica with tribunes, or raised platforms, intended for gatherings of the faithful. It probably terminated at the west with a rotunda, open to the nave and surrounded by 12 columns marking the place where it was thought that Helena, mother of Constantine, had found Christ's cross. The church of the Holy Sepulchre and the court of Golgotha were surrounded by porches aligned along the exterior aisles of the basilica (martyrium) and on the galleries of an atrium (forecourt), which preceded the martyrium. The Constantinian basilica at Bethlehem (still partly intact) with five aisles without tribunes and the central aisle raised, was preceded on the west by an atrium and terminated in the east by an octagon built above the Grotto of the Nativity. Justinian had it replaced by a triconch (three-apsed building), which still stands.

      The considerable dimensions of all these complexes (657 by 230 feet [200 by 70 metres] including the atrium in the case of St. Peter's, the largest) and the richness of their decoration (marble columns and inlay; mosaics on the vaults; opus sectile, or inlaid stone, in the pavements; and sometimes gold coffered ceilings, as at the Martyrium in Jerusalem) lent to these structures a sumptuousness that made them the equals in scale and splendour of the imperial palaces. Moreover, the liturgical ceremony became progressively assimilated with that of the court; the image of Christ standing or enthroned in the apses of the basilicas evoked the emperor presiding over reception ceremonies in his palace.

      The differences of plan between the Greek and the Latin Constantinian churches have been a subject of controversy. One hypothesis explains them on the grounds of the Greek traditions—differing from those of the Romans—of the cult of heroes and of the dead. Since the churches of Palestine commemorate the earthly appearances of Christ, his Birth, and his Resurrection, they are comparable in function to the Greek hērōa, which are commemorative temples. In the West, however, the churches enclose actual graves, the focus of a funerary cult, completely different from the cult of the Greek heroes.

      The central-plan building, round, polygonal, or cruciform in design, gathered considerable momentum in the West as well as in the East in the course of the 4th and 5th centuries. The deconsecrated church of Santa Costanza in Rome, built between 337 and 350 for members of the imperial family, was a rotunda with an ambulatory or circular walkway separated from the central area by columns; the mausoleum of Centcelles (Tarragona) in Spain, likewise a rotunda, was probably the burial place of Constans (Constans I), son of Constantine, assassinated in 350. Both are somewhat related in type to the Tomb of Diocletian (c. 300) at Split in Croatia.

       Milan, which had been the imperial residence several times since 350 and seat of the bishop St. Ambrose since 374, has preserved the remains of some centrally planned churches of the 4th century. San Lorenzo Maggiore, begun about 370, is a quadrifoil room with four niches and ambulatory; an octagon adjoining it (today Sant'Aquilino) was formerly an imperial mausoleum or baptistery. The church of the Holy Apostles, the present San Nazaro Maggiore (begun in 382), is cruciform in plan with an apse in the east, built in imitation of the church of the same name at Constantinople. At Cologne, the oval plan of St. Gereon (built about 380) is enriched by eight smaller apses (apsidioles), an apse in the east, and a narthex, or large rectangular room placed before the west entrance. At Antioch in Syria an octagonal structure, called the Golden House because of its gilded roofing, was begun as early as 327 by Constantine. Near this city at Kaussich are preserved the foundations of a cruciform church, built between 378 and the end of the 4th century; it served both the normal cult and the commemoration of three martyrs whose sarcophagi were found in the transept.

      Since most of these churches were not consecrated to the cult of a martyr, the mausoleum could not be the only source of inspiration for their plans. Imperial reception rooms may have been models. The octagonal church at Antioch and that of San Lorenzo in Milan were probably palace churches, and the transfer of plan from one to the other seems perfectly plausible.

      In the 5th century, as local schools formed, the unity of Christian architecture with that of the empire ceased to exist. In Italy, although basilicas of the Classical type continued to be built, they assimilated Eastern influences. North Africa modified the basilica plan only by multiplying the number of side aisles (Damous-el-Karita in Carthage has eight) or by adding apses.

      The ecclesiastical architecture of the East is more varied, partly as a result of differences in the liturgies. The monastery of St. John the Baptist of Studium in Constantinople (463) and the church of the Acheiropoietos at Thessalonica (470) were basilicas with tribunes and narthexes, which, in their proportions, approached those of centrally planned structures. The large central aisle, inaccessible to the faithful, was reserved for the service of the eucharist, the side aisles for the men, the tribunes for the women, and the narthex for those who for some reason could not participate in the communion. Later, this form of basilica spread into the Greek countries and gave birth to an essentially Byzantine type of church, the “domed basilica.” Nevertheless, the ordinary basilica plan, of three or five aisles with an apse in the east, remained no less popular in Greece, on the islands, in the Balkans (Stobi in Serbia), and in the Middle East. In Asia Minor the church of St. John of Ephesus (450), later replaced by a building of Justinian, was cruciform in plan, inspired by the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Extending from the square ciborium (a canopy over the altar supported by columns) placed at the crossing were four wings, the eastern one having an apse and five aisles, the others having three aisles.

      In Syria, Israel, and Jordan a particularly large number of 5th-, 6th-, and 7th-century churches are preserved. The triple influence of the Greek countries, Constantinople, and the imperial sanctuaries of the Holy Land resulted in many plans, whereas the materials and construction methods remained in the tradition of the region. At Qalʿat as-Simʿān near Aleppo, Syria, lies the ruin of a martyrium built about 470 around the column on which the ascetic St. Simeon Stylites (Simeon Stylites, Saint) spent the last years of his life. The precious relic was enclosed by a central octagon of considerable dimensions, adjoined by four arms of a cross in the form of basilicas. At Jarash in Jordan the church of the Apostles and Martyrs (465) is a cross inscribed in a square, heralding a typically Byzantine plan of later centuries. Also at Jarash, the triple church dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian, to St. John the Baptist, and to St. George consists of two basilicas flanking a rotunda with an ambulatory (528–533) and an apse in the east. Other rotundas are at Buṣrā ash-Shām and Izraʿ in Syria, as well as the octagonal church of the Theotokos (484) on Mount Gerizim (now in the occupied West Bank territory). The sanctuaries of Egypt were also influenced by those of Constantinople, the Greek countries, and Italy. The cathedral of Hermopolis (al-Ashmūnayn (Hermopolis Magna)), built about 430–440 in southern Egypt, and the martyrium-church of St. Menas, nearer the coast (first half of the 5th century), combine the influences of Constantinople and Italy in the three-lobed sanctuary, the transept, and the long basilica room with three aisles. The ties between the Latin West and the Greek East, particularly strong in the 4th and 5th centuries, relaxed in the 6th. Beginning with the reign of Justinian, a true Byzantine architecture developed from the new capital. In the western Mediterranean, the end of the ancient world and of early Christian architecture came with the fall of the Roman Empire in 476.

Henri Stern

The Christian East

The early Byzantine (Byzantine architecture) period (330–726)
      When Constantine (Istanbul) began to build his new capital on the Bosporus, a mass of artisans was assembled for the purpose. The majority of them were drawn from Rome, so that, at first, official art was early Christian in style and was, in fact, virtually Roman art: the Classical basilica was adopted as the usual type of Christian church; portrait statues of emperors were set up as in pagan times, and sarcophagi were elaborately sculptured; floor mosaics of Classical character were widely used; and works in ivory and metal retained a basically Roman character. Change was in the air, however, even before the capital had been moved from Rome. In architecture the post-and-lintel style (post-and-lintel system) in stone, which had been taken over from the Greeks, was already giving place to an architecture of arches, vaults, and domes in brick, whereas sculptural ornament was becoming more formal and less naturalistic. These changes were accelerated at Constantinople partly because of the proximity of the city to Asia Minor and Syria, both fertile centres of new artistic ideas that had developed independently of Rome. Indeed, church architecture in those areas progressed considerably between the 4th and the 6th centuries, while in the visual arts a style that favoured formality and expression rather than the idealized naturalism of Classical art had begun to find approval at an early date.

      Constantine's new capital was carefully laid out and boasted an important series of secular buildings—walls, hippodrome, forums, public buildings, arcaded streets, and an imperial palace—all of great magnificence. The religious structures he set up were of two principal types: longitudinal basilicas (basilica) and centralized churches. The former, usually with three aisles, were intended for congregational worship; the latter, which were circular, square, or even octagonal, were for burial or commemorative usage. Both types were to be found over a very wide area, though there were, of course, numerous local variations. It was through a subtle combination of the two types that the characteristic church of the Byzantine Empire emerged, thanks to some experiments made in the eastern Mediterranean area in the 5th century. The progress cannot be followed exactly because so much has been destroyed, but the earliest surviving church in Constantinople, that of St. John of Studium (Mosque of İmrahor), shows that this process had already gone quite far by the year it was built, 463. It is a basilica in that it has an eastern apse and three aisles, but in plan it approaches a centralized building, for it is nearly square, in contrast to the long basilicas in vogue in Rome. A similar change characterizes the sculptures that adorn its facade, for they are in low relief, in contrast with typical Roman high-relief sculpture, and the motifs are treated formally, as pieces of pattern, rather than as depictions of natural forms.

 The process of development that began in such examples had greatly advanced by the end of the century, as recently discovered remains of the church of St. Polyeuktos show. The church was founded by the princess Juliana Anicia (granddaughter of Valentinian III), whose name is known from an illuminated manuscript dated 512. The change was advanced still further some 30 years later, thanks to the patronage of the emperor Justinian, one of the greatest builders of all time. He was responsible for four major churches in Constantinople: Saints Sergius and Bacchus, a centralized building; the church of St. Eirene (Irene), a basilica roofed by two domes in echelon (i.e., parallel-stepped arrangement); the church of the Holy Apostles, which was cruciform, with a dome at the crossing and another on each of the arms of the cross; and, finally, the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, where the ideas of longitudinal basilica and centralized building were combined in a wholly original manner. The distinctive feature of all these structures was the form of roof, the dome. In Saints Sergius and Bacchus it stood on an octagonal base, so that no great problems were involved in converting the angular ground plan to a circle on which the dome could rest. But in the others the dome stands above a square, and the transition from the one to the other was complicated. Two separate processes of doing this had evolved: the squinch, a niche or arch in the corner of the square, which transformed it into an octagon, over which the dome could be placed without great difficulty; and the pendentive, a spherical triangle fitted into the corners of the square, its vertical sides corresponding to the curves of the arches supporting the dome and its upper side corresponding to the circular base of the drum. This served to brace and support the weight and to transfer it downward to the ground at the same time. The squinch served its purpose well enough and continued in use for many centuries, but it had certain weaknesses; the pendentive was one of the great architectural inventions of all time, transforming what had been mere building, where stress was counteracted by mass, into organic architecture, where thrust was compensated by thrust and strength depended on balance. So far as is known, the squinch was first used in Persia and the pendentive in Syria.

      Though Justinian's domed basilicas are the models from which Byzantine architecture developed, Hagia Sophia remained unique, and no attempt was thereafter made by Byzantine builders to emulate it. In plan it is almost square, but looked at from within, it appears to be rectangular, for there is a great semidome at east and west above that prolongs the effect of the roof, while on the ground there are three aisles, separated by columns with galleries above. At either end, however, great piers rise up through the galleries to support the dome. Above the galleries are curtain walls (non-load-bearing exterior walls) at either side, pierced by windows, and there are more windows at the base of the dome. The columns are of finest marble, selected for their colour and variety, while the lower parts of the walls are covered with marble slabs. Like the elaborately carved cornices and capitals, these survive, but the rest of the original decoration, including most of the mosaics that adorned the upper parts of the walls and the roof, have perished. They were all described in the most glowing terms by early writers. But enough does survive to warrant the inclusion of Hagia Sophia in the list of the world's greatest buildings. It was built as the result of the destruction in a riot of its predecessor, the basilica begun by Constantine, and the work of rebuilding was completed in the amazingly short period of five years, 10 months, and four days, under the direction of two architects from Asia Minor, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidorus of Miletus, in the year 537.

      From the little known it would seem that similar changes were taking place in secular architecture. The walls (wall) of the city, which still in greater part survive, were set up under Theodosius II (408–450) early in the 5th century, and already the method of construction (where a number of courses of brick alternate with those of stone) and the forms of vaulting used to support the floors in the numerous towers show several innovations. The walls themselves, a triple line of defense, with 192 towers at alternate intervals in the inner and middle wall, were far in advance of anything erected previously; they were, indeed, so well conceived that they served to protect the city against every assault until the Turks, supported by cannon, attacked with vastly superior odds in 1453. Also distinctive were the underground cisterns, of which more than 30 are known in Constantinople today. They all took on the same character, with strong outer walls and roofs of small domes supported on tall columns. Some are of great size, some comparatively small. In some, like the great cistern near Hagia Sophia called by the Turks the Yerebatan (Underground) Palace, old material was reused; in others, like the even more impressive Binbirdirek (Thousand and One Columns) cistern, new columns of unusually tall and slender proportions and new capitals of cubic form were designed specially. These cisterns assured an adequate supply of water even when the aqueducts that fed the city were cut by an attacking enemy. Many of them were still in use at the end of the 19th century. Contemporary texts show that the houses were often large and elaborate and had at least two stories, while the imperial palace was built on enormous terraces of masonry on the slopes bordering the upper shores of the Sea of Marmara. The palace was founded by Constantine, but practically every subsequent emperor added to it, and it eventually became a vast conglomeration of buildings extending over more than 100 acres (40 hectares). Many of the buildings were of a very original character, if the descriptions that survive are to be believed; unfortunately, nearly all have been destroyed in the course of time.

The Iconoclastic (Iconoclastic Controversy) Age (726–843)
      A common theme in the history of Byzantium of this period is the attempt to ban the veneration of icons (the representation of saintly or divine personages). This Iconoclastic Controversy raged for a century, from the time Iconoclasm became an imperial policy under Leo III in 730 until icon veneration was officially proclaimed as Orthodox belief in 843. In spite of this controversy, and the reduced prosperity of the state during this period, churches continued to be built, including the church of the Assumption at Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) and Ayía Sofía at Thessalonica (Thessaloníki). The emperors were not necessarily opposed to all building and art, however. It is known from texts that Theophilus (829–842) was responsible for numerous additions to the Great Palace.

The middle Byzantine period (843–1204)
 The most understanding of the emperors in the years immediately succeeding Iconoclasm was Basil I (867–886). Like many of his predecessors, he built in the area of the Great Palace, his most interesting contributions being two churches, the New Church and the church of the Theotokos of the Pharos. These set a fashion in church building and decoration that was to exercise an influence for many centuries. Neither survives, but something is known of them from written descriptions; it would seem that both were typical of what was to be the mid-Byzantine style. Broadly speaking, the churches of this age conform to a single type, usually termed the cross-in-square. It is made up of three aisles, each one terminating in an apsidal chapel at the east, with a transverse nave, known as the exonarthex, at the west. Invariably, there was a dome over the central aisle, supported on four columns, with four vaults radiating from it to roof the central aisle to the west, the sanctuary to the east, and the central portions of the side aisles to the north and south. These vaults rose above the roofs of the other portions of the building, so that the church was cruciform at roof level. Excluding the exonarthex, the churches were usually almost as broad as they were long, making the basic plan virtually a square. Occasionally, additional columns were used to extend the nave westward, producing a type known as the domed basilica; sometimes the walls separating the eastern ends of the side aisles from the central presbytery were extended westward as substitutes for the two eastern columns upholding the dome, but the essentials of the plan were always retained. Subsidiary domes were sometimes added, either in place of the vaults on the arms of the cross, producing a true five-domed type such as St. Mark's Cathedral at Venice, or placed above the eastern and western extremities of the side aisles, producing a type called the quincunx. These domes were usually comparatively small and were set on drums, which tended to become narrower and taller with the progress of time. The eastern extremities of the side aisles formed chapels which played an important part in the liturgy, that to the north being termed the prothesis and that to the south the diakonikon. Both the chapels and the main sanctuary were separated from the body of the church by a screen, which also became taller and heavier until it developed into the massive iconostasis that constitutes such a characteristic feature of Orthodox churches today. As in earlier periods, the lower portions of the walls were, in the richer churches, covered with marble slabs; and there were elaborately carved cornices and capitals, though ornament was always rather formal and in low relief. The main church at the monastery of St. Luke near Delphi, in Greece (c. 1050), is the most complete surviving example of the type.

The late Byzantine period (1204–1453)
      Quite a number of buildings from the late Byzantine period survive in Istanbul, Thessaloníki, and throughout Greece and the Balkans. In general they are on a small scale and follow the plan of those of the middle Byzantine period. But their appearance changed quite considerably, with the domes becoming smaller and higher, while the wall surfaces of the exterior were usually elaborately decorated, either with intricate patterns in brickwork or by setting glazed pottery vessels into the wall to form friezes similar to work in tile. In Constantinople elaborate blank arcading also played an important role, as, for example, in the church of the Pammakaristos Virgin (Mosque of Fethiye; c. 1315). The building material varied with the locality, though generally brick was preferred to stone. In the details of planning and in the handling there was considerable regional variation, and numerous local styles may be distinguished. Grandeur was generally lacking—except perhaps in the churches set up for the Comnene emperors of Trebizond, a state on the south side of the Black Sea, ruled by Greeks (1204–1461)—but all the buildings have considerable charm and deserve fuller consideration than they have sometimes received. Good work was done even after the Turkish conquests, especially on Mount Athos, Greece, and in the Romanian region of Moldavia, where the large-scale painted churches, which mostly date from the 16th and 17th centuries, are often both magnificent and very beautiful.

      Even at this period, little is known of secular architecture, but a portion of the Blachernae Palace at Constantinople may be noted, as well as the monasteries, particularly those on Mount Athos; though they have been much restored or even wholly rebuilt, the general layout of most follows a Byzantine scheme.

David Talbot Rice

Kievan (Kiev) Rus and Russia
      Kievan Rus (Ukraine) was converted to Christianity in 988, and in Kiev, its dominant political and cultural centre, mosaics dating from about 1045 were created by Byzantine craftsmen. Other Byzantine artists and artisans worked intermittently in the area from that time onward, so that Russian art as a whole was founded on a Byzantine basis. Architecture and icon painting grew up as important independent arts, both having their beginnings during this period.

      From Kiev the Byzantine style of architecture soon spread throughout the principalities of Novgorod and Vladimir-Suzdal. The emphasis of the Byzantine church on the physical splendour of its edifices was a cardinal factor in determining the characteristics of Russian ecclesiastical architecture. Everything connected with the design and decoration of the new churches followed the Byzantine pattern; and the standard scheme of the Greek church—the cross inscribed in a rectangle and the dome supported on piers or on pendentives—became the accepted type for Orthodox churches. The design and support of the central dome or cupola, together with the number and disposition of the subsidiary cupolas, remained for a long time the principal theme of Russian architecture.

      The main monuments of Kiev were the church of the Tithes (989–996), the cathedral of St. Sophia (1037), and the church of the Assumption in the Monastery of the Caves (1073–78). All of these churches were built in the Byzantine tradition, though certain influences from Bulgaria, Georgia, and Armenia can be discerned. The cathedral of St. Sophia is the only structure of this period that still stands and retains, at least in the interior, something of its original form. The central part of the cathedral was in the form of a Greek cross. The nave and four aisles terminated in semicircular apses, and it had 13 cupolas (symbolizing Christ and his Apostles). It was reconstructed and enlarged at the end of the 17th century, and it was later obscured by additional bays and stories to its lateral galleries, a new tower, and many bizarre Baroque cupolas. Only five apses and the central interior portion survive from the 11th century.

      Novgorod (Novgorod school) was the centre of a unique and quite original art that lived on long after the political death of the city in the 16th century; it was there that the fundamental features of later Russian architecture were developed. The ecclesiastical architectural history of Novgorod began with the cathedral of St. Sophia. It was built in 1045–52, replacing a wooden, 13-dome church of the same name. The new cathedral followed its Kievan namesake in plan, but the divergences from the Byzantine pattern are quite apparent; it has double aisles but only three apses. Externally, the church differs even more from its southern prototype; it has only five cupolas, its walls are austere, the buttresses are flat and bare, and the windows are small and narrow. There is something unmistakably Russian in the silhouette of its helmeted cupolas and in the vigour and verticality of its solid masses.

      The churches of the 12th century resemble St. Sophia, Novgorod, only in the general tendency toward simplicity and verticality; they were small, cubic in form, and modest in decoration. The severe climate and heavy snowfalls of the north necessitated various modifications of the Byzantine architectural forms. In the course of time windows were narrowed and deeply splayed; roofs became steeper; and flat-dome profiles assumed the bulbous form, which, in different varieties, eventually became the most notable feature of Russian church architecture.

      The churches of Pskov in northwest Russia were relatively tiny and squat and usually had three low apses. The cupolas, roofs, and decorative elements were similar to those of Novgorod. Because these churches were too small to contain interior columns for the support of the cupola, the Pskov builders developed the structural device of recessive rows of corbel arches (stepped archlike structures built out from the walls) for the support of cupola drums and cupolas. This feature—the kokoshniki—was to become a favourite Russian structural and decorative element. The church porches, the exterior walled-in galleries, and the arcaded bell towers were Pskov's other outstanding contributions to Russian architecture.

      The region of Vladimir-Suzdal (Vladimir-Suzdal school) (also in northwest Russia), as another centre of early Russian culture, was a factor in a creative fusion of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Caucasian influences—the Romanesque being seen in the style that was growing up in western Europe and the Caucasian influence appearing in the churches to the south. The 12th- and early 13th-century structures were a further modification of the earlier Byzantine style, leading toward the innovations at Moscow in the 15th century.

      Among the outstanding monuments of Vladimir-Suzdal are the church of the Assumption (1158–89), which was to serve as a model for its namesake in the Moscow Kremlin; the church of the Intercession of the Virgin on the Nerl, one of the loveliest creations of medieval Russia (1165); and the church of St. Dmitri (1194–97). These churches as a group represent the continuation of the Kievo-Byzantine tradition in their ground plan, but the old scheme was given a new interpretation. From Byzantium the Suzdalians adopted the general features of the square plan with semicircular apses and the four columns supporting a cupola with its circular drum. Instead of brick, so characteristic of Byzantine and Kievan ecclesiastical architecture, they used cut stone, and instead of polychrome wall facings they used carved-stone embroideries. The treatment and decoration of the walls and the deeply splayed portals and windows suggest the Romanesque architecture of Western Christendom; the character of the carved ornament is analogous to the intricate decoration of the Caucasus; but the organization and arrangement of the forms and patterns is definitely Russian.

      After Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Russia continued for several centuries to develop a national art that had grown out of the middle Byzantine period. During the 10th–15th centuries, Russian art had begun to show marked local variation from the Byzantine model, and after the fall of Constantinople it continued along these distinctive lines of development. This period of Russian art, which lasted until the adoption of western European culture in the 18th century, is also known as the Moscow (Moscow school) or National period.

      After the hegemony in the world of Orthodox Christianity shifted to Muscovite Russia, Moscow, having become the new city of Constantine—the “third Rome”—and aspiring to rival the older centres of culture, launched a building program commensurate with its international importance. The Kremlin (kremlin) and two of its important churches were rebuilt by Italian architects between 1475 and 1510. These churches, the Assumption (Uspensky) Cathedral and the cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel, were largely modeled after the churches of Vladimir. The Italians were required to incorporate the basic features of Byzantine planning and design into the new cathedrals; it was only in the exterior decoration of St. Michael the Archangel that they succeeded in introducing Italian decorative motifs. A third church, the modest Annunciation Cathedral (1484–89), with its warm beauty, was the work of Pskov architects. There the kokoshniki were introduced in the treatment of the roof. This element, similar in outline to the popular Russian bochka roof (pointed on top, with the sides forming a continuous double curve, concave above and convex below), foreshadowed a tendency to replace the forms of the Byzantine arch by more elongated silhouettes. Ecclesiastical architecture began to lose the special features associated with the Byzantine heritage, becoming more national in character and increasingly permeated with the taste and thought of the people. The most important change in Russian church design of the 16th century was the introduction of the tiered tower and the tent-shaped roof first developed in wood by Russia's carpenters. Next was the substitution of the bulb-shaped spire for the traditional Byzantine cupola. This affected the design of masonry architecture by transforming its proportions and decoration and even its structural methods. The buildings acquired a dynamic, exteriorized articulation and specifically Russian national characteristics.

      The boldest departures from Byzantine architecture were the Church of the Ascension at Kolomenskoye (now a suburb of Moscow; 1532), the Church of the Decapitation of St. John the Baptist at Dyakovo (c. 1532), and, above all, the cathedral of St. Basil (Vasily) the Blessed (the Pokrovsky Cathedral (Saint Basil the Blessed)) in Moscow (1554–60).

 In St. Basil the western academic architectural concepts, based on rational, manifest harmony, were ignored; the structure, with no easily readable design and a profusion of disparate colourful exterior decoration, is uniquely medieval Russian in content and form, in technique, decoration, and feeling. St. Basil, like its predecessors, the churches at Kolomenskoye and Dyakovo, embodies the characteristic features of the wood churches of northern Russia, translated into masonry. An effective finishing touch was given to the ensemble of the Kremlin's Cathedral Square by the erection of the imposing Belfry of Ivan II the Great, begun in 1542. The colossal white stone “column of fame,” with its golden cupola gleaming above the Kremlin hill, was the definite expression of an era, reflecting the tastes and grandiose political ambitions of the rising Russian state.

      The basic types and structural forms of the Russian multicolumned and tented churches were fully developed in the 16th century. It remained for the next century to concentrate its efforts on the refinement of those forms and on the embellishment of the facades. The tent spires degenerated into mere decoration; they were used as exterior ornamental features set loosely in numbers over gabled roofs and on top of roof vaulting (for example, the church of the Nativity in Putinki in Moscow, 1649–52). This decorative use of the formerly functional element was combined with the liberal employment of the kokoshnik. The latter, in converging and ascending tiers and in diversified shapes and arrangements, was used as a decorative screen for the drumlike bases of the spires and sometimes as parapets over the cornices. At the same time the formerly large expanses of unbroken wall surfaces (of the Novgorod-Pskov architectural traditions) were replaced by rich decorative paneling. Polychromy asserted itself: coloured and glazed tile and carved stone ornament, used in combination with brick patterns, were employed extensively. This was especially evidenced in a large group of Yaroslavl churches (church).

Arthur Voyce

The Christian West

The early Middle Ages
Migratory period (human migration)
      The migration of European peoples, which was one of the consequences of the decline and ultimate fall of the Roman Empire, had its prelude in the transmigration of the Goths, who, about AD 200, had crossed from Sweden to the region around the mouth of the Vistula River, thence eventually reaching southern Russia. There they came into contact with an ancient artistic tradition that they largely succeeded in grafting onto decorative styles brought over from Scandinavia. When, in 375, the Huns invaded Russia, the Goths demanded and obtained permission to settle within the borders of the Roman Empire. This westward movement was the beginning of the great migration of peoples. In this way, too, new forms of art, soon to be amalgamated with influences from other tribes, also reached western and southern Europe.

      When the Ostrogoths under Theodoric came into contact with the late Classical and Byzantine cultures, their art was influenced by these civilizations. This is evident from the Mausoleum of Theodoric (Theodoric, Mausoleum of) in Ravenna (built c. 520), which generally reflects the Classical and Byzantine traditions, but which in its abstract ornamentation is linked with the art of the migration period. It is likely that the mausoleum also reflects influences that had lived on from prehistoric megalithic graves, which were piled up from solid blocks of stone.

      Of the architecture of this period, little has survived. In the south of France there are still a few baptisteries (Fréjus, Riez, Venasque) that reveal a distinct affinity to similar structures in Italy. The Poitiers baptistery, in its present form dating from the 8th century, is on the threshold of the Carolingian epoch, but it contains much more ancient wall work. Most of the major church buildings are known only from descriptions by early medieval writers or from research work undertaken through excavation of the foundation ruins. According to Apollinaris Sidonius, the naves of the cathedral of Lyon (founded about 470) were separated from each other by a forest of columns and were covered by gilded, paneled ceilings. Saint Gregory of Tours (Gregory of Tours, Saint) relates that the church of Bishop Namatius of Clermont (built c. 450) boasted 70 columns, 42 windows, and 8 portals. The same author also praises the church of Saint-Martin at Tours, which was begun by Bishop Perpetuus in the latter half of the 5th century. Also 5th-century in their original form were the chapel of Saint-Maurice-d'Agaune and the church of Saint-Germain at Auxerre. Excavations have revealed the shape of such churches as those of Saint-Martin at Autun (built 590) and the church of Jouarre (c. 680). The Merovingian kings were great builders; about 510 Clovis founded a church on the tomb of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, and Childebert built Sainte-Croix-et-Saint-Vincent (today Saint-Germain-des-Prés). Both churches were decorated with marble and mosaic and roofed with bronze tiles—as was the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Daurade in Toulouse, which probably dates from the end of the 6th century and was demolished only as late as 1761.

      Of the earliest Irish architecture very little is known. There are some ruins of monasteries found, for example, at Skellig Michael (off the southwestern coast of Ireland), at Nendrum (County Down), and, in England, at Tintagel (Cornwall).

      The oldest churches in Kent and Essex (including those at Canterbury, Lyminge, Reculver, and Rochester) consist of a rectangular nave with an apse. Most of these churches were later enlarged by the addition of two smaller spaces flanking the nave and connected by narrow passageways. The outside walls are lined with pilasters, or columns projecting about one-third of their widths from the walls. In some of the churches the choir is separated from the nave by an arcade, as at St. Pancras in Canterbury and Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex.

      In the second half of the 5th century, the Visigoth (Visigothic art)s penetrated into Spain and, as early as 470, ruled practically the entire country. Toulouse remained their capital until 507, when Clovis I pushed them back beyond the Pyrenees. In 554 Byzantine troops invaded Spain but were driven back in the last quarter of the 6th century; nevertheless, contact with the Byzantines left an indelible impression on Visigothic art. The influence was short-lived, however, ending when the Muslims conquered almost the whole of Spain in 711. The only surviving Visigothic structure is the church of San Juan Bautista at Baños de Cerrato, consecrated in 661; it is a small structure, originally planned as a three-aisled basilica, in which the horseshoe-shaped arch is predominant.

      In contrast to Merovingian architecture, a comparatively large number of Carolingian buildings have survived. The most renowned edifice is the Palatine Chapel of Charlemagne at Aachen (consecrated 805), the core of the present-day cathedral. Built in the shape of an octagon with two superimposed galleries, this structure resembles San Vitale in Ravenna, and the ground-floor section of the interior recalls the mausoleum of Theodoric. The building was enriched with Classical columns brought from Ravenna and Rome, and the bronze railings and door wings were presumably fashioned by artisans from Lombardy. Above the octagonal chapel rises a dome, which is 101.5 feet (31 metres) high on the inside with a diameter of 46.7 feet (14 metres). This desire for loftiness is neither Classical nor Byzantine but Germanic, and it continued into the Romanesque and Gothic styles. Central architecture also found favour elsewhere; Bishop Theodulf Of Orléans, for example, built a chapel in the vicinity of the abbey of Fleury (afterward Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire), a chapel that, unfortunately, has been greatly altered by 19th-century restoration. As in Charlemagne's chapel, the highest part is the square central section, from which four branches extend, forming a Greek cross; in the corners of the cross are four lower chapels, and at the ends are apses shaped somewhat like horseshoes. The arches are also slightly horseshoe-shaped—possibly a Visigothic influence from Spain. Unlike the cathedral at Aachen, which in the 18th century lost all mosaic decoration, this church has preserved its Carolingian apse mosaic.

      In addition to central architecture, the T-shaped basilica form was frequently employed; fairly well-preserved examples of this can be found at Steinbach and at Seligenstadt in Germany. The walls of the nave at Steinbach (821–827) rest on square masonry pillars. On the east side there are two transept chapels, which are lower in height than the nave but higher than the aisles; like the nave, they end in semicircular apses. The church had a tripartite narthex no longer in existence. In the church of Saints Marcellinus and Peter at Seligenstadt (830–840) only the three-aisle nave on pillars is original. In the style of the great basilicas of Rome, this church had a hall-shaped, wide transept with a semicircular apse adjoining it. Some churches, such as Centula (Saint-Riquier, France), which is known only through pictures, had a second choir on the west side. A fairly well-preserved west choir, forerunner of the later Romanesque westwork, is to be found in the church of Corvey, in Germany (873–885). Notable also is the gatehouse of the monastery of Lorsch, near Worms, Germany (founded c. 760–764). This edifice borrowed its three arch-shaped passageways and its sectioning by means of Classically influenced half-columns from ancient triumphal arches. On the other hand, Teutonic influence is evident in the upper section of the blind arcade, which consists of baseless triangles, and in the multicoloured decoration of the masonry.

Ottonian period
       Ottonian art is the official art of the realm in the epoch of the Saxon, or Ottonian, emperors and of their first successors from the Salian house. Its centre was Saxony, birthplace of the Ottonians, but its influence extended over the whole realm, with the exception of Italy. Ottonian art was shaped by the Carolingian tradition, by early Christian art, and—because Otto III's mother, Theophano, was a Byzantine princess—by contemporary Byzantine art.

      It was architecture especially that followed early Christian and specifically Roman examples, while at the same time remaining true to the Carolingian style (in the west choir, for example). In Saxony, the art-loving bishop Bernward, who had seen the great basilicas in Rome and had come into contact with Classical art, was the great builder; about 1001 he founded the abbey church of St. Michael in his episcopal city of Hildesheim. At an earlier date (961) the margrave Gero had the church of St. Cyriacus built at Gernrode. The two churches have wooden-roofed, three-aisle naves; but, in contrast to the Carolingian pillar basilicas, alternating pillars and columns have been used, and at Gernrode the side aisles are crowned by galleries. The two churches have both an east and a west choir and transept arms as high as the nave. At Hildesheim both choirs have a transept with a square dome over the crossing, flanked by staircase towers. Gernrode has crypts underneath both choirs whereas Hildesheim has them only beneath the west choir. The harmony and clarity that characterize both the interior and the exterior of the church at Hildesheim make it the finest example of Ottonian architecture. On the alternating pillars and columns (that is, a pair of columns between each pillar), one encounters for the first time the cubical, or cushion, capital that was later to become such a characteristic feature of the Romanesque style.

      Few of the innumerable major churches built about the year 1000 are well-preserved; others have completely disappeared. Some of the outstanding ones are, or were, the cathedrals of Magdeburg, Merseburg, Paderborn, Liège, Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Verdun, Basel, Metz, Eichstätt, Bamberg, Regensburg, Augsburg, Lausanne, and Dijon. The surviving ground plans show that frequently they were wooden-roofed basilicas with east and west choirs. Of the basilicas on columns, which are rare, there is Oberzell, in the south, on the island of Reichenau, and, in the north, St. Peter's at Utrecht (The Netherlands). Churches with a nave are also rare; notable examples are the original St. Pantaleon at Cologne and St. Patroclus's Church at Soest, Germany. The Aachen chapel's octagon was fairly widely imitated; the best-preserved examples are in Ottmarsheim (France) and Nijmegen (The Netherlands), both dating from the early 11th century. The west choir of the Minster at Essen is remarkable in that it imitates the forms of the chapel at Aachen on a ground plan of a semihexagon.

Prelude to Romanesque in the north
      Northern construction of wood in pre-Romanesque times is well represented by the “long hall” or palace at Lojsta (built c. 1000) on the island of Gotland. Judging from the remains of the building, the superstructure must have consisted of tall, triangular frames stiffened by timbers that mark out a supporting square in the lower half of the triangle. There was a smoke hole above the hearth. This type of construction, originating on the Continent, spread throughout Scandinavia. It has been traced by excavation in Greenland (Gardar) and in Newfoundland (La Baie aux Meadows, near Cape Race); and actual modern examples of the traditional mode exist in Iceland (Vidhmýri). In fine medieval examples, the timbers were richly carved and painted.

      By the time churches were being built, the sloping exterior bank of a longhouse, or long dwelling of wood, was often replaced by vertical timbers and plank walls. In the more ambitious buildings there might be four files of interior supports, instead of two, under the steep two-slope roof. The churches were distinguished by having the aisles carried entirely around the central space, which projected above them in order to permit small windows. The sanctuary was a small, shedlike projection with a pinnacle, and the belfry took the form of a small shed perched on the roof, with a pinnacle above it. These churches are called stave (wooden-plank) churches or, more properly, mast churches (stave church), because of the novel way in which the inner middle part is supported by masts, or vertical posts, on its periphery; the masts themselves are supported on a stout chassis, the timbers of which extend outward to sustain the aisles and porches. It is probable that this formula was achieved by the year 1000, when Christianity began to dominate in Scandinavia. The churches are extraordinarily picturesque, in contrast to the longhouses or palaces near which they were often placed as palace chapels—their special form suggested, perhaps, by reliquaries or manuscript drawings of churches. The more elaborate churches had wonderfully energetic carvings, in particular the panels of interlaced lacertine, or lizardlike, creatures (as at Urnes in Norway, c. 1100). They were replaced by simple Romanesque buildings of English and German inspiration when the congregations outgrew the mast churches, which are necessarily rather small.

      When towns and cities came to be built, improved versions of the longhouses, with several stories, were placed side by side. A reminder of this persists in the many-gabled street frontages not only in Scandinavia but also in The Netherlands and along the south Baltic littoral—regions that are heavily timbered. In Russia, walls were built of horizontal timbers sometimes as much as 3 square feet (about 0.3 square metre) in cross section. In Scandinavia the ancestors of the American frontier log cabin were built in this way. In the Germanic area, however, half-timber and palisade construction were preferred. A survivor of the latter type is the old part of the Saxon church (1013) at Greenstead, Essex, England.

Romanesque
      “Romanesque (Romanesque art)” is the name given to the architectural and artistic style current in Europe from about the mid-11th century until the advent of Gothic. “Romanesque” is a less familiar term than “Classical,” “Gothic,” or “Renaissance” because of the historical circumstances under which it entered artistic terminology. The Classical and Renaissance periods were clearly defined by art historians with a view of a clear, canonical trajectory of art within which medieval styles were seen as fanciful (if not objectionable) aberrations. Blinded by the fashionable canon, a critic wrote in 1750:

The Goths and Vandals, having demolished the Greek and Roman architecture, introduced in its stead a certain fantastical and incentious manner of building, which we have since called modern or Gothic, full of fret and lamentable imagery.

      Half a century later the Gothic was understood as having a noble canon of its own, but its background was still veiled—considered to be the work of untutored barbarians, whose vigour, interpreted as crudity, repelled those who cared for the arts. Romanesque did not even have a name until 1818, when the term roman (Romanesque, romanico, romanisch) was coined by Charles-Alexis-Adrien de Gerville. The corresponding term is “Romance” in languages based on Latin; in each case the underlying elements came from Rome. Actually the name “Romanesque” itself is the simplest, most practical definition of the style. It is Roman, with differences—differences conditioned by a complex historical background, which brings about a marvelous richness of expression, varied from region to region, with a truly noble lucidity in the finest creations.

      The Romanesque period was no less complex in its art than in its history, though it had a unifying theme in monasticism. To compensate for the loss of stable central governments, there was a strong movement to found monasteries from about 650 to 1200. Such brotherhoods, which lived the ideal Christian life as it was understood at the time, were islands of civilization in a very much disturbed world. The most effective of these institutions were in the Frankish territory between the Rhine River on the east, the Loire River on the south, and the coast on the north and west.

      Records of lost buildings show how much of the later architectural development was envisaged in the time of Charlemagne. As a basis for monastic (monastery) unity he chose the Rule of St. Benedict. On his estate at Aniane a later Benedict—of Aniane—with Charlemagne's encouragement, built a monastery where all the arts were brought into play (782) and later constructed a model monastery at Cornelimünster (Inden, near Aachen). Meanwhile, a monastic holy city had been built at Centula, where the monastic church of 799, with its cloister and chapels, was the centre of all. Around it, the wards and various guild quarters of the city were laid out in regular fashion; at some distance there were seven satellite villages bound to the monastery by periodical ceremonial visits in the form of processions. For better exploitation of the imperial estates everywhere, a type of villa was evolved; with the passage of time, many of these became ecclesiastical possessions—then priories, or even monasteries, as in the case of Cluny (910). By 820 the typical monastic layout had been fully studied (as at Inden and St. Gall). This later site, the Insula Felix in Lake Constance, was a stopping place for the imperial journeys, and it developed as a powerful monastic and missionary centre—one of the many that enlarged the boundaries of Christendom as Charlemagne's dominions expanded to the north and east.

      In the Middle Ages the population of Europe had diminished by half since Roman times. Communication and transport, either by land or by sea, might be difficult or hazardous, and this tended naturally to divide the country into neighbourhoods. Under these conditions, a great monastery, like a city, could serve a considerable surrounding area as an administrative, intellectual, and spiritual centre and as a workshop, granary, and refuge. With increasing prosperity the monastic building complexes were progressively better organized, better built, and more impressive. Showing the way for cathedral and domestic architecture, the great patrons of the age were the abbots (abbot), though not to the exclusion of the bishops and magnates.

      The Romans had not solved the problem of the fireproof basilican church—a problem that became pressing with the frequent conflagrations in timber-built towns and, not less, the incendiarism that was a lamentable consequence of endemic local wars and the incursions of organized marauders. By AD 1000 the monastic builders had begun to solve this problem by vaulting. Moreover, they had improved upon the Roman attempts at systematic plans for the monasteries themselves, which might accommodate 1,000 persons—monks, brethren, craftsmen, servants, slaves, and guests—with provision for their multiple activities and also suitable storage facilities.

      The solution, well exemplified in the plan of 820 for the monastery at St. Gall, was a quadrangular court, or cloister, provided with arcaded walks, or “alleys,” and placed beside the nave of the church. Typically, the east walk had an entrance into the church near the sanctuary; and the members of the community, entering processionally, would turn into their choir enclosure in the nave, while the celebrants would occupy their posts in the sanctuary. Important rooms bordered the east walk: the chapter house, where the community met as a corporation; the parlour, where speaking was allowed for the transaction of business; and the camera, or workroom. The walk parallel to the church gave access to the calefactory (in early times often the only heated room) for fellowship, the refectory, the pantries, and the kitchens. The cellars stretched along the west walk between the kitchens and a porter's lodge adjoining the church. The door at the porter's lodge was the principal entrance to the cloister. The scriptorium and library were typically in the walk beside the church; the dormitory was usually located directly above the buildings of the east walk.

      This plan was very flexible, for in a large monastery there would be several cloisters or courts with suitable independent arrangements for archives, administration, guests, wayfarers, servants, artisans, shops, and folds; special quarters were provided by such courts for retired or sick monks and for novices. Special chapels were provided, where necessary, in these subsidiary parts of the establishment.

      The several cloisters or courts of a large monastery carried on the tradition established by the greater Germanic households of the pagan time; they too were composed of “proliferating quadrangles.” The basic unit, as has been learned from excavation, was a wide, framed, compartmented longhouse with a steep, thatched roof. By Charlemagne's time longhouses of this type were sometimes adapted as churches.

      Though Rome (ancient Rome) could no longer present fresh models for universal emulation or exercise unifying control, its architectural monuments were still numerous in many regions and could not be ignored. The Roman heritage is particularly apparent in conservative southern regions, where Roman massiveness and horizontality persist and are perceptible to some degree even in the Gothic architecture of the area. In the regions where the Roman population had been large, commonplace buildings continued for a long time to be built in much the same way as before, with increasing emphasis—especially in the north—on the use of timber construction in small or utilitarian structures. In the wet northern climates steeper roofs were necessary, particularly where thatch was used. New importance accrued to the fact that the various regions had differing materials and aesthetic ideals. The artists had a wider choice among sources of inspiration than the Romans, but the choices that were made by responsible architects varied from region to region. This explains the origin of “schools” of Romanesque—families of designs inspired by successful buildings in a local context. These were usually churches, often of novel design, and situated at the centre of an important region that, in modern parlance, gives its name to the school.

      The forward-looking Romanesque artists were aware of and could synthesize ideas and practices from Rome, Byzantium, the Islamic world, Scandinavia, and the Teutonic regions. The number of options was fairly large, offering a great many possibilities of variety; moreover, the importance given to certain features varied from one school to the next.

      Elements of Roman origin might involve one or several important Roman types of fabric and material, plan, vaulting, decorative elements, and, in the south, the Roman canon of proportion. Early Christian works offered a choice of plans, with or without towers and porches. Elements of Eastern origin might be structural or decorative, and they might be derived from Iberian, African, or Asiatic examples. From the north came not only imaginative timber construction but also various lively decorative systems and verve in their application.

      Perhaps even more important was the northern love of powerfully composed, intersecting forms, which affected almost the entire Romanesque area, stretching from Portugal to the Holy Land, including Scandinavia and what would later be known as the Holy Roman Empire (see Researcher's Note: Empire). The greater buildings were most often churches, which stood out boldly above the ordinary constructions but had an organic relationship to them. The resulting silhouette, so much in contrast with placid Classical design, quite transformed the idea of what a city or church group should look like, either from within or from a distance as an ensemble. This dynamic mode was bequeathed to Gothic, Renaissance, and modern times.

      After 950 the excellent construction, the grand scale, the assured design, the increasingly capable use of masonry vaulting, and the increasingly rich and appropriate use of foliate and figural sculpture showed that the initial period was over and that a noble, new Romanesque style had come into existence (fully, by 1050). The greatest works in the Romanesque style date from 1075 to 1125, the classic age of Romanesque, so to speak; after this, in some regions, the style entered a florid “baroque” phase that lasted a generation and then was revivified as Gothic.

      The coming eclipse of Romanesque may first be sensed in new structural developments that began about 1090. Sophisticated but unsatisfactory attempts to vault the great basilican naves safely, with elements of Roman, Byzantine, or Eastern origin, impelled progressive Romanesque engineers, from about 1090 onward, to invent a new type of ribbed groin-vaulted unit bay, using pointed arches to distribute thrust and improve the shape of the geometric surfaces. Fifty years of experimentation produced vaulting that was light, strong, open, versatile, and applicable everywhere—in short, Gothic vaulting. A whole new aesthetic, with a new decorative system—the Gothic—was being evolved as early as 1145. The spatial forms of the new buildings sometimes caused acoustic difficulties, which may help to account for the concomitant development of the new polyphonic music (music, Western) that supplemented the traditional Romanesque plainsong. Romanesque architecture became old-fashioned, but its heavy forms pleased the Cistercian monks and, likewise, other conservative patrons in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Thus, buildings that were essentially Romanesque in spirit continued to be built, even when such extraordinary Gothic works as the Amiens Cathedral were under construction (begun 1220).

 The development of proto-Romanesque in the Ottonian period culminated in the true Romanesque style represented by five magnificent churches on the international pilgrimage routes leading from central France to the reputed tomb of St. James at Santiago de Compostela in Spain: Saint-Martin at Tours (a huge once wooden-roofed basilica that was rebuilt on the new model beginning about 1050), Sainte-Foy at Conques (c. 1052–1130), Saint-Martial at Limoges (c. 1062–95), Saint-Sernin at Toulouse (1077 or 1082–1118), and the new cathedral at Santiago de Compostela itself (c. 1075–1211). This was a real family of buildings; each one had a splendid apse with ambulatory (a sheltered place to walk) and radiating chapels, a transept and nave with aisles and galleries, an imposing tower system, and beautiful sculptures. Each one was entirely vaulted, typically, with barrel vaults over the nave, quadrant vaults (four-part vaults, formed by two intersecting arches) over the galleries, and groin-vaulted aisles. A little later, at the Cluniac priory of Saint-Étienne (Nevers, France), such a church was boldly built with clerestory (part of the nave, choir, and transept walls above the aisle roofs) windows under the high vault.

 While such religious architecture dominated the Middle Ages, there were also important architectural expressions of secular power. The Normans were among the first in Europe to build elaborate fortifications and castles. These were built to overwhelm the populace, and they served a variety of functions, including royal residences, treasury houses, prisons, administrative centres, and bases from which the surrounding countryside could be controlled. One such construction, the White Tower (begun c. 1078) at the Tower of London (London, Tower of), was built as much to express William I the Conqueror's wealth and authority as to secure his safety and that of the court. Some of the most sophisticated of all castles were those erected in southern Italy in the 1230s and '40s by the Holy Roman emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen; of particular note is the octagonal Castel del Monte in Andria, in the Puglia region. These structures influenced the building of the circular castle palace of Bellver (1309–14) in Palma, as well as Welsh castles from the late 13th century such as Harlech Castle, which was characterized by concentric forms. Like the earlier commissions of Frederick II, these structures celebrated pure geometry through symmetrical patterns. Great castles such as Villandraut, built by the first French pope at Avignon and perhaps inspired by the Welsh model, were also constructed in France in the 13th through 15th centuries. The 14th-century fortress palace of Marienburg (now Malbork, Poland), near Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), is among the most impressive structures of its kind. (For more on the subject, see castle.)

      Related to these strongholds, the construction of fortified cities also characterized the period. Beginning in the late 11th century in Spain, polygonal walls were built to encompass the ancient city of Ávila; this represented the impulse, frequent during the period, for a ruling or royal family to overcome revolt from barons through architectural means. By the 13th and 14th centuries in France, walled cities such as Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes were developed. Laid out in a grid plan, Aigues-Mortes is one of the largest surviving fortified towns of the Middle Ages. (For more on city planning during the Middle Ages, see city (urban planning).) Other forms of secular architecture also emerged during the period: Flanders, Belgium, and Italy were notable for their monumental town halls, cloth halls, and guild halls, especially as seen in Antwerp, Arras, Brussels, Bruges, Ypres, Florence, and Siena.

      Since the monasteries had done so much to create the new Europe now bursting into architectural flower, it is appropriate that there are two families of churches that express the greatness of Burgundian federative monasticism: Cluny and Cîteaux. Cluny ultimately had about 1,400 dependencies under centralized rule, of which about 200 were important establishments. The Cistercians had a ramified system that ultimately included 742 monasteries and about 900 nunneries.

      It was Cluny that, after an impressive rebuilding of the monastery buildings (1077–85), undertook the Maior Ecclesia, or Cluny III (1088–1130 and later). Until it was largely demolished in the early 19th century, it was the largest monastic church, the largest Romanesque church, and the largest French church. It had many features that prepared the way for Gothic: tall proportions, grouped piers, pointed arches, specialized wall and vault construction. It had carvings of great beauty in the apse (where one of the first medieval sculptural allegories was placed by 1095) and at the portals of the nave (where the first really grand ensemble of monumental carved and painted west portals was placed, about 1108). Cluny III inspired only a few great buildings (including, however, Paray-le-Monial, La Charité-sur-Loire, and Autun Cathedral) because of its special, advanced character and the fact that the design was soon attacked in an unfortunate Cistercian polemic (1124). It may be that certain architects at Cluny itself considered the design too bold, for they built at the priory of Vézelay (1104–32) a groin-vaulted nave nearly as wide but only two-thirds as high as that of Cluny III. In the narthex at Vézelay there was one groin vault that had ribs, and buttresses resembling flying buttresses were concealed under roofs of the galleries. A pair of towers flanking a carved portal were planned for the facade.

      Thus, between these features of Vézelay and the pointed arches composed in tall proportions at Cluny III, the ingredients of the Gothic style were at hand in Burgundy by 1135, awaiting the creative Gothic spark of Saint-Denis (near Paris). The rich portals of Saint-Denis show the influence of the great Burgundian carving. Account must be taken, however, of another episode—the development of consistent ribbed vaulting in the Norman dominions. Probably the high-ranking Lombard ecclesiastics who undertook the reform and development of the Norman church brought with them some knowledge of ribbed-vault construction, which then passed to England. The cathedral abbey church of Durham (1093–1133) was a very early demonstration of the dramatic potentialities of this type of construction. Lombard experiments may have been as early as 1080, but the dating is uncertain; in any event, the development of this structural unit into the admirable Gothic type of ribbed groin vault is due to the skill of French and Anglo-French engineers.

      Returning to another great family of Burgundian monastic builders, it should be noted that the Cistercian Order, founded in 1098, was both austere and popular and spread rapidly. The Cistercian architects were commanded to build well but without bravura of any kind; their architecture was dramatically stark in comparison with the elaborate architecture of the Cluniacs, reflecting the order's stricter and simpler monastic life. They accepted the pointed arch but built ponderously within it a style that might be called half-Gothic, because it has the general appearance but not the special structural characteristics of Gothic. Fontenay Abbey (1139 and later) represented the personal preference of St. Bernard, and it is almost Roman, with its very simple and substantial scheme of pointed barrel vaulting. In general, however, the Cistercian churches came more and more to approximate Gothic designs. In the ground floors of their monastery buildings the Cistercians early introduced the idea of using ribbed groin vaulting in repetitive square bays (a Gothic scheme). To the east, the south, the west, and the northwest of Europe, the first buildings resembling Gothic were erected by the Cistercians: Pontigny, 1140–1210 (Burgundy); Alcobaça, 1158–1223 (Portugal); Fossanova, 1187–1208 (Italy); Maulbronn, 1146–78 (Germany); Fountains, 1135–50 (England); Vreta, about 1100–62 (Sweden); Kercz, 1202 (Hungary); and Beirut, about 1150 (Lebanon)—all of these give an idea of the power and extension of their effort.

      The Cistercian establishments were located in remote places, but the husbandry of the communities was superb and benefited the whole of Europe. Their monasteries were so uniform in conception that a monk coming from a Cistercian house anywhere would feel quite at home in one of these monasteries anywhere else. The basic plan was traditional, but the western court (where visitors were usually received) was reduced to a mere corridor. The Cistercians did not encourage visitors; they were not provided with space in guesthouses within the enclosures or even in the churches. Cistercian refectories were regularly placed at right angles opposite the church, rather than parallel, as in early plans. The monks (monastery) chose well-watered sites and used waterpower. Ideally, the brotherhoods were able to supply all of their own needs.

  Many examples of great architecture came from Normandy (Norman style): Rouen Cathedral (c. 1037–63), followed by Westminster Abbey (1050–65) and the splendid abbeys built in Caen by Duke William and his duchess, Matilda. She built La Trinité, beginning in 1062, and was buried as queen in its sanctuary (1083). William's church, Saint-Étienne, was begun in 1067 and dedicated in 1081. The Norman series was continued in England by the foundation and endowment of magnificent Benedictine abbeys after the Conquest, as royal policy—to gain the favour of the church, to improve the exploitation of the land, and to pacify the country. Many of the church buildings still exist, and they are very impressive indeed. Typically, they have, or have had, long, wooden-roofed naves with vaulted aisles and wooden-roofed galleries, embellished, stage by stage, with bold, rich interior arcading. The churches have spacious transepts and deep sanctuaries, the apses being arranged in echelon or with ambulatories. It gives one a sense of the builder's means to know that a very large part of the beautiful limestone used in facing the walls was transported across the Channel from the famous quarries of Caen. Though the walls and piers are beautiful, the mortar was not good, and only great thickness made the masonry strong. The Norman parish churches that survive are neither numerous nor striking. Among the more ambitious naves originally roofed in wood but now closed with Gothic vaults are those of the cathedrals at Winchester (1079), Gloucester (1089), and Norwich (1096). Peterborough Cathedral (1118) still possesses its old ceiling, painted in lozenge-shaped panels. In many of the churches a large number of additions have been made in the Gothic style without impairing the dignity of the Norman construction. But Durham Cathedral, with its Romanesque ribbed groin vault, remains by far the finest example of the Norman style.

      Long united to the English crown after 1152, Aquitaine has a quite separate church architecture. To achieve free interior space, masonry domes of special construction were used, often four in line, as at Saint-Étienne-de-la-Cité, Périgueux (c. 1100–50), and the cathedral of Saint-Pierre at Angoulême (1105–28 and later), with a richly sculptured facade.

      In Poitou, elaborately arcaded facades formed somewhat illogical frontispieces for spacious “three-naved” churches, with windowed aisles almost as tall as the central windowless naves. There are beautiful paintings in such churches (as at Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe). This region has several Romanesque castles, in the usual form (as at Loches, about 1100) of a great square tower, the donjon or keep, with guard and residential rooms on several levels, and appropriate outworks.

      The churches of Languedoc have bold massing and beautiful sculpture, the tradition of which goes back to the formative period (Saint-Genis-des-Fontaines, 1020). Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, in the pilgrimage style, has beautiful carvings, and many churches in the region are related to it.

      In Auvergne, a long tradition (Clermont Cathedral, 946) developed, more or less in the manner of the pilgrimage churches. The high “lantern transepts” are characteristic (for example, Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand, 1150). The cathedral of Le Puy-en-Velay (11th and 12th centuries), with zebra work in the masonry and a file of domes, represents reflex influence from Spain; Muslim motifs were brought in via the pilgrimage road. Such influence is perceptible also in Burgundy and perhaps in the west of France.

      Turning eastward to Provence, the old Provincia Romana, one finds that Romanesque architecture is most Roman in feeling there: grand, simple, spacious bulks were built, usually in fine ashlar (squared stone blocks) masonry, as at Avignon Cathedral (about 1140–1200), and often with fine sculpture, as at the cathedral of Arles (Saint-Trophime, 1150 and later) and Saint-Gilles-du-Gard (1116 and later, to about 1170). Some of the portals, especially, seem very Roman.

Germany and the Low Countries
      By contrast with the fresh activity in France, the imperial lands, which had done so much to further the development of Romanesque architecture, remained conservative. The period of the mature Romanesque was prosperous in Germany; new buildings were larger and more numerous but technically less interesting. The embellishment and vaulting of the cathedrals in the Rhine country date from this time: Mainz (1036–1137), Speyer (1030–65, remade c. 1082–1137), and Worms (12th and 13th centuries). A prime example is the abbey church of Maria Laach (1130–56). Elsewhere, there is a spectacular church design with five towers at Tournai (c. 1110–1200), and there are ponderous but handsome palaces with fine upper rooms at Goslar (c. 1050, rebuilt after 1132) and Eisenach (the Wartburg, 12th century).

      Romanesque architecture in the Low Countries is generally divided into four stylistic classifications: the style of Meuseland, the Scheldt district style, the style of the bishopric of Utrecht, and the style prevalent in the provinces of Groningen and Friesland. The Meuseland churches are characterized by their use of the Carolingian basilica plan. Among the most outstanding examples are St. Servatius at Maastricht; and Saint-Denis, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Jean, and Sainte-Gertrude, all at Nivelles. At the end of the 12th century, Rhenish influences were evident in Meuseland, such as in the apse of St. Servatius at Maastricht. In the Scheldt (Schelde River) district a pronounced Norman influence is apparent, as in the cathedral of Tournai and the church of St. Vincent at Soignies. A blending of Ottonian, Rhenish, and Meuseland styles characterizes Romanesque churches in the bishopric of Utrecht as St. Peter's at Utrecht, Grote Kerk at Deventer, and St. Martin at Emmerich. Groningen and Friesland possess a great number of Romanesque village churches that were founded by abbeys in the region. Stylistically, they are related to monastic churches in Meuseland and parts of northern France.

      The pre-Romanesque types of building in the peninsula were insufficient to satisfy the needs and ambitions of the Spaniards (Spain) as the Christian states increased in population by immigration and expanded southward by the reconquest in Romanesque times. The architecture clearly testifies to the great influx of men and ideas, particularly from Burgundy, Poitou, and Languedoc (as at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral). Cistercian half-Gothic became important (e.g., Poblet, 1180–96). Catalonia long remained faithful to the Lombard style. Everywhere there are Muslim reminiscences, sometimes obvious, sometimes very subtle.

      The walls of Ávila (1090 and later) are among the finest of Romanesque military constructions, and Loarre in Aragon, with its beautiful chapel, is perhaps the finest Romanesque castle.

       Lombardy was an area in which the proto-Romanesque style was transformed into the true Romanesque, particularly because of the development of ribbed-groin vaulting. Decorative arcading, in enriched form, was used and brick was widely employed in later work. Romanesque forms continued in use long after the coming of Cistercian half-Gothic. The Lombard cities built tremendous cathedrals, simple in plan, during the 12th century; examples are Modena (1099–1184), Parma (1117–32), and Cremona (1129–1342). Parma and Cremona have large freestanding baptisteries, unusual at the time. A very handsome type of belfry tower was brought to perfection by the Lombards, and impressive town halls were built with Romanesque inspiration but at Gothic dates. Turbulence in the city streets caused the construction of private fortifications in the form of taller houses: Bologna, for example, had 180, and Lucca “rose like a forest.”

       Tuscany retained strong early Christian traditions, exemplified in the octagonal Baptistery of Florence (restored in 1059) and the common use of basilican church forms. In the Romanesque period, marble was used extensively, often in panels and zebra work (for example, the cathedral group at Pisa; cathedral 1063–13th century, baptistery 1152–1278, and the Camposanto 1278).

      Central Italy was still more conservative; the early Christian style survived there with little change except degeneration. The region about Monte Cassino was more inventive; the famous abbey built the typical church of the region, basilican in form (1066–71). A school of painters developed there, under Byzantine influence, which was drawn on by the Cluniacs in their work.

Norman Italy and Sicily
 Buildings basically Lombard, Tuscan, Muslim, Byzantine, or early Christian were built as the realm became prosperous. Nuances of design and a strange mingling of influences give them strong local feeling. Examples are San Nicola, Bari (1087), where St. Nicholas is buried; the cathedral of Monreale (1174), with wonderful mosaics and a poetic, half-Asian-influenced cloister (1172–89); and San Cataldo at Palermo (1161), a former synagogue in the Muslim domed style. These Sicilian buildings are actually more exotic than the structures built by the Crusaders (Crusades) in Palestine (1099–1244).

      The Crusaders built extensively in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. The buildings are southern French or Burgundian Romanesque or Burgundian half-Gothic in style (for example, new constructions at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 1099–1147, and the cathedral of Tortosa, or Tartūs, late 12th century). Many remarkable castles were built before and after 1200, incorporating Byzantine and Muslim innovations in military architecture, as at the Krak des Chevaliers or at Margat, “whose bastions seemed to sustain the sky; only eagles and vultures could approach its battlements”—striking witness, in so remote a place, to Romanesque faith and power.

Jan Joseph Marie Timmers

Gothic
      Throughout this period, the central corridor of Europe running northwest from Lombardy to England, between Cologne and Paris, retains an exceptional importance. Much of the significant art—especially architecture—was produced within this geographic area, because it appears to have been an extraordinarily wealthy area, with enough funds to attract good artists and to pay for expensive materials and buildings. Paris—for much of this period the home of a powerful and artistically enlightened court—played an especially important role in the history of Gothic art.

Early Gothic
      At the technical level Gothic architecture is characterized by the ribbed vault (a vault in which stone ribs carry the vaulted surface), the pointed arch, and the flying buttress (normally a half arch carrying the thrust of a roof or vault across an aisle to an outer pier or buttress). These features were all present in a number of earlier, Romanesque buildings, and one of the major 12th- and early 13th-century achievements was to use this engineering expertise to create major buildings that became, in succession, broader and taller. How their visual appearance changed is easy to see if one compares, for instance, the early 13th-century Reims Cathedral, in France, with the late 11th-century Durham Cathedral, in England. A broad comparison of this sort also brings out the artistic ends to which the new engineering means were applied. Skilled use of the pointed arch and the ribbed vault made it possible to cover far more elaborate and complicated ground plans than hitherto. Skilled use of buttressing, especially of flying buttresses, made it possible both to build taller buildings and to open up the intervening wall spaces to create larger windows. In the 12th century larger windows produced novel lighting effects, not lighter churches. The stained glass of the period was heavily coloured and remained so—for example, at Chartres Cathedral—well into the 13th century.

 One of the earliest buildings in which these techniques were introduced in a highly sophisticated architectural plan was the abbey of Saint-Denis, Paris. The east end was rebuilt about 1135–44, and, although the upper parts of the choir and apse were later changed, the ambulatory and chapels belong to this phase. The proportions are not large, but the skill and precision with which the vaulting is managed and the subjective effect of the undulating chain windows around the perimeter have given the abbey its traditional claim to the title “first Gothic building.” The driving figure was Suger, the abbot of Saint-Denis, who wrote two accounts of his abbey that are infused with his personal aesthetic of light as a reflection of the infinite light of God. Something similar to what he intended at Saint-Denis was attempted soon after at Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris), Paris, begun in 1163 (the east end was subsequently altered), and Laon Cathedral, begun about 1165 (the east end was rebuilt in the early 13th century). Perhaps because of liturgical inconvenience, it later became more common to keep firm the architectural divisions between the peripheral eastern chapels, as at Reims (Reims Cathedral) (rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original cathedral in 1210) and Amiens (Amiens Cathedral) (begun 1220) cathedrals, for example. This particular feature of Saint-Denis did not, therefore, have a very long subsequent history.

      It is not known what the original 12th-century interior elevation of Saint-Denis was like. Elsewhere, though, the problems that followed in the wake of the increasing ability to build gigantic buildings are easily seen. Possibly the most important one concerns the disposition of the main interior elevation. The chief elements are the arcade, the tribune (upper gallery set over the aisle and normally opening into the church) or triforium galleries (arcaded wall passages set above the main arcade) or both, and the clerestory. These may be given equivalent treatment, or one may be stressed at the expense of the others. Precedents for almost every conceivable combination existed in Romanesque architecture. In a building such as Sens Cathedral (begun c. 1140), the arcade is given prominence, but in Noyon (begun c. 1150) and Laon cathedrals the four elements mentioned above are all used, with the result that the arcade is comparatively small. Subsequently, the arcade came back into prominence with Bourges Cathedral (begun c. 1195). But one of the most influential buildings was Chartres Cathedral (present church mainly built after 1194). There, the architect abandoned entirely the use of the tribune gallery, but, instead of increasing the size of the arcade, he managed, by a highly individual type of flying buttress, to increase the size of the clerestory. This idea was followed in a number of important buildings, such as the 13th-century Reims and Amiens cathedrals. The conception that the content of a great church should be dominated by large areas of glazing set in the upper parts was influential in the 13th century.

      The decorative features of these great churches were, on the whole, simple. In the second half of the 12th century it became fashionable, as at Laon Cathedral, to “bind” the interior elevation together by series of colonettes, or small columns, set vertically in clusters. Again, as at Laon, much of the elaborate figured carving of Romanesque buildings was abandoned in favour of a highly simplified version of the Classical Corinthian capital—usually called a “crocket” capital. Under the influence of Chartres Cathedral, window tracery (decorative ribwork subdividing the window opening) gradually evolved.

      There is one group of churches, built for houses of the Cistercian order, that requires separate consideration. They tend to be similar, but it is often a similarity of general simplicity as much as of architectural detail. The Cistercian order was bound to the ideas of austerity as exemplified by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (Bernard de Clairvaux, Saint). During his lifetime these ideals were maintained largely through the degree of centralized control exercised from the head house at Cîteaux (Burgundy). Thus, many of the Cistercian (Cistercian style) churches built in England, Italy, or Germany seem to have had characteristics in common with French Cistercian churches. A good French example survives at Fontenay (begun 1139). These buildings probably encouraged the early dissemination of the pointed arch. That they did much more than this is doubtful.

      If one examines the architecture outside northern and northeastern France, one finds, first, that buildings in what might be called a Romanesque (Romanesque art) style continued up to the end of the 12th and into the 13th century and, second, that the appreciation of the developments in France was often partial and haphazard. In England the most influential building in the new fashion was the choir of Canterbury Cathedral (1175–84), which has many of the features of Laon Cathedral. It is the decorative effects of Laon that are used rather than its overall architectural plan, however. There is only a rather depressed tribune gallery, and the building retains a passage at clerestory level—an Anglo-Norman feature that remained standard in English architecture well into the 13th century. Both in the shape of the piers and in the multiplicity of attached colonettes, Canterbury resembles Laon. Colonettes became extremely popular with English architects, particularly because of the large supplies of purbeck (Purbeck Beds) marble, which gave any elevation a special coloristic character. This is obvious at Salisbury Cathedral (begun 1220), but one of the richest examples of the effect is in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral (begun c. 1225).

      The early stages of architectural development in the Gothic period are untidy and have a strong regional flavour. During this period in Germany, large buildings showing northern French characteristics are few. The church of Our Lady at Trier (begun c. 1235) and the church of St. Elizabeth at Marburg (begun 1235) both have features, such as window tracery, dependent on northern French example; but the church at Trier is highly unusual in its centralized plan, and St. Elizabeth is a “hall church” (that is, the nave is virtually the same height as the aisles), which places it outside the canon of contemporary French building.

      In Spain the two most important early Gothic buildings were Burgos (begun 1222) and Toledo (begun 1221) cathedrals. Their architects probably knew Reims and Amiens; but their models were undoubtedly Bourges and Le Mans (begun 1217), since the main internal architectural feature is a giant arcade rather than an extended clerestory. By contrast, Scandinavian architects seem to have been influenced, to begin with, by English buildings. Certainly there is a strong English flavour in the 13th-century Trondheim Cathedral (Norway).

High Gothic
      During the 13th century European art was dominated for the first time by the art and architecture of France. The reasons for this are not clear, although it seems certain that they are connected with the influence of the court of King Louis IX (1226–70).

 By about 1220–30 it must have been clear that engineering expertise had pushed building sizes to limits beyond which it was unsafe to go. The last of these gigantic buildings, Beauvais Cathedral, had a disastrous history, which included the collapse of its vaults, and it was never completed. In about 1230 architects became less interested in size and more interested in decoration. The result was the birth of what is known as the Rayonnant style (from the radiating character of the rose window, one of the style's most prominent features). The earliest moves in this direction were at Amiens Cathedral, where the choir triforium and clerestory were begun after 1236, and at Saint-Denis, where transepts and nave were begun after 1231. Architects opened up as much of the wall surface as possible, producing areas of glazing that ran from the top of the main arcade to the apex of the vault. The combination of the triforium gallery and clerestory into one large glazed area had, of course, a unifying effect on the elevations. It produced an intricate play of tracery patterns and instantly unleashed an era of intense experiment into the form that these patterns should take. Many of the achievements of the Rayonnant architects are extremely fine—for instance, the two transept facades, begun during the 1250s, of Notre-Dame, Paris. The decorative effect of this architecture depends not only on the tracery of the windows but also on the spread of tracery patterns over areas of stonework and on architectural features such as gables.

      In the history of this development, one building deserves special mention, the Sainte-Chapelle, Paris (consecrated 1248). This was Louis IX's palace chapel, built to house an imposing collection of relics. It is a Rayonnant building in that it has enormous areas of glazing. Its form was extremely influential, and there were a number of subsequent “saintes-chapelles”—for instance, at Aachen and Riom—that were clearly modeled on the Parisian one. The interior of the Parisian Sainte-Chapelle is extraordinarily sumptuous. Although the sumptuousness itself set new standards, its characteristics belonged, curiously, to a past age. The glass (stained glass) is heavily coloured, the masonry heavily painted, and there is much carved detail. One of the characteristics of the second half of the 13th century is that glass became lighter, painting decreased, and the amount of carved decoration dwindled. Thus, in its chronological context, the Sainte-Chapelle is a Janus-like building—Rayonnant in its architecture but, in some ways, old-fashioned in its decoration.

      Of the many smaller Rayonnant monuments that exist in France, one of the most complete is Saint-Urbain, Troyes (founded 1262). There, one can see the virtuosity practiced by the architects in playing with layers of tracery, setting off one “skin” of tracery against another.

      In a sense, the Rayonnant style was technically a simple one. Depending, as it did, not primarily on engineering expertise or on sensitivity in the handling of architectural volumes and masses but on the manipulation of geometric shapes normally in two dimensions, the main prerequisites were a drawing board and an office.

      Most countries produced versions of the Rayonnant style. In the Rhineland the Germans began one of the largest Rayonnant buildings, Cologne Cathedral, which was not completed until the late 19th century. The German masons carried the application of tracery patterns much further than did the French. One of the most complicated essays is the west front of Strasbourg Cathedral (planned originally in 1277 but subsequently altered and modified). One feature of Strasbourg and of German Rayonnant architecture in general was the application of tracery to spires—at Freiburg im Breisgau (spire begun c. 1330), for example, and the spire of Strasbourg that was begun about 1399. Few such medieval spires survive (though often they were completed in the 19th century).

      Of all the European buildings of this period, the most important is probably the cathedral of Prague (founded in 1344). The plan was devised according to routine French principles by the first master mason, Mathieu d'Arras. When he died in 1352, his place was taken (1353–99) by Petr Parléř (Parléř, Petr), the most influential mason in Prague and a member of a family of masons active in south Germany and the Rhineland. Parléř's building included the start of a south tower and spire that clearly continued the traditions of the Rhineland. His originality lay in his experiments with vault designs, from which stem much of the virtuoso achievement of German masons in the 15th century.

       London, too, has Rayonnant monuments. Westminster Abbey was rebuilt after 1245 by Henry III's order, and in 1258 the remodeling of the east end of St. Paul's Cathedral began. King Henry was doubtless inspired by the work carried out by his brother-in-law, King Louis IX of France, at the Sainte-Chapelle and elsewhere. Westminster Abbey, however, lacks the clear lines of a Rayonnant church, mainly because, like the Sainte-Chapelle, it was heavily decorated with carved stonework and with colour.

      In fact, English (England) architects for a long time retained a preference for heavy surface decoration; thus, when Rayonnant tracery designs were imported, they were combined with the existing repertoire of colonettes, attached shafts, and vault ribs. The result, which could be extraordinarily dense—for instance, in the east (or Angel) choir (begun 1256) at Lincoln Cathedral and at Exeter Cathedral (begun before 1280)—has been called the English Decorated style, a term that is in many ways an oversimplification. The interior architectural effects achieved (notably the retrochoir of Wells Cathedral or the choir of St. Augustine, Bristol) were more inventive generally than those of contemporary continental buildings. The inventive virtuosity of the masons of the Decorated style also produced experiments in tracery and vault design that anticipated by 50 years or more similar developments on the continent.

      English Decorated was, however, never really a court style. Already by the end of the 13th century, a style of architecture was evolving that ultimately developed into the true English equivalent of Rayonnant, generally known as Perpendicular. The first major surviving statement of the Perpendicular style is probably the choir of Gloucester Cathedral (begun soon after 1330). Other major monuments were St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster (begun 1292 but now mostly destroyed) and York Minster nave (begun 1291).

      Spain also produced Rayonnant buildings: León Cathedral (begun c. 1255) and the nave and transepts of Toledo Cathedral, both of which have, or had, characteristics similar to the French buildings. But, since the Spanish partiality for giant arcades (already seen in the earlier parts of Toledo and at Burgos) persisted, one can hardly classify as French the three major cathedrals of this period: Gerona (begun c. 1292), Barcelona (begun 1298), and Palma-de-Mallorca (begun c. 1300). They are, in fact, so individual that it is difficult to classify them at all, although peculiarities in the planning and buttressing of the outer walls gives them some similarity to the French cathedral of Albi (begun 1281).

      Toward the end of the century, the influence of French ideas spread northward to Scandinavia, and in 1287 French architects were summoned to Sweden to rebuild Uppsala Cathedral.

Italian Gothic (c. 1200–1400)
      In its development of a Gothic style, Italy stood curiously apart from the rest of Europe. For one thing, the more obvious developments of the Italian Gothic style occurred comparatively late—in the 13th century. For another, whereas in most European countries artists imitated with reasonable faithfulness architectural styles that were derived ultimately from northern France, they seldom did so in Italy. This was in part because of geographic and geologic factors. In the figurative arts the combined influences of Byzantine Constantinople and Classical antiquity continued to play a far more important role in Italy than in countries north of the Alps. Furthermore, Italian architectural style was decisively affected by the fact that brick (brick and tile)—not stone—was the most common building material and marble the most common decorative material.

      The distinctiveness of Italian art emerges as soon as one studies the architecture. Twelfth-century buildings such as Laon, Chartres, or Saint-Denis, which appear to have been so important in the north, had virtually no imitators in Italy. Indeed, buildings with Romanesque characteristics, such as Orvieto Cathedral (begun 1290), were still being built at the end of the 13th century. The Italians, however, were not unaware of what, by French standards, a great church ought to look like. There is a sprinkling of churches belonging to the first third of the century that have northern characteristics, such as attached (partially recessed in the wall) shafts or columns, crocket capitals, pointed arches, and ribbed vaults. Some of these were Cistercian (Fossanova, consecrated 1208), others were secular (Sant'Andrea, Vercelli; founded 1219). The chief common feature of the larger Italian 13th-century churches, such as Orvieto Cathedral and Santa Croce in Florence (begun 1294), was the size of their arcades, which gives the interiors a spacious feeling. Yet in detail the churches vary from the French pattern in a highly individual way.

 To the extent that Rayonnant architecture is particularly concerned with the manipulation of two-dimensional patterns, the Italian masons produced their own version of the style. In these terms, the facade of Orvieto Cathedral (begun 1310), for example, is Rayonnant; the front of Siena Cathedral was planned as a Rayonnant facade, and the Campanile, or freestanding bell tower, of Florence Cathedral (founded 1334) is Rayonnant to the extent that its entire effect depends on marble patterning (which is traditionally ascribed to the painter Giotto). Finally, it is perhaps legitimate to see Filippo Brunelleschi (Brunelleschi, Filippo)'s 15th-century architecture as a continuation of this tendency—a kind of Florentine equivalent, perhaps, to English Perpendicular style. But before the 15th century, Italian architectural development never appears to have the logic or purpose of northern architecture.

      Though the rebuilt Milan Cathedral is, in plan and general character, Italianate, its decorative character is mainly derived from the north, probably Germany. The exterior is covered with tracery, which makes Milan Cathedral more like a Rayonnant building than any other large church in Italy.

Late Gothic
      During the 15th century much of the most elaborate architectural experiment took place in southern Germany and Austria. German (Germany) masons specialized in vault designs; and, in order to get the largest possible expanse of ceiling space, they built mainly hall churches (a type that had been popular throughout the 14th century). Important hall churches exist at Landshut (St. Martin's and the Spitalkirche, c. 1400) and Munich (Church of Our Lady, 1468–88). The vault patterns are created out of predominantly straight lines. Toward the end of the 15th century, however, this kind of design gave way to curvilinear patterns set in two distinct layers. The new style developed particularly in the eastern areas of Europe: at Annaberg (St. Anne's, begun 1499) and Kuttenberg (St. Barbara's, 1512).

 Such virtuosity had no rival elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless, other areas developed distinctive characteristics. The Perpendicular style is a phase of late Gothic unique to England. Its characteristic feature is the fan vault, which seems to have begun as an interesting extension of the Rayonnant idea in the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral (begun 1337), where tracery panels were inserted into the vault. Another major monument is the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, which was begun in the late 1370s, but the style continued to evolve, the application of tracery panels tending to become denser. St. George's Chapel, Windsor (c. 1475–1500), is an interesting prelude to the ornateness of Henry VII's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. Some of the best late Gothic achievements are bell towers, such as the crossing tower of Canterbury Cathedral (c. 1500).

      In France the local style of late Gothic is usually called Flamboyant, from the flamelike shapes often assumed by the tracery. The style did not significantly increase the range of architectural opportunities. Late Gothic vaults, for instance, are not normally very elaborate (one of the exceptions is Saint-Pierre in Caen [1518–45], which has pendant bosses). But the development of window tracery continued and, with it, the development of elaborate facades. Most of the important examples are in northern France—for example, Saint-Maclou in Rouen (c. 1500–14) and Notre-Dame in Alençon (c. 1500). France also produced a number of striking 16th-century towers (Rouen and Chartres cathedrals).

      The most notable feature of the great churches (church) of Spain is the persistence of the influence of Bourges and the partiality for giant interior arcades. This is still clear in one of the last of the large Gothic churches to be built—the New Cathedral of Salamanca (begun 1510). By this time, Spanish architects were already developing their own intricate forms of vaulting with curvilinear patterns. The Capilla del Condestable in Burgos Cathedral (1482–94) provides an elaborate example of Spanish (Spain) Flamboyant, as does—on a larger scale—Segovia Cathedral (begun 1525).

      There was a final flowering of Gothic architecture in Portugal under King Manuel (Manueline) the Fortunate (1495–1521). The fantastic nature of much late Gothic Iberian architecture has won for it the name Plateresque, meaning that it is like silversmith's work. The decorative elements used were extremely heterogeneous, and Arabic or Mudéjar forms emanating from the south were popular. Ultimately, during the 16th century, antique elements were added, facilitating the development of a Renaissance style. These curious hybrid effects were transplanted to the New World, where they appear in the earliest European architecture in Central America.

The end of Gothic
      The change from late Gothic to Renaissance was superficially far less cataclysmic than the change from Romanesque to Gothic. In the figurative arts, it was not the great shift from symbolism to realistic representation but a change from one sort of realism to another.

      Architecturally, as well, the initial changes involved decorative material. For this reason, the early stages of Renaissance art outside Italy are hard to disentangle from late Gothic. Monuments like the huge Franche-Comté chantry chapel at Brou (1513–32) may have intermittent Italian motifs, but the general effect intended was not very different from that of Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster. The Shrine of St. Sebaldus at Nürnberg (1508–19) has the general shape of a Gothic tomb with canopy, although much of the detail is Italianate. In fact, throughout Europe the “Italian Renaissance” meant, for artists between about 1500 and 1530, the enjolivement, or embellishment, of an already rich decorative repertoire with shapes, motifs, and figures adapted from another canon of taste. The history of the northern artistic Renaissance is in part the story of the process by which artists gradually realized that Classicism (Classicism and Neoclassicism) represented another canon of taste and treated it accordingly.

      But it is possible to suggest a more profound character to the change. Late Gothic has a peculiar aura of finality about it. From about 1470 to 1520, one gets the impression that the combination of decorative richness and realistic detail was being worked virtually to death. Classical antiquity at least provided an alternative form of art. It is arguable that change would have come in the north anyway and that adoption of Renaissance forms was a matter of coincidence and convenience. They were there at hand, for experiment.

      The use of Renaissance forms was certainly encouraged, however, by the general admiration for Classical antiquity. They had a claim to “rightness” that led ultimately to the abandonment of all Gothic forms as being barbarous. This development belongs to the history of the Italian Renaissance, but the phenomenon emphasizes one aspect of medieval art. Through all the changes of Romanesque and Gothic, no body of critical literature (art criticism) appeared in which people tried to evaluate the art and distinguish old from new, good from bad. The development of such a literature was part of the Renaissance and, as such, was intimately related to the defense of Classical art. This meant that Gothic art was left in an intellectually defenseless state. All the praise went to ancient art, most of the blame to the art of the more recent past. Insofar as Gothic art had no critical literature by which a part of it, at least, could be justified, it was, to that extent, inarticulate.

Andrew Henry Robert Martindale David John Watkin

The Renaissance
      The concept of the Renaissance, which aimed to achieve the rebirth or re-creation of ancient Classical culture, originated in Florence in the early 15th century and thence spread throughout most of the Italian peninsula; by the end of the 16th century the new style pervaded almost all of Europe, gradually replacing the Gothic style of the late Middle Ages. It encouraged a revival of naturalism, seen in Italian 15th-century painting and sculpture, and of Classical forms and ornament in architecture, such as the column and round arch, the tunnel vault, and the dome.

 Knowledge of the Classical style in architecture was derived during the Renaissance from two sources: the ruins of ancient Classical buildings, particularly in Italy but also in France and Spain, and the treatise De architectura (c. 27 BC; “On Architecture”) by the Roman architect Vitruvius. For Classical antiquity and, therefore, for the Renaissance, the basic element of architectural design was the order, which was a system of traditional architectural units. During the Renaissance five orders were used, the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, with various ones prevalent in different periods. For example, the ornate, decorative quality of the Corinthian order was embraced during the early Renaissance, while the masculine simplicity and strength of the Doric was preferred during the Italian High Renaissance. Following ancient Roman practice (e.g., the Colosseum or the Theatre of Marcellus (Marcellus, Theatre of)), Renaissance architects often superimposed the order (superposed order)—that is, used a different order for each of the several stories of a building—commencing with the heavier, stronger Tuscan or Doric order below and then rising through the lighter, more decorative Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite.

      For the Renaissance, proportion was the most important predetermining factor of beauty. The great Italian humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti (Alberti, Leon Battista) defined beauty in architecture as

that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. (On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, book vi, chapter 2, 1988.)

      On the authority of Vitruvius, the Renaissance architects found a harmony between the proportions of the human body and those of their architecture. There was even a relationship between architectural proportions and the Renaissance pictorial device of perspective; the Italian painter Piero della Francesca said that perspective represented objects seen from afar “in proportion according to their respective distance.” In fact, it was an Italian Renaissance architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, who was the first to formulate perspective. The concern of these architects for proportion led to the clear, measured expression and definition of architectural space and mass that differentiates the Renaissance style from the Gothic and encourages in the spectator an immediate and full comprehension of the building.

 The Renaissance was a great moment in the history of architecture for the expression of architectural theory. Inspired by the rediscovery or reevaluation of the treatise by Vitruvius, many architects recorded their theories of architecture; some were preserved in manuscript (e.g., those of the 15th-century Italian architects Francesco Di Giorgio and Filarete), but most were published. Alberti's treatise De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture), modeled on Vitruvius, was written in the middle of the 15th century and published in 1485. But it was during the last three-quarters of the 16th century that architectural theory flourished. The Italians Sebastiano Serlio (Serlio, Sebastiano), Giacomo da Vignola (Vignola, Giacomo da), and Andrea Palladio (Palladio, Andrea) published famous books on architecture at that time. Elsewhere, works were published by the Frenchmen Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (Cerceau, du, family), Philibert Delorme (Delorme, Philibert), and Jean Bullant (Bullant, Jean); the Fleming Vredeman de Vries; the German Wendel Dietterlin; and the Englishman John Shute.

Early Renaissance in Italy (1401–95)
      The Renaissance began in Italy, where there was always a residue of Classical feeling in architecture. A Gothic building such as the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence was characterized by a large round arch instead of the usual Gothic pointed arch and preserved the simplicity and monumentality of Classical architecture. The Renaissance might have been expected to appear first in Rome, where there was the greatest quantity of ancient Roman ruins; however, during the 14th and early 15th centuries, when the Italians were impelled to renew classicism, the political situation in Rome was very unfavourable for artistic endeavour. Florence, however, under the leadership of the Medici (Medici Family) family, was economically prosperous and politically stable.

 In 1401 a competition was held among sculptors and goldsmiths to design a pair of doors for the old baptistery at Florence. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (Ghiberti, Lorenzo) won, and a losing goldsmith, Filippo Brunelleschi (Brunelleschi, Filippo), resolving to be the leader in one of the arts, then turned to the study of architecture. Brunelleschi spent the period between 1402 and 1418 alternately in Florence and Rome. During this time he studied mathematics intensively and formulated linear perspective, which was to become a basic element of Renaissance art. At the same time, Brunelleschi investigated ancient Roman architecture and acquired the knowledge of Classical architecture and ornament that he used as a foundation for Renaissance architecture. He was also influenced by the local Florentine tradition, which had flowered in the 11th and 12th centuries in the so-called Tuscan proto-Renaissance style found in churches such as San Miniato al Monte. Brunelleschi's great opportunity came in 1418 with the competition for the completion of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) of Florence. The medieval architects had intended a great dome over the crossing of the cathedral, but it had never been created, and no one knew how to accomplish it. Winning the competition, Brunelleschi began the great dome in 1420 (the finishing touches were not applied until the 1460s and '70s, after his death). The Florentine dome still belongs within the Gothic tradition, as it was built with rib construction and a pointed arch form, but the introduction of a drum, which made the dome more prominent, was to become characteristic of the Renaissance dome.

 Brunelleschi also produced other notable examples of the Renaissance style in Florence. The loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti (1419–51) was the first building in the Renaissance manner; a very graceful arcade was designed with Composite columns, and windows with Classical pediments were regularly spaced above each of the arches. This style was more fully exploited in the church of San Lorenzo (c. 1421 to c. 1460). Using the traditional basilica plan, the plan and elevations were organized on a system of proportions with the height of the nave equal to twice its width. All the ornament is Classical, with Corinthian (Corinthian order) columns, pilasters, and Classical moldings. Brunelleschi used the Corinthian order almost exclusively. All the moldings, door and window frames, and orders are of a soft blue-gray stone (piètra serena) contrasted against a light stucco wall. The ornamental features have very little projection, being rather lines on a surface. Colour was used in Florentine architecture to stress the linear relationship rather than for overall patternistic uses (as in northern Italian architecture).

  The traditional plan for medieval churches (church) was the Latin cross plan, as at San Lorenzo; the longer arm of the cross formed the nave of the church. During the Middle Ages this plan was considered a symbolic reference to the cross of Christ. During the Renaissance the ideal church plan tended to be centralized; that is, it was symmetrical about a central point, as is a circle, a square, or a Greek cross (which has four equal arms). Many Renaissance architects came to believe that the circle was the most perfect geometric form and, therefore, most appropriate in dedication to a perfect God. Brunelleschi also worked with the central plan. In the Pazzi Chapel (1429–60), constructed in the medieval cloister of Santa Croce at Florence, the plan approaches the central type. On the inside it is actually a rectangle, slightly wider than it is deep; at its rear is a square bay for the sanctuary, and at the front is a porch. There are three domes, a large one over the centre of the chapel and small ones over the sanctuary and over the centre of the porch on the exterior. Its plan, but not its interior space, resembles a Greek cross. On the exterior the large dome is covered by a conical roof with a lantern at the top. The porch has a horizontal entablature supported by six Corinthian columns but broken in the centre by a semicircular arch that centralizes the composition, repeats the shape of the dome in the porch behind it, and gives a lift to the horizontal facade.

      Soon after the commencement of the Pazzi Chapel, Brunelleschi began a central-plan church, that of Santa Maria degli Angeli (begun 1434) at Florence, which was never completed. It was very important because it was the first central-plan church of the Renaissance, the type of plan which dominates Renaissance thinking. The plan is an octagon on the interior and 16-sided on the exterior, with a domical vault probably intended to cover the centre.

 An outstanding example of secular architecture was the Medici Palace (1444–59; now called the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi) at Florence by Michelozzo, a follower of Brunelleschi. Created for Cosimo de' Medici, a great political leader and art patron of Florence, the palace was arranged around a central court, the traditional Florentine palace plan.

      Medieval Florentine palaces were built of great rusticated (rustication) blocks of stone, as if they had just been hacked out of the quarry, giving the impression of fortification. With the Renaissance, some fundamental changes appeared. Michelozzo crowned his palace with a massive horizontal cornice in the Classical style and regularized the window and entrance openings. Even the rustication of the stonework was differentiated in each of the three stories. The ground floor has the usual heavy rustication; the second story is marked by drafted stonework with smooth blocks outlined by incised lines; and the third story has ashlar stonework with no indications of the blocks. Unlike medieval patternistic rustication, that of the Renaissance, which carefully distinguished between the stories, set up a logical relationship among them.

 This Renaissance treatment of a palace facade was carried further in the Palazzo Rucellai (Rucellai, Palazzo) (1452?–1470?) at Florence, following the design of the great architect Alberti. Classical orders were applied to the palace elevation by Alberti, using pilasters of the different orders superimposed on the three stories, so that there was another relationship established among the differentiated stories, from the short, strong Tuscan pilaster on the ground floor to the tall, decorative Corinthian at the top. For Alberti the beauty of architecture consisted of a harmonious relationship among the parts, with ornament, including the Classical orders, being auxiliary to the proportional relationships.

  The culmination of Alberti's style is seen at Mantua in the church of Sant'Andrea (begun 1472, completed in the 18th century), an early Renaissance masterpiece that was to exert much influence on later religious architecture. It is important as a brilliant application of the ancient Roman triumphal arch motif both to the facade of a church and to its interior articulation. The plan, as completed, is a Latin cross with one long arm for the nave flanked by side chapels, but the crossing at the sanctuary end was treated as a central plan with the nave added to it. It is unknown whether this plan corresponds to Alberti's intention, for only the nave portion was erected in the 15th century. The facade is of square proportion, with a wide bay at the centre twice the width of each of the side bays. The interior elevation was organized on this same alternating system, the so-called rhythmic bay that was to be popularized in the early 16th century by Bramante (Bramante, Donato). As a result of this system, there is a close correspondence between the interior and exterior composition of Sant'Andrea.

      From Florence the early Renaissance style spread gradually over Italy, becoming prevalent in the second half of the 15th century. In the architecture of northern Italy there was a greater interest in pattern and colour. Colour was emphasized by the use of variegated marble inlays, as in the facade of the church of the Certosa di Pavia (begun 1491) or in most Venetian architecture. The favourite building material of northern Italy was brick with terra-cotta trim and decoration, a combination by means of which a pattern of light and dark was created over the entire building. On occasions when stone was used, as at the Palazzo Bevilacqua in Bologna (c. 1479–84), the blocks were cut with facets forming a diamond pattern on the facade. This was actually a decorative treatment of rustication. Even the Classical orders (order) were affected by this decorative approach. Classical pilasters often had panels of candelabra and arabesque decoration in delicate relief on the surfaces of their shafts; the lower third of a column was frequently carved with relief sculpture.

 Florentine artists, such as Filarete with his project for the Ospedale Maggiore at Milan (begun 1457), brought Classical decoration and a slight knowledge of Renaissance architecture to the region of Lombardy. The style was transferred to Venice by such Lombard architects as Pietro Lombardo (Lombardo, Pietro) and Mauro Coducci. The church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli (1481–89) at Venice, with its facade faced with coloured marble, is typical of Lombardo's work.

 The Venetian palace, as exemplified by the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli (late 15th century) and the Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi (c. 1500–09), both of which are the work of Coducci and both with large and numerous windows, was more open than the palaces found in central Italy.

      In Rome in the second half of the 15th century, there were several notable Renaissance palaces, principally derived from the style of Alberti, who spent extensive periods in Rome as a member of the papal court. The Palazzo Venezia (1455–1503) has a rather medieval exterior, but set within the palace is a characteristically Renaissance court (1468–71), of which only two sides forming an angle were completed. It has been suggested without definite proof that Alberti may have furnished the design for this court; it at least reveals his influence in its full understanding of the Classical style. The court consists of two stories of semicircular arches supported by piers, on which are attached superimposed Classical half columns, Tuscan below and Ionic above. The model for this arcade is the ancient Colosseum of Rome. The sense of mass created by the heavy piers contrasted with the lighter effect of the early Renaissance court typical of Florence, which has arches supported on columns. The Palazzo della Cancelleria (1495) shows its dependence upon Alberti's style in its facade, which resembles in part his Palazzo Rucellai in Florence. The lower story simply has drafted or leveled and squared stonework, but the two upper stories have rather flat Corinthian pilasters as well as the drafted stone. Unlike the Rucellai palace, the bays composed by the pilasters alternate wide and narrow, but this alternation had been used by Alberti (Alberti, Leon Battista) already in Sant'Andrea at Mantua. Alberti's influence is also visible in the facades of the churches of Sant'Agostino (1479–83) and Santa Maria del Popolo (rebuilt 1472–77) in Rome.

      These examples of the early Renaissance in Rome were rapidly approaching the simplicity, monumentality, and massiveness of the High Renaissance of the early 16th century. Donato Bramante (Bramante, Donato), who was to create this new style, was active in Lombardy in northern Italy, but his work in Milan, as at Santa Maria presso San Satiro (about 1480–86), was still in the Lombard early Renaissance manner. He was in contact at this time, however, with the great Florentine Leonardo da Vinci, who was active at the Milanese court. Leonardo was then considering the concept of the central-plan church and filling his notebooks with sketches of such plans, which Bramante must have studied. When Bramante moved to Rome at the very end of the 15th century, his study of ancient ruins—combined with the ideas of Leonardo and the growing classicism of Roman early Renaissance architecture—resulted in the flourishing of the High Renaissance.

High Renaissance in Italy (1495–1520)
      High Renaissance architecture first appeared at Rome in the work of Bramante at the beginning of the 16th century. The period was a very brief one, centred almost exclusively in the city of Rome; it ended with the political and religious tensions that shook Europe during the third decade of the century, culminating in the disastrous sack of Rome in 1527 and the siege of Florence in 1529. The High Renaissance was a period of harmony and balance in all the arts, perhaps the most definitive moment in this respect since the 5th century BC in Greece.

      Political and cultural leadership shifted from Florence to Rome particularly because of a succession of powerful popes who wanted to develop the papacy as a secular power. The greatest of all was Julius II (1503–13), who was likewise a fabulous patron of the arts. Almost all the leading Italian artists were attracted to Rome. With the exception of Giulio Romano, none of the important artists active in Rome at this time was Roman by birth.

 Bramante (Bramante, Donato), the leader of this new manner, had already acquired an architectural reputation at Milan. Almost immediately after his arrival in Rome, in 1499, there was an amazing change in Bramante's work, as he became the exemplar of the High Renaissance style and lost his Lombard early Renaissance qualities. The Tempietto (1502), or small chapel, next to San Pietro in Montorio, typifies the new style. Erected on the supposed site of the martyrdom of St. Peter, the Tempietto is circular in plan, with a colonnade of 16 columns surrounding a small cella, or enclosed interior sanctuary. The chapel was meant to stand in the centre of a circular court, which was likewise to be surrounded by a colonnade, so that the whole structure was to be self-contained and centralized. The enclosing circular court was never erected. The ultimate inspiration of the Tempietto was a Roman circular temple, like the temples of Vesta at Rome or Tivoli, but so many notable changes were made that the Renaissance chapel was an original creation. On the exterior it was organized in two stories: the Doric colonnade forms the first story, above which is a semicircular dome raised high on a drum. The present large finial, or crowning ornament, on the dome is of a later date and destroys some of the simplicity of the massing. Niches cut into the wall of the drum help to emphasize the solidity and strength of the whole, as does the heavy Doric order of which Bramante was so fond—in contrast to Brunelleschi, who had a predilection for the ornate Corinthian. The monument is very simple, harmonious, and comprehensible.

      Several churches present the same qualities as the Tempietto on a larger physical scale. The church of Santa Maria della Consolazione (1504–1617) at Todi, probably by Bramante, is likewise centralized in plan, being square with a semicircular or polygonal apse opening off each side. The mass is built up of simple geometric forms capped by the cylinder of a drum and a slightly pointed dome. On the interior the outstanding quality is a sense of quiet, harmonious spaciousness. The Florentine architect Antonio da Sangallo the Elder (Sangallo Family), influenced by Bramante, created his church of San Biagio at Montepulciano (1518–29) on a Greek cross plan. On the facade in the two recesses of the arms of the cross were to rise two towers, the right one never completed. Otherwise the massing is similar to that of Todi, with dome and drum above. All the moldings and ornamental elements were carved with strong projection, so that on the interior heavy Roman arches, with deep coffers containing rosettes, define the tunnel vaults rising over the arms of the church. The churches at Todi and Montepulciano are pilgrimage churches or shrines and thus have the centralized planning characteristic of the martyrium or church built over the tomb of a martyr or saint (Saint Peter's Basilica).

      Sangallo's church at Montepulciano reflects Bramante's greatest undertaking, the rebuilding of St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica) in Rome. Early in 1505 Pope Julius II began to consider the question of a tomb for himself that would be appropriate to his idea of the power and nobility of his position. The sculptor Michelangelo soon presented a great project for a freestanding tomb, but such a monument required a proper setting. The Renaissance artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, Giorgio) claimed that the question of an appropriate location for this projected tomb brought to the Pope's mind the idea of rebuilding St. Peter's, which was in very poor condition. Bramante, therefore, prepared plans for a monumental church late in 1505, and in April 1506 the foundation stone was laid. Bramante's first design was a Greek cross in plan, with towers at the four corners and a tremendous dome over the crossing, inspired by that of the ancient Roman Pantheon but in this case raised on a drum. The Greek cross plan being unacceptable, Bramante finally planned to lengthen one arm to form a nave with a centralized crossing. At his death in 1514 Bramante had completed only the four main piers that were to support the dome, but these piers determined the manner in which later architects attempted the completion of the church.

      Several notable secular buildings were as important as the central-plan churches of this period. At the papal palace of the Vatican (Vatican palace), next to St. Peter's, Bramante added two important features. The great Belvedere court (begun 1505) was planned to bring together the two disparate elements of the older palace attached to the church and the Belvedere villa of Innocent VIII on the hill above the palace. Bramante gave the new court a neo-antique flavour recalling the imperial palaces on the hills of Rome and the hippodromus on the Palatine. Terraced up the hillside on three levels joined by monumental stairs, it was enclosed on the two long sides by arcaded loggias with superimposed orders. This large court was completed in the later 16th century with some minor changes, but in 1587 the whole concept was destroyed by the building of the present Vatican Apostolic Library across the centre of the court. Just before his death, Bramante also began a series of superimposed loggias attached to the face of the old Vatican Palace looking out over the city and river. As completed by Raphael, there are two superimposed arcades with Tuscan and Ionic orders and a colonnade with Composite columns.

  The largest palace of the High Renaissance is the Palazzo Farnese (Farnese, Palazzo) (1517–89) at Rome, designed and commenced by a follower of Bramante, Antonio da Sangallo (Sangallo Family) the Younger, nephew of the older Sangallo. At Sangallo's death, in 1546, Michelangelo carried the palace toward completion, making important changes in the third story. On the exterior Sangallo gave up the use of the Classical orders as a means of dividing the facade into a number of equal bays; he used instead a facade more like those of the Florentines, but with quoins, or rough-cut blocks of stone at the edges of the building, to confine the composition in a High Renaissance fashion. The facade is composed in proportions as a double square. On the interior the central square court is more Classical, using superimposed orders. Based on the ancient Roman Theatre of Marcellus or the Colosseum, the two first floors have an arcade supported by rectangular piers against which are half columns. On the third story Michelangelo eliminated the arcade and used pilasters flanked by half pilasters, which destroyed the High Renaissance idea of the careful separation and definition of parts.

      One of the most charming buildings of the period is the Villa Farnesina (1509–11) at Rome by Baldassarre Peruzzi (Peruzzi, Baldassarre) from Siena. Designed for the fabulously wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (Chigi Family), the villa was the scene of numerous elaborate banquets for the pope and cardinals. A suburban villa, the Farnesina was planned in relation to the gardens around it with two small wings projecting from the central block to flank the entrance loggia. Originally, another loggia opened at the side upon the gardens stretching to the bank of the Tiber, but this loggia was later walled in. The elevation appears as two stories comparted into equal bays by Tuscan pilasters. The neat, reserved quality of the present building was originally lightened by painted fresco decoration over all the exterior wall surfaces. Other important buildings were designed by the painter Raphael, such as the Villa Madama (begun 1518) at Rome or the Palazzo Pandolfini (begun c. 1516) at Florence.

David R. Coffin

Italian Mannerism or Late Renaissance (1520–1600)
       Mannerism is the term applied to certain aspects of artistic style, mainly Italian, in the period between the High Renaissance of the early 16th century and the beginnings of Baroque art in the early 17th. From the third decade of the 16th century, political and religious tensions erupted violently in Italy, particularly in Rome, which was sacked in 1527 by the imperial troops of Charles V. The school of Bramante and Raphael, which had produced the High Renaissance style, was dispersed throughout Italy as artists fled from devastated Rome. Mannerism appeared and prevailed in some regions until the end of the 16th century, when the Baroque style developed. Mannerism was antithetical to many of the principles of the High Renaissance. Instead of harmony, clarity, and repose it was characterized by extreme sophistication, complexity, and novelty. Mannerist architects were no less interested in ancient Classical architecture than were their predecessors, but they found other qualities in ancient Roman architecture to exploit. In fact, they often displayed an even greater knowledge of antiquity than did earlier artists.

      For Vasari, as a practicing Mannerist architect, the same criteria of stylishness in design could be applied to a building as to a work of painting or sculpture. Vasari designed and built for an educated elite, one that would appreciate both his understanding of the rules of Roman architecture and the ingenious liberties that he took with these rules. Florentine and Roman 16th-century architecture is characterized by a secular cleverness—a building was judged on elegance, ingenuity, and variety of form.

 The change in style between the High Renaissance and Mannerism can be seen in the work of Baldassarre Peruzzi (Peruzzi, Baldassarre), who was active in both periods. Unlike his High Renaissance Villa Farnesina, Peruzzi's design for the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne (about 1535) in Rome shows indications of Mannerism. The facade of the palace was curved to fit the site on which it was erected; instead of remaining the passive form it had been in the earlier phases of Renaissance architecture, the wall surface was beginning to assert itself. The Classical order is limited to the ground floor of the palace; the upper three stories have imitation drafted stonework made of brick covered with stucco, inscribed to feign stone coursing. Under these three stories in the centre of the facade is a loggia or colonnade, which seems of questionable adequacy as a support for the apparent load. The second story has rectangular windows crowned by Peruzzi's usual neat lintel supported on volutes, but the windows of the upper two stories are set horizontally with rather elaborate curvilinear moldings about them. There is, therefore, no longer a harmonious balance among the various stories. The architecture shows a greater emphasis on decorative qualities than on the expression of structural relationships.

      After the resolved Classical order and measured harmony of Bramante's High Renaissance buildings, two main, though interwoven, directions of Mannerist development become apparent. One of these, emanating largely from Peruzzi, relied upon a detailed study of antique decorative motifs—grotesques, Classical gems, coins, and the like—which were used in a pictorial fashion to decorate the plane of the facade. This tendency was crystallized in Raphael's Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila (destroyed) at Rome, where the regular logic of a Bramante facade was abandoned in favour of complex, out-of-step rhythms and encrusted surface decorations of medallions and swags. The detailed archaizing elements of this manner were taken up later by Pirro Ligorio (Ligorio, Pirro), by the architects of the Palazzo Spada in Rome, and by Giovanni Antonio Dosio.

      The second trend exploited the calculated breaking of rules, the taking of sophisticated liberties with Classical architectural vocabulary. Two very different buildings of the 1520s were responsible for initiating this taste, Michelangelo's Laurentian Library (Medicean-Laurentian Library) in Florence and the Palazzo del Te by Giulio Romano in Mantua. Michelangelo's composition relies upon a novel reassembly of Classical motifs for plastically expressive purposes, while Giulio's weird distortion of Classical forms is of a more consciously bizarre and entertaining kind. The various exterior aspects of the Palazzo del Te provide a succession of changing moods, which are contrived so as to retain the surprised attention of the spectator rather than to present him with a building that can be comprehended at a glance. In the courtyard the oddly fractured cornice sections create an air of ponderous tension, whereas the loggia is lightly elegant. Similarly, the illusionistic decoration of the interior runs the full gamut from heavy (if self-parodying) tragedy to pretty delicacy. Giulio also created a series of contrived vistas, through arches and doors, much like that later projected by Michelangelo for the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Such management of scenic effects became one of the hallmarks of later Mannerist architecture.

      Increasingly, architecture, sculpture, and walled gardens came to be regarded as part of a complex (but not unified) whole. In the Villa Giulia (Villa Giulia, Museo Nazionale di) (c. 1550–55), the most significant secular project of its time, Vasari appears to have been in charge of the scenic integration of the various elements; Giacomo da Vignola (Vignola, Giacomo da) designed part of the actual building, while the Mannerist sculptor Bartolommeo Ammanati was largely responsible for the sculptural decoration. In spite of the continuous stepped vista, the building makes its impact through a succession of diverse effects rather than by mounting up to a unified climax. There, and in Vasari's design for the Uffizi (Uffizi Gallery) Palace (1560), the vista seems to have been based upon the supposed style of antique stage sets, as interpreted by Peruzzi. It is not surprising that the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (Palladio, Andrea) came closest to achieving a fully Mannerist style in his Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, where the receding vistas and rich sculptural details create an effect of extraordinary complexity. Similarly, it is not surprising that the greatest of the later Mannerist architects in Florence, Bernardo Buontalenti (Buontalenti, Bernardo), should have been an acknowledged master of stage design. He was employed at the Medici court as a designer of grandly fantastic ephemera—mock river battles and stage intermezzi (interval entertainments) in which elaborate stage machinery effected miraculous transformations, figures descending from the clouds to slay dragons that spouted realistic blood, followed by music and dance all'antica. As a garden designer, Buontalenti enriched the traditional formal schemes with entertaining diversions, in which water often played a prominent role—either in fountains or in wetting booby traps for the strolling visitor. Buontalenti's buildings possess much of this capricious spirit in addition to his brilliantly inventive command of fluently plastic detailing.

      In their treatment of detail, 16th-century Florentine architects inevitably looked toward Michelangelo as their example of innovative genius. Michelangelo's Medici Chapel in San Lorenzo was executed, in Vasari (Vasari, Giorgio)'s opinion, “in a style more varied and novel than that of any other master,” and “thus all artists are under a great and eternal obligation to Michelangelo, seeing that he broke the fetters and chains that had earlier confined them to the creation of traditional forms.” By Vasari's time the Mannerist quest for novelty had reached a thoroughly self-conscious level.

      Michelangelo's later architecture in Rome was more restrained than his Florentine works. In 1546 he was commissioned to complete St. Peter's Basilica (Saint Peter's Basilica) in Rome, succeeding Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. During the next 18 years he was able to complete most of his design for the church, except the facade and great dome above. He returned to a central-plan church reminiscent of Bramante's first project but with fewer parts. Michelangelo's elevation, still visible at the rear or sides of the church, is composed of gigantic pilasters and a rather high attic story. Between the pilasters are several stories of windows or niches. Unlike the harmonious orders and openings of the High Renaissance, these are constricted by the pilasters so that a tension is created in the wall surface. Michelangelo planned a tremendous semicircular dome on a drum as the climax of the composition. Engravings of his original project suggest that this dome would have been overwhelming in relation to the rest of the design. The great central dome was executed toward the end of the 16th century by Michelangelo's follower, Giacomo della Porta (Porta, Giacomo della), who gave a more vertical expression to the dome by raising it about 25 feet (8 metres) higher than a semicircle. In the early 17th century, the Baroque architect Carlo Maderno (Maderno, Carlo) added a large nave and facade to the front of the church, converting it into a Latin cross plan and destroying the dominating quality of the dome, at least from the exterior front.

      Early Mannerism in northern Italy developed out of the dissolution of the school of Bramante (Bramante, Donato) after 1527. Giulio Romano, the chief assistant of Raphael, became court artist and architect in the city of Mantua. With the works of Galeazzo Alessi of Genoa, Leone Leoni of Milan, and Sebastiano Serlio (Serlio, Sebastiano) of Bologna, Mannerist architecture gained a firm hold. In 1537 Serlio began to publish his series of books on architecture, in which he examined antiquity through Mannerist eyes and provided a series of pattern-book Mannerist designs. Three years later, Serlio joined the Italian Mannerist painter Francesco Primaticcio (Primaticcio, Francesco) at Fontainebleau, where he helped to consolidate the early acceptance of Mannerist ideals in France. In the work of Alessandro Vittoria, the influence of central Italy was pronounced. His heavy ceiling moldings are composed of Classical motifs and bold strapwork. The north's taste for bizarre fancies—such as Vittoria's fireplace for the Palazzo Thiene—was often in advance of that in Rome and Florence.

      Even Venice proved to be quickly susceptible to the clever tricks of Mannerist license. Michele Sanmicheli (Sanmicheli, Michele), a pupil of Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, returned after the sack of Rome to his native town of Verona and later went to Venice, where his architecture shows a clear awareness of Giulio Romano's Mantuan experiments. Another prominent architect in Venice was the Florentine sculptor Jacopo Sansovino (Sansovino, Jacopo), who also had fled to the north from Rome after the sack. Sansovino's architecture, as represented by the Loggetta (1537–40) at the foot of St. Mark's campanile or by the Old Library of St. Mark's (Libreria Vecchia [1536–88]), is rich in surface decorative qualities. The library has two stories of arcades; it has no basement but merely three low steps, so as to match the Gothic Palazzo Ducale opposite it. The upper entablature is extremely heavy, equaling half the height of the Ionic columns on which it rests. The rich application of relief sculpture with no unadorned wall surfaces creates this decorative quality, which has only superficial affinities with Florentine Mannerism.

      This period of free and decorative Mannerism was followed by a more restrained Classical architecture seen to perfection in the work of one of the greatest architects of the Renaissance, Andrea Palladio (Palladio, Andrea). The city of Vicenza, not far from Venice, was almost completely rebuilt with edifices after his design, including the basilica or town hall (1549) and the Loggia del Capitaniato (1571), as well as many private palaces. In the varied design of these buildings and in numerous villas in the Venetian mainland around Vicenza, Palladio brilliantly demonstrated the versatility of a range of neo-antique formulas. The Villa Capra or Rotonda (1550–51; with later changes) is magnificent in its simplicity and massing. In the centre of a cubelike block (typical of most Palladian villas) is a circular hall, and on all four sides are projecting Classical temple fronts as porticoes, resulting in an absolute Classical symmetry in the plan. In Venice, Palladio built several churches, all with the Latin cross plan and rather similar facades. San Giorgio Maggiore (1566–1610) has a Roman temple front, on four giant half columns, applied to the centre of the facade; abutting the sides are two half temple fronts with smaller coupled pilasters. The resulting composition suggests the interpenetration of two complete temple fronts in a Mannerist way, since the elements of the composition are less independent than they would be in High Renaissance architecture. Also typical of Mannerism is the way in which the interior space, instead of being Classically confined, is permitted to escape through a colonnaded screen behind the sanctuary into a large choir at the rear. Palladio's greatest fame rests on his treatise I quattro libri dell'architettura (1570; The Four Books on Architecture).

      The most important architect of this period in Rome was Giacomo da Vignola (Vignola, Giacomo da), who wrote a treatise, Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (1562; “Rule of the Five Orders of Architecture”), devoted solely to a consideration of the architectural orders and their proportions. Like Palladio's book, Vignola's Regola became a textbook for later Classical architecture.

      Of his many buildings, the project for the church of Il Gesù (1568) at Rome, the central church of the Jesuit order, was very influential on the later history of architecture. The plan is a Latin cross with side chapels flanking the nave, but the eastern end is a central plan, capped by a dome. Il Gesù's plan was imitated throughout Europe, but especially in Italy, during the early Baroque period of the 17th century. Vignola built the church except for its facade, which was executed by Giacomo della Porta (Porta, Giacomo della). Della Porta, inspired by Vignola's original design, created a facade concentrated toward its centre, which, like the plan, was the prototype for most early Baroque facades of the late 16th and 17th centuries.

David R. Coffin Martin J. Kemp David John Watkin

The Renaissance outside Italy
      The Renaissance style of architecture appeared in France at the very end of the 15th century and flourished until the end of the 16th century. As in other northern European countries and in the Iberian Peninsula, the new Renaissance manner did not completely supplant the older Gothic style, which survived in many parts of France throughout the 16th century. French Renaissance architecture is divided into two periods: the early Renaissance, from the end of the 15th century until about 1530, and Mannerism, dating from about 1530 to the end of the 16th century.

      The many invasions of Italy from 1494 until 1525 by French armies acquainted the French kings and nobles with the charms of Renaissance art. During the reigns of Louis XII and Francis I, the French possessed the city of Milan for the first 25 years of the 16th century. It was in Lombardy, therefore, that contact was made between French art and the Renaissance, and it was the Lombard Renaissance style that appeared in France during its early Renaissance.

      The new style had a certain prestige since it was imported by the nobility and aristocracy, while the middle-class burghers continued to support their native Gothic style. This social difference (social class) also applied to the artists themselves. The French aristocracy imported Italian architects and artists who had been influenced by the Italian Renaissance and who were considered to have a higher social standing than artisans. The French builders and craftsmen who executed the designs of the Italians still belonged to the social level of medieval artisans. This created a friction between the two groups, which was furthered by French resentment of imported foreign artists.

      With the exception of a few brief outcroppings of Classicism in such centres as Marseille and Gaillon, French early Renaissance architecture was centred in the Loire Valley, since the capital of France was at nearby Tours during the reign of Louis XII and the early part of the reign of Francis I. Most of the new architecture was secular, such as the château, which was an offshoot of the medieval feudal castle combined with the idea of an Italian villa. A characteristic example is the château at Blois, where two wings in the early Renaissance manner replaced parts of the 13th-century château. The first wing, erected (1498–1503) for Louis XII, is almost completely in the late Gothic Flamboyant style, with high roofs, an asymmetrical elevation, and pointed, depressed, and ogee arches. The only hint of the Renaissance is the occasional use of a bit of Classical decoration, such as egg-and-dart molding, mingled with the Gothic. The second wing, built (1515–24) by Francis I, is more nearly in the Renaissance style. The structure remained Gothic with a high roof and dormers and the irregular spacing of the vertical windows, but all the ornament was in the Classical mode, although its handling was often non-Classical. Classical pilasters were used to divide the elevation into bays, but there is no consistency in the proportions of the pilasters. The most notable feature of the interior elevation of the wing of Francis I is a great octagonal open staircase, five sides of which project into the court. Within is a spiral staircase set on a continuous tunnel vault that is supported by radiating piers. On the surface of the piers are panels in low relief of arabesque decoration, of a type that is found often in Lombard Renaissance architecture. The richness of the Lombard style blends very well with Flamboyant Gothic, which had always been characterized by intricate and rich decoration. The exterior elevation of the wing of Francis I consists of a series of open loggias—the two lower ones arched, the upper one with a straight entablature—reminiscent of the famous series of loggias just completed by Bramante and Raphael at the Vatican palace in Rome. Yet the Italian High Renaissance concept was expressed in France in early Renaissance terms with squat pilasters, irregularly spaced bays, and somewhat depressed arches.

 The finest example of the early French Renaissance style is the château, or hunting lodge, erected between 1519 and 1547 for Francis I at Chambord. The Italian architect Bernabei Domenico da Cortona presumably made the basic model for the château, but the designs of Italian architects were usually executed by French builders (in this case Pierre Nepveu), often with many changes. Chambord is a tremendous structure, about 500 feet (150 metres) wide, with a plan showing the gradual breakdown of the old castle plan. There is a rectangular court surrounded by walls with round towers at the corners, but on three sides of the court there are only low walls serving as screens. The old donjon, or massive chief tower of medieval castles, developed into the château proper as a blocklike building with round towers at each corner. The flat passageways over the screen walls and on top of the central block were intended to form galleries from which the ladies of the court could observe the hunt. The plan of the main block of the château reveals Italian influence in its symmetrical organization on cross axes with a double spiral staircase at the centre. In the four corners left by the cross axes are four identical apartments, each of which consists of three basic rooms (chamber, antechamber, and cabinet); this form of apartment was from then on the favourite unit of French domestic planning.

      Typically for this period, the silhouette and structure remained Gothic in elevation with strip windows, a multiplicity of elements, and a general vertical expression. Ornament, however, is in the Classical vocabulary of pilasters, round arches, and at times a geometric decoration consisting of slate panels set in the cream-coloured stone.

      From about 1530, Francis I imported numerous Italian artists, such as Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo Rosso (Rosso Fiorentino)), Francesco Primaticcio (Primaticcio, Francesco), Sebastiano Serlio (Serlio, Sebastiano), Giacomo da Vignola (Vignola, Giacomo da), and Benvenuto Cellini (Cellini, Benvenuto). Most of these artists were followers of Michelangelo or Raphael, so that the new period of French architecture partook of Italian Mannerism. The style that resulted lasted until about 1590 and is sometimes known as the style of Henry II, although it actually was produced under five different kings, beginning late in the reign of Francis I.

 The full influence of the new Italian style can best be seen in the château at Fontainebleau. In 1528 Francis I began to make revisions and additions to this medieval château, the exterior architecture being carried out by French builders under Gilles Le Breton. The Italian painter Rosso Fiorentino was placed in charge of the interior decoration of the Gallery of Francis I (c. 1533–45). The gallery is a long, narrow room covered by a wooden ceiling. On each side of the room is a high dado (i.e., the lower section of a wall) of carved walnut with rich decoration above of stucco relief sculpture and painting. As Rosso was a Mannerist painter, prominent French commissions went directly from the early Renaissance style of the Loire châteaus to Mannerism. Rosso, who died in 1540, was succeeded by another Italian, Primaticcio (Primaticcio, Francesco), who decorated the ballroom, or gallery (1548–56), of Henry II and added the wing called the Aile de la Belle Cheminée (1568).

      The most important Italian architect to build in France was Serlio (Serlio, Sebastiano), who arrived in 1541 to take Rosso's place as court architect. Serlio prepared plans for the rebuilding of the royal palace of the Louvre (Louvre Museum) at Paris, but his ideas seem to have been too grandiose for Francis I. He did manage to build two châteaus, the casino of the Cardinal of Ferrara at Fontainebleau (1544–46), now destroyed, and the château of Ancy-le-Franc (begun 1546) in Burgundy. Serlio devoted most of his time to an architectural treatise that he had begun in Italy. Various books of the treatise were published during his lifetime from 1537 on, but the collected work was published after his death with the title Tutte l'opere d'architettura, et prospetiva (1619; “Complete Works of Architecture and Perspective”). It was influential in spreading the Renaissance style in France, England, and the Low Countries.

      The influx of Italian artists soon compelled the French architects to adopt Renaissance principles of design as well as Renaissance ornamental details. Many French architects began to study the theory of design and often went to Italy as the source of the Renaissance style.

 After Serlio's failure with the palace of the Louvre in Paris, a French gentleman of the court, Pierre Lescot (Lescot, Pierre), was ordered to design and build a Renaissance palace to replace the medieval castle. Lescot, in collaboration with the sculptor Jean Goujon (Goujon, Jean), designed a palace set around a square court about 175 feet (53 metres) wide. Only two sides, the west and south, of Lescot's court were built (1546–51). The execution and amplification of this design extended to the middle of the 19th century. The small section carried out under Lescot, the Gallery of Francis I, reveals a thorough understanding of the principles of Italian design but is expressed in French terms. The Classical elements are used as low-relief surface decoration with little emphasis on mass.

      The two leading French architects of the second half of the 16th century, Philibert Delorme (Delorme, Philibert) and Jean Bullant (Bullant, Jean), studied in Rome. Delorme was trained as a builder before going to Rome and, therefore, was always interested in the constructive side of architecture as well as in the theory of design. About 1547 Delorme was commissioned by the mistress of Henry II, Diane de Poitiers, to design her château at Anet. The original château (about 1547–52) formed three sides of a court closed at the front by a screen wall and entrance gateway. Much of the château has been destroyed; only the left wing of the house, the screen wall, and the chapel that formed part of the right wing survive. The entrance gateway, which originally contained Cellini (Cellini, Benvenuto)'s bronze relief of Diana (now in the Louvre), is very Mannerist with a complicated superstructure, a semicircular arch with raised bands cutting across the moldings, and, at the top, a bronze group of a stag that strikes the hour with its hoof as the accompanying hounds bay mechanically. The chapel at Anet has a centralized Greek cross plan with a large circle capped by a dome at the crossing. The exterior of the chapel is Mannerist, with the windows cutting through the entablature and half pediments abutting the main block. Delorme commenced in 1564 a large palace called the Tuileries (Tuileries Palace), since it was situated on the site of tileworks in front of the Louvre. Again, elements of Mannerism were visible. On the first story Delorme used his own so-called French order, consisting of Ionic half columns and pilasters with decorative bands across the shafts, but this order was actually an Italian Mannerist treatment of the Classical order.

      Bullant's (Bullant, Jean) architecture was rather like that of Vignola in that it was very Classical in details but often Mannerist in relationships. His early and best-preserved works were for Anne, duc de Montmorency and constable of France: part of the Château d'Ecouen (about 1555) and the chatelet (about 1560) at the Château de Chantilly. The architect Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (Cerceau, du, family) the Elder prepared Les plus excellents bastiments de France (1576–79), a two-volume set of engravings that depict the new Renaissance 16th-century buildings of France, many of which have been destroyed or drastically altered. The Mannerist style died out in the early 17th century as slight hints of the Baroque style blended with a renewed classicism to gradually form the Academic style prevalent in the 17th century.

      Italian Renaissance decorative elements first appeared in Spanish architecture at about the time of the unification of Spain and the expulsion of the Moors in 1492. There were three phases of Spanish Renaissance architecture: (1) the early Renaissance, or Plateresque, from the late 15th century until about 1560; (2) a brief Classical period, coexistent with the Plateresque from about 1525 to 1560; and (3) the Herreran style from 1560 until the end of the 16th century.

      The earliest phase of Renaissance architecture in Spain is usually called the Plateresque (from platero, “silversmith”) because its rich ornament resembles silversmith's work. There has always been a long tradition in Spain of elaborate decoration, explained in part as an influence from Moorish (Islamic arts) art. The Moors possessed almost all of Spain during the Middle Ages and left this decorative heritage to the Spaniards. During the early 16th century, minor northern Italian sculptors and artisans, particularly from Lombardy and Genoa, were imported into Spain to execute tombs and altars for the Spanish nobles and ecclesiastics. These artisans introduced the northern Italian Renaissance vocabulary of Classical decoration, such as the pilaster paneled with arabesques or the candelabrum shaft. Spanish architects picked up these elements and applied them to their buildings.

      The Renaissance Plateresque style is purely one of architectural ornament. There was no change in structure; heavy walls were used with either Gothic ribbed vaults or intricately carved wooden ceilings (artesando) that indicated Moorish influence. Many of the elements of decoration also preserved the influence of Gothic and Moorish art, such as the Flamboyant Gothic pinnacle and pierced balustrade or coats of arms and bits of heraldry used as ornamental motifs. Richly coloured tiles created decorative patterns on the walls as in Moorish art. The richness of the Classical decoration imported from northern Italy blended effectively with the elements of the Moorish and Flamboyant Gothic styles to form the new Plateresque style. The luxuriance of its ornament was a fitting expression of the splendour-loving culture that Spain developed as the wealth of the Americas began to pour in during the early 16th century.

      In most cases the new Plateresque decoration was confined to rich spots or panels of ornament around the portals and windows of the buildings. These ornamental areas were relieved by large expanses of bare wall, as in the facade of the Royal Hospital at Santiago de Compostela (1501–11) by Enrique de Egas or his Santa Cruz Hospital at Toledo (1504–14).

 The greatest centre of the Plateresque style was the town of Salamanca, with buildings such as the university (about 1516–29) and the Monterey Palace (1539). Perhaps the most outstanding example of the style is the Ayuntamiento, or town hall, of Sevilla (Seville) (Sevilla) (begun 1527) by Diego de Riaño, with Lombard paneled pilasters on the ground floor and half columns completely covered with relief sculpture on the second floor. Also in the Lombard manner are the numerous medallions spotted over the wall under the windows or between the pilasters.

 Although the exuberant Plateresque style lingered in some regions until about 1560, it was soon superseded by a much more Classical style, which appeared in 1526 in the Palace of Charles V within the Alhambra at Granada. The Palace of Charles V was the first Italian Classical building in Spain, in contrast to Plateresque buildings that were Classical only in terms of a few elements of Italian Renaissance decoration. Charles V, as king of Spain and Holy Roman emperor, was the most powerful political figure in Europe, dominating Italy, as well as Spain, the Low Countries, and Austria. His palace in the Alhambra reflected the increasing contact with Italy. Designed by the Spaniard Pedro Machuca, who had studied in Italy, the Palace of Charles V was never completed, although work on it continued throughout most of the 16th century. The palace is square in plan with a huge central circular court (100 feet [30 metres] in diameter), which was intended for bullfights and tournaments. The plan is, therefore, fully Renaissance, being centralized and symmetrical; it is organized on cross-axes formed by the four entrances, one in the centre of each side. The facade shows a full understanding of the principles of Italian Renaissance design in its superimposition of orders and in the alternating rhythm of the triangular and segmental pediments above the windows of the second story. The interior court is surrounded by a colonnade with a similar superimposition of Doric and Ionic.

Herreran
      The classicism of the Palace of Charles V was succeeded by an extremely austere and cold style named after the greatest Spanish architect of the 16th century, Juan de Herrera (Herrera, Juan de). Perhaps more important than the architect was the social and cultural atmosphere in which the Herreran style developed, from about 1560 to the end of the 16th century. Charles V had been a true Renaissance prince; his only son, Philip II, who came to the throne in 1556, was one of the most typical representatives of the age of Mannerism as it was manifested in Spain. Philip II was morbid and melancholic, a religious fanatic against whose strict rule the Low Countries soon rose in revolt, beginning the difficulties that gradually dispelled Spanish political and cultural power in Europe.

      The finest example of the Herreran style illustrates clearly the change in cultural atmosphere under Philip II. This is the palace-monastery of El Escorial (1563–84), which Philip II had built as a retreat outside Madrid. It is a great contrast to the worldly Palace of Charles V with its tournament court set in the luxurious, sensuous Alhambra. El Escorial was more than a royal palace, as it also contained provisions for a monastery and college. A city in itself, El Escorial was planned as a tremendous rectangle (675 by 525 feet [205 by 160 metres]), with a large church at the centre.

      El Escorial was begun by the architect Juan Bautista de Toledo, who may be responsible for the planning, but the execution and architectural style were that of his assistant and successor, Herrera. Philip II himself reviewed the drawings for the palace, removing anything ornamental or ostentatious. On the exterior the architecture is very simple—a plain wall with a monotonous series of unadorned windows expressing the general monastic character of the whole. The only segment of the Classical Renaissance style on the exterior is at the central portal with two stories of giant Doric half columns supporting a triangular pediment. The church, at the centre of the complex, has two bell towers and a great dome set on a drum, which surmount the whole. The austerity is enhanced by the cold, gray granite of which El Escorial was built. On the interior a similar severity of manner is indicated by the lack of decoration. Except for the Classical Doric order, which is the least ornamental of the orders, there is no architectural decoration. Plain arches of stone were used under the vaults without any coffering. Occasional raised panels on the wall surface suggest where Plateresque ornament would normally be located, but instead of relief sculpture, there are only starkly smooth panels. Even the Doric order was handled severely; the pilasters on the interior show no entasis (i.e., an upward taper of the width of the pilaster to give a sense of lightness and to relieve the strict verticals). El Escorial is impressive in its size and mass and in the consistency of its austerity, but it has a forbidding quality that no other building can match. Other examples of Herrera's design are the cathedral of Valladolid (begun 1585, completed in the 18th century) and the court of the Lonja, or Exchange (1582–99), of Sevilla.

David R. Coffin David John Watkin

 The architecture of Portugal tends to parallel the development of Spanish architecture. The Manueline style of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, like the Plateresque of Spain, was a very decorative mode in which small motifs of Classical ornament were introduced into a local late Gothic style. After the middle of the 16th century, a fully Italianate Classical style developed in the architecture of Diogo de Torralva. His cloister in the convent of the Order of Christ (1557–62) at Tomar is composed of the rhythmic bay of alternating arches and coupled Classical orders made popular by Bramante (Bramante, Donato) in Italy. The full projection of the superimposed Doric and Ionic columns suggests the stolidity of the Italian High Renaissance. During the last two decades of the century the work of the Bolognese architect Filippo Terzi presents that austere planarity, seen in the church of São Vincente de Flora, Lisbon (1582–1605), reminiscent of Herrera.

 The burgeoning of Italian Renaissance architectural forms in Germany was even slower than in other northern European countries. Only by the middle of the 16th century was the Renaissance style manifestly important, generally in those regions in closest contact with Italy, such as southern Germany or the trade route along the Rhine River leading from the south to the Low Countries. The style lingered in Germany until about the middle of the 17th century. The few hints of classicism in Germany prior to the mid-16th century can be considered the early Renaissance phase. They were limited to minor architectural monuments, such as the Fugger Chapel in St. Anne's church at Augsburg (1509–18), which was the first Renaissance building in Germany, or they consisted of bits of Renaissance decoration attached to Gothic structures. An example of the latter is Hartenfels Castle (c. 1532–44) at Torgau by Konrad Krebs, which is completely medieval in design but has occasional fragments of Classical ornament applied to the surface. The rear portion of the Residence (c. 1537–43) at Landshut is exceptional in that its architecture and decoration are fully Italianate, but this is explained by the visit in 1536 of Duke Ludwig X of Munich to Mantua, where Giulio Romano had just completed the Palazzo del Te.

      After 1550 Renaissance style architecture in Germany often had Mannerist details derived from Italian ornamental engravings. German architecture of this period was abundant with medallions, herms (i.e., architectural elements topped by human busts), and caryatids and atlantes (atlas) (i.e., human figures used as columns or pilasters). The German treatise on the five orders by Wendel Dietterlin, entitled Architectura (1598), is filled with such Mannerist ornament. An architectural example is the Otto-Heinrichsbau added to the Gothic castle at Heidelberg (burned by the French in 1689). The three tall stories presented the usual verticality of northern architecture, but there was an understanding of the Classical superimposition of the orders with Corinthian above Ionic. Nevertheless, there was a certain freedom in the treatment of the orders, for a Doric frieze was supported by the Ionic pilasters. From Italian Mannerism came the rustication of the lower order, the use of herms as window mullions, and the caryatids flanking the portal. Other examples of the German Renaissance are the porch of the Rathaus, or Town Hall (1569–73), at Cologne by the Dutchman Wilhelm Vernuiken and the Friedrichsbau (1601–07), which was added to the castle at Heidelberg by Johannes Schoch.

Flanders and Holland (Netherlands, The)
      In the Low Countries, Flanders, because of trade and finance, was in close communication with Italy from the 15th century. As a result, there are slight hints of the Renaissance style in the Flemish (Flemish art) architecture of the early 16th century, as in the palace of Margaret of Austria, now the Palais de Justice (1507–25), at Mechelen (Malines), completed by Rombout Keldermans.

 The most important building of the Flemish Renaissance style was the Stadhuis, or Town Hall (1561–65), at Antwerp, designed by Loys du Foys and Nicolo Scarini and executed by Cornelis II Floris (Floris, Cornelis II) (originally de Vriendt [1514–75]). It was decided to replace Antwerp's small medieval town hall with a large structure, 300 feet (90 metres) long, in the new style, as a reflection of Antwerp's prosperity as the leading northern port of the 16th century. As with many northern buildings, there is a lack of monumentality, for its physical hugeness is not expressed in the details. There is a low basement with a rusticated arcade, which was originally used by traders during fairs. Above are two principal stories with superimposition of Doric and Ionic pilasters, between which large windows almost completely open each bay.

      The advent of the Baroque style early in the 17th century replaced the Renaissance in Flanders much sooner than it did in Germany. Among the few examples of the 16th-century Renaissance style in Holland were the town hall (1597) at Leiden and the town hall (c. 1564) at The Hague.

      The Renaissance style of architecture made a very timid appearance in England during the first half of the 16th century, and it was only from about 1550 that it became a positive style with local qualities. In fact, the Gothic style continued in many parts of England throughout most of the 16th century, and English Renaissance architecture was a very original fusion of the Tudor Gothic and Classical styles. This style flourished until the early 17th century when Inigo Jones (Jones, Inigo) created a much more Italianate style that gradually replaced the English Renaissance style.

      During the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47), some elements of Italian Renaissance decoration were imported by England through a few minor Italian artists, such as Pietro Torrigiani (Torrigiani, Pietro), who executed the tomb (1512–18) of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey. At the great palace of Hampton Court, begun by Cardinal Wolsey in 1515 and continued by Henry VIII until 1540, a few bits of Italian Renaissance decoration have been added, although the structure is completely in the Tudor manner. On the gateways are several terra-cotta medallions by the Italian Giovanni da Maiano, and there is a symmetry and regularity in the plan of the palace (Somerset, Edward Seymour, 1st duke of, Baron Seymour of Hache) that hints of the Renaissance.

      The Renaissance style really began in England in the middle of the 16th century in architecture built for the circle of the Lord Protector Somerset, who served as regent after Henry VIII's death. During the 16th century the patron played a much greater role in the development of English Renaissance architecture than did the architect; there were almost no professional architects who were trained as the Italians were in the theory of design and building. Most of the building was executed by mason or carpenter designers. A typical example of the role of the patron in introducing the Renaissance style of England is to be found in the quadrangle that John Caius (Caius, John) added to Gonville Hall (now Gonville and Caius) at Cambridge. Caius had spent a long time in Italy as well as elsewhere in Europe. The architecture of the new court was basically Tudor Gothic, but Caius planned three gateways in connection with the court, two of which were in the Italian style. The three gates were to mark the progress of the student through the university. At the entrance was the Gate of Humility (1565), a modest doorway, now in the Master's garden. The Gate of Virtue (after 1565), opening into the new quadrangle, is a fine Classical portal with Ionic pilasters, but with a Tudor Gothic many-centred arch for the opening. Finally, the Gate of Honour (1573) is a separate tiny triumphal arch leading out toward the schools for the final disputation and degree. Caius probably designed these gates with the aid of the Flemish 16th-century architect Theodore de Have.

 There was little religious architecture created in England during the 16th century, in part because of the break of Henry VIII with Rome. It is in the great country houses of the nobility that the Renaissance style is visible. Sir John Thynne, steward to the Lord Protector Somerset, designed several notable examples. The finest of these was his own house, Longleat (1568–c. 1580), on which he had the assistance of the mason Robert Smythson, who was to be the leading architect of the late 16th century. Except for the symmetry of the plan, arranged around two courts, there was little new in planning at Longleat, for the Tudor house was usually organized about a court. The typical English great hall at Longleat was an element derived from the hall of the medieval castle and retained in English architecture through the 16th century. The main entrance of the house opens directly into one end of the great hall, but a low screen at the end of the hall, topped by a musicians' gallery, forms a passageway. In elevation Longleat is a long, horizontal building with a wealth of windows; it is one of the most open secular buildings in Europe of the 16th century. There is a rectangular quality about the whole exterior that is characteristic of English architecture; it is augmented by the repeated use of the bay window unit. There are now three stories on the exterior, with the correct Classical superimposition of the Doric order on the ground floor and Ionic (Ionic order) and Corinthian (Corinthian order) orders above, but the third story was probably added after Thynne's death, replacing a pitched roof and dormers.

      Robert Smythson, who aided Thynne at Longleat, later designed and built several notable houses, the finest being Wollaton Hall (1580–88) near Nottingham. Wollaton has a magnificent site on a small hill overlooking a large park. The plan of the house is a square with four square corner towers, resembling a plan in the treatise on architecture by Serlio (Serlio, Sebastiano), whose book was influential in English Renaissance architecture. The great hall is in the centre of the square; it rises an extra story above the whole building. The house has a low basement story that contained the kitchens and service rooms; it is one of the first buildings to use this arrangement, which became common in the history of later English and American architecture. On the exterior the massing is that of a rectangular block the rectilinear quality of which is further emphasized by the numerous many-mullioned rectangular windows. The decoration is completely Classical, with superimposed pilasters, round-arched niches, and Classical balustrades, but it shows touches of Italian Mannerism, which came into England primarily from Flanders. The pilasters and half columns have raised bands across their middles, and the gables crowning the corner towers are decorated with Flemish strapwork (i.e., bands raised in relief assuming curvilinear forms suggestive of leather straps). Other examples of this style are Hardwick Hall (1590–97) in Derbyshire, probably by Smythson; Kirby Hall (about 1570–78) in Northamptonshire, perhaps by the mason Thomas Thorpe; and Montacute House (1588–1601) in Somerset.

Eastern Europe
      Because of the unstable political situation in eastern Europe, the appearance there of the Renaissance style of architecture was very sporadic and usually closely dependent upon the ruling personalities. The election in 1458 of Matthias Corvinus (Matthias I) as king of Hungary marks the first serious interest in this region in the new architectural style. Matthias had translations prepared of the contemporary Italian architectural treatises of Filarete and Alberti and in 1467 invited to Hungary briefly the Bolognese architect and engineer Aristotele Fioravanti. The buildings designed for Matthias, such as his hunting lodge of Nyek, have been destroyed. The Bakócz Chapel (1507) erected by Cardinal Tamás Bakócz as his sepulchral chapel at the cathedral of Esztergom is completely Italianate. Built on a Greek cross plan surmounted by a dome, the chapel resembles late 15th-century Florentine chapels. Turkish occupation, however, soon delayed the adoption of the Classical architectural style until the 18th century.

      In Russia during the reign of Ivan III the Great (1462–1505), as Tatar pressure lessened and Moscow gradually assumed importance, there was a brief interest in Western cultural developments. Thus, in 1475 Fioravanti, who had been in Hungary earlier, was brought to Moscow. Soon Tsar Ivan resolved to rebuild the Kremlin (Moscow), most of which was still of wood. From 1485 to 1516 the Italian architects Antonio Solario and Marco Ruffo enclosed the Kremlin with brick walls and erected within them the Granovitaya Palace (1487–91). This was a two-story blocklike palace with a rusticated exterior, as its name (granovitaya, “faceted”) indicates, in the manner of early Renaissance palaces of Bologna and Ferrara. Cultural contacts with the West then diminished under the impact of rising nationalism until the reign of Peter the Great in the early 18th century.

      The Renaissance architectural style appears in Poland under the late Jagiellon dynasty, and especially in the reign of Sigismund I (1506–48), whose wife came from the Sforza family of Lombardy. The rebuilding of his Wawel Castle (1507–36) in Kraków was begun by the Italian Francesco della Lore and continued by Bartolommeo Berecci of Florence. It presents a blend of local Gothic and 15th-century Italian architecture. The great courtyard has three stories of loggias; the two lower ones, with semicircular arches on squat Ionic columns, suggest the new style, but the much taller upper story, with the steep roof supported by excessively slender posts, betrays a medieval wooden tradition. The mortuary chapel (1517–33) for Sigismund attached to the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, also after the design of Berecci, represents one of the richest examples of the Italian Renaissance style in central Europe. Square in plan, each wall is divided by elaborately carved pilasters into a wide central bay for the tombs or altar, flanked by narrower bays with statue niches. Above, a coffered, semicircular dome rests on a drum with great circular windows. Unlike the other central European countries, in Poland Renaissance architecture continued to flourish throughout the remainder of the 16th century. In 1578 Jan Zamoyski, chancellor of Poland, commissioned the Venetian architect Bernardo Morando to design the fortified town of Zamość following the latest Italian ideas. The resultant town with street arcades resembles those of northern Italy.

      The shift from the Gothic style to the Renaissance in Bohemia is visible in the architecture of the leading late 15th-century architect in Prague, Benedikt Ried. The interior of his Vladislav Hall, Prague (1493–1510), with its intertwining ribbon vaults, represents the climax of the late Gothic; but as the work on the exterior continued, the ornamental features of windows and portals are Classical. Religious architecture continued in the Gothic mode, and most secular architecture was local in style with only a slight influence from the Italianate Renaissance. A few minor royal commissions were more Classical, such as the Letohrádek (1538–63), or garden belvedere (summerhouse), at Prague for Queen Anne, wife of Ferdinand I, with its delicate exterior arcade. The nearby tennis court (1565–68), designed by Bonifaz Wolmut, is in a heavier classicism expressed by the alternation of engaged Ionic half columns with deeply recessed arched openings. Several castles or large houses like that at Opočno (1560–67) or of Bučovice (1566–87), designed by the Italian Pietro Ferrabosco, had spacious courtyards with arcades on Classical columns.

David R. Coffin David John Watkin

Baroque (Baroque period) and Rococo (Rococo style)
      Baroque (Baroque period) and late Baroque, or Rococo (Rococo style), are loosely defined terms, generally applied by common consent to European art of the period from the early 17th century to the mid-18th century.

      Baroque was at first an undisguised term of abuse, probably derived from the Italian word barocco, which was a term used by philosophers during the Middle Ages to describe an obstacle in schematic logic. Subsequently, this became a description for any contorted idea or involuted process of thought. Another possible source is the Portuguese word barroco, with its Spanish form barrueco, used to describe an irregular or imperfectly shaped pearl; this usage still survives in the jeweler's term “baroque pearl.”

      The derivation of the word Rococo is equally uncertain, though its source is most probably to be found in the French word rocaille, used to describe shell and pebble decorations in the 16th century. In the 18th century, however, the scope of the word was increased when it came to be used to describe the mainstream of French art of the first half of the century; Neoclassical (Classicism and Neoclassicism) artists used it as a derogatory term. Fundamentally a style of decoration, Rococo is much more a facet of late Baroque art than an autonomous style, and the relationship between the two presents interesting parallels to that between High Renaissance and Mannerist art.

Peter Cannon-Brookes David John Watkin
      During the Baroque period (c. 1600–1750), architecture, painting, and sculpture were integrated into decorative ensembles. Architecture and sculpture became pictorial, and painting became illusionistic. Baroque art was essentially concerned with the dramatic and the illusory, with vivid colours, hidden light sources, luxurious materials, and elaborate, contrasting surface textures, used to heighten immediacy and sensual delight. Ceilings of Baroque churches, dissolved in painted scenes, presented vivid views of the infinite to the worshiper and directed him through his senses toward heavenly concerns. Seventeenth-century Baroque architects made architecture a means of propagating faith in the church and in the state. Baroque palaces expanded to command the infinite and to display the power and order of the state. Baroque space, with directionality, movement, and positive molding, contrasted markedly with the static, stable, and defined space of the High Renaissance and with the frustrating conflict of unbalanced spaces of the preceding Mannerist period. Baroque space invited participation and provided multiple changing views. Renaissance space was passive and invited contemplation of its precise symmetry. While a Renaissance statue was meant to be seen in the round, a Baroque statue either had a principal view with a preferred angle or was definitely enclosed by a niche or frame. A Renaissance building was to be seen equally from all sides, while a Baroque building had a main axis or viewpoint as well as subsidiary viewpoints. Attention was focused on the entrance axis or on the central pavilion, and its symmetry was emphasized by the central culmination. A Baroque building expanded in its effect to include the square facing it, and often the ensemble included all the buildings on the square as well as the approaching streets and the surrounding landscape. Baroque buildings dominated their environment; Renaissance buildings separated themselves from it.

      The Baroque rapidly developed into two separate forms: the strongly Roman Catholic (Roman Catholicism) countries (Italy, Spain, Portugal, Flanders, Bohemia, southern Germany, Austria, and Poland) tended toward freer and more active architectural forms and surfaces; in Protestant (Protestantism) regions (England, the Netherlands, and the remainder of northern Europe) architecture was more restrained and developed a sober, quiet monumentality that was impressive in its refinement. In the Protestant countries and France, which sought the spirit through the mind, architecture was more geometric, formal, and precise—an appeal to the intellect. In the Roman Catholic south, buildings were more complex, freer, and done with greater artistic license—an appeal to the spirit made through the senses.

      Treatises on the orders and on civil and military architecture provided a theoretical basis for Baroque architects. While many 16th-century architects published treatises on architecture or prepared them for publication, major 17th-century architects published very little. Two fragmentary volumes by Francesco Borromini (Borromini, Francesco) appeared years after his death, and Guarino Guarini (Guarini, Guarino)'s major contribution (though he brought out two volumes on architecture before he died) did not appear until well into the 18th century. Other Italian publications tended to be repetitions of earlier ideas with the exception of a tardily published manuscript of Teofilo Gallaccini, whose treatise on the errors of Mannerist and early Baroque architects became a point of departure for later theoreticians.

      In France, Jacques-François Blondel (Blondel, Jacques-François) and Augustin d'Aviler published notes for lectures given at the Academy of Architecture, but the most important publications were those of Fréart de Chambray and Claude Perrault (Perrault, Claude). Perrault attacked established Italian theory. Other notable French works included writings by René Ouvard, André Félibien, Pierre Le Muet, and Julien Mauclerc. In England, Sir Henry Wotton (Wotton, Sir Henry)'s book was an adaptation of Vitruvius, and Balthazar Gerbier's was a compendium of advice for builders. Among the notable 17th-century German publications were books by Georg Boeckler, Josef Furttenbach, and Joachim von Sandrart.

      During the period of the Enlightenment (about 1700 to 1780), various currents of post-Baroque art and architecture evolved. A principal current, generally known as Rococo, refined the robust architecture of the 17th century to suit elegant 18th-century tastes. Vivid colours were replaced by pastel shades; diffuse light flooded the building volume; and violent surface relief was replaced by smooth flowing masses with emphasis only at isolated points. Churches and palaces still exhibited an integration of the three arts, but the building structure was lightened to render interiors graceful and ethereal. Interior and exterior space retained none of the bravado and dominance of the Baroque but entertained and captured the imagination by intricacy and subtlety.

      In Rococo architecture, decorative sculpture and painting are inseparable from the structure. Simple dramatic spatial sequences or the complex interweaving of spaces of 17th-century churches gave way to a new spatial concept. By progressively modifying the Renaissance-Baroque horizontal separation into discrete parts, Rococo architects obtained unified spaces, emphasized structural elements, created continuous decorative schemes, and reduced column sizes to a minimum. In churches (church), the ceilings of side aisles were raised to the height of the nave ceiling to unify the space from wall to wall (e.g., church of the Carmine, Turin, Italy, 1732, by Filippo Juvarra; Pilgrimage Church, Steinhausen, near Biberach, Germany, 1728, by Dominikus Zimmermann; Saint-Jacques, Lunéville, France, 1730, by Germain Boffrand). To obtain a vertical unification of structure and space, the vertical line of a supporting column might be carried up from the floor to the dome (e.g., church of San Luis, Sevilla, Spain, begun 1699, by Leonardo de Figueroa). The entire building was often lighted by numerous windows placed to give dramatic effect (e.g., Schloss Brühl, near Cologne, by Balthasar Neumann, 1740) or to flood the space with a cool diffuse light (e.g., Pilgrimage Church, Wies, Germany, by Zimmermann, 1745).

Origins and development in Rome
 The work of Carlo Maderno (Maderno, Carlo) in Rome represented the first pure statement of the principles that became the basis of most of the architecture of the Western world in the 17th century. A northern Italian, Maderno worked most of his life in Rome where, about 1597, he designed the revolutionary facade of the church of Santa Susanna. Roman church facades in the late 16th century tended to be either precise, elegant, and papery thin or disjointed, equivocal, and awkwardly massive. Maderno's Santa Susanna facade is an integrated design in which each element contributes to the central culminating feature. Precision and elegance were relinquished to gain vitality and movement. Disjointed and ambiguous features were suppressed to achieve unity and harmony. A towering massiveness obtained by an increased surface relief and quickened rhythm of architectural members toward the centre replaced the papery-thin walls and hesitant massiveness of the 16th century. Vertical unification was achieved by breaking the entablature at similar places on both stories and by repeating pilasters and columns at both levels. Maderno also conceived the facade as part of an integrated unit, including the two-story church and one-story associated areas to either side, and thereby gave form to the Baroque desire to associate buildings, street facades, and squares in a continuous whole.

 The basic premises of the early Baroque, as reaffirmed by Maderno in the facade and nave of St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica), Rome (1607), were: (1) subordination of the parts to the whole to achieve unity and directionality; (2) progressive alteration of pilaster rhythm and wall relief to emphasize massiveness, movement, axiality, and activity; and (3) directional emphasis in interiors through diagonal views and culminating light and spatial sequences.

      The three great masters of the Baroque in Rome were Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo), Francesco Borromini (Borromini, Francesco), and Pietro da Cortona. Bernini, also a brilliant sculptor, designed both the baldachin (an ornamental canopy-like structure) with bronze spiral columns over the grave of St. Peter (1624–33) and the vast enclosing colonnade (begun 1656) that forms the piazza of St. Peter's. He was responsible also for the facade of the Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi (1664), a model for later urban palaces, and the exquisite oval church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale (1658–70), the epitome of richly coloured marble-encrusted church interiors.

      In contrast to Bernini, Borromini preferred monochromatic interiors. The buildings of Borromini, who came from northern Italy, are characterized by their inventive transformations of the established vocabulary of space, light, and architectural elements in order to increase the content of their work. Borromini's works, composed of fluid and active concave and convex masses and surfaces ( San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 1634–41), contain spaces that are intricate, geometrically derived irregular ovals, octagons, or hexagons (Sant'Ivo della Sapienza, 1642–60). His late palace facade for the College of the Propagation of the Faith (1646–67) was a bold and vigorous essay that became a major source for Rococo architects in the early years of the 18th century.

      Pietro da Cortona's early design for the Villa del Pigneto, near Rome (before 1630), was derived from the ancient Roman temple complex at Palestrina, Italy, and decisively altered villa design; his San Luca e Santa Martina, Rome (1635), was the first church to exhibit fully developed high Baroque characteristics in which the movement toward plasticity, continuity, and dramatic emphasis, begun by Maderno, achieved fruition. Pietro's reworking of a small square in Rome to include his facade of Santa Maria della Pace (1656–59) as an almost theatrical element is a cogent example of the Baroque insistence on the participation of a work in its environment.

      In the early years of the 18th century in Rome, parallel to the development of Rococo in France, renewed interest in the work of Borromini was shown by Alessandro Specchi in his Ripetta Gate (1704), and by Filippo Juvarra (Juvarra, Filippo), a gifted, if unorthodox, pupil of Carlo Fontana (Fontana, Carlo), in his early architectural projects and scene designs. Italian Rococo developed out of this new interest in Borromini. In Rome the Rococo developed further with the so-called Spanish Steps (1723) by Francesco de Sanctis; the facade of Santa Maria della Quercia (begun 1727) and Piazza Sant'Ignazio (1727) by Filippo Raguzzini; and, in Piedmont, Santa Caterina, Casale Monferrato (1718) by Giovanni Battista Scapitta.

National and regional variations
      Architects in northern Italy, notably Guarino Guarini (Guarini, Guarino), Filippo Juvarra, and Bernardo Vittone (Vittone, Bernardo Antonio), developed a Baroque style of great structural audacity. Guarini's San Lorenzo (1668–80) and Palazzo Carignano (1679), both in Turin, have swelling curvilinear forms, terra-cotta construction, exposed structural members, and intricate spatial compositions that show his relation to Borromini and also represent significant developments in the relationship between structure and light. Juvarra (Juvarra, Filippo)'s Palazzo Madama, Turin (1718–21), has one of the most spectacular of all Baroque staircases, but the true heir to Guarini was Vittone (Vittone, Bernardo Antonio). To increase the vertical effect and the unification of space in churches such as Santa Chiara, Brà (1742), Vittone raised the main arches, eliminated the drum, and designed a double dome in which one could look through spherical openings puncturing the inner dome and see the outer shell painted with images of saints and angels: a glimpse of heaven.

      Spanish Baroque was similar to Italian Baroque but with a greater emphasis on surface decorations. Alonso Cano (Cano, Alonso), in his facade of the Granada Cathedral (1667), and Eufrasio López de Rojas, with the facade of the cathedral of Jaén (1667), show Spain's absorption of the concepts of the Baroque at the same time that it maintained a local tradition. The greatest of the Spanish masters was José Benito Churriguera (Churriguera family), whose work shows most fully the Spanish Baroque interest in surface texture and decorative detail. His lush ornamentation attracted many followers, and Spanish architecture of the late 17th century and early 18th century has been labeled “Churrigueresque.” Narciso and Diego Tomé, in the University of Valladolid (1715), and Pedro de Ribera, in the facade of the San Fernando Hospital (now the Municipal Museum) in Madrid (1722), proved themselves to be the chief inheritors of Churriguera.

      The outstanding figure of 18th-century Spanish architecture was Ventura Rodríguez, who, in his designs for the Chapel of Our Lady of Pilar in the cathedral of Saragossa (Zaragoza) (1750), showed himself to be a master of the developed Rococo in its altered Spanish form; but it was a Fleming, Jaime Borty Miliá, who brought Rococo to Spain when he built the west front of the cathedral of Murcia in 1733.

      Roman Catholicism, political opposition to Spain, and the painter Peter Paul Rubens (Rubens, Peter Paul) were all responsible for the astonishing full-bodied character of Flemish Baroque. Rubens's friends Jacques Francart and Pieter Huyssens created an influential northern centre for vigorous expansive Baroque architecture to which France, England, and Germany turned. Francart's Béguinage Church (1629) at Mechelen (Malines) and Huyssens's St. Charles Borromeo (1615) at Antwerp set the stage for the more fully developed Baroque at St. Michel (1650) at Louvain, by Willem Hesius, as well as at the Abbey of Averbode (1664), by Jan van den Eynde.

      Seventeenth-century architecture in Holland, in contrast, is marked by sobriety and restraint. Pieter Post (Post, Pieter), noted for the Huis ten Bosch (1645) at The Hague and the Town Hall of Maastricht (c. 1658), and Jacob van Campen (Campen, Jacob van), who built the Amsterdam Old Town Hall (1648; now the Royal Palace), were the principal Dutch architects of the 17th century. After the middle of the century, Dutch architecture exerted an influence on architecture in France and England. Dutch colonial architecture was especially evident in the 17th and 18th centuries in the Hudson River Valley of North America and the Dutch West Indies (notably Willemstad on the island of Curaçao).

      Salomon de Brosse (Brosse, Salomon de)'s Luxembourg Palace (1615), in Paris, and Château de Blérancourt (1614), northeast of Paris between Coucy and Noyon, were the bases from which François Mansart (Mansart, François) and Louis Le Vau developed their succession of superb country houses.

      Mansart was the more accomplished of the two architects, and his Orléans wing of the Château de Blois (1635) in the Loire Valley and Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris (1642), are renowned for their high degree of refinement, subtlety, and elegance. Mansart's church of Val-de-Grâce (1645) in Paris and his designs for the Bourbon mausoleum (1665) established the full Baroque in France; it was a rich, subtle Baroque that was quiet in its strength and restrained in its vigour.

      Le Vau was Mansart's only serious competitor, and in 1657, with his Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, near Paris, he fired the imagination of Louis XIV and of his finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Vaux, though exhibiting certain Dutch influences, is noted for its integration of Le Vau's architecture with the decorative ensembles of the painter and designer Charles Le Brun (Le Brun, Charles) and the garden designs of landscape architect André Le Nôtre (Le Nôtre, André). By serving as a model for Louis XIV's Palace of Versailles (Versailles, Palace of), the complex at Vaux was perhaps the most important midcentury European palace. Le Vau showed a sensitivity to Italian Baroque architecture that was unusual in a French architect, and his College of Four Nations (1662; now the Institute of France) in Paris owes much to the Roman churches of Santa Maria della Pace, by Pietro da Cortona, and Sant'Agnese in Agone (1652–55), in the Piazza Navona, by Borromini and Carlo Rainaldi.

      Le Vau, Le Nôtre, and Le Brun began working at Versailles (Versailles, Palace of) within a few years of their success at Vaux, but the major expansion of the palace did not occur until after the end of the Queen's War (1668). At Versailles, Le Vau showed his ability to deal with a building of imposing size. The simplicity of his forms and the rich, yet restrained, articulation of the garden facade mark Versailles as his most accomplished building. Le Nôtre's inventive disposition of ground, plant, and water forms created a wide range of vistas, terraces, gardens, and wooded areas that integrated palace and landscape into an environment emphasizing the delights of continuity and separation, of the infinite and the intimate. Upon Le Vau's death, Jules Hardouin-Mansart (Mansart, Jules Hardouin-), grandnephew of François, succeeded him and proved himself equal to Louis XIV's desires by more than trebling the size of the palace (1678–1708). Versailles became the palatial ideal and model throughout Europe and the Americas until the end of the 18th century. A succession of grand palaces was built, including the following: Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, in England, by Sir John Vanbrugh; the Residenz of Würzburg, Germany (1719), by Neumann; the Zwinger in Dresden, Germany (1711), by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann; the Belvedere, Vienna (1714), by Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt; the Royal Palace at Caserta, Italy (1752), by Luigi Vanvitelli; and the Royal Palace (National Palace) at Madrid (1736), by Giovanni Battista Sacchetti.

 Hardouin-Mansart's Dôme des Invalides, Paris (c. 1675), is generally agreed to be the finest church of the last half of the 17th century in France. The correctness and precision of its form, the harmony and balance of its spaces, and the soaring vigour of its dome make it a landmark not only of the Paris skyline but also of European Baroque architecture.

      After Nicolas Pineau (Pineau, Nicolas) returned to France from Russia, he, with Gilles-Marie Oppenordt and Juste-Aurèle Meissonier (Meissonier, Juste-Aurèle), who were increasingly concerned with asymmetry, created the full Rococo. Meissonier and Oppenordt should be noted too for their exquisite, imaginative architectural designs that were unfortunately never built (e.g., facade of Saint-Sulpice, Paris, 1726, by Meissonier).

      The early years of the 18th century saw the artistic centre of Europe shift from Rome to Paris. Pierre Lepautre, working under Hardouin-Mansart on the interiors of the Château de Marly (1679), invented new decorative ideas that became the Rococo. Lepautre changed the typical late 17th-century flat arabesque, which filled a geometrically constructed panel, to a linear pattern in relief, which was enclosed by a frame that determined its own shape. White-and gold-painted 17th-century interiors (interior design) (e.g., the central salon of the palace at Versailles) were replaced by varnished natural-wood surfaces (e.g., Château de Meudon, Cabinet à la Capucine) or by painted pale greens, blues, and creams (e.g., Cabinet Vert, Versailles, 1735). The resulting delicate asymmetry in relief and elegant freedom revolutionized interior decoration and within a generation exerted a profound effect on architecture. Architects rejected the massive heavy relief of the Baroque in favour of a light and delicate, but still active, surface. Strong, active, and robust interior spaces gave way to intricate, elegant but restrained spatial sequences.

      The late designs of Inigo Jones (Jones, Inigo) for Whitehall Palace (1638) and Queen's Chapel (1623) in London introduced English patrons to the prevailing architectural ideas of northern Italy in the late 16th century. Although he was influenced heavily by 16th-century architects such as Palladio (Palladio, Andrea), Serlio (Serlio, Sebastiano), and Vincenzo Scamozzi (Scamozzi, Vincenzo), Jones approached the Baroque spirit in his late works by unifying them with a refined compositional vigour. Sir Christopher Wren (Wren, Sir Christopher) presented English Baroque in its characteristic restrained but intricate form in St. Stephen's, Walbrook, London (1672), with its multiple changing views and spatial and structural complexity. Wren's greatest achievement, St. Paul's Cathedral (Saint Paul's Cathedral), London (1675–1711), owes much to French and Italian examples of the Baroque period; but the plan shows a remarkable adaptation of the traditional English cathedral plan to Baroque spatial uses. Wren is notable for his large building complexes (Hampton Court Palace, 1689, and Greenwich Hospital, 1696), which, in continuing the tradition of Inigo Jones, paved the way for the future successes of Sir John Vanbrugh (Vanbrugh, Sir John). Vanbrugh's Castle Howard in Yorkshire (1699) and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire (1705–25) mark the culmination of the Baroque style in England.

      Even in England, reflections of an interest in continuous curvilinear form inspired by Borromini and Bernini may be seen in isolated examples such as St. Philip, Birmingham (1710), by Thomas Archer (Archer, Thomas).

Central Europe
      A stable political situation in central Europe and the vision of Rudolf II in Prague in the late 16th and early 17th centuries created an intellectual climate that encouraged the adoption of new Baroque ideas. The Thirty Years' War and the defense against the encroachments of the expanding French and Ottoman empires, however, absorbed all the energies of central Europe. The fully developed Baroque style appeared in Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Poland after 1680 but flourished only after the end of the debilitating War of the Spanish Succession (Spanish Succession, War of the) (1714). In the late 17th and early 18th centuries Germany and Austria turned for their models principally to Italy, where Guarini and Borromini exerted an influence on Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard) and Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt (Hildebrandt, Johann Lucas von). The third Austrian master, Jakob Prandtauer, on the other hand, came from a local stonemason tradition and worked primarily for monastic orders. Fischer von Erlach's University Church in Salzburg (1696) is particularly noteworthy and shows direct Italian inspiration, while the Karlskirche, Vienna (1715), demonstrates his original, mature phase. Hildebrandt's Belvedere palace in Vienna and Prandtauer's superbly sited Abbey of Melk overlooking the Danube (1702) are among their most notable works.

      In Bohemia the developed, or high, Baroque was heralded by the work of a French architect, Jean-Baptiste Mathey, who carried both Roman and French ideas to Prague from Rome in 1675. The Bavarian Christoph Dientzenhofer (Dientzenhofer, Christoph), however, transformed architecture in Prague and Bohemia with his boldly conceived buildings in the high Baroque style (Prague, nave of St. Nicholas, 1703, and Břevnov, Benedictine church, 1708).

      The spectacular Rococo of central Europe, Germany, and Austria, which by 1720 had begun to influence Italian architecture, grew out of a fusion of Italian Baroque and French Rococo. Its chief monuments are to be found in the Roman Catholic regions. Johann Michael Fischer (Fischer, Johann Michael), Balthasar Neumann (Neumann, Balthasar), the brothers Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirim Asam (Asam, Cosmas Damian), and Dominikus Zimmermann (Zimmermann, Dominikus) were the most accomplished of the native architects, while the Frenchmen François de Cuvilliés (Cuvilliés, François de, The Elder), Philippe de La Guêpière, and Nicolas de Pigage made the most important foreign contributions to midcentury architecture in Germany.

      Fischer (Fischer, Johann Michael)'s austere, dignified facade of the church at Diessen (1732) and his masterpiece of integrated painting, decorative stucco, sculpture, and architecture, the Benedictine abbey of Ottobeuren (1744), are landmarks of the Bavarian Rococo. Neumann (Neumann, Balthasar)'s joyous, airy Rococo Pilgrimage Church at Vierzehnheiligen (1743) and his later, more restrained Benedictine abbey at Neresheim (1745) characterize the increasing influence of classicism in Germany. In the north, in Berlin, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff alternated between Rococo (e.g., Potsdam, Sanssouci, 1745) and neo-Palladian classicism (e.g., Berlin, Opera House, 1741). Two influential country houses, La Guêpière's Solitude, near Stuttgart (1763), and Cuvilliés's Amalienburg, Munich (1734), exquisitely graceful and refined, are examples of French influence in Württemberg and Bavaria.

Henry A. Millon David John Watkin

      The Baroque appeared in Russia toward the end of the 17th century. The Russians imaginatively transformed its modes into a clearly expressed national style that became known as the Naryshkin Baroque, a delightful example of which is the church of the Intercession of the Virgin at Fili (1693) on the estate of Boyarin Naryshkin, whose name had become identified with this phase of the Russian Baroque.

      Western Europeans brought the prevailing Baroque styles characteristic of their own countries, but the very different artistic and physical setting of St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg) produced a new expression, embodying Russia's peculiar sense of form, scale, colour, and choice of materials. The transformed Baroque eventually spread all over Russia and, with its vast register of variations, developed many regional idioms.

      A French architect, Nicolas Pineau (Pineau, Nicolas), went to Russia in 1716 and introduced the Rococo style to the newly founded city of St. Petersburg (e.g., Peter's study in Peterhof, before 1721). The Rococo in Russia flourished in St. Petersburg under the protection of Peter I and Elizabeth. Peter's principal architect, Gaetano Chiaveri, who drew heavily on northern Italian models, is most noted for the library of the Academy of Sciences (1725) and the royal churches of Warsaw and Dresden. Bartolomeo Rastrelli was responsible for all large building projects under the reign of Elizabeth, and among his most accomplished designs in St. Petersburg are the Smolny Cathedral and the turquoise and white Winter Palace.

Arthur Voyce Henry A. Millon

Colonial architecture in North America
      The colonial architecture of the United States and Canada was as diverse as the peoples who settled there: English, Dutch, French, Swedish, Spanish, German, Scots-Irish. Each group carried with it the style and building customs of the mother country, adapting them as best it could to the materials and conditions of a new land. Thus, there were several colonial styles. The earliest buildings of all but the Spanish colonists were medieval in style: not the elaborate Gothic of the great European cathedrals and manor houses but the simple late Gothic of village houses and barns. These practical structures were well adapted to the pioneer conditions that prevailed in the colonies until about 1700, and few changes were needed to adapt them to the more severe climate. The styles were frank expressions of functional and structural requirements, with only an occasional bit of ornament. So far as is known, no single new structural technique or architectural form was invented in the North American colonies.

      There were seven reasonably distinct regional colonial styles: (1) the New England colonial, visible in almost 100 surviving 17th-century houses, was predominantly of wood construction with hand-hewn oak frames and clapboard siding; its prototypes are to be found chiefly in the southeastern counties of England. (2) The Dutch colonial, centring in the Hudson River Valley, in western Long Island, and in northern New Jersey, made more use of stone and brick or a combination of these with wood; its prototypes were in Holland and Flanders. The style persisted in this region until after the American Revolution. (3) The Swedish colonial settlement, established in 1638 along the lower Delaware River, was of short duration but contributed the log cabin (in the sense of a structure with round logs, notched at the corners and with protruding ends) to American architecture. (4) The Pennsylvania colonial style was late in origin (the colony was not founded until 1681) and rapidly developed into a sophisticated Georgian mode, based on English precedents. A local variant, often called Pennsylvania Dutch, evolved in the southeastern counties where Germans settled in large numbers after 1710. (5) The Southern colonial flourished in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Story-and-a-half brick houses, sometimes with large projecting end chimneys and decorative brick masonry, prevailed. (6) The French colonial, stemming from medieval French sources, evolved in Canada in the Maritime Provinces and the St. Lawrence Valley. The earliest impressive structure was the habitation of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain (Champlain, Samuel de), built at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, in 1604. Most of the surviving early houses of New France are to be found in the province of Quebec. The French settled the Great Lakes and Mississippi regions by the late 17th century and introduced the Quebec style. Far to the south, Louisiana was established as a colony in 1699, and New Orleans became the capital in 1718. There grew up a distinctive regional style in the close-packed streets of the Vieux Carré of New Orleans and in the quiet plantations of the bayou country. (7) The Spanish colonial style in the United States extended geographically and chronologically from St. Augustine in 1565 to San Francisco in 1848. The five great mission fields were in Florida, New Mexico (from 1598), Texas, Arizona (both from 1690), and California (from 1769). Unlike other colonial styles, which were essentially medieval, the Spanish colonial followed the Renaissance and Baroque styles of Spain and Mexico.

      The architectural style of the 18th century in England and in the English colonies in America was called Georgian (Georgian style). There are slight differences in usages of the term in the two countries. In England, Georgian refers to the mode in architecture and the allied arts of the reigns of George I, II, and III, extending from 1714 to 1820. In America, Georgian refers to the architectural style of the English colonies from about 1700 to the American Revolution in the late 1770s. Formal and aristocratic in spirit, it was at first based on the Baroque work of Sir Christopher Wren and his English followers; but after 1750 it became more severely Palladian. Typically, houses were of red brick with white-painted wood trim. Interiors had central halls, elaborately turned stair balustrades, paneled walls painted in warm colours and white plaster ceilings. All of these features were new to the colonies in 1700. Some of the earliest Georgian buildings were at Williamsburg, capital of Virginia from 1699 to 1780; other notable examples are Independence Hall, Philadelphia (1745), and King's Chapel, Boston (1750). The style was followed by the Federal style, 1780–1820.

      For the architecture of Latin America, see Latin American architecture.

Hugh Sinclair Morrison

Urban design (urban planning)
17th century
      The basic rational principles of Renaissance urban design—geometric order, gridiron or single focus radial plans, primary and dispersed activity centres, and restricted and unlimited vistas—as stated early in the Renaissance by the 15th-century Italian architects Filarete, Leon Battista Alberti (Alberti, Leon Battista), and Francesco Di Giorgio, remained basic to 17th-century thought. Only in the New World—in the Utopian (utopia) religious settlements that were founded by dissident sects in the American colonies—were there new cities planned as agrarian communities composed of closely spaced but freestanding houses that seemed to reject both medieval and Renaissance urban-design theories.

      By the middle of the 17th century, new organizational principles, developed in France by André Le Nôtre (Le Nôtre, André) in garden design (Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles), replaced the diffuseness of Renaissance urban design with a more highly integrated radial axial scheme, with multiple subordinate radial focuses at locations of significant activities that gave overall coherent form to an entire city. A city form that disclosed the hierarchical interrelationship of functions and portions of a city reinforced prevailing concepts of hierarchical social and political order. The fusion of form and content had the effect of transforming the concept of a city and continues to be felt to the present day.

      In the late 16th century in Rome the major street pattern was largely the creation of Domenico Fontana (Fontana, Domenico), who, under Pope Sixtus V in the years just before 1600, imposed an avenue plan that linked all the major pilgrimage churches. The avenues were laid out over the most direct routes, regardless of the terrain; and at the focal points (i.e., piazzas in front of the major monuments) obelisks were erected. Fontana's emphasis on communication routes and gathering spaces became the model for most later large-scale urban designs or renovations, such as Wren (Wren, Sir Christopher)'s plan for London, submitted after the Great Fire of 1666. This unexecuted proposal showed a series of avenues linking the major religious and commercial centres superimposed on a rational gridiron plan.

      The regularized residential city square received its greatest development in France with the planning of the royal squares. The Parisian Place des Vosges (1605), with its well-proportioned facades, shadowed arcades, and balanced colour scheme, was the beginning of a series that culminated with the circular Place des Victoires (1685) and the Place Vendôme (1698), both in Paris. Italian city squares tended to be either open, grand, and monumental (e.g., St. Peter's Square, Rome) or intimate, formally provocative, and spatially exciting (e.g., Santa Maria della Pace, Rome).

18th century
      Urban design in the 18th century placed greater emphasis on unity and direction through the subordination of lesser parts to the whole. Entire cities were laid out on regularized multiaxial schemes (e.g., Washington, D.C., 1792, by Pierre-Charles L'Enfant (L'Enfant, Pierre-Charles)); the spaces between the radiating avenues were subdivided either geometrically or on a gridiron pattern. New principles calling for a sequence of different spatial experiences were also introduced, as in the plan for Nancy, France (1752–55), by Emmanuel Héré de Corny (Héré de Corny, Emmanuel). In Italy outstanding examples of the new style are the splendid oval Piazza Sant'Ignazio, Rome (1727), by Filippo Raguzzini; and the grand military quarter of Turin (1716), by Juvarra. Notable among the many English examples of planned urban development in this period are St. James's Square, London (1726), and the Circus (1754) and the Royal Crescent (begun 1767), Bath, by John Wood the Elder (Wood, John, the Elder) and the Younger (Wood, John, the Younger). In Reims, France, the solemn Place Royale (1756) by the engineer J.G. Legendre is notable, but the finest example of an 18th-century large, urban pedestrian square may be the Place Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde), Paris (1755), by Ange-Jacques Gabriel (Gabriel, Ange-Jacques). On the banks of the Seine, in its original design, it served as a focal point for the gardens of the Louvre, for the street which led to the church of the Madeleine, and for three radiating streets of the Champs-Élysées. (For a fuller discussion of urban design and urban planning in general, see city (urban planning).)

Henry A. Millon

Classicism, 1750–1830

Origins and development
      The classicism that flourished in the period 1750–1830 is often known as “Neoclassicism (Classicism and Neoclassicism),” in order to distinguish it, perhaps unnecessarily, from the Classical architecture of ancient Rome or of the Renaissance. The search for intellectual and architectural truth characterized the period. (In the 18th century, modern classicism was described as the “true style,” the word “Neoclassical” being then unknown.) Stylistically this began with an onslaught against Baroque architecture, which—with its emphasis on illusion and applied ornament—was felt to be manifestly untruthful. Renaissance architecture was also questioned. As early as the 1680s the French architect Claude Perrault (Perrault, Claude) had undermined the Renaissance concept of the absolute right of the orders. According to Perrault, the proportions of the orders had no basis in absolute truth but were instead the result of fancy and association. The consequent attempt to discover a new basis for architectural reality took many forms, from archaeology to theory.

      Essentially representing a new taste for Classical serenity and archaeologically correct forms, 18th-century classicism manifested itself in all the arts. It corresponded to a new attitude toward the past that began to be perceptible about 1750; it was at once a reaction against the last phase of the Baroque and symptomatic of a new philosophical outlook. As the Baroque was the style of absolutism, so Neoclassicism corresponded loosely with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Coincidental with the rise of Neoclassicism and exerting a formative and profound influence on the movement at all stages was a new and more scientific interest in Classical antiquity. The discovery, exploration, and archaeological investigation of Classical sites in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor were crucial to the emergence of Neoclassicism.

      The emergence of the science of archaeology was indicative of a new attitude to the past in which separate and distinct chronological periods could be distinguished. This sense of a plurality of valid styles replaced the older conception of Classical Rome as the unique object of veneration. An important architectural corollary of this idea, which was to spring into prominence in the 19th century, was the notion of a modern style of building. Just as the past could now be interpreted and re-created by the study of a diverse range of monuments, each now seeming to be uniquely characteristic of its own particular moment in time, so it was thought possible that a mode of building reflecting the present, a mode recognizable by future archaeologists as uniquely representative of their own time, might be created.

      Numerous events beginning in the second decade of the 18th century, when English tourists began to visit Italy to experience, explore, and collect fragments of its antique past, herald this new and increasing interest in archaeology. As early as 1719, Bernard de Montfaucon (Montfaucon, Bernard de), a French antiquarian, began to publish his 10-volume L'Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1719; Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams, 1721–25). It was an immediate success. Excavations at the newly discovered ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum (discovered in 1719) began in 1748 and 1738, respectively. The publication of the Comte de Caylus (Caylus, Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, comte de)'s Recueil d'antiquités, which began to appear in 1752, was another landmark. Influential plates of Roman antiquities drawn by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Piranesi, Giovanni Battista) first appeared in 1743, when he published his book of etched plates entitled Prima parte di architettura. A steady stream of similar works followed from Piranesi's workshop. The first of a long and significant list of publications of measured drawings and picturesque views of Roman and Greek antiquities was Robert Wood's Ruins of Palmyra (1753), which was followed in 1757 by the same author's Ruins of Balbec and by the Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, written in 1764 by the English Neoclassical architect and designer Robert Adam (Adam, Robert).

      At the same time a significant interest in Greek antiquities was emerging along with a growing belief in the superiority of Greek over Roman architecture that was to result in a Greek Revival in architecture. At about this time the 6th-century Greek ruins at Paestum in southern Italy and in Sicily began to attract the attention of visitors. The Paestum sites were first described by the Italian artist Domenico Antonini in 1745. In 1750 the French architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot (Soufflot, Jacques-Germain) visited Paestum. The following year Giuseppe Maria Pancrazi's Antichità siciliane appeared, and in 1769 the architect Gabriel-Pierre-Martin Dumont's Ruines de Paestum was published. The picturesque qualities of these Greek temples, with their heavy baseless columns broken and overgrown with romantic vegetation, prompted those interested in architecture to venture farther afield and to explore the Greek mainland and Asia Minor. The first book with detailed illustrations of Greek monuments to be published was the Frenchman Julien-David LeRoy's Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758). This was followed by The Antiquities of Athens by two English architects, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, which appeared in three parts in 1762, 1789, and 1795. The actual imitation of Greek architecture developed slowly, though the idea of the superiority of Greek over Roman architecture was established by Johann Winckelmann (Winckelmann, Johann)'s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 1765).

      In this way, Neoclassicism, in its nostalgia for past civilizations and its attempt to re-create order and reason through the adoption of Classical forms, was, paradoxically, also a Romantic (Romanticism) movement. Prompted by feeling as well as by reason, architects interested themselves as much in the picturesque aspects of nature and objects in nature (such as ruins) as in rational procedures. The term Romantic Classicism has been used by some 20th-century art historians to describe certain aspects of Neoclassical architecture. This term admits non-Greco-Roman forms and the many attempts to imitate Chinese, Moorish, Indian, Egyptian, and, of course, Gothic buildings.

      The pursuit of Greek architecture had as one incentive the pursuit of primitive truth and thus of an inherent Rationalism. This line of thought had been developed early in the 18th century and was popularized by a French Jesuit, Marc-Antoine Laugier, whose Essai sur l'architecture appeared in French in 1753 and in English in 1755. Advocating a return to rationalism and simplicity in building and taking the primitive hut as his example of the fundamental expression of human needs, Laugier was both reacting against the excesses of the Rococo period and laying the theoretical groundwork for Neoclassicism. He did not advocate copying Greek forms, with which he was probably unacquainted, but argued that all forms not having a structural or functional purpose should be eliminated.

      The centre of international Neoclassicism was Rome, a gathering place, from the 1740s on, for talented young artists from all over Europe. Virtually every figure who was to play a significant role in the movement passed through that city. Piranesi arrived in 1740, Anton Raphael Mengs (Mengs, Anton Raphael) in 1741, Robert Adam in 1754, Winckelmann in 1755, the French painter Jacques-Louis David (David, Jacques-Louis) in 1755, and the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (Canova, Antonio, marchese d'Ischia) in 1779. Although it was Rome, the cradle of Italian antiquities, that provided the stage, the leading actors in the Neoclassical drama were French, German, or English; very little was contributed by Italians to this new movement. The centre of activity was the French Academy, where winners of the academy's coveted Prix de Rome went to study the monuments firsthand and to be exposed to the artistic life of the Italian capital. The projects produced by French Prix de Rome winners are characterized by their grandeur of scale; strict geometric organization; simplicity of geometric forms; Greek or Roman detail; dramatic use of columns, particularly to articulate interior spaces and create urban landscapes; and a preference for blank walls and the contrast of formal volumes and textures. The same qualities describe Neoclassical architecture as it was to emerge throughout Europe and in America.

National and regional variations
      In England the Palladianism (a Classical style of architecture based on the writings of Andrea Palladio (Palladio, Andrea)) of architects such as Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell, and their followers, beginning in the 1720s, had already marked a turning away from the Baroque style of Wren's successors Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor (Hawksmoor, Nicholas) as well as the adoption of a simpler and more restrained style. As early as 1715 the new spirit was discernible in Campbell's introduction to the first volume of his Vitruvius Britannicus. Advocating the judgment “truly of the Merit of Things by the Strength of Reason,” his heroes were Vitruvius, Palladio, and Inigo Jones (Jones, Inigo); his villains, the architects of the Italian Baroque: “The Italians can no more now relish the Antique Simplicity.” The works of Bernini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo) and Carlo Fontana (Fontana, Carlo) are “affected and licentious”; for Borromini (Borromini, Francesco), “who has endeavoured to debauch Mankind with his odd and chimerical beauties,” he feels only disgust. By 1731 Burlington (Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd earl of)'s Assembly Rooms at York, based on Palladio's reconstruction of an Egyptian hall, was fully Neoclassical. Similarly, William Kent (Kent, William)'s entrance hall at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, begun in 1734 and reminiscent of a Roman basilica, would not seem out of date 50 years later. Despite these early essays by Burlington and his circle, the next generation of English designers remained conservatively in the Palladian mold.

      By midcentury the atmosphere was beginning to change, and two events of 1758 marked the birth of English Neoclassical architecture: the erection of a Greek Doric garden temple in the grounds of Hagley Park, Worcestershire, by James (“Athenian”) Stuart and the return to England of the 30-year-old Robert Adam (Adam, Robert).

      Adam, the son of a leading Scottish Baroque architect, William Adam, arrived in London fresh from four years in Italy, his head full of Roman ruins and Renaissance arabesques, his style of drawing and composition bearing the telling marks of his friendship with Piranesi and the French draftsman Charles-Louis Clérisseau. Essential to the Adam style, that mode of decoration and planning that was to effect a revolution in English taste, was the notion of freedom. Absorbing a variety of influences ranging from the Palladianism of the Burlington–Campbell school and the decorative elements and spirit of France to the archaeology of Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, Adam re-created and recombined the elements of architecture in a way that was wholly new—and wholly Neoclassical. His executed works consisted mainly of the remodeling of existing houses, the most important of which were Osterley Park, Middlesex (1761–80); Syon House, Middlesex (1762–69); and Kenwood House, Hampstead, London (1767–69). At Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire (c. 1765–70), he completed James Paine's plan and added a garden front in which the central portion (centrepiece) is clearly derived from an ancient Roman triumphal arch, the first use of this form in domestic architecture. This use of antique forms in a new context is a recurring characteristic of Neoclassical architecture. Adam's planning, to which he devoted considerable attention, was based on a variety of contrasting room shapes, each geometric in itself and contained within an overall geometric plan yet creating a sense of movement, variety, and surprise. Such play with shapes and spaces was to characterize Neoclassical planning, particularly in France.

      But the Adam revolution was over by 1780, and a new mood, one closer to that exemplified by Stuart's small Doric temple at Hagley, was taking its place. Now it was “noble simplicity” and “antique grandeur” that were sought after, and Horace Walpole (Walpole, Horace, 4th earl of Orford), that weather vane of fashion, was writing how sick he was of “gingerbread” and “snippets of embroidery.”

      Of the next generation the leading architects were George Dance the Younger (Dance, George, the Younger), Henry Holland (Holland, Henry), and James Wyatt (Wyatt, James). Dance's Newgate Prison, London (1769; demolished 1902), was among the most original English buildings of the century, a grim, rusticated complex combining the romantic drama of Piranesi with the discipline of Palladio and the Mannerist details of Giulio Romano in an imaginative paradigm of Neoclassicism. Holland (Holland, Henry) was architect to the Prince of Wales and his most important work in this capacity was the extensive remodeling of Carlton House begun in 1783, a refined and elegant whole with a joint debt to Adam and to France and a simplicity that pleased Walpole. Wyatt (Wyatt, James), tremendously successful and busy, was equally at home in his own Classical idiom, a stripped derivative of the Adam style, as in Gothic. There was no contradiction, for Wyatt's Gothic, like that of Adam before him, was Classical in all but its details with cloisters substituted for arcades and battlements for balustrades.

      By 1800 nearly all English architecture reflected the Neoclassical spirit. Sir John Soane (Soane, Sir John), pupil of the younger Dance and architect to the Bank of England, developed a highly personal style characterized by a stripping down and linear abstraction of the Classical elements, use of archaeological detailing such as the Greek key pattern, and the creation of dramatic interior space by toplighting. Totally original, his work invites comparison with the projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in France.

 After 1800 the interest in revival of Greek forms intensified and the stream of buildings based either wholly or in part on Greek models continued well into the 19th century. One of the earliest was William Wilkins's Downing College, Cambridge (1806–11), with details closely copied from the Erechtheum on the Acropolis at Athens. Following this were Sir Robert Smirke's Covent Garden Theatre (1809), London's first Greek Doric building; Wilkins's Grange Park, Hampshire (1809), a monumental attempt to cram an English country house into the form of a Greek temple; Smirke's vast Ionic British Museum (1824–47); and St. Pancras Church (1819–22) by William and Henry William Inwood, with a portico and two caryatid porches based on the Erechtheum and an octagonal tower based on the ancient Athenian Tower of the Winds. The design of Regent Street and Regent's Park (with its palatial terraces) by John Nash (Nash, John) in the second decade of the 19th century exemplifies the kind of town planning (urban planning) associated with the mood of Neoclassicism, a combination of formal elements with the picturesque.

      Both Ireland and Scotland produced significant Neoclassical buildings. In Dublin, James Gandon's Four Courts (1786–96), with its shallow saucer dome raised on a high columnar drum with echoes of Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral, and his Custom House (1781–91) owe joint allegiance to the Palladianism of Sir William Chambers (Chambers, Sir William) and contemporary French Neoclassicism. Edinburgh, the “Athens of the North,” experienced a particularly tenacious Greek Revival. Among its monuments are the Royal High School (begun 1825) by Thomas Hamilton and the Royal Institution (now the Royal Scottish Academy) by William Henry Playfair. David Hamilton built the Royal Exchange (now Stirling's Library), Glasgow (1829–30), in a style showing the Greek influence, and the revival in that city remained strong well into the 19th century, culminating in the work of Alexander (“Greek”) Thomson, whose Caledonia Road Free Church (1856–57) is among the finest monuments of Neoclassical architecture in Scotland.

      In France a reaction against the Rococo style began in the 1740s. Never very satisfactory for exterior architecture, the Rococo nevertheless had considerable appeal as a decorative program, reaching its height in the work of Juste-Aurèle Meissonier and Gilles-Marie Oppenordt. A dogmatic classicism in architecture had been a serious consideration in France as early as 1671 when Louis XIV's Royal Academy of Architecture was formed. The style, produced for Louis XIV, adopted the richness and grandeur of the Roman Baroque while modifying its more dramatic excesses by a rational application of le bon goût (“good taste”). A cornerstone of rationalism already had been laid in 1714 with the publication of the French theorist the Abbé de Cordemoy's Nouveau traité de toute l'architecture (1714; “New Treatise on All Architecture”). Reaction against the Rococo crystallized in the writings of Charles-Nicolas Cochin (Cochin, Charles-Nicolas, The Younger) and in the lectures of the Comte de Caylus at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1747. Along with the return to nature and reason, the twisting curvilinear forms of the Rococo were seen to work against nature. The same desire for truth to nature accounted for the growing preference in France for the informal landscape gardens of the English.

      The Essai sur l'architecture of Laugier provided a rational alternative to the Rococo and formed the theoretical basis for Neoclassicism in France and in the rest of Europe. Already by midcentury a new interest in archaeology, Rome, and antiquity had been established.

      A significant architectural event marking a reaction against the Baroque was the design of a new facade for the important Paris church of Saint-Sulpice in 1733 by Giovanni Nicolo Servandoni (Servandoni, Giovanni Niccolò), who manifested a new taste for sobriety. His project for Saint-Sulpice represented a break with the Roman Baroque tradition of church facades deriving from Giacomo da Vignola (Vignola, Giacomo da)'s Gesù Church, Rome (1568), and still being used in Paris at Saint-Roche (by Robert de Cotte) in 1735. Servandoni's design derived inspiration from Roman basilicas, from Perrault's Louvre (Louvre Museum) colonnade, and from Wren's St. Paul's (Saint Paul's Cathedral). In execution the design lost its central pediment and arches. Superimposed open colonnades were substituted and the two lateral towers were built to different designs, the north one being completed only in 1777 by Jean-François-Thérèse Chalgrin (Chalgrin, Jean-François-Thérèse). Nevertheless, the new restraint and classicism that pervade Servandoni's facade was a portent of what was to come.

      The work of Ange-Jacques Gabriel (Gabriel, Ange-Jacques), director of the Academy of Architecture from 1735, is a successful compromise between the new rationalism of the 18th century and the French classical tradition of the 17th century. In 1757 he began the Place de la Concorde in Paris, with its twin palaces (Hôtel de Crillon and the Admiralty) that boast columnar facades inspired by Perrault's great east front of the Louvre (begun 1667). Despite his many major public works, Gabriel is probably best known for his enchanting Petit Trianon, built at Versailles in 1761–64 for Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. Classically restrained and elegant, this subtle cubic composition achieves a timeless gravity that seems beyond the compass of stylistic terms such as Baroque or Neoclassical.

      The leading Neoclassical architect was Jacques-Germain Soufflot (Soufflot, Jacques-Germain), who was in Italy in the 1750s and was the first French architect to study the Greek ruins at Paestum. Soufflot's great building was the church of Sainte-Geneviève (now the Panthéon), Paris (1757–90), a domed cruciform edifice combining the new taste for antique grandeur and simplicity with a structural rationalism, the offspring of the marriage of a Roman temple and a Gothic cathedral. A crucial Neoclassical building that owes nothing to the Baroque, Soufflot's church nevertheless is not purely antique in character, as its dome is derived from Wren's St. Paul's and it has a Roman rather than a Greek temple front.

      A second Parisian church already fully Neoclassical in feeling is Chalgrin (Chalgrin, Jean-François-Thérèse)'s Saint-Philippe-du-Roule of 1768–84. Saint-Philippe, inspired by early Christian basilicas, is remarkably pure, with an Ionic (Ionic order) colonnade separating nave from aisles. The nave terminates in a semicircular apse and is covered with a coffered Roman barrel vault. The exterior is a model of simplicity in the antique taste with a Roman Doric portico framed against the cubic mass of the wall. Similar and of about the same date (1764–70) is Louis-François Trouard's church of Saint-Symphorien at Versailles, again basilical with a Roman Doric portico.

      A most remarkable and original architect of the Revolutionary period was Étienne-Louis Boullée (Boullée, Étienne-Louis), whose work before 1780 was in the style of his contemporaries but who after that date produced a number of curious and revolutionary projects. Of his several Paris townhouses, or hôtels, the Hôtel de Monville of about 1770 and the Hôtel de Brunoy of 1772 deserve mention. The former has a central facade featuring giant Ionic pilasters divided by sculptured panels and the latter a giant Ionic colonnade flanked by arcaded wings forming the three-sided court (cour d'honneur). Boullée's project for a cenotaph to Sir Isaac Newton (Newton, Sir Isaac) based on a pure spherical form (c. 1780) is an example of that formalistic aspect of Neoclassicism that sought pure geometry and simplicity.

      Other Neoclassical architects of the pre-Revolutionary period were Marie-Joseph Peyre, whose Livre d'architecture of 1765 was influential in publicizing the type of work being produced by French students in Rome; Charles de Wailly, who was an important teacher and, with Peyre, was the architect of the Paris Odéon; Jacques Gondoin, architect of the School of Medicine (1769–76), which, with its Corinthian temple portico and Roman-inspired amphitheatre covered by a coffered half dome and lit from a half oculus (a round opening in the top of a dome), was one of the most advanced interiors of its date anywhere; Jacques-Denis Antoine, winner of the competition for the new Mint (Hôtel des Monnaies); and Victor Louis (Louis, Victor), whose theatre at Bordeaux (1772–80) with its Roman colonnade and vaults set the model for Neoclassical theatres. All had studied in Rome.

      The boldest innovator in the world of French Neoclassical architecture was Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas). Like Boullée he designed a number of buildings between 1765 and 1780 in which he attempted to reconcile the traditional elements of French classicism with the new spirit of the antique. Among these were the Château de Benouville, Calvados (1768–75), and the Hôtel de Montmorency, Paris (c. 1770–72), both of which feature Ionic colonnades with straight entablatures and are somewhat English in feeling. More original were the Pavilion at Louveciennes of 1771 for Madame du Barry, which again invited comparison with contemporary English villas and with the Petit Trianon, and the Hôtel Guimard of 1772. The theatre at Besançon, with its cubic exterior and interior range of baseless columns stylistically derived from those at Paestum, dates from 1775–84.

      But it is for later projects, such as the royal saltworks at Arc-et-Senans (1775–79), with their simplified forms, and the highly original series of barrières (tollgates) for Paris (1784–89), that ensure to Ledoux his central role in the evolution of Neoclassical and, indeed, of modern architecture. The Barrière de la Villette, consisting of a tall cylinder rising out of a low square block with porticoes of heavy, square Doric (Doric order) piers, exhibits all the essentials of the style: megalomania, geometry, simplicity, antique detail, formalism, and stylophily (use of many columns). Even more influential were the unexecuted projects by Ledoux published in his Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des moeurs et de la législation (“Architecture Considered with Respect to Art, Customs, and Legislation”) in 1804, which contains his ideal city of Chaux, a plan for a whole city with buildings in which symbolism and abstraction are carried to new heights.

      The revolutionary Neoclassicism of Ledoux resulted in few monuments. It was the Paris of Napoleon that saw the erection of the most conspicuous examples of the style, intended to symbolize in stone the grandeur of the Emperor. The two architects associated with this transformation of Paris were Charles Percier (Percier, Charles; and Fontaine, Pierre (-François-Léonard)) and Pierre-François Fontaine (Percier, Charles; and Fontaine, Pierre (-François-Léonard)), who were responsible for the extensive planning scheme at the beginning of the 19th century that included the rue de Castiglione, the rue and Place des Pyramides, and the rue de Rivoli. The Arc du Carrousel was built to their designs in 1806–08 and the grander Arc de Triomphe by Chalgrin and Jean-Armand Raymond in 1806–35. Conspicuous in Napoleonic Paris was an imposing Corinthian temple, the church of the Madeleine, begun in 1806 by Pierre-Alexandre Vignon and completed in 1842. Similar in scale and effect were the Paris Bourse (1808–15) by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart and the Chamber of Deputies of 1806–51 by Bernard Poyet (now the National Assembly).

      Italy was the centre from which Neoclassicism emanated, in the sense that Neoclassicism would be unimaginable without Rome. The remains of antiquity on Italian soil, many of which were by the 18th century romantically overgrown and half buried, inspired all artists and architects. Yet, Italian architects were followers rather than initiators of international Neoclassicism. One of the most important formative influences on the movement was Piranesi (Piranesi, Giovanni Battista), whose etchings of Roman ruins transformed those antique fragments into sublime romantic compositions. Piranesi was in the forefront of Roman activity, and through his acquaintance with the foreign architects and patrons who visited the Italian capital he helped to crystallize the growing taste for Neoclassicism. Juvarra's designs for a tomb for the King of France (1715?) served as a source for Piranesi in his design for the Piazza of the Knights of Malta in Rome (c. 1765). In the church of Santa Maria del Priorato, Piranesi incorporated Classical references that were to greatly influence the succeeding generation of architects.

      In the field of pure theory, a Venetian, Carlo Lodoli, was an important early advocate of Functionalism. His ideas are known through the writings of Francesco Algarotti, including the Saggio sopra l'architettura (1753) and Lettere sopra l'architettura (beginning 1742). Lodoli's theories were similar to those of Laugier, requiring that every part of a building derive from necessity and that architecture be true to the nature of materials, and tolerating no useless ornament. The theories of Francesco Milizia contained in his Principi d'architettura civile of 1785 were similar.

      The tradition of the Baroque was of course strong in Italy and lingered on throughout the 18th century in many parts of what was still an agglomeration of independent states. Early tendencies toward Neoclassicism appear in the late work of Luigi Vanvitelli (Vanvitelli, Luigi); for example, the Castelluccio Reale (1774) in the park at Caserta, an octagonal structure with a round superstructure. Other barometers of the new taste were the Villa Albani, Rome (completed c. 1760), built by Carlo Marchionni to house a collection of ancient marbles formed by Cardinal Alessandro Albani; and the new Pio-Clementino Museum at the Vatican (1776–81), the work of Michelangelo Simonetti.

      Early in the 18th century Italy had experienced a fertile Palladian (Palladianism) revival, and a number of buildings based on the Pantheon model were built, among them Tommaso Temanza's church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Venice in 1748. Palladianism was a significant element in much Italian Neoclassical architecture.

      Giacomo Antonio Domenico Quarenghi (Quarenghi, Giacomo Antonio Domenico), who was to work in Russia for Catherine II, built the monastery of Santa Scolastica, Subiaco (1774–77), with a barrel-vaulted nave characteristic of the new taste. In 1787 the first baseless Greek Doric columns in Italy appeared in the Chiesetta di Piazza di Siena in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, Rome, designed by Mario Asprucci, 20 years after Stuart's temple at Hagley. Also Greek was the Gymnasium, in the Botanic Garden, Palermo (1789–92), built by Léon Dufourny, who had been a pupil of LeRoy and Peyre.

      Neoclassical buildings after 1800 were more numerous, and a few examples illustrate the character and range of the movement. Peter von Nobile's Sant'Antonio, Trieste (1826–49); Luigi Cagnola's Rotunda, Ghisalba (1834); and Giovanni Antonio Selva's Canova Temple, Possagno (1819–33) all took the Pantheon as their starting point. Cagnola also built the Ionic Ticinese Gate in Milan (1801–14), and the Arch of Sempione in Milan (1806–38), a Roman triumphal arch similar to the contemporary Parisian Arc du Carrousel. Luigi Canina's Greek propylea, or gateway, at the entrance to the Villa Borghese (1827–29); Carlo Barabino's Doric Teatro Carlo Felice, Genoa (1826–28); and Giuseppe Japelli's meat market at Padua (1821) using the unfluted Paestum order all exemplify the continuing taste for Greek forms. Japelli was also the architect of the Pedrocchi Café, Padua (1816–42), which, with its Doric and Gothic exteriors and equally eclectic interiors is a remarkable extravaganza.

      The greatest achievement in urban planning of the period was the design of the Piazza del Popolo in Rome (1813–31) by Giuseppe Valadier, a great open space with three diagonal avenues leading off it.

Spain and Portugal
      In Spain the leading Neoclassical architect was Juan de Villanueva, who studied in Rome and returned to Spain in 1705 with a style similar to that evolved by the leading contemporary French and English architects. His buildings include three villas; the Casita de Arriba (1773) and the Casita de Abajo (1773), both at El Escorial, and the Casita del Principe at El Prado (1784). His major building was the Prado Museum in Madrid (1785–87). In Portugal the destruction of Lisbon by earthquake in 1755 necessitated rebuilding, most of which was carried out by military engineers. The Ajuda Palace (begun 1802) by the Italian Manuel Fabri is Neoclassical; and in Oporto, the Hospital of Santo Antonio with a vast Doric portico was designed by the English architect John Carr.

      The Louis XVI style of mid-18th-century France was taken to Germany by the many French architects who worked there, such as Philippe de La Guêpière (Mon Repos, near Ludwigsburg, 1760–64, and La Solitude, Stuttgart, 1763–67). Many German patrons were also Anglophiles, including Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, for whom the talented architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff created the schloss and park at Wörlitz, near Dessau (1766–90). Schloss Wörlitz was directly inspired by English Palladian country houses such as Claremont, Surrey; Erdmannsdorff laid out the park with a range of exotic garden buildings around a lake, recalling contemporary English gardens such as Stourhead and Stowe. The association of such naturalistic gardens with ideals of political liberty is underlined by the presence at Wörlitz of the remarkable Rousseau Island, which was planted with poplars in 1782 in imitation of the island on which Rousseau was buried in the celebrated landscaped garden at Ermenonville in France.

      King Frederick William II of Prussia (reigned 1786–97) decided to make Berlin a cultural centre dominated by German artists. Among the architects he called to Berlin were Carl Gotthard Langhans and David Gilly, who, with Heinrich Gentz, created a severe but inventive style in the 1790s that was indebted to Ledoux as well as to Johann Winckelmann (Winckelmann, Johann)'s call for a return to the spirit of ancient Greek architecture. The great early monument of the Berlin school was the Brandenburg Gate (1789–93) by Langhans. Distantly inspired by the propylaea on the Acropolis in Athens, it was the first of the ceremonial Doric gateways to rise in modern Europe. The Greek Revival in Germany was linked with the growth of Prussian nationalism and imbued with the supposed moral virtues of the Doric order. Key buildings in this stern geometric style include the Berlin Mint (1798), by Gentz, and the Vieweg House, Brunswick (1800–07), by David Gilly. Gilly also founded a school of architecture in Berlin, where both Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Schinkel, Karl Friedrich) and Leo von Klenze (Klenze, Leo von) received formative training. The apogee of German Neoclassical architecture can be traced in the work of three brilliant designers: David Gilly's son, Friedrich, and the latter's disciples, Schinkel and Klenze.

      Friedrich Gilly built little, dying in 1800, but he left some remarkable designs that justify his central place in German Neoclassicism. His project for a monument to Frederick the Great (1797) consisted of a raised Greek Doric temple on a geometric substructure surrounded by obelisks and set in a vast open space. This caught the imagination of German architects as a symbol of Prussian nationhood during the humiliating occupation of Berlin by Napoleon in 1806–13. It was in those years that Gilly's pupil Schinkel (Schinkel, Karl Friedrich) was active as a designer of theatre sets and as a Romantic painter. Schinkel, who was named state architect in 1815 by Frederick William III, transformed Berlin with a series of monuments in a rationalist Greek style, beginning with the New Royal Guardhouse (1816–18). His Schauspielhaus (theatre and concert hall) of 1818–26 is essentially a grid of trabeated elements framing glazed openings. The modern flavour of this construction, which, according to Schinkel, derived from the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus in Athens, has contributed to Schinkel's popularity as an architect in the 20th century.

      Schinkel's next major work in Berlin, the Old (Altes) Museum (1823–33), is important as an early example of a national museum built in order to educate the public. With its long but undemonstrative Ionic colonnade, it is comparable to Smirke's contemporary British Museum. Indeed, in 1826 Schinkel made an important tour of France and, more particularly, of Britain to collect information on the display of paintings. The detailed diary he kept on his tour shows that what interested him most was the architecture and technology of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. On his return to Berlin he designed a number of buildings in which he incorporated the new methods of fireproof construction he had seen in England. The most important of these was the School of Architecture (1831), with walls of red brick ornamented with glazed violet tiles, windows of unpainted terra-cotta, and internal construction of iron beams and brick cap vaults. For Schinkel, who was not a pure Functionalist (Functionalism), the poetry of architecture was as important as it was for Soane in England. Thus the facades of the School of Architecture were ornamented with carved terra-cotta panels depicting the history and symbolism of architecture.

      As part of his concern for poetry in architecture, Schinkel was also keenly aware of the need to relate buildings to their settings. He gave beautiful expression to this in the 1820s in a number of asymmetrical but Classical villas—for example, Schloss Charlottenhof at Sanssouci, for Crown Prince Frederick William, and Schloss Glienicke, near Potsdam, for Frederick William's younger brother, Prince Charles. Schinkel developed this theme on a more extravagant scale in two unexecuted palaces of the 1830s, one on the Acropolis in Athens for the King of Greece and one at Orianda on the Black Sea for the Empress of Russia. The coloured lithographs that he subsequently published of these gorgeous polychromatic dream-palaces are among the greatest products of the 19th-century Romantic imagination.

      Klenze (Klenze, Leo von), who had studied in Paris with Durand and Percier and had visited Italy, developed Munich into a monumental souvenir of the Grand Tour for his patron, Ludwig I of Bavaria. The result was an extraordinarily successful transformation of a minor court city into a great cultural capital that was intended to be the Florence of the 19th century. Klenze laid out a wide new street, the Ludwigstrasse, which he lined with palaces and public buildings. The program was widely adopted in the expansion of European capitals, notably Vienna, later in the 19th century.

      More eclectic than Schinkel, Klenze created a living museum of styles in Munich, including his noble Sculpture Gallery ( Glyptothek, 1816–30), with its Greek Ionic portico; his Leuchtenberg Palace (1816), modeled on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome; and his Königsbau (1826–35) at the Residenz, which was an echo of the Pitti Palace in Florence. Klenze's Sculpture Gallery, commissioned by the future Ludwig I, has some claim to be regarded as the first public museum ever erected solely for the display of sculpture. With no examples to follow, Klenze produced a novel plan with galleries around the four sides of a square courtyard. In accordance with the desire of both patron and architect to make the building a total work of art, its interiors were decorated with (now destroyed) stuccowork and frescoes that were stylistically related to the exhibits they contained. This decoration mounted in richness from the first rooms, which contained Egyptian sculpture, to the final gallery, which exhibited Roman sculpture.

Scandinavia and Finland
      Neoclassical taste was introduced into Denmark and Sweden between 1750 and 1790 by French designers such as Louis Le Lorrain, Nicolas-Henri Jardin, and Louis-Jean Desprez (Desprez, Louis-Jean). In Denmark, Jardin's pupil Caspar Frederik Harsdorff built the austere royal mortuary chapel of Frederick V in Roskilde Cathedral (1774–79), while in Sweden Desprez (Desprez, Louis-Jean) was responsible for the Botanical Institute in Uppsala (1791–1807), with a Greek Doric portico. The Danish architect Christian Frederik Hansen, a pupil of Harsdorff, turned the medieval and Baroque city of Copenhagen into a Neoclassical capital. He built the town hall, court house, and prison (1803–16) and the church of Our Lady (1810–29), with its Boullée-inspired interior. Schinkel's example in Berlin was followed by Hansen's pupil Heinrich Grosch, who provided Christiania (Oslo), the new capital of Norway, with a series of Greek Revival public buildings. Perhaps the finest example of this Classical urban planning is in Helsinki, established as capital of Finland in 1812. Beginning in 1818, Johan Ehrenström and Carl Engel created a monumental group of the Lutheran Cathedral flanked by the Senate, University, and University Library.

       Stanisław II August Poniatowski, king of Poland from 1764 to 1795, brought the Louis XVI style of contemporary France to the Royal Castle in Warsaw in a series of interiors designed by Dominik Merlini and Jan Chrystian Kamsetzer in 1776–85. Merlini also designed the Łazienki Palace at Ujazdów near Warsaw (1775–93) for the king, while Szymon Bogumił Zug brought Neoclassicism to ecclesiastical architecture in his Lutheran Church, Warsaw (1777–81), modeled on the Pantheon. Zug also designed Arkadia (1777–98), one of the many picturesque gardens in Poland. Laid out on the Radziwiłł family estate of Nieborow, the garden contains numerous Romantic (Romanticism) buildings. After 1815, Warsaw was rebuilt as a model Neoclassical city with major public buildings by Merlini's pupil Jakub Kubicki and the Italian architect Antonio Corazzi.

      The leading role played by Russia in the production of early Neoclassical architecture was almost entirely due to Catherine II. Under her aegis St. Petersburg (Saint Petersburg) was transformed into an unparalleled museum of Neoclassical buildings as advanced as contemporary French and English work. As in other countries, the new taste for antique simplicity represented a reaction against the excesses of the Rococo, which in Russia had its apotheosis in the work of Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli.

      Two foreign architects played important roles: a Scotsman, Charles Cameron, whose most extensive work was at Tsarskoye Selo in the style invented by Robert Adam (Adam, Robert) and who was responsible for introducing the first correct Greek Doric column and entablature in Russia in the circular Temple of Friendship at Pavlovsk (1780); and an Italian, Giacomo Antonio Domenico Quarenghi (Quarenghi, Giacomo Antonio Domenico), who arrived in Russia in 1780 and built for Catherine the Palladian English Palace at Peterhof (1781–89).

      The two leading Russian architects were Vasily Ivanovich Bazhenov and Ivan Yegorovich Starov, both of whom studied in Paris under de Wailly in the 1760s, bringing back to Russia the most-advanced Neoclassical ideas. Bazhenov designed the new Arsenal in St. Petersburg (1765) and prepared unexecuted designs for the Kamenni Ostrov Palace (1765–75) and for a new Kremlin. Starov designed a country house for Prince Gagarin at Nikolskoye (1774–76), the new cathedral of the Trinity, St. Petersburg (1776), and the influential prototype of Russian country houses, the Tauride Palace (1783–88), for Grigory Potemkin (Potemkin, Grigory Aleksandrovich, Prince Tavrichesky, Imperial Prince), Catherine's lover. The Tauride Palace consisted of a central-domed and porticoed central block connected by narrow galleries to large wings.

      Under Catherine's grandson, Alexander I (reigned 1801–25), the Russian version of the Empire style flourished. The great monument of this later period was the St. Petersburg Bourse (1804–16) by Thomas de Thomon, a vast peripteral (surrounded by a row of columns) edifice. Andrey Nikiforovich Voronikhin, also a pupil of de Wailly, was architect of the Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg (1801–11), and Andreyan Dmitriyevich Zakharov built the Admiralty (1806–15) in the same city.

      Neoclassical architecture thrived in the United States throughout the 19th century, and examples of it exist in nearly every major city. The analogy with imperial Rome and later (after the War of Greek Independence, 1821–32, in particular) with the grandeur and political ideals of Periclean Athens strengthened the case for the adoption of Roman and Greek architectural models in the United States. In 1785 Thomas Jefferson (Jefferson, Thomas) planned the Virginia State Capitol with the Frenchman Charles-Louis Clérisseau, taking as his model the ancient Roman Maison-Carrée at Nîmes. It was to be the first public building in the modern world directly based on an antique temple. Jefferson's own house, Monticello, in Virginia, featured a central-domed space and was indebted to ancient Roman villas as well as to Palladianism and to modern French and English domestic design. If Monticello echoed the private agrarian retreat of Classical statesmen, as described in the writings of Cicero (Cicero, Marcus Tullius) and the younger Pliny (Pliny the Younger), the University of Virginia (Virginia, University of) at Charlottesville (1817–26) was an example of Jefferson's effort to educate the public of the new United States. He conceived the campus as an academic village of extraordinary charm and novelty in which a central Pantheon-like rotunda, containing a library, stands at the head of a grassy open space flanked by two lines of small templelike pavilions, which are linked by colonnades.

      In Boston, the Massachusetts State House, designed 1787–88 and built 1795–98 by Charles Bulfinch (Bulfinch, Charles), derived from English Neoclassical models. By far the most gifted architect working in the United States in these years was Benjamin Latrobe (Latrobe, Benjamin). Latrobe was born in England, where he was trained by the innovative architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell. He evidently became familiar with the radical work of Dance, Soane, and Ledoux and of engineers such as John Smeaton. In 1796 he went to the United States, where he worked as the first fully professional architect and eventually became known as the father of the American architectural profession. A characteristic early building is his Bank of Pennsylvania (1798–1800), in Philadelphia, which was then the largest American city and was, indeed, the United States capital from 1790 to 1800. The bank is a novel reinterpretation of ancient temple architecture, with a Greek Ionic portico at each end but no Classical order on its long side walls. It was also fireproof, being the first American building to be vaulted in masonry throughout. The shallow top-lit saucer dome in the central banking hall recalls the work of Soane, as does Latrobe's Roman Catholic Cathedral at Baltimore (1805–18). Drawing on the Pantheon and on Soufflot (Soufflot, Jacques-Germain)'s Sainte-Geneviève, the cathedral contains a dome resting on segmental arches perhaps inspired by Soane's interiors at the Bank of England. Latrobe's most poetic and inventive work is a series of interiors at the United States Capitol (Capitol, United States) in Washington, D.C., which he executed in his capacity as surveyor of public works, a position to which Jefferson appointed him in 1803. The Supreme Court (Supreme Court of the United States) Chamber (1815–17), with its strange lobed vault resting on stunted Doric columns, suggests a search for a new architecture, as do the capitals of corn (maize) and tobacco leaves that he invented for use in other parts of the building. Jefferson responded warmly to Latrobe's attempt to symbolize in architecture the values of the newly founded republic.

      For the architecture of Latin America, see Latin American architecture.

Sandra Millikin David John Watkin

Gothic Revival, c. 1730–c. 1930

Origins and development
      The architectural movement most commonly associated with Romanticism is the Gothic Revival, a term first used in England in the mid-19th century to describe buildings being erected in the style of the Middle Ages and later expanded to embrace the entire Neo-Gothic movement. The date of its beginning is not easy to pinpoint, for, even when there was no particular liking for Gothic, conservatism and local building practices had conditioned its use as the style for churches and collegiate buildings. In its earliest phase, therefore, Gothic Revival is not easily distinguished from Gothic survival.

      The first clearly self-conscious imitation of Gothic architecture for reasons of nostalgia appeared in England in the early 18th century. Buildings erected at that time in the Gothic manner were for the most part frivolous and decorative garden ornaments, actually more Rococo than Gothic in spirit. But, with the rebuilding beginning in 1747 of the country house Strawberry Hill by the English writer Horace Walpole (Walpole, Horace, 4th earl of Orford), a new and significant aspect of the revived style was given convincing form, and, by the beginning of the 19th century, picturesque planning and grouping provided the basis for experimentation in architecture. Gothic was especially suited to this aim. Scores of houses with battlements and turrets in the style of a castle were built in England during the last years of the 18th century.

      With developing archaeological interest, a new and more earnest turn was given to the movement—a turn that coincided with the religious revivals of the early 19th century and that manifested itself in a spate of church building in the Gothic style. Only toward the middle of the century were the seriousness and moral purpose that underlay this movement formulated as a doctrine and presented to architects as a challenge to the intellect. Augustus Charles Pugin, in England, was the first to codify the principles of the Gothic Revival. Far more persuasive and influential exponents, however, were Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel) in France and John Ruskin (Ruskin, John) in England, who gave to the movement a moral and intellectual purpose. The second half of the 19th century saw the active and highly productive period of the Gothic Revival. By then, the mere imitation of Gothic forms and details was its least important aspect; architects were intent on creating original works based on the principles underlying Gothic architecture and deeply infused with its spirit.

      Another contribution that the Gothic Revival made to architecture was the encouragement of freedom and honesty of structural arrangement. Structural elements could be provided as and where they were needed. There was no need for dissimulation. French architects, in particular Viollet-le-Duc, who restored a range of buildings from the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris) in Paris to the whole town of Carcassonne, were the first to appreciate the applicability of the Gothic skeleton structure, with its light infilling, to a modern age; the analogy was not lost on subsequent architects at a time when the steel frame was emerging as an important element of structural engineering. ( Functionalism and structural honesty as ideals in the modern movement were a legacy of the Gothic Revival.)

      Not surprisingly, the Gothic Revival was felt with most force in those countries in which Gothic architecture itself was most in evidence—England, France, and Germany. Each conceived it as a national style, and each gave to it a strong and characteristic twist of its own.

National and regional variations

From the 17th to the 19th century
      A Gothic Revival was in a sense initiated early in England during the late 16th century under the influence of Elizabethan and Jacobean notions of chivalry and again between 1620 and 1630 under the impetus of William Laud (Laud, William)'s Anglicanism; but it is in the Gothic experimentalism of the late 17th century, particularly that of Sir Christopher Wren (Wren, Sir Christopher)'s circle, in which seeds of a Gothic Revival can be discerned. Although buildings erected at these times imitated Gothic forms, none of them was revivalist in spirit. The Gothic Revival was largely conditioned by literary theory and practice. Although it had antecedents, the so-called “revolution of taste” in the mid-18th century was most clearly marked by publication of Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Thomas Gray (Gray, Thomas), especially in his poems of the 1750s and, later, in his letters, was the first major poet to seek inspiration in a “Gothic” past—not only medieval but Celtic and Icelandic. Thomas Warton (Warton, Thomas, the Younger), poet and critic, acquired his interest in the Middle Ages from architecture and, in his work on medieval English cathedrals and churches, connected the literary aspect of the Gothic Revival with the work that was begun by a group of antiquaries in the late 17th century and that was continued into the 18th.

      The transition from a survival to a revival phase of Gothic architecture took place almost imperceptibly. Curiously enough, it was Sir John Vanbrugh (Vanbrugh, Sir John), England's great exponent of the Baroque spirit, who made the first successful attempt to evoke sensations of the medieval past. In 1717 he built a house for himself at Greenwich, near London, that was intended to conjure up a “castle air.” It is a simple, robust, brick building that relies for its effect on slender proportion rather than detail. But it is an isolated work of its kind.

      Only toward the end of the 18th century did “picturesque” take on a precise meaning, affecting the planning and the forms of English architecture. However, from the late 17th century onward, isolated gardens and estates were laid out to take advantage of the irregularity of landscape, resulting in compositions that approximated those in the paintings of 17th- and 18th-century artists such as Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa (Rosa, Salvator), and Gaspard Poussin—hence, the denomination of the style as “ picturesque.” It was William Kent (Kent, William), in response to the literary ideal of “naturalness” of such writers as Sir William Temple (Temple, Sir William, Baronet), Joseph Addison (Addison, Joseph), and Alexander Pope (Pope, Alexander), who was first acclaimed for fashioning the picturesque landscape that was to be made famous in the 18th century by Lancelot (“Capability”) Brown (Brown, Lancelot) and who introduced occasional buildings into it, often in a Gothic style, to serve as a focus of interest. There were, however, other precursors, notably Vanbrugh and Charles Bridgeman.

      Kent first used the fanciful Rococo “Gothick” that was to become characteristic of the 18th century in 1732, on a gateway in the Clock Tower at Hampton Court. He also reconstructed the Tudor buildings of Esher Lodge between 1729 and 1733, introducing ogee arches and quatrefoil openings. These he used again in the late 1730s in the Temple of the Mill at Rousham, Oxfordshire, where he laid out one of the first irregular gardens. The ornamental character of the Gothic Revival was thus established from the start, and it was popularized as such within a few years by Batty Langley, author of Gothic Architecture Improved by Rules and Proportions (1742). Pretensions to archaeological accuracy appear in two churches built in 1753 by Henry Keene—that at Shobdon, Herefordshire, and a charming, though now derelict, octagonal church at Hartwell, Buckinghamshire. An ardent admirer of Gothic, Keene had begun Gothicizing Arbury Hall, Warwickshire, as early as 1748. It was to the amateurs Sanderson Miller and Horace Walpole, however, that the credit for a full-scale domestic Gothic Revival was due.

      Miller, a Warwickshire squire, began about 1744 by inserting pointed arches in the south front of his Tudor house at Radway, Warwickshire. Later, he put up a garden ornament in the form of a mock Gothic castle at nearby Edgehill, the idea of which became fashionable and made a reputation for him as a designer of Gothic extravaganzas. His most significant work was Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, the symmetrical, flattened facade of which is thinly decorated with Gothic motifs. Walpole (Walpole, Horace, 4th earl of Orford)'s Gothic, though apparently as lighthearted, was more serious in intent. When in 1747 he decided to rebuild his house, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex, he proposed to reflect faithfully in its architecture his tastes for topography, history, and heraldry. He formed a “committee on taste” to advise him on the design. Among the members were the amateur archaeologists Richard Bentley and John Chute, both of whom provided designs. The architect responsible for the execution of most of the work was William Robinson (Robinson, William). During the early phase of building, alterations and interior decorations were made in a pretty, decorative style, with a freedom unhampered by any serious archaeological study. Nor was there any real feeling for medieval composition in the massing of the elements. But in 1761, when a vast circular tower was added to the southwest corner of the house, Walpole gave evidence of a deliberate attempt to achieve an asymmetrical, picturesque composition. The west of the house was more freely grouped. Finally, in 1776, James Essex, probably the most earnest Gothicist of the period, inserted the Beauclerc Tower between the west end and the round tower, making the whole the first and most determined example of a large-scale picturesque composition.

 The fortuitous appearance and the deliberate irregularity of Strawberry Hill were exploited in many late 18th-century buildings. The most extravagant and sensational of all Gothic Revival buildings was Fonthill Abbey (1796–1806), Wiltshire, designed by James Wyatt (Wyatt, James) primarily as a landscape feature for the arch-Romantic William Beckford. The great central tower collapsed in 1807, and most of the building has today disappeared; but, in John Rutter's Delineations of Fonthill (1823), it is still possible to perceive something of the grotesquely spectacular quality that made this building, for a short time, notorious.

      Although many Classically inspired architects, including Sir William Chambers (Chambers, Sir William) and Robert Adam (Adam, Robert), applied Gothic details to the exterior of their country houses (and Adam was even employed at Strawberry Hill), they displayed no great interest in the style and always retained strict symmetry of composition. George Dance (Dance, George, the Younger) used it more thoughtfully and originally in his occasional Gothic buildings—e.g., the facade of the Guildhall (1789), London; Cole Orton Hall (1804–08), Leicestershire; Ashburnham Place (1813–17), Sussex; and the churches of St. Bartholomew-the-Less (1789), London, and Micheldever (1808), Hampshire.

      Walpole's innovation assumed real significance only toward the end of the century, after the theory of the picturesque was evolved and publicized by Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price. Already Knight had given architectural form to his ideas of rugged, irregular, and apparently “natural” composition in Downton Castle, Herefordshire, near Ludlow (1774–78). This was the first irregularly planned castellated (castle-style) building with a Classical interior. It inspired a vast range of such buildings. John Nash (Nash, John) is the best known and most proficient exponent of the style. Starting with his own house, East Cowes Castle, on the Isle of Wight, in about 1798, he exploited the deliberate irregularity of plan and silhouette afforded by the castellated style; from Caerhayes (1808), Cornwall, in the south, to Ravensworth Castle (1808), Durham, in the north, Nash dotted England (and also Ireland) with picturesque castles, houses, and ornamental cottages all of vaguely Gothic or Italianate inspiration.

      Sir John Soane (Soane, Sir John) attempted the Gothic style on at least three occasions—at Port Eliot (1804–06), Cornwall, at Ramsey Abbey (1804–06), Huntingdonshire, and for the library at Stowe (1805–07), Buckinghamshire—but, like his master Dance, strongly influenced by the French Neoclassical theorists Abbé de Cordemoy and Marc-Antoine Laugier, he attempted to distill the effects of Gothic rather than to imitate the style. His suspended arches and his clustered ribs rising sheer from the floor and continuing around the vault are, ultimately, of Gothic inspiration.

From the 19th to the early 20th century
      The great change that occurred at the beginning of the 19th century, when the Gothic Revival moved from a phase of sentimental and picturesque attraction to one of greater archaeological exactitude, was determined largely by the research and publications of antiquarians. In the Itinerarium Curiosum of 1725 William Stukeley (Stukeley, William) first introduced plans, in addition to topographical views, of Gothic buildings; but it was not until 1753, with the publication of Francis Price's Salisbury, that sectional drawings were included. Knowledge was but slowly accumulated, and active, enterprising scholars appeared only toward the end of the 18th century. Foremost of these was John Carter, author of The Ancient Architecture of England (1795 and 1807), in which Gothic details were more faithfully and accurately recorded than in any earlier publication. Thomas Rickman designated the various styles of medieval architecture in An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture (1817), and the French refugee Augustus Charles Pugin, who was first employed by Nash, produced a series of meticulously measured details in Specimens of Gothic Architecture (1821–23). The great popularizer of Gothic archaeology was John Britton, who diffused a knowledge of the medieval buildings of Great Britain with two series of books, The Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain (1807–26) and The History and Antiquities of the Cathedral (Churches of England) (1814–35).

      For many years architecture, however, lagged far behind scholarship. Buildings continued to be put up in a decorative and unconvincing Gothic style. Dozens of castellated houses were built during the first decades of the century. The first successes of Smirke—Lowther Castle (1806–11), Westmorland, and Eastnor Castle (c. 1810–15), Herefordshire—were in this style. The most spectacular was Windsor Castle, by James Wyatt's nephew, Sir Jeffry Wyatville, who began the remodeling in 1824. Gothic was also employed in collegiate work. William Wilkins built the screen and hall at King's College, Cambridge (Cambridge, University of), between 1824 and 1827, and Rickman and Henry Hutchinson added New Court to St. John's College, Cambridge, between 1827 and 1831. But Gothic was to be most widely used—and even exploited—for church architecture, not because it was thought more appropriate than Classical architecture but rather because it was cheaper.

      The Church Building Act of 1818, providing for the expenditure of £1,000,000 on churches, emphasized Gothic as the ecclesiastical style. The commissioners responsible for the spending of this money (together with an additional £500,000 voted in 1824) discovered that a Gothic church cost less to build than a Neoclassical one, with its requisite stone portico; this determined the widespread utilization of the Gothic style. The first significant church to which the commissioners contributed, St. Luke's (1820–24), Chelsea, London, by James Savage, was splendidly vaulted in Bath stone, but meanness as well as meagreness progressively controlled the design of their churches. Of the 612 churches built for the commissioners, more than 550 were Gothic or some related style.

      Gothic was established as a national style when, in 1836, the commissioners for the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament (Parliament, Houses of)) accepted a Gothic design by Sir Charles Barry (Barry, Sir Charles). This was to be the first public building of any consequence in the style. Barry had already experimented with Gothic in no less than nine churches—the best known being St. Peter's (1824–26), Brighton—and had built King Edward's Grammar School (1833–37) in Birmingham in the Gothic style. His great and elaborate Palace of Westminster, however, is not a convincing essay in Gothic composition. The plan is formal, the facade to the river altogether symmetrical, and the detail repetitive. But it derives a picturesque effect from the placing and proportioning of its two towers, St. Stephen's ( Big Ben), halfway along the north face, and the squatter Victoria tower, in the west facade. In England the Palace of Westminster was not imitated—though in Budapest it was formally commemorated in Imre Steindl's Parliament House (1883–1902). Work at Westminster was completed slowly and was finished only after Barry's death. By then the Gothic Revival had been put on an altogether different footing, paradoxically, by the man who was responsible for all the Gothic details of both the King Edward's Grammar School and the Palace of Westminster, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (Pugin, A.W.N.), son of the author of Specimens of Gothic Architecture.

      A Roman Catholic convert, the younger Pugin was intent to show that Gothic was an expression of the Catholic spirit and thus the only form of architecture properly suited to its ritual. In his book Contrasts (1836) he also sought to show that architecture reflects the state of the society by which it is built: the society of the Middle Ages was good; therefore, Gothic architecture was good. In The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) he first laid down firm principles for the Victorian Gothic Revival. Architecture, he held, should be honest in its expression. Every feature of a building should be essential to its proper functioning and construction, and every feature of this construction should be frankly expressed. Architecture was to be judged by the highest standards of morality. Such concepts are a part of Pugin's French heritage; they were commonplace in 18th-century France, but Pugin's ideals came as a revelation to British architects and gave to the Gothic Revival a wholly new seriousness of purpose.

      Most of the buildings in which Pugin attempted to give form to his ideas were built between 1837 and 1844. His first church of any consequence was St. Mary's (1837–39), Derby; his most influential were St. Wilfrid's (1839–42), Hulme, Manchester, and St. Oswald's (1840–42), Old Swan, Liverpool. But all three—like most of his other buildings and even his own favourite, St. Augustine's (1845–51), built near his house at Ramsgate, Kent—though solid and broadly proportioned and far more convincingly imbued with the Gothic spirit than earlier buildings, are not entirely successful as works of architecture. Pugin was too much concerned with the minutiae of medieval detail. When incomplete in their detail and furnishing, his churches are grim; when fully and expensively finished, as at St. Giles's (1841–46) in Cheadle, Staffordshire, they appear overexquisite.

      Pugin's doctrines were taken up by the Anglican reformers, the Tractarians of Oxford (Oxford, University of) and the Camdenians of Cambridge (Cambridge, University of). The Ecclesiological Society, into which the Camden Society was transformed in 1845, so successfully aroused the liturgical enthusiasm of the clergy that most architects employed by the established Church of England in the years that followed were subject to the most doctrinaire of disciplines. Numerous architects were castigated by the critics of the Ecclesiologist, though Richard Cromwell Carpenter—who in 1838 had applied Neo-Tudor details to Lonsdale Square in Islington, London—was consistently upheld for the “correctness” of his work, as were those far more original and competent architects William Butterfield (Butterfield, William) and John Loughborough Pearson. Pearson's masterpiece was St. Augustine's (1870–80), Kilburn Park Road, London.

      Butterfield is remembered today chiefly for the polychromy of his collegiate work at Keble College (1866–86), Oxford, and Rugby School (1868–86), but he was responsible for a range of simple, though no less rigorous and emphatic, country parsonages and churches in Yorkshire, culminating in the group at Baldersby St. James (1855–61), and bold, ruthless, and highly idiosyncratic churches such as St. Matthias's (1849–58), Stoke Newington, London; St. Alban's (1859–63), off Holborn, also in London; St. Augustine's (1864–66), Penarth, near Cardiff; and All Saints' (1865–74), Babbacombe, Devon. Butterfield brought a new vigour to the Gothic Revival. The building that first gave evidence of his power and originality was All Saints', Margaret Street, London, designed in 1849 and largely completed by 1852. This church was sponsored by the Ecclesiological Society. But it is not its liturgical correctness that makes it so important in the history of the Gothic Revival. From the pavement to the top of the tower, the church was built in bands of black and red brickwork, setting a fashion for “structural polychromy.” Internally, marbles and tiles were used to cover all surfaces, giving them a rich coloration.

      This taste for polychromatic decoration was initiated, encouraged, and sustained by the greatest apologist of the Gothic Revival, the critic John Ruskin (Ruskin, John). In 1849 he published The Seven Lamps of Architecture in time to influence Butterfield at All Saints', Margaret Street. Ruskin's Stones of Venice appeared between 1851 and 1853; and within a few years architects throughout England were adapting the details and colour combinations of Italian, especially Venetian Gothic, architecture for myriad clients who had been enraptured by Ruskin's mellifluous descriptions and lofty-sounding sanctions for a Gothic Revival. Like Pugin and the Camdenians, he judged Gothic to be a style with a firm moral basis.

      By the middle of the 1850s, Gothic had become the established mode for church architecture in Great Britain, but it was also considered appropriate to many other types of architecture. In the prodigiously productive decades that followed, the style was applied by a host of industrious and competent architects to many buildings that had no medieval precedents. The most active practitioners of Gothic were Sir George Gilbert Scott (Scott, Sir George Gilbert) and George Edmund Street (Street, George Edmund). Both were busy restorers of medieval cathedrals and churches, but they found time to build a great number of new buildings in the Gothic style. Scott designed no less than 800. His first success was the Martyrs' Memorial (1841) in Oxford; others included the Albert Memorial (1862–72), Hyde Park, London; Glasgow University (1866–71); and the vast and picturesque Midland Hotel (1867–74) at St. Pancras Station, London. He firmly established the supremacy of England as arbiter in the Gothic Revival by winning a competition in 1844 for the church of St. Nicholas (1844–63), in Hamburg, Germany. Street, who was trained by Scott, designed about 260 original buildings, starting with a number of small churches and schools in Cornwall, an outcrop of churches in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, and another in Yorkshire. His churches vary in style, from the elaborate, decorative polychromy of St. James-the-Less (1858–61), Thorndike Street, London, through the more forcefully detailed style of St. Philip and St. James's (1860–62), Oxford, to the bare barn of St. George's (1861), Oakengates, Shropshire. His most famous and probably his noblest work was a secular building, the Law Courts (Royal Courts of Justice), London, competed for in 1866 but not begun until 1874 and completed only after his death in 1882. His influence was exerted through both his architecture and his famous publication Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages (1855).

      The other great secular work of the Gothic Revival, Manchester Town Hall, was won in competition in the same year as the Law Courts, 1866, and begun in 1869. The designer was Alfred Waterhouse (Waterhouse, Alfred), an architect almost as active as Street but one who was responsible for very few churches. Waterhouse demonstrated conclusively that, because of its flexibility, Gothic was not only suitable but was virtually the only revival style applicable to the design of the large and complex buildings required by Victorian administration and institutions. A master planner, he first achieved fame as a result of a competition for the Manchester Assize Court (1859–64); he then designed the ingenious Town Hall (1869–77) and later Owens College (1870–98), also in Manchester. For Oxford he designed Balliol College (1867–69); for Cambridge, the Union (1865–67), Gonville and Caius Colleges, started in 1870, and buildings at Pembroke College (1871–72). His vast London buildings include the Natural History Museum (1873–81), the Prudential Assurance building (1879, 1899–1903), and University College Hospital (1897–1906).

      Though Scott, Street, and Waterhouse dominated the mature phase of the Gothic Revival, they were not always responsible for the most interesting and experimental work of the period. William Burges (Burges, William) (1827–81) designed St. Finbar's Church of Ireland Cathedral in Cork (1863–76) in a curious 12th-century French style. In 1865, at Cardiff Castle in Wales, he began to interpret medieval architecture with merry and decorative freedom. The interiors of this building and of Castell Coch, built 10 years later, are a riot of decoration. His friend Edward Godwin (Godwin, Edward), on the other hand, was more restrained; he built two small, neat town halls in the Gothic style, one at Northampton (1861–64), the other at Congleton (1864–67), Cheshire. Other notable Gothicists were George F. Bodley, who often employed the artist William Morris (Morris, William) and his associates, including the painters Ford Madox Brown (Brown, Ford Madox) and Sir Edward Burne-Jones (Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley, 1st Baronet), to decorate his churches; and Philip Speakman Webb (Webb, Philip Speakman), who had himself been a pupil with Morris in the office of Street and was to build for Morris the Red House (1859–60) at Bexleyheath near London. Little in this building is overtly Gothic—rather, it is intended to evoke the solidity and sound craftsmanship of medieval architecture, an ideal he had adopted from a greatly neglected architect, William White, and one that was to be taken up later by Norman Shaw (Shaw, Norman).

      The Gothic Revival survived into the 20th century, though largely for ecclesiastical architecture. Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, was built in 1880–1910 from designs by J.L. Pearson. After his death in 1897, it was completed by his son, Frank Loughborough Pearson, as was his last work, Brisbane Cathedral, Australia, the construction of which did not begin until 1901. Similarly, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (Scott, Sir Giles Gilbert), the grandson of Sir George Gilbert Scott, maintained the family tradition by designing a cathedral for Liverpool in 1903 in a Gothic style; this magnificent building was completed in 1978. Stephen Dykes Bower made extensive additions in a late Gothic style to Bury St. Edmunds Cathedral (1960–70), and—funded in part by a bequest from the architect—the tower and spire were completed in 2005 to his designs.

      Scott, Butterfield, and Carpenter all supplied designs for churches in the British Commonwealth, but their designs were often modified and slowly executed: Butterfield's Anglican Cathedral, St. Paul's, in Melbourne, Australia, although designed in 1847 and begun in 1850, was not finished until 1934. The direct influence of the English leaders on colonial Gothic was thus small, and numerous churches built in the British dominions during the second half of the 19th century were mostly in a meagre, uninspired Gothic mode.

      In France a taste for medieval legend survived into the 16th century in aristocratic circles and was nurtured not only by the literary works of the Italian Renaissance poets Ludovico Ariosto (Ariosto, Ludovico) and Torquato Tasso (Tasso, Torquato) but also by books on heraldry and blazonry by humanist scholars. More remarkable as evidence of conscious, widespread, and continuing popular interest in the Middle Ages—and especially in Gothic building—were topographical studies and guidebooks published from the middle of the 16th century onward. The Gothic tradition of building continued, especially in ecclesiastical circles, far into the 18th century (e.g., the cathedral at Orléans). But it was largely survival rather than revival. French admirers of Gothic architecture regarded it primarily as a challenge to the intellect. The architects Philibert Delorme (Delorme, Philibert) in the 16th century and François Derand in the 17th analyzed the construction of the Gothic vault. They were quick to appreciate it as a highly efficient and economical framework of columns and ribs, supporting the webs of the vaults (which they regarded as no more than infilling panels carrying no thrust) and counterbalanced by buttresses and flying buttresses—as something, indeed, of a structural scaffold. It was this structural elegance that early 18th-century enthusiasts of Gothic, such as Abbé de Cordemoy, sought to infuse into contemporary architecture. In the Nouveau Traité de toute l'architecture (1714; “New Treatise on All Architecture”) Cordemoy proposed that a new, honest, and economical architecture might be arrived at by abstracting the principles of Gothic construction and applying them in a perfectly regular Classical way. There was no question of reviving the Gothic style; interest in Gothic was to be altogether transmuted into Classical terms. The building of the church of Sainte-Geneviève (now known as the Panthéon) in Paris, designed in a style confirming the Neoclassical ideal but on principles derived from Gothic architecture, gave a new impetus to the study of Gothic construction. French architects were imbued with a rational appreciation of Gothic that was without parallel.

      Although there was a native French vogue in the 18th century for the medieval literature of the troubadours, it was the intrusion of English ideas that prompted more authentic representations of the medieval world in stage settings and history paintings after 1772. Certainly, the Gothic taste in architecture was conditioned by the introduction of the informal landscape garden. By 1781 there were a number of English gardens in France with mock-Gothic pavilions, and, during the last two decades of the century, many more were built. But the frivolous, lighthearted “Gothick” of 18th-century England never took hold in France; the French (French Revolution) made virtually no attempt to imitate, let alone rival, the splendours of Strawberry Hill and Fonthill Abbey.

      To the revolutionaries at the end of the 18th century, Gothic architecture seemed a symbol of the vested power of the aristocracy and the church, and many buildings were wantonly destroyed. Yet, popular interest in the picturesque charms of Gothic architecture was sustained and even intensified by such men as Alexandre Lenoir, who in 1795 turned the largest of the Paris depots for plundered works of art, the Petits-Augustins (now the École des Beaux-Arts (Beaux-Arts, École des)), into the Museum of French Monuments. Here, by clever juxtaposition and subtle lighting, the Middle Ages seemed to be endowed with an aura of magic. By suggesting a relationship between a chivalric past and the actual forms of Gothic sculpture and architecture, Lenoir coloured the imagination of a whole generation of Romantics (Romanticism). The great Romantic writer François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René, vicomte de), was fascinated by Lenoir's collection. Indeed, a celebrated chapter on Gothic architecture in Chateaubriand's Le Génie du christianisme (1802; “The Genius of Christianity”), in which Gothic is not only taken as the symbol for the old French Catholic spirit but also is traced beyond, through the forests of Gaul, to nature itself, was directly inspired by Lenoir's work. Inevitably, a Romantic Gothic image was popularized in the years that followed; Romantic playwrights, novelists, and painters were seduced by the charms of Gothic. Even antiquarians succumbed to the Romantic myth, and from 1810 onward a spate of popular guidebooks and studies of Gothic architecture was published.

      In spite of a few Gothic-inspired fantasies and an archaeological interest in medieval architecture that found expression in the Neo-Romanesque church of Saint-Paul (1835) at Nîmes by Charles-Auguste Questel, architecture remained a virtually impregnable stronghold until after 1840, when a hard core of Gothic Revivalists began to emerge. This was composed of consistent medievalists who were stirred primarily by archaeological pretensions. Stimulated by the activity of English scholars in Normandy, they patiently studied the medieval remains of that region and slowly forged the science of French Gothic archaeology. An equally important aspect of the Gothic Revival was inaugurated by the great Romantic author Victor Hugo (Hugo, Victor), when he published in 1831 Notre-Dame de Paris, the explicit purpose of which was the glorification of Gothic as a national and Catholic style of architecture. But it was the Protestant statesman François Guizot (Guizot, François) who first gave real impetus to those ideas promoted by Hugo. In 1830 he inaugurated the organization that seven years later became the Commission on Historical Monuments.

      All the serious, acceptable architects of the Gothic Revival were amateur archaeologists (archaeology), and they acknowledged an archaeological standard of taste. They designed from the first in the 13th-century style, and nearly all had designed the restorations for at least one Gothic building before they undertook to build anything new. The patronage of the Commission on Historical Monuments and later of the Diocesan Buildings Service (formed in 1848), for which thousands of medieval buildings were restored and enlarged, was thus of enormous importance in furthering the aims and the technical skill of the Gothic Revivalists. The men who sustained the Gothic Revival were almost all taught by the commission's leading architects, Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel). Lassus trained Viollet-le-Duc first on the restorations in Paris of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois and the Sainte-Chapelle. In 1844 they were both appointed to restore Notre-Dame de Paris and to build a new sacristy in the Gothic style; this was regarded as an official sanction for the Gothic Revival. But, although a picturesque revival of Gothic had already been initiated in the provinces, official sanction for a full-scale revival was not easily accorded. The members of the French Academy, faithful to Neoclassical ideals, were firmly against it.

      In 1844 the north tower of the abbey church of Saint-Denis, begun under Suger in 1135, was found to be in danger of collapse. All Gothic Revivalists were aghast. Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, editor of the Annales archéologiques and propagandist for the Gothic Revival, tactlessly accused the Council of Civil Buildings, which was charged with the approval of all building plans in France, of irresponsibility. Its members, mainly academicians, retaliated by arbitrarily stopping the construction of three churches in the Gothic style that Didron had acclaimed in his journal. Didron then launched a counteroffensive; he demanded a public inquiry into the restoration of Saint-Denis. Under threat of this inquiry, which was powerfully supported by the prefect of the Seine district, Barthelot Rambuteau, the council was forced to approve the plans for Sainte-Clotilde in Paris by Franz Christian Gau, plans that they had held up for more than four years. It became a cause célèbre. A furious pamphlet war followed, from which the Gothic Revivalists emerged triumphant, and in 1852 Didron estimated that 200 neo-Gothic churches had been built or were in the process of construction. But the victory was short-lived. Sainte-Clotilde, as completed by Gau and his successor Théodore Ballu in 1857, was an anomalous expression of revivalist ideals. Didron disliked it intensely, and the dispute caused many admirers of Gothic architecture to reflect seriously on the merits of a Gothic Revival.

      Lassus went on to build Saint-Nicolas (1848) at Moulins, Saint-Pierre at Dijon (1852), and Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-Belleville (1854) in Paris. Viollet-le-Duc constructed Saint-Gimer (1853–57) at Carcassonne, the church of Nouvelle Aude (1855) and Saint-Denys-de l'Estrée (1860–67) at Saint-Denis; he restored the Château de Pierrefonds (1858-70) to a state of colourful medieval splendour for Louis-Napoleon; and, in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française (1854–68; “Analytical Dictionary of French Architecture”) and the Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français (1858–75; “Analytical Dictionary of French Furniture”), together running into 16 volumes, he provided the vital visual and intellectual inspiration required to sustain the Gothic movement. But he was by no means a convinced revivalist. All but one of his secular works are in an uneasy Renaissance mode. He determined to think his way beyond the Romantic attractions of the Gothic style. Pursuing the inquiries of 18th-century theorists, he envisaged an architecture of the 19th century that would be based on the rational system of construction and composition that he recognized to be embodied in Gothic; however, he would in no way imitate the Gothic's forms and details. Architecture, he thought, should be the clear expression in 19th-century materials of 19th-century structural and functional needs. He was unable to accept the challenge of his own ideas. Both he and his disciples—Paul Abadie, Émile Boeswillwald, Eugène-Louis Millet, Maurice Ouradou, Anatole de Baudot, Édouard Corroyer, Félix Narjoux, and Édmond Duthoit—continued to design buildings (primarily churches) in a weak Gothic style. There were many less-thoughtful and determined men who put up imitations of Gothic architecture in the late 19th century, but the Gothic Revival was never a full-blooded affair. Some of the finest buildings designed after the medieval manner—Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge (1864–72) in Paris, by Joseph-Auguste-Émile Vaudremer, is one—were isolated works by architects who worked outside the orbit of the Gothic Revivalists and who had no qualms about the intellectual honesty of their chosen mode of expression.

Germany and central Europe
      As in France, German interest in medieval legend, history, art, and architecture was sustained throughout the Renaissance both by the general public and by scholars and antiquarians. Interest was focused, in particular, on the cathedrals of Strasbourg and Cologne, buildings that were to assume an almost symbolic significance in the history of the Gothic Revival on the continent. In his Rerum Germanicarum Epitome (1505; “Epitome of Things German”) the humanist Jakob Wimpheling extolled Strasbourg cathedral as the rarest and most excellent of buildings, and Oseas Schadaeus's guide to the cathedral, Summum Argentoratensium Templum (1617; “Strasbourg's Finest Church”) was the first illustrated guidebook ever devoted to a single medieval building and, in spite of its Latin title, was written in German. Other 17th- and early 18th-century histories and guides—and there were many—give ample evidence of a respectful appreciation of Gothic, despite the jibes of fashionable leaders. Appreciation of Gothic was a traditional and emotional affair, far removed from the studied and analytical interest of the French. Not surprisingly, English Gothic sentiments permeated Germany with the mid-18th-century taste for things English. Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) by the English poet Edward Young (Young, Edward) enjoyed a vogue in Germany that it never aspired to in England. English attitudes and ideas provided the German Gothic Revival with its peculiarly impassioned character.

      The Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) conception of the late 18th century invested the Gothic with extraordinary and unparalleled qualities; it seemed to such philosophers as Johann Gottfried von Herder (Herder, Johann Gottfried von) (and, under his inspiration, to the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von)) to be of the most sublime and exalted inspiration—an expression at once of all nature, all things divine and infinite. Goethe's paean to the cathedral at Strasbourg—and to its builder Erwin von Steinbach—was a 16-page pamphlet, Von deutscher Baukunst (1772; “On German Architecture”), that was an inspiration to all future revivalists. Goethe epitomized the Gothic as the expression of the German spirit. The Gothic became a German form of architecture, and it was to remain such in the estimate of all Germans, even German scholars, for 50 years and more. Goethe's passion for the Gothic was not long sustained, but his enthusiasm was shared by other contemporaries, notably, the author and statesman Friedrich von Schlegel (Schlegel, Friedrich von), who saw the Gothic not only as an expression of the German spirit but specifically of a German Catholic spirit. This belief he shared with the brothers Sulpiz and Melchoir Boisserée, by whom he was largely inspired.

      Sulpiz Boisserée was the most active and enthusiastic of early Gothic Revivalists. His great preoccupation was the cathedral of Cologne, which he measured minutely, starting in 1808 but continuing up to the publication of Ansichten, Risse und einzelne Theile des Doms von Köln (“Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Cathedral of Cologne”), issued between 1823 and 1831, and an accompanying text, Geschichte und Beschreibung des Doms von Köln (“History and Description of the Cathedral of Cologne”), of 1823. The purpose of this study was the restoration and completion of the unfinished cathedral. He enlisted the moral support even of Goethe and the financial support of King Frederick William III, who in 1824 ordered the preservation of the building. This work of conservation was carried out by Friedrich Ahlert, under the guidance of Schinkel, and after his death by the most gifted of Schinkel's pupils, Ernst Friedrich Zwirner. The task of completion was started in 1842, at the command of King Frederick William IV, and was carried through after Zwirner's death by Richard Voigtel, who finished the work only in 1880. The building of the Cologne cathedral was an expression of German nationalism and marked the beginning of the Gothic Revival proper in Germany.

      Earlier expressions of the Gothic Revival in architecture were of a Rococo or picturesque nature and were much influenced by contemporary fashions in England. From 1725 to 1728, Joseph Effner, gardener to the elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria, built the Gothic-inspired Magdalene Chapel on the grounds of the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. In 1755 Frederick II the Great of Prussia designed the Nauener Gate in Potsdam himself, and in 1768 Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau laid out his park in the picturesque manner and scattered it, in the years that followed, with Gothic hermitages and ruins. Other 18th-century German gardens were similarly embellished: the New Garden in Potsdam, laid out in the 1780s for Frederick William II by Langhans, or the more spectacular ruined Ritterburg (1793–98), in the park of the landgrave William IX of Hesse at Wilhelmshöhe. There were even odd or idiosyncratic interpretations of the Gothic—the tower of Mainz Cathedral (1767–74) by Franz Ignaz Neumann or the Laugier-inspired remodeling of the St. Nikolai Church in Leipzig (1784–97) by Johann Friedrich Carl Dauthe. In the latter church, the Gothic ribs of the vault were transformed into palm fronds.

      The first architect of any distinction to take an active interest in the Gothic was Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Schinkel, Karl Friedrich). He was inspired by Friedrich Gilly's engravings of the castle of Marienburg in East Prussia (1799) to paint, between 1810 and 1815, a number of visionary studies of Gothic buildings in the manner of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (Friedrich, Caspar David). He also designed several stage sets in the Gothic style. Schinkel's first serious architectural composition was a Gothic mausoleum designed in 1810 for Queen Louisa of Prussia. He did other equally Romantic designs in the Gothic, the most spectacular being that for a cathedral in the Leipzig Square, Berlin. But none of his ambitious Gothic projects was executed.

      Other prominent Neoclassicists who experimented with Gothic were Friedrich von Gärtner, designer of the Ludwigskirche (1829–44) in Munich, and Gottfried Semper, who provided the plans for the Cholera Fountain in Dresden (1843). But their handling of Gothic forms was stiff and awkward, as was that of most German architects of the period, whose works were adulterated and unconvincing essays into the style.

      The first significant church of the Gothic Revival was the Votive Church (1856–79) in Vienna by Heinrich von Ferstel. Indeed, Vienna was the centre of the most active and intriguing adaptations of Gothic. Friedrich Schmidt, who had worked under Zwirner at Cologne, was the leading revivalist. He built no fewer than eight churches in Vienna, ranging in date from the church of the Lazarists (1860–62) to St. Severinus Church (1877–78). The most ambitious is the Fünfhaus parish church (1868–75) outside Vienna.

      Along the Rhine, several great castles were restored and dramatized with spiky Gothic trimmings. In Dresden there was a minor outburst of revivalism, but these works cannot be said to have contributed much to the course of architectural history. The Gothic Revival in Germany was not a concerted movement, and there is no specific term in German to describe it. One of the rare buildings that may be considered as characteristic of a specifically German revival and exuberantly Gothic is the Munich Town Hall (1867–74, enlarged 1899–1909), by Georg Joseph von Hauberisser.

      Gothic elements are apparent in the elegant wooden churches that dot the Transylvanian countryside. Eighteenth-century village craftsmen combined the image of the peasant house with steep roofs and tall spires.

      The Gothic style continued strong in the Low Countries throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, inflecting the revived Classical architecture to so great an extent that it retained a peculiar, hybrid quality. But no significant contribution was made to the Gothic movement until the Dutch (Netherlands, The) architect Petrus Josephus Hubertus Cuypers, an ardent and painstaking interpreter of the ideas of Viollet-le-Duc, began work. The career of Cuypers was, indeed, parallel to that of Viollet-le-Duc; he restored numerous Gothic churches and built many new ones in that style, mainly of brick, the Vondel Church of 1870 and the church of Mary Magdalene of 1887, both in Amsterdam, being the most impressive. For his great secular buildings in that city, the Rijksmuseum (1876–85) and the Central Station (1881–89), he chose a Gothic that passes rather into the Renaissance style.

      In Belgium the work of Cuypers finds its counterpart in that of Jozef Schadde, architect of the Antwerp stock exchange (1858–80) and the station in Brugge.

      The emergence of National Romanticism in Scandinavia in the 1880s gave rise to buildings such as Martin Nyrop's Copenhagen Town Hall (1892–1902), which combined Northern Renaissance features with a crenellated Gothic skyline. Its fine craftsmanship and delicate eclecticism were echoed in the celebrated Town Hall at Stockholm, designed in 1908 by Ragnar Östberg and executed in 1911–23. In Finland, Lars Sonck worked in an Arts and Crafts Gothic style reminiscent of the work of the American Henry Hobson Richardson (Richardson, Henry Hobson)—e.g., his Tampere Cathedral (1902–07) and Telephone Exchange, Helsinki (1905).

      The Gothic Revival never really took hold in Italy. The Pedrocchi Café (1837), with its Venetian Gothic wing erected in Padua by Giuseppe Japelli, and Pelagio Palagi's pavilion La Margheria (1834–39), at Racconigi, are isolated examples. The revival was confined in the main to the completion of church facades, starting with that of the cathedral in Milan (1806–13) by Carlo Amati and Giuseppe Zanoia. It included Giorgio Morandi (Morandi, Giorgio)'s fanciful addition to the front of the cathedral at Biella (c. 1825) and the facades of Santa Croce (1857–63) in Florence, by Niccolò Matas; the cathedral of Florence (1867–87) by Emilio de Fabris; and the cathedral of Naples (1876–1907) by Enrico Alvino, Niccolò Breglia, and Giuseppe Pisanti.

Spain and Portugal
      There was virtually nothing in the way of revived Gothic architecture in Spain before the middle of the 19th century, when Juan Martorell and a group of his disciples in Catalonia took up the idea of evolving a national style based on medieval precedent. The source of their inspiration was the work of Viollet-le-Duc. But it was not until Antoni Gaudí (Gaudí, Antoni), the most idiosyncratic of all Catalan architects, started designing in the 1870s that anything of more than marginal interest was built. His first independent work, the house of Don Manuel Vicens in Barcelona (1878–80), was, however, Mudéjar rather than Gothic in style, as were such later works as the Episcopal Palace at Astorga (1887–93) and the College of Santa Teresa de Jesús (1889–94) in Barcelona. His Gothic sympathies were evident in the crypt of the church of the Holy Family in Barcelona, which he completed from 1884 to 1887, to the design of his master Francesc de Paula del Villar i Carmona. Gaudí also restored the Gothic cathedral of Palma, on the island of Mallorca, between 1901 and 1914. The Gothic element is implicit rather than overt, however, in most of his intensely personal mature works.

      The Gothic Revival in the United States was inevitably a stylistic import; it was not the outcome of deeply felt original sentiments of either a Romantic or moral nature. At first, it was regarded only as a facet of architectural historicism. Architects later adopted the aspirations and ideals of Pugin, the Camdenians, and even of Viollet-le-Duc and attempted to use the Gothic style in conformity with the principles that they had laid down; but few were consistent (the Episcopalians (Episcopal Church in the United States of America) alone adhered to the doctrines of the Ecclesiologists), and fewer still had sufficient firsthand knowledge of the style to interpret it with any conviction.

      Drawings exist for Gothic garden pavilions for Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia; but the first recorded building in the Gothic style was Sedgeley, a mansion erected outside Philadelphia in 1798 to the design of Benjamin Latrobe (Latrobe, Benjamin). The thin, etiolated Gothic of this house was repeated in other of his designs—an unexecuted project for a cathedral in Baltimore, Maryland (1805); the Bank of Philadelphia (1807–08); Christ Church (1808), Washington, D.C.; and St. Paul's at Alexandria, Virginia (1817)—but he was essentially a Neoclassical architect. The same could be said of other early practitioners of Gothic—William Strickland (Strickland, William), who built the Masonic Hall (1809–11) and St. Stephen's (1822–23), both in Philadelphia, and Charles Bulfinch (Bulfinch, Charles), architect of the Federal Street Church, Boston (1809).

      The first Gothic Revival church of any consequence, St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore (1807), was designed by a Frenchman, Maximilien Godefroy. Others were built in the early decades of the 19th century—e.g., St. Luke's at Rochester, New York (1824–26)—but not before the 1830s was a series of churches put up in and around Boston that gives evidence of a consistent Gothic Revival movement—Solomon Willard's Bowdoin Street Church (1830) and the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Temple Street, both in Boston, and St. Peter's (1833) and the First Unitarian Church (1936–37) in Salem, Massachusetts, are examples. Most of these churches are constructed of granite and consequently are plain and simple in detail. In sharp contrast are the light timber churches with intricate and fanciful Gothic details put up at the same period, in particular St. Peter's at Waterford, Pennsylvania (1831), by Bishop John Hopkins, author of Essay on Gothic Architecture (1836).

      The active, enterprising architect of the next phase of the Gothic Revival was Richard Upjohn (Upjohn, Richard). In 1835 he built a somewhat thin and vitiated Gothic mansion, Oaklands, at Gardiner, Maine. He achieved fame, however, as a builder of churches. St. John's (1836), Bangor, Maine, was his first Gothic church; but it was Trinity Church (1839–46) at New York City, in a flat, harsh Gothic style, that established his reputation. This was built for the Episcopalians and was rigidly “correct” in the ecclesiological sense. During the next 30 years he designed no fewer than 40 Gothic churches, mostly for the Episcopalians. Externally, they appear as brittle, uninspired adaptations of English models, but in his internal work and especially in buildings such as the First Parish Church (1845–46), Brunswick, Maine, he showed himself to be an extraordinary and unparalleled manipulator of timber arcading and trussing. Equally important as exemplars of intrinsically American interpretations of the Gothic Revival theme are his churches built entirely of timber—wooden framed and sheathed with vertical boarding and battening—such as St. Paul's at Brunswick, Maine, of 1845, or St. Thomas's, Hamilton, New York, of 1847.

      The timber tradition (or “carpenter's Gothic (Carpenter Gothic)”) was in no way limited to ecclesiastical work. Upjohn's Rural Architecture (1852) applied the same method of design to the construction of timber houses and cottages. Decorated with details deriving from Gothic sources, this domestic architecture was, in sheer quantity, the chief expression of the Gothic Revival during the middle years of the century. Powerful support for the movement came also from Andrew Jackson Downing (Downing, Andrew Jackson), landscape gardener and architectural critic, who was a close friend of the architect Alexander Jackson Davis (Davis, Alexander Jackson). In 1845 Davis designed the first plantation mansion in the Gothic style (Belmead, Powhatan County, Virginia) and, more significantly, Ericstan (1855), the John J. Herrick house in Tarrytown, New York, which introduced castellated Gothic into the Hudson River valley, and did Gothic cottage designs such as the home of William H. Drake at Hartford, Connecticut. Downing leaned heavily on the theorists of the English picturesque style—his major work, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America (1841), is, indeed, a paraphrase of their arguments—but, in his pattern books Cottage Residences (1842) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), he provided an inherently American variant on the “stick style,” with its use of board-and-batten finish to imitate half-timbering, that was soon diffused widely as the “bracketed cottage style.”

      About 1860 the Gothic movement entered a new and determinedly serious phase. James Renwick (Renwick, James, (Jr.)) (1818–95), who in 1848 had designed the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in a Neo-Norman style, used continental models again in 1859 when building St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Cathedral in New York City. Most architects of the period, however, sought inspiration from England and acclaimed the writings of John Ruskin (Ruskin, John). The first building to give expression to his teachings was perhaps the Alumni Hall, Union College, Schenectady, New York, designed in 1858 and completed in 1875, by Edward T. Potter, a pupil of Upjohn. The banded and pointed arches of this building suggest the influence of Ruskin. More successful—and controversial—as an exponent of the Ruskinian aesthetic was Peter B. Wight, architect of the National Academy of Design, New York City (1863–65). There the Venetian Gothic mode came into its own. Wight and Potter—and, later, Potter's brother William Appleton—were responsible for a number of collegiate and public buildings in this harsh, polychrome Gothic style, but it was William Robert Ware and his partner Henry Van Brunt who were to become its most fashionable exponents. In 1859 Ware built St. John's Chapel at the Episcopal Theological Seminary on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts; six years later he and his partner started the First Church (Unitarian) in Boston, and in 1870 they began Memorial Hall at Harvard, a conspicuous, if not altogether polished, exemplar of the style. Other purveyors of “collegiate Gothic” were Richard Morris Hunt (Hunt, Richard Morris), architect of the Yale Divinity School (1869), and Russell Sturgis, a partner of Wight, who designed several of the halls at Yale University between 1869 and 1885.

      John H. Sturgis and Charles Brigham, architects of the Museum of Fine Arts on Copley Square (1876; closed 1909) and the church of the Advent (1878), both in Boston, attempted to give to this tough, uneasy Gothic style something of monumental grandeur in their competition design of 1872 for the Connecticut State Capitol Building in Hartford. Their design was reminiscent of that submitted by William Burges (Burges, William) in 1866 for the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The competition, however, was won by Richard M. Upjohn, son of the church builder, who provided a Gothic project that was equally grandiose if more equivocal in expression. Within a few years Hartford was to possess an authentic Burges building, Trinity College. Only a small part of Burges's magnificent design of 1873 was, however, executed.

      The most original architects to emerge from the late Gothic Revival movement were Frank Heyling Furness (Furness, Frank Heyling), known for his vigorous handling of Gothic motifs on the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1872–76) and a series of banks in Philadelphia—the most extraordinary of which was the Provident Institution on Chestnut Street (1879)—and Henry Hobson Richardson (Richardson, Henry Hobson), who used characteristics of the Gothic and Romanesque as a point of departure for the creation of a distinctive and altogether personal style. Richardson started his Gothic career with the Unity Church (1866–69), Springfield, Massachusetts. During the following years he developed a robust, broadly proportioned style in a series of churches—Grace Episcopal Church, West Medford, Massachusetts (1867–68); Brattle Square Church, Boston (1870–72); and the North Congregational Church, Springfield, Massachusetts (1872–73)—culminating in Trinity Church on Copley Square, Boston (c. 1872–77). Overt Gothic influence is evident in most of Richardson's early works, but later the Gothic style was to be superseded by the introduction of Romanesque paradigms, to which he gave so strong an imprint of his own distinct sense of style that they are rarely disquieting.

      In the 20th century the most ardent exponents of Gothic were Ralph Adams Cram (Cram, Ralph Adams) and his partners, Bertram G. Goodhue and Frank W. Ferguson, who regarded it as particularly suitable for educational establishments. The Graduate College (1913) and University Chapel (1929) at Princeton University are among their finest achievements. Other powerful Gothic buildings include their Cadet Chapel, United States Military Academy, West Point, New York (1910), and James Gamble Rogers's Memorial Quadrangle and Harkness Tower, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (1916–33). Goodhue's most arresting building is his State Capitol, Lincoln, Nebraska (1921–32), with a soaring tower that has a Gothic flavour though its design is fundamentally abstract. Gothic elements are also responsible for the medieval-tower aspect of many of the early skyscrapers, the most notable example being Cass Gilbert (Gilbert, Cass)'s Woolworth Building, New York City (1910–13), which has a steel frame clad in fireproof, lightweight terra-cotta, richly carved with Gothic detail and dramatically illuminated at night.

Robin David Middleton Ed.

Classicism (Classicism and Neoclassicism), 1830–1930

Continuing development
      Until recently conventional histories of architecture treated the 19th century as an unfortunate period in which historicist architects needlessly obstructed the path to a new architecture based on technology and engineering. The importance of the 20th century, according to this view, consisted in the establishment of the Modernist movement as the final victory of Functionalism—in which buildings are designed so as to avoid all historical reference and are even constructed of “new” materials.

      Today, however, a new interpretation has arisen, for two reasons: first, the growth of serious study of the historical architecture of the 19th century led to its reappraisal as an independent architectural movement of high quality; second, the arrival of postmodernism in the 1970s led to a realization that the Modernist movement was not a permanent plateau to which the whole of the 19th and 20th centuries had been leading but was simply another historical period. With the withdrawal of the privileged status that had been for so long granted to Modernism, it became possible to take a broader look at the period from 1830 to 1930. From the conventional histories, for example, one would scarcely be aware that most buildings erected up to the 1930s were designed in a range of Classical and traditional styles.

National and regional variations
      The École des Beaux-Arts (Beaux-Arts, École des) (School of Fine Arts) in Paris was the most important centre of architectural education in the Western world in the 19th century. Founded in 1819 as the successor to the Royal Academy of Architecture, the École drew students not only from France but also from throughout Europe and, after 1850, from North America. At the École, architecture was seen as a public service involving the representation in stone of national and civic dignity, and teaching thus centred on the problems of designing monumental public buildings in the Classical style. Jacques-Ignace Hittorff was typical of those architects who combined the practice of modern classicism with archaeological investigation into Greek and Roman architecture. His Gare du Nord, Paris (1861–65), showed brilliantly how a language ultimately inspired by the triumphal arches of ancient Rome could lend an appropriate monumental emphasis to a major metropolitan railway terminus. In Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Paris (1830–46), a church with a giant portico leading to an aisled basilican interior, Hittorff incorporated polychromatic decoration inspired by his discoveries that Greek temples had been systematically painted in strong colours. His publications on this subject between 1827 and 1851 were important because the gaudy and essentially ephemeral character of polychromatic decoration was incompatible with the image of timeless purity with which Greek art had been invested by Johann Winckelmann (Winckelmann, Johann).

      Henri Labrouste (Labrouste, Henri), a more inventive architect than Hittorff, pursued similar research into Greek architecture with the ambition of making it seem human rather than divine or unapproachable; for example, he argued that what is now known as the Temple of Hera I at Paestum was not a temple but a civil assembly hall. His drawings showing the building in use, with transitory adornments such as trophies, inscriptions, paintings, and even graffiti, shocked the members of the Academy of Fine Arts to whom he submitted them in 1828. Ten years later he had the opportunity of designing a great public building in which he could express his ideals of modernized classicism. This was the Library of Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, designed in 1838–39 and built from 1843 to 1850; it is one of the masterpieces of 19th-century architecture. The austere arcuated (arched) facade, owing something to Leon Battista Alberti (Alberti, Leon Battista)'s Malatesta Temple at Rimini, Italy, is adorned with the carved names of more than 800 of the most important authors whose books are housed within. The columns and arches supporting the huge barrel-vaulted ceiling of the main reading room are constructed of elegantly ornamented cast iron—an early use of this material in a major public building.

 Louis Duc's Palace of Justice, Paris (1857–68), articulated with a powerful Doric order, is a major expression of Beaux-Arts ideals, but it is Charles Garnier (Garnier, Charles)'s Paris Opéra House (1862–75) that is widely regarded as the climax of 19th-century French classicism. The ingenious planning and spatial complexity of the Opéra owe much to Beaux-Arts methods of organization, but the scale is new, as is the lavish provision of circulation space, including the great staircase and numerous richly decorated galleries, foyers, and corridors). Garnier planned this spectacular setting so that visitors would begin their theatrical experience the moment they entered the building. The Opéra fits into the web of new streets or boulevards built for Emperor Napoleon III by Baron Haussmann (Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, Baron) in 1854–70. These broad avenues of apartment blocks and shops, frequently contrived in Baroque fashion to create vistas converging on major public buildings, set a pattern that was widely followed in the expansion and modernization of European capital cities.

      The Classical language of Hittorff and Duc was echoed throughout the 19th century by French architects such as Jean-Louis Pascal (e.g., Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bordeaux; 1880–88) and Henri-Paul Nénot (e.g., New Sorbonne, Paris; 1885–1901), both of whom were influential teachers at the École des Beaux-Arts. A high point was reached with the Paris Exposition of 1889, for which Henri Deglane and Victor Laloux erected, respectively, the Grand Palais and the Gare d'Orsay (renovated as the Musée d'Orsay (Orsay Museum), 1979–86). These monumental buildings are in a frothy Baroque style, though they incorporate much glass and iron. Reaction to this exuberance was expressed in the work of Auguste Perret (Perret, Auguste), who attempted to apply the newly developed technique of reinforced-concrete construction to buildings designed in a trabeated (post-and-lintel) style that was ultimately Classical: for example, his Theatre of the Champs-Élysées, Paris (1911–12), and the Museum of Public Works, Paris (1936), now the headquarters of the Economic and Social Council. At the International Exposition of 1937, or Paris World's Fair, pavilions in a range of styles were dominated by the Chaillot Palace, built from designs by Jacques Carlu, Louis-Hippolyte Boileau, and Léon Azéma. This is a striking example of the austere trabeated classicism that was the most popular style for public buildings in the 1930s in many parts of the United States and Europe. It is often known as stripped classicism because features such as columns and pilasters were reduced to a grid and deprived of their customary moldings.

      Britain in 1830 was still in the middle of a building boom that had begun at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Towns were expanded with buildings in the international Greek Revival manner such as William Wilkins's Yorkshire Museum, York (1827–30). The architect Charles Robert Cockerell, despite being a distinguished Classical archaeologist, regarded this rigid Greek formula as stylistically restricting. He felt that he belonged to a continuing Classical tradition that linked ancient Greek architect Ictinus with Baroque architect Francesco Borromini (Borromini, Francesco). In his masterpiece, the Ashmolean Museum (Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology) and Taylor Institution, Oxford (1841–44), he produced a type of Grecian mannerism in which elements from Greek, Roman, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture were united in a rich sculptural weave of powerful originality. He was also important for bringing the same high quality of design and materials to the field of commercial architecture, as in his Bank of England, Liverpool (1844–47).

      Despite the high regard in which the allusive Classical buildings of this learned and sensitive architect were held, the immediate future for British architecture did not lie with Cockerell. The Gothic Revival attracted the most thoughtful minds and the most gifted architects between about 1840 and 1870. From the 1870s, however, Norman Shaw (Shaw, Norman) and William Eden Nesfield led a move away from the Gothic Revival, with its strongly ecclesiastical flavour, to the more domestic charms of the so-called Queen Anne Revival. In prominent buildings such as his red-brick mansion for Frederick White at No. 170, Queen's Gate, London (1888–90), and Parr's (now National Westminster) Bank, Liverpool (1898–1901), Shaw demonstrated the virtues of the simple astylar (columnless) tradition of English 17th- and 18th-century architecture.

      Among the many who were profoundly influenced by the brilliance and diversity of Shaw in the field of domestic and commercial architecture, none was more important than Sir Edwin Lutyens (Lutyens, Sir Edwin). In early houses such as Deanery Garden, Sonning, Berkshire (1901), he adopted local vernacular styles but was nonetheless able to display his characteristic geometric massing on the exteriors and his love of complex spatial flow in the interiors. These qualities make such houses an interesting parallel to the domestic work of Lutyens's contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd). The same play with volume and space governs the design of Lutyens's masterpieces such as Viceroy's House (now the Presidential Palace), New Delhi (1912–30), and the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Thiepval, France (1928–30), in which he reduced the language of the Classical orders to an almost abstract synthesis.

      The Neoclassical town planning of the years around 1815 was succeeded in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, by a Renaissance revival of which an ambitious example is the Palace of Justice, Rome (1888–1910), by Guglielmo Calderini. This revival was appropriate in a country that was home to the Renaissance. It thus blended well with the growth of Italian nationalism, of which the most conspicuous architectural expression is Giuseppe Sacconi's Monument to Victor Emmanuel II, Rome (1885–1911). This amazingly confident, if generally unloved, re-creation of imperial Roman grandeur commemorates the king under whom Italian unity had been achieved in 1861.

      Italy's ancient Roman past was recalled once more in the 1920s and '30s as a consequence of Mussolini's attempt to legitimate his political regime. In Rome during the 1930s Marcello Piacentini and Vittorio Ballio Mopurgo created, respectively, the Via della Conciliazione and the Piazza Augusto Imperiale. Though monumental in scale, these were in a dull and simplified Classical style and involved the destruction of substantial parts of the historic centre of the city. More attractive were the new towns, such as Littoria (now Latina) and Aprilia, created south of Rome in 1932–39, whose architects drew on the recent archaeological discoveries at the ancient Roman town of Ostia.

      Schinkel set the pattern for the transformation of 18th-century royal cities into modern urban centres with numerous Neoclassical public buildings built in Berlin between 1815 and 1835. His many successors in Berlin included Friedrich Stüler and Johann Strack, who designed the National Gallery (1865–69), but architects such as Paul Wallot adopted an increasingly turgid neo-Renaissance manner, as in the Reichstag Building (1884–94). In the mid-19th century Munich was transformed for King Ludwig I of Bavaria by architects Leo von Klenze (Klenze, Leo von) and Friedrich von Gärtner into a major cultural capital. Their twin models were Periclean Athens and Renaissance Florence, the former providing the inspiration for Klenze's Greek Doric Ruhmeshalle (1843–54) and Propylaeon (1846–60) and the latter for Gärtner's Bavarian State Library (1832–43). The most poetic product of a Winckelmannesque identification of the spirit of modern Germany with that of ancient Greece was the Walhalla above the Danube River near Regensburg. This great Greek temple was built in 1830–42 for Ludwig I from designs by Klenze as a monument to pan-German unity.

       Vienna was also transformed from 1858 by the construction of the Ringstrasse, a great boulevard on the site of the old city walls. In the 1870s and '80s it was lined with monumental public buildings in a variety of styles thought historically appropriate for their functions: the Danish architect Theophilus Hansen's neo-Greek Parliament House, Gottfried Semper (Semper, Gottfried)'s and Karl von Hasenauer's neo-Baroque Burgtheater, and Friedrich von Schmidt's neo-Gothic Town Hall.

      About 1900 the search for a more indigenous German classicism encouraged Alfred Messel in Berlin to study the austere Neoclassicism of Gentz and Gilly of a century earlier, hence the Greek Revival flavour of Messel's offices for the AEG (AEG AG) (formerly the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft) and his National Bank, both built in Berlin in 1905–07. This style was popular between the world wars when it was regarded as so essentially Germanic that it was adopted for the design of key monuments of the Third Reich, such as Paul Ludwig Troost's House of German Art, Munich (1933–37), and Albert Speer (Speer, Albert)'s New Chancellery, Berlin (1938–39).

Scandinavia and Greece
      The key building in the development of Scandinavian classicism in the period 1830–1930 is the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, erected in 1839–48 from designs by Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll. It was built to house the collection of sculpture that the celebrated Danish (Denmark) Neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (Thorvaldsen, Bertel) presented to his native country in 1837. The opportunity was taken of providing a major cultural monument to strengthen national consciousness at a time of political crisis and to symbolize the new constitutional democracy that was established in 1849. The exterior walls of Bindesbøll's grave Schinkelesque courtyard were enlivened with polychromatic decoration and painted with appropriate narrative scenes. This system of ornament was inspired by his knowledge of the recent archaeological discoveries in Greece and Sicily. He had visited Athens in 1835–36, and it was in this city, appropriately, that the Greek Revival was given perhaps its most fitting civic expression: Hans Christian Hansen, a friend of Bindesbøll, excavated and restored the ancient Greek monuments on the Acropolis and built the University (1839–50). This crisp Ionic building eventually formed a group with the National Library and the Academy of Science, which were added from designs by Hans Christian and his brother Theophilus between 1859 and 1892.

      The buildings of Bindesbøll and the Hansen brothers were a potent influence on the Scandinavian classicists of the early 20th century such as Carl Petersen (Fåborg Museum, Denmark, 1912–15) and Hack Kampmann (Police Headquarters, Copenhagen, 1919–24). Other notable expressions of this cool and austere language in Stockholm are Ivar Tengbom's Concert House (1920–26) and two masterpieces by Gunnar Asplund (Asplund, (Erik) Gunnar), the City Library (1920–28) and Woodland Crematorium (1935–40).

David John Watkin

      The followers of Latrobe lacked his inventive genius but adapted the more conventional aspects of his Greek Revival work to create a public style that symbolized the dignity of the new democracy. The Greek Revival in the United States had as its leading exponents William Strickland (Strickland, William), Robert Mills (Mills, Robert), Thomas Ustick Walter (Walter, Thomas Ustick), and Ithiel Town. Strickland was the architect of the Merchants' Exchange, Philadelphia (1832–34), which featured a soaring lantern reminiscent of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. Mills (Mills, Robert) built many government buildings in Washington, D.C., including the Treasury (1836–42) and the Patent Office (begun 1836). He also designed the Washington Monument in Baltimore (1815–29), a giant Doric (Doric order) column, the first such monument in the United States. Walter (Walter, Thomas Ustick) worked on the United States Capitol building and in Philadelphia, where he designed Girard College (1833–47) in the form of an elegant Corinthian temple. Countless state houses and public buildings throughout the United States continued to be built from Greco-Roman models into the 20th century. Alexander Jackson Davis (Davis, Alexander Jackson) was one of the leading architects of the Greek-temple house, of which the Bowers House, Northampton, Massachusetts (1825–26), is an example. Such Greek houses were particularly numerous in the South, fine examples being Berry Hill, Halifax County, Virginia (1835–40), and Belle Meade, near Nashville, Tennessee (1853).

Sandra Millikin David John Watkin
      These Neoclassical buildings were ultimately of English derivation, but the pattern of architecture in the United States shifted in 1846 when Richard Morris Hunt (Hunt, Richard Morris) became the first American to enroll as an architectural student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Hunt specialized in mansions for the new commercial aristocracy of America: for example, The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island, built in 1892–95 in an opulent neo-Renaissance style for Cornelius Vanderbilt II (Vanderbilt Family). In 1859–62 Henry Hobson Richardson (Richardson, Henry Hobson) trained at the École, and on his return to the United States he specialized in a rock-faced Romanesque (Romanesque art) style probably inspired by the work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's rationalist follower, Émile Vaudremer. Richardson's most celebrated buildings in this vein are the Allegheny County Court House and Jail, Pittsburgh (1883–88), and the Marshall Field & Co. (Marshall Field's) Wholesale Store, Chicago (1885–87; demolished in 1930).

      Richardson's pupil Charles Follen McKim (McKim, Charles Follen), who had been trained at the École in 1867–70, set up a partnership with William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White (White, Stanford) that was to change the course of American architecture. Following their early domestic masterpieces in the vernacular, or Shingle, style, such as the Low House, Bristol, Rhode Island (1887; demolished in 1962), McKim, Mead, and White produced a chain of Classical buildings that were more consistently monumental than anything seen since the days of the Roman Empire. These include the Boston Public Library (1887–95), the Rhode Island State Capitol (1891–93), Columbia University, New York City (1894–98), and Pennsylvania Station, New York City (1902–11; demolished in 1963); the last is a mighty adaptation of the Baths of Caracalla and a reminder that the Roman baths exercised a powerful influence on the imagination of architects from at least the time of Donato Bramante (Bramante, Donato).

      The World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, which included buildings by McKim, Mead, and White, commemorated the 400th anniversary of the “discovery” of the New World by Christopher Columbus and also helped modern Americans rediscover the value of Classical planning in civic design. The dazzling spectacle of monumental Classical architecture on the fair's Midway caught the fancy of Americans who saw in its great axes, lagoons, sculpture, white buildings, and large plazas an answer to the dreary urban environments of their hometowns. Similar schemes were supported in other cities; some of these were designed by the fair's principal planner, Daniel H. Burnham (Burnham, Daniel H.), who brought the notion of the “great white city” to Cleveland, Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco. The best parts of many American cities are spacious because of the planners of this “City Beautiful” movement.

      Three of the many architects who continued this Classical tradition after World War I were John R. Pope (Pope, John R.) ( Jefferson Memorial, 1934–43, and National Gallery of Art, 1937–41, both in Washington, D.C.), Paul Philippe Cret (Cret, Paul Phillippe) (Hartford County Building, Connecticut, 1926), and Philip Trammell Shutze (Temple of the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, Atlanta, Georgia, 1931–32). Despite this Classical strain, the keynote of 1930s architecture was stylistic pluralism. The Gothic Revival continued, especially in university buildings, whereas domestic architecture in the suburbs could be neo-Tudor or neo-Georgian. With the aid of technology, buildings in the style of Spanish estates were built in Florida, French farmhouses in Philadelphia, Georgian and colonial houses in New England, and pueblos in the Southwest. Georgia revived its antebellum architecture, and Santa Barbara, California, which was destroyed by an earthquake in 1925, was quickly rebuilt in the style of a Spanish mission.

David John Watkin

Late 19th-century developments

Construction in iron and glass
      The Industrial Revolution in Britain introduced new building types and new methods of construction. Marshall, Benyou, and Bage's flour mill (now Allied Breweries) at Ditherington, Shropshire (1796–97), is one of the first iron-frame buildings (framed building), though brick walls still carry part of the load and there are no longitudinal beams. The cloth mill at King's Stanley, Gloucestershire (1812–13), is more convincing as an iron-frame building. Fully fireproof and avoiding the use of timber, it is clad in an attractive red-brick skin with Venetian windows and angle quoins. Leading Regency architects even used cast-iron construction members in major public buildings in the Classical style: Robert Smirke incorporated concealed cast-iron beams in the British Museum (1823–46), while John Nash openly displayed cast-iron Doric columns at Buckingham Palace (1825–30).

      Iron was frequently combined with glass in the construction of conservatories; early surviving examples include the conservatory (1827–30) at Syon House, Middlesex, by Charles Fowler, and the Palm House (1845–47) at Kew Gardens, Surrey, by Decimus Burton. These led naturally to the Crystal Palace, the climax of early Victorian technology. In the design of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition held at London in 1851, Sir Joseph Paxton (Paxton, Sir Joseph), a botanist, employed timber, cast iron, wrought iron, and glass in a ridge-and-furrow system he had developed for greenhouses at Chatsworth in 1837. Paxton was partly inspired by the organic structure of the Amazonian lily Victoria regia, which he successfully cultivated. The Crystal Palace contained important innovations in mass production of standardized materials and rapid assembly of parts, but its chief architectural merit lay in its cadence of colossal spaces. French designers recognized its magic, and a series of buildings for universal exhibitions held at Paris in 1855, 1867, and 1878 showed its influence.

 The emancipation of markets and stores was no less impressive. Designers erected iron-and-glass umbrellas, such as Victor Baltard's Halles Centrales, Paris (1853–70; demolished 1971). An especially beautiful example of iron-and-glass construction is Henri Labrouste's nine-domed reading room at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (1860–67).

      Closer to the English tradition are the billowing Laeken glass houses, Brussels (1868–76), by Alphonse Balat. Visitors were admitted to the Coal Exchange in London (1846–49, J.B. Bunning) through a round towered Classical porch at the corner of two Renaissance palaces to a magnificent rotunda hall, which was surrounded by three tiers of ornamental iron balconies and roofed by a lacelike dome of iron and glass. In Paris, Gustave Eiffel (Eiffel, Gustave), together with the architect Louis-Auguste Boileau, gave the retail shop a new and exciting setting in the Bon Marché (1876), where merchandise was displayed around the perimeters of skylighted, interior courts. The United States saw nothing comparable, but cast-iron (cast iron) columns and arches appeared during the 1850s in commercial buildings such as the Harper Brothers Building at New York City (1849) by John B. Corlies and James Bogardus (Bogardus, James). Stores were given cast-iron faces, as in the pioneering Stewart's Department Store (later Wanamaker's) by John Kellum in New York City (1859–62). Iron was frequently intended to simulate stone, and it was admired for its economy of maintenance as well as such neglected qualities as precision, standardization, and efficient strength. British parallels to these American examples include Gardner's Warehouse, Glasgow (1855–56), by John Baird and Oriel Chambers, Liverpool (1864), by Peter Ellis.

      The Eiffel Tower (1887–89), the most important emblem of the Paris exhibition of 1889, was designed by Gustave Eiffel, an engineer who had done outstanding work in the Paris Exposition of 1878 and in steel structures such as the trussed parabolic arches in the viaduct at Garabit, France (1880–84). In the Palais des Machines (at the 1889 exhibition) by Ferdinand Dutert and Victor Contamin, a series of three-hinged trussed arches sprang from small points across a huge space, 385 feet (117 metres) long and 150 feet (45 metres) high. Similar spaces had already been created in railway stations in England such as St. Pancras, London (1864–68, by William H. Barlow), where the wrought-iron arches have a span of 243 feet (74 metres) and rise to a height of 100 feet (30 metres).

      In the United States a major effort took place in one of the most important new building types, the large office building. This building type was made necessary by the concentration of markets, banks, railroad terminals, and warehouses in small sections of growing cities, and it pushed skyward (skyscraper) as a result of the attempt to get maximum income from expensive urban properties, the desire for the commercial prestige of tall emblems, and the need of businesses for mutual proximity in the days before rapid electronic communication. The safe, fast elevator removed the major prejudice against height. Designed by traditionalist architects, the tall buildings stretched masonry construction to its limits; they frequently resembled towers composed of smaller buildings stacked one on another, as in Hunt's Tribune Building at New York City (1874). The structural problem was solved at Chicago in 1884–85, when an engineer, William Le Baron Jenney (Jenney, William Le Baron), developed in the Home Insurance Company Building a metal skeleton of cast-iron columns—sheathed in masonry—and wrought-iron beams, carrying the masonry walls and windows at each floor level. While technically innovative, the building retained masonry sidewalls, making its elevations disunified and inept.

      Inspired by the architectural rationalism of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Chicago architects—who came to be known as the Chicago School—sought a better aesthetic expression of the metal frame, but even the talented John Wellborn Root (Root, John Wellborn), working with Daniel H. Burnham (Burnham, Daniel H.), failed to achieve it in the Ashland Block (completed 1892). Other designers, such as William Holabird (Holabird, William) and Martin Roche in the Tacoma Building (1887–89), also missed their chance. Even the great Louis Sullivan (Sullivan, Louis) was not successful in his early buildings, such as the Ryerson (1884). Covering them with gross, somewhat Art Nouveau ornament, he accentuated first the vertical columns and then the horizontal beams in a covert admission of failure. At his best, as in his Auditorium Building, Sullivan trod Richardson's path toward unified Romanesque forms. The Marshall Field & Co. Wholesale Store showed Sullivan the way toward a theme for the skyscraper, which he first stated with assurance in the Wainwright Building at St. Louis (1890–91). Brick piers mark each steel column and half module to create a rhythm of tall, narrow bays punctuated by recessed spandrels (the spaces above and below each window), terminating at the roofline. Jenney's Leiter Building II (1891; later Sears, Roebuck and Co.'s main retail store) and Burnham and Root's Monadnock Building (1891), both in Chicago, went beyond the Wainwright Building and were the first modern commercial buildings to demonstrate in their designs formal simplicity and ornamental abstinence, resulting from a new form of harmony between the demands of artistic expression, function, and technology.

 The ferment in Chicago was neither halted nor marred by classicism's transcontinental popularity. Burnham's firm went on to produce Chicago's Reliance Building (1890–95), an excellent office building with logically ordered spaces enclosed by faceted walls of glass and a steel skeleton covered by terra-cotta panels. Sullivan found his best expression of the skyscraper in the Prudential Building, in Buffalo, New York (1894–95), and he developed the theory for it in an essay published in Lippincott's Magazine (1896). That theory received even more dramatic expression in the Schlesinger-Mayer Department Store (later Carson Pirie Scott) in Chicago (1898–1904), in which the towered corner marked the climax of the logic of the steel frame and the entrance was made inviting with rich, naturalistic ornament. At the very end of the 19th century, the important emblem of modern commerce thus received an appropriate form: its structure was made of steel, its spaces were planned efficiently, its elevations were expressive of the skeleton, and its scale was marked by the fenestration and ornament.

Albert Bush-Brown David John Watkin

      Although known as Jugendstil in Germany, Sezessionstil in Austria, Modernista in Spain, and Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale in Italy, Art Nouveau has become the general term applied to a highly varied movement that was European-centred but internationally current at the end of the century. Art Nouveau architects gave idiosyncratic expression to many of the themes that had preoccupied the 19th century, ranging from Viollet-le-Duc's call for structural honesty to Sullivan's call for an organic architecture. The extensive use of iron and glass in Art Nouveau buildings was also rooted in 19th-century practice. In France bizarre forms appeared in iron, masonry, and concrete, such as the structures of Hector Guimard (Guimard, Hector) for the Paris Métro (c. 1900), the Montmartre church of Saint-Jean L'Évangéliste (1894–1904) by Anatole de Baudot, Xavier Schollkopf's house for the actress Yvette Guilbert at Paris (1900), and the Samaritaine Department Store (1905) near the Pont Neuf in Paris, by Frantz Jourdain (1847–1935). The Art Nouveau architect's preference for the curvilinear is especially evident in the Brussels buildings of the Belgian Baron Victor Horta (Horta, Victor, Baron). In the Hôtel Van Eetvelde (1895) he used floral, tendrilous ornaments, while his Maison du Peuple (1896–99) exhibits undulating enclosures of space. Decorative exploitation of the architectural surface with flexible, S-shaped linear ornament, commonly called whiplash or eel styles, was indulged in by the Jugendstil and Sezessionstil architects. The Studio Elvira at Munich (1897–98) by August Endell and Otto Wagner (Wagner, Otto)'s Majolika Haus at Vienna (c. 1898) are two of the more significant examples of this German and Austrian use of line.

      Wagner continued to combine academic geometry with Classical modified Art Nouveau decoration in his Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station (1899–1901) and in the Postal Savings Bank (1904–06), both in Vienna. Wagner's pupils broke free of his classicism and formed the Sezessionists. Joseph Olbrich (Olbrich, Joseph) joined the art colony at Darmstadt, in Germany, where his houses and exhibition gallery of about 1905 were boxlike, severe buildings. Josef Hoffmann (Hoffmann, Josef) left Wagner to found the Wiener Werkstätte, an Austrian equivalent of the English Arts and Crafts Movement; his best work, the Stoclet House at Brussels (1905), was an asymmetrical composition in which white planes were defined at the edges by gilt lines and decorated by formalized Art Nouveau motifs reminiscent of Wagner's ornament. Josef Plečnik, a talented pupil of Wagner, began his career in 1903–05 with the office and residence of Johannes Zacherl in Vienna. This was in a Wagner-inspired style that Plečnik developed in the 1930s in a fascinating series of buildings, especially in his native city of Ljubljana, now in Slovenia.

      In Finland, Eliel Saarinen (Saarinen, Eliel) brought an Art Nouveau flavour to the National Romanticism current in the years around 1900. His Helsinki Railway Station (1906–14) is close to the work of Olbrich and the Viennese Sezessionists. Close links existed between Art Nouveau designers in Vienna and in Glasgow, where Charles Rennie Mackintosh's (Mackintosh, Charles Rennie) School of Art (1896–1909), with its rationalist yet poetic aesthetic, is one of the most inventive and personal of all Art Nouveau buildings. In The Netherlands, Hendrik Petrus Berlage (Berlage, Hendrik Petrus) also created a sternly fundamentalist language of marked individuality that is best appreciated in his masterpiece, the Amsterdam Exchange (1898–1903). The exterior is in a rugged and deliberately unpicturesque vernacular, while the even more ruthless interior deploys brick, iron, and glass in a manner that owes much to the rationalist aesthetic of Viollet-le-Duc.

 In the United States the Art Nouveau movement arrived with designer Louis Comfort Tiffany (Tiffany, Louis Comfort) and was especially influential on ornamental rather than spatial design, particularly on Sullivan's decorative schemes and, for a time, those of Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd). Similarly, in Italy decorative exuberance and the formally picturesque were elements of Stile Floreale buildings by Raimondo D'Aronco, such as the main building for the Applied Art Exhibition held at Turin, Italy, in 1902. These qualities, along with dynamic spatial innovations, were manifested in the works of perhaps the most singular Art Nouveau architect, the Spaniard Antoni Gaudí (Gaudí, Antoni). His imaginative and dramatic experiments with space, form, structure, and ornament fascinate the visitor to Barcelona. With their peculiar organicism, the Casa Milá apartment house (1905–10), the residence of the Batlló family (1904–06), Gaudí's unfinished lifetime projects of the surrealistic Güell Park and the enigmatic church of the Holy Family were personal statements. Their effect, like that of most Art Nouveau architecture, was gained through bizarre form and ornament.

20th-century architecture

The Modernist (modern art) movement
Before World War II

      The Modernist movement in architecture was an attempt to create a nonhistorical architecture of Functionalism in which a new sense of space would be created with the help of modern materials. A reaction against the stylistic pluralism of the 19th century, Modernism was also coloured by the belief that the 20th century had given birth to “modern man,” who would need a radically new kind of architecture.

      The Viennese architect Adolf Loos (Loos, Adolf) opposed the use of any ornament at all and designed purist compositions of bald, functional blocks such as the Steiner House at Vienna (1910), one of the first private houses of reinforced concrete. Peter Behrens (Behrens, Peter), having had contact with Joseph Olbrich (Olbrich, Joseph) at Darmstadt and with Josef Hoffmann (Hoffmann, Josef) at Vienna, was in 1907 appointed artistic adviser in charge of the AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft), for which he designed a turbine factory (1909) at Berlin. Behrens strongly affected three great architects who worked in his office: Walter Gropius (Gropius, Walter), Le Corbusier (Corbusier, Le), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig).

      In Germany, Gropius followed a mechanistic direction. His Fagus Works factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine in Germany (1911) and the Werkbund exposition building at the Cologne exhibition (1914) had been models of industrial architecture in which vigorous forms were enclosed by masonry and glass; the effect of these buildings was gained by the use of steel frames, strong silhouette, and the logic of their plans. There were no historical influences or expressions of local landscape, traditions, or materials. The beauty of the buildings derived from adapting form to a technological culture.

      Gropius succeeded van de Velde as director of the ducal Arts and Crafts School at Weimar in 1919. Later called the Bauhaus, it became the most important centre of modern design until the Nazi (Nazi Party)s closed it in 1933. While he was at Weimar, Gropius developed a firm philosophy about architecture and education, which he announced in 1923. The aim of the visual arts (art), he said, is to create a complete, homogeneous physical environment in which all the arts have their place. Architects, sculptors, furniture makers, and painters must learn practical crafts and obtain knowledge of tools, materials, and forms; they must become acquainted with the machine and attempt to use it in solving the social problems of an industrial society. At the Bauhaus, aesthetic investigations into space, colour, construction, and elementary forms were flavoured by Cubism and Constructivism. Moving the school to Dessau in 1925, Gropius designed the pioneering new Bauhaus (1925–26) in which steel frames and glass walls provided workshops within severely Cubistic buildings. Gropius assembled a staff of Modernist teachers, including the artists László Moholy-Nagy (Moholy-Nagy, László), Wassily Kandinsky (Kandinsky, Wassily), Paul Klee (Klee, Paul), Marcel Breuer (Breuer, Marcel), and Adolf Meyer, whose projects, such as the 116 experimental standardized housing units of the Törten Estate at Dessau, Germany (1926–28), bore a highly machined, depersonalized appearance.

      In France, Tony Garnier (Garnier, Tony) caught the Modernist currents in materials, structure, and composition when he evolved his masterful plan for a Cité Industrielle (1901–04), published in 1917, in which reinforced concrete was to be used to create a modern city of modern buildings. With insight, Garnier developed a comprehensive scheme for residential neighbourhoods, transportation terminals, schools, and industrial centres, and his plan became a major influential scheme for 20th-century urban design. Garnier received no mandate to build such a city, but his town hall at Boulogne-Billancourt (1931–34) recalled the promise he had shown, though it was not so innovative and masterful as might have been expected.

      The Futurist (Futurism) movement counted among its members another early 20th-century urban planner, the Italian architect Antonio Sant'Elia (Sant'Elia, Antonio). Influenced by American industrial cities and the Viennese architects Otto Wagner (Wagner, Otto) and Adolf Loos, he designed a grandiose futuristic city, entitled “Città nuova” (“New City”), the drawings for which were exhibited at Milan in 1914. He conceived of the city as a symbol of the new technological age. It was an affirmative environment for the future, however, in opposition to the negating inhuman Expressionistic (Expressionism) city of the future conceived by Fritz Lang (Lang, Fritz) in the 1926 film classic Metropolis.

      Centred in Germany between 1910 and 1925, Expressionist (Expressionism) architects, such as the painters who were part of the Brücke (Brücke, Die) (“Bridge”) and Blaue Reiter (Blaue Reiter, Der) (“Blue Rider”) groups, sought peculiarly personal and often bizarre visual forms and effects. Among the earliest manifestations of an Expressionistic building style were the highly individual early works of Hans Poelzig (Poelzig, Hans), such as the Luban Chemical Factory (1911–12) and the municipal water tower (1911) of Posen, Germany (now Poznań, Poland), which led to his monumental, visionary “space caves,” such as the project for the Salzburg Festival Theatre (1920–21) and the Grosses Schauspielhaus, built in Berlin (1919) for Max Reinhardt (Reinhardt, Max)'s Expressionistic theatre. These later works by Poelzig show the influence of the structural audacity of Max Berg (Berg, Max)'s Centenary Hall at Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland; 1912–13), with its gigantic reinforced concrete dome measuring 213 feet (65 metres) in diameter. The second generation of Expressionists centred their activities in postwar Germany and The Netherlands. Distinctly personal architectural statements were given form in such dynamically sculptured structures as the Einstein Observatory in Potsdam (1920), by Erich Mendelsohn (Mendelsohn, Erich); the anthroposophically based design by Rudolf Steiner (Steiner, Rudolf) for the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland (1925–28); the Eigen Haard Estates (housing development) at Amsterdam (1921), by Michel de Klerk; and Fritz Höger's (1877–1949) Chilehaus office building in Hamburg (1922–23), with its imperative thrust of mass and acute angularity.

      As Germany was the centre of Expressionism, Paris was the stronghold of the advocates of a new vision of space, Cubism, which Georges Braque (Braque, Georges) and Pablo Picasso developed about 1906. Forms were dismembered into their faceted components; angular forms, interpenetrated planes, transparencies, and diverse impressions were recorded as though seen simultaneously. Soon architectural reflections of the Cubist aesthetic appeared internationally. Interior spaces were defined by thin, discontinuous planes and glass walls; supports were reduced to slender metal columns, machine-finished and without ornamentation; and Cubistic voids and masses were arranged programmatically in asymmetric compositions.

      The Dutch De Stijl (Stijl, De) movement was influenced by Cubism, although it sought a greater abstract purity in its geometric formalism. Organized in Leiden in 1917, the painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg (Doesburg, Theo van) and the architects Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud (Oud, Jacobus Johannes Pieter) and Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (Rietveld, Gerrit Thomas) were counted among its members. Their “Neoplastic” aesthetic advocated severe precision of line and shape, austerely pristine surfaces, a Spartan economy of form, and purity of colour. Rietveld (Rietveld, Gerrit Thomas)'s Schroeder House, built in 1924 at Utrecht, was a three-dimensional parallel to Mondrian's paintings of the period. Van Doesburg (Doesburg, Theo van)'s work for the Bauhaus art school at Weimar brought the influence of Dutch Neoplasticism to bear upon Gropius and Mies, whose plans for houses at times markedly resembled van Doesburg's paintings. Meanwhile Oud (Oud, Jacobus Johannes Pieter) collaborated with van Doesburg for a time and vigorously proclaimed the new style in housing developments he built at Rotterdam (after 1918), Hook of Holland (1924–27), and Stuttgart, Germany (1927).

      Cubism and the related movements of Futurism, Constructivism, Suprematism, and Neoplasticism, like any artistic styles, might have faltered and fallen into a merely decorative cliché, as at the Paris Exposition of 1925, but for Gropius, Mies van der Rohe (Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig), and Le Corbusier.

      Gropius was succeeded at the Bauhaus in 1930 by Mies van der Rohe, whose training as a mason was supplemented by the engineering experience he had gained from 1908 to 1911 in the office of Behrens; both of these elements of his education were synthesized in his project for the Kröller House in The Hague (1912). Influenced by van Doesburg's De Stijl, Mies's natural elegance and precise orderliness soon revealed themselves in unrealized projects for a brick country house, a steel-and-glass skyscraper, and a glazed, cantilevered concrete-slab office building (1920–22). He directed the Weissenhof estate project of the Werkbund Exposition at Stuttgart (1927), contributing the design for an apartment house. Such practical problems failed to show his talent, which was not fully known until he designed the German pavilion for the International Exposition at Barcelona in 1929. The continuous spaces partitioned with thin marble planes and the chromed steel columns drew international applause. His Tugendhat House at Brno, Czech Republic (1930), along with Le Corbusier (Corbusier, Le)'s Villa Savoye, epitomized the Modernist domestic setting at its best.

      The Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, gave the new architecture, sometimes referred to as the International Style, a firm foundation by writing the strong theoretical statement, Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture), published in 1923. It revealed a world of new forms—not Classical capitals and Gothic arches but ships, turbines, grain elevators, airplanes, and machine products, which Le Corbusier said were indexes to 20th-century imagination. His love of machines was combined with a belief in communal authority as the best means of accomplishing social reforms, and Le Corbusier directed his attention toward the problems of housing and urban patterns. An architectural attack, using standardized building components and mass production, was required. His sociological and formal ideas appeared in a Cubist project for Domino housing (1916), and his aesthetic preferences led him to develop an extreme version of Cubist painting that he and the painter Amédée Ozenfant (Ozenfant, Amédée) called Purism. Returning to architecture in 1921, he designed a villa at Vaucresson, France (1922), the abstract planes and strip windows of which revealed his desire to “arrive at the house machine”—that is, standardized houses with standardized furniture. In 1922 he also brought forth his project for a skyscraper city of 3,000,000 people, in which tall office and apartment buildings would stand in broad open plazas and parks with the Cubist spaces between them defined by low row housing.

      Much of his work thereafter—his Voisin city plan, his Pavilion of the New Spirit at the Paris Exposition of 1925, his exhibit of workers' apartments at the Werkbund Exposition at Stuttgart (1927), and his influential but unexecuted submittal to the League of Nations competition—was a footnote to that dream of a new city. The villa, Les Terrasses, at Garches, France (1927), was a lively play of spatial parallelepipeds (six-sided solid geometric forms the faces of which are parallelograms) ruled by horizontal planes, but his style seemed to culminate in the most famous of his houses, the Villa Savoye at Poissy, France (1929–31). The building's principal block was raised one story above the ground on pilotis (heavy reinforced-concrete columns); floors were cantilevered to permit long strip windows; and space was molded plastically and made to flow horizontally, vertically, and diagonally until, on the topmost terrace, the whole composition ended in a cadenza of rounded, terminating spaces. Gaining greater facility in manipulating flowing spaces, Le Corbusier designed the dormitory for Swiss students at the Cité Universitaire (1931–32) in Paris.

      In the period after the Russian Revolution of 1917 the erstwhile Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) at first encouraged modern art, and several architects, notably the German Bruno Taut, looked to the new government for a sociological program. The Constructivist project for a monument to the Third International (1920) by Vladimir Tatlin (Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich) was a machine in which the various sections (comprising legislative houses and offices) would rotate within an exposed steel armature. A workers' club in Moscow (1929) had a plan resembling half a gear, and the Ministry of Central Economic Planning (1928–32), designed by Le Corbusier, was intended to be a glass-filled slab but, because of Stalin's dislike of modern architecture, was never completed. Its foundation later was used for an outdoor swimming pool.

      Modern European styles of architecture were subjected to official disfavour in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as Stalin's government adopted Classical monuments—such as Boris Mikhaylovich Iofan's winning design for the Palace of the Soviets (1931), which was intended to pile Classical colonnades to a height of 1,365 feet (416 metres) and have a colossal statue of Lenin at its summit. With its gigantic Corinthian columns, the building for the Central Committee of the Communist Party at Kiev (1937) showed an overbearing scale.

      After 1930 the Modernist movement spread through Europe. In Switzerland Robert Maillart (Maillart, Robert)'s experiments with reinforced concrete attained great grace in his Salginatobel Bridge (1930). Finland's Alvar Aalto (Aalto, Alvar) won a competition for the Municipal Library at Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia) in 1927 with a building of glass walls, flat roof, and round skylights (completed 1935; destroyed 1943); but he retained the traditional Scandinavian sympathy for wood and picturesque planning that were evident in his Villa Mairea at Noormarkku, Finland (1938–39), the factory and housing at Sunila, Kotka, Finland (1936–39, completed 1951–54), and his later civic centre at Säynätsalo, Finland (1950–52). Aalto and other Scandinavians gained a following among those repelled by severe German Modernism. Sweden's Gunnar Asplund (Asplund, (Erik) Gunnar) and Denmark's Kay Fisker, Christian Frederick Møller, and Arne Jacobsen (Jacobsen, Arne) also brought regional character into their Modernist work. In The Netherlands, Johannes Andreas Brinkman (Brinkman, Johannes Andreas) and Lodewijk Cornelis van der Vlugt aimed at more mechanistic, universal form in the Van Nelle Tobacco Factory in Rotterdam (1928–30). In England, refugees from Germany and other countries, alone or with English designers, inaugurated a radical Modernism—for example, the apartment block known as Highpoint I, Highgate, London (by Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton group, 1935).

      The locus for creative architecture in the United States remained the Midwest, although Californians such as the brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene (Greene and Greene) struck occasional regional and modern notes, as in the Gamble House at Pasadena, California (1908–09). The second generation of architects of the Chicago School, such as William G. Purcell, George Grant Elmslie (Elmslie, George Grant), and William Drummond, disseminated Midwestern modern architecture throughout the United States.

 The greatest of all these new Chicago architects was Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd). His “prairie architecture (Prairie style)” expressed its site, region, structure, and materials and avoided all historical reminiscences; beginning with its plan and a distinctive spatial theme, each building burgeoned to its exterior sculptural form. Starting from Henry Hobson Richardson (Richardson, Henry Hobson)'s rustic, shingle houses and making free use of Beaux-Arts composition during the 1880s and 1890s, Wright hinted at his prairie house idiom with the Winslow House at River Forest, Illinois (1893), elaborated it in the Coonley House at Riverside, Illinois (1908), and, ultimately, realized it in 1909 in the flowing volumes of space defined by sculptural masses and horizontal planes of his Robie House at Chicago. Meanwhile, he scored a triumph with his administration building for the Larkin Company at Buffalo, New York, in 1904 (destroyed 1950), which grouped offices around a central skylighted court, sealed them hermetically against their smoky environs, and offered amenities in circulation, air conditioning, fire protection, and plumbing. In its blocky fire towers, sequences of piers and recessed spandrels were coupled together in a powerful composition. Wright was, however, ignored by all except a select following. The buildings of the single figure who gave international distinction to early 20th-century American architecture remained the cherished property of personal clients, such as Aline Barnsdall, for whom Wright designed the Hollyhock House at Los Angeles (1918–20).

      Wright's autobiography (1943) recorded his frustrations in gaining acceptance for organic architecture. The first edition summarized the chief features of that architecture: the reduction to a minimum in the number of rooms and the definition of them by point supports; the close association of buildings to their sites by means of extended and emphasized planes parallel to the ground; the free flow of space, unencumbered by boxlike enclosures; harmony of all openings with each other and with human scale; the exploitation of the nature of a material, in both its surface manifestations and its structure; the incorporation of mechanical equipment and furniture as organic parts of structure; and the elimination of applied decoration. There were also four new properties: transparency, which was obtained through the use of glass; tenuity, or plasticity of mass achieved through the use of steel in tension, as in reinforced concrete; naturalism, or the expression of materials; and integration, in which all ornamental features were natural by-products of manufacture and assembly.

      His Millard House at Pasadena, California (1923), exemplified many of these principles; its concrete-block walls were cast with decorative patterns. Taliesin (Taliesin and Taliesin West) East, Wright's house near Spring Green, Wisconsin, went through a series of major rebuildings (1911, 1914, 1915, and 1925), and each fitted the site beautifully; local stone, gabled roofs, and outdoor gardens reflected the themes of the countryside. A period of withdrawal at Taliesin afforded Wright several years of intensive reflection, from which he emerged with fabulous drawings for the Doheny ranch in California (1921), a skyscraper for the National Life Insurance Company at Chicago (1920–25), and St. Mark's Tower, New York City (1929). The last was to have been an 18-story apartment house comprising a concrete stem from which four arms branched outward to form the sidewalls of apartments cantilevered from the stem to an exterior glass wall. Unexecuted like most of Wright's most exciting projects, St. Mark's Tower testified to his revolutionary thinking about skyscraper architecture. His ideas gained a wide hearing in 1931 when he published the Kahn lectures he had delivered at Princeton in 1930. In keeping with the needs of the United States during the Great Depression, Wright turned his attention to the low-cost house, designing a “Usonian house” for Herbert Jacobs near Madison, Wisconsin (1937), and a quadruple house, “the Sun houses,” at Ardmore, Pennsylvania (1939). These exemplified the residences he intended for his ideal communities, such as rural, decentralized Broadacre City (1936), which was Wright's answer to European schemes for skyscraper cities.

      At about the same time, Wright produced four masterpieces: Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1936), the daringly cantilevered weekend house of Edgar Kaufmann; the administration building of S.C. Johnson & Son in Racine, Wisconsin, in which brick cylinders and planes develop a series of echoing spaces, culminating in the forest of graceful “mushroom” columns in the main hall; the Johnson House (1937), aptly called Wingspread, also at Racine; and Taliesin West at Paradise Valley, near Phoenix, Arizona (begun 1938), where rough, angular walls and roofs echo the desert valley and surrounding mountains. With increasing sensitivity to local terrain and native forms and materials, Wright stated more complex spatial and structural themes than European Modernists, who seldom attempted either extreme programmatic plans or organic adaptation of form to a particular environment. Eventually, Wright himself developed a more universal geometry, as he revealed in the sculptural Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Guggenheim Museum) at New York City (1956–59).

      During the period, some buildings gained attention through their Classical ornament; others were Renaissance palaces. The emblem of business, the office building, sometimes suffered from the demand for unique, distinctive towers; indeed, Harvey Wiley Corbett, a New York architect, admitted that publicity was the ruling motivation for some designers. The Gothic skyscraper, popularized by Gilbert's Woolworth Building, was the style used by Raymond M. Hood (Hood, Raymond M) for his winning entry in the Chicago Tribune competition (1922), beating out many seemingly more contemporary, albeit less splashy, entries.

      About 1920 some architects developed simple cubical forms, and the stepped ziggurat was popularized by renderers, notably Hugh Ferriss, and painters such as Georgia O'Keeffe (O'Keeffe, Georgia), John Marin (Marin, John), and Charles Sheeler (Sheeler, Charles). This soaring and jagged form received legal support from the New York City zoning law of 1916 and economic justification from the fact that, in order to obtain rentable, peripheral office space in the upper floors, where the banks of elevators diminished, whole increments of office space had to be omitted. These cubical envelopes were not without ornament at their crests, as in Hood's American Radiator Building in New York City (1924–25), suitably described as “one huge cinder incandescent at the top.” Such decoration might be chic, as in New York City's Barclay–Vesey (telephone company) Building, where Ralph Walker re-created the Art Deco interiors of the Paris Exposition of 1925. In San Francisco, Miller, Pflueger, & Cantin used Chinese ornament to enliven their telephone building (1926). Paradoxically, one archaeological find led to simpler buildings when, about 1930, Mayan pyramids inspired Timothy Pflueger in his work on the 450 Sutter building in San Francisco. Clifflike blocks arose in Chicago, the Daily News and Palmolive buildings (1929) being the best examples; New York City acquired a straightforward expression of tall vertical piers and setback cubical masses in the Daily News Building (1930), by the versatile Hood, who had run the course from Gothic to modern form. The bank and office building of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (1931–32) by George Howe and William Lescaze, a Swiss architect, gave the skyscraper its first thoroughly 20th-century form, and Hood, again, produced a counterpart in New York City, the McGraw-Hill Building (1931). Few of these, including the Empire State Building (1931), did anything to solve urban density and transportation problems; indeed, they intensified them. Rockefeller Center, however, begun in 1929, was, with its space for pedestrians within a complex of slablike skyscrapers, outstanding and too seldom copied.

      American industry showed some inclination to respect function, materials, and engineering between the world wars, as was evident in Joseph Leland's glazed, skeletal buildings for the Pressed Steel Company at Worcester, Massachusetts (1930). Occasionally, a traditional architect had produced an innovation, such as Willis Polk's (1867–1924) Hallidie Building at San Francisco (1918). With the aid of Ernest Wilby, the engineering firm of Albert Kahn created a work of architectural merit in Detroit's Continental Motors Factory (about 1918). The National Cash Register, United States Shoe Company, National Biscuit, Sears, Roebuck and Company, and various automobile companies, such as Ford, sponsored Functional architecture.

      Rockefeller Center was proof that by 1930 there was a move toward simple form, which was presaged by the architecture of the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) (Tennessee Valley Authority). European Modernism gained a firm following in the United States as some of its best practitioners emigrated there. Eliel Saarinen (Saarinen, Eliel), who won second prize in the Chicago Tribune competition, gained the acclaim of Sullivan and other architects. He settled in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, where he established a school of architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Saarinen designed its new buildings, gradually freeing himself from historical reminiscences of his native Scandinavia. He remained sensitive to the role of art in architecture, best revealed by his use of the sculpture of the Swede Carl Milles (Milles, Carl). The Austrian architect Richard Neutra (Neutra, Richard Joseph) established a practice in California, notable products of which were the Lovell House at Los Angeles (1927–28) and the Kaufmann Desert House at Palm Springs (1946–47).

      A modern architecture exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in 1932, recorded by the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the architect Philip Johnson (Johnson, Philip C.) in the book International Style; Architecture Since 1922, familiarized Americans with the International Style. After 1933, as Modernists fled the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy, the United States received Gropius (Gropius, Walter), Breuer, and Mies. Gropius joined the architectural school of Harvard University and established an educational focus recalling the Bauhaus.

After World War II
      Initially, the leading interwar architects of Modernism, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Wright, and Aalto, continued to dominate the scene. In the United States, Gropius, with Breuer, introduced modern houses to Lincoln, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, and formed a group, the Architects Collaborative (Architects Collaborative, The), the members of which designed the thoroughly modern Harvard Graduate Center (1949–50). Mies (Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig) became dean of the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology at Chicago in 1938 and designed its new campus. Crown Hall (1952–56) marked the apogee of this quarter-century project.

      Beginning with private houses by Hood, Lescaze, Edward Stone, Neutra, Gropius, and Breuer during the 1930s, American Modernism gradually supplanted the historical styles in a range of building types, including schools and churches; for example, Eliel Saarinen's simple, brick Christ Lutheran Church (1949–50) at Minneapolis, Minnesota.

      After World War II, big industry turned to modern architects for distinctive emblems of prestige. The Connecticut General Life Insurance Company hired one of the largest modern firms, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, to design their new decentralized headquarters outside Hartford, Connecticut (1955–57). Lever Brothers turned to the same firm for New York City's Lever House (1952), in which the parklike plaza, glass-curtain walls, and thin aluminum mullions realized the dreams of Mies and others in the 1920s of freestanding crystalline shafts. Designed by Eliel Saarinen's son Eero (Saarinen, Eero), the General Motors Technical Center (1948–56) at Warren, Michigan, was compared with Versailles in its extent, grandeur, and rigorous conformity to an austere, geometric aesthetic of Miesian forms. The Harrison and Abramovitz's tower for the Aluminum Company of America at Pittsburgh (1954) advertised its own product, as did Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Inland Steel Building at Chicago (1955–57). Perhaps the most chaste of all was the Seagram Building (1954–58) at New York City, designed by Mies and Philip Johnson. Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd) alone avoided the rectilinear geometry of these office buildings. In 1955 he saw his Price Tower rise at Bartlesville, Oklahoma, a richly faceted, concrete and copper fulfillment of the St. Mark's Tower he had designed more than 25 years earlier.

      About 1952 there was a significant shift within Modernism from what had come to be called Functionalism, or the International Style, toward a monumental formalism. There was increasing interest in highly sculptural masses and spaces, as well as in the decorative qualities of diverse building materials and exposed structural systems. Wright's Guggenheim Museum is a manifestation of this aesthetic. Those who had focused their attention on the rectilinear portions of Le Corbusier (Corbusier, Le)'s Savoye House and Unité d'Habitation apartments at Marseille (1946–52), tended to ignore the plastic sculpture on the roofs of those buildings; to such people, Le Corbusier's highly individual buildings at Chandigarh, India (begun 1950), and the cavernous space in the lyrical church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut (1950–55) at Ronchamp, France, seemed to be examples of personal whimsy. Pier Luigi Nervi (Nervi, Pier Luigi) in Italy gave structural integrity to the complex curves and geometry of reinforced-concrete structures, such as the Orbetello aircraft hangar (begun 1938) and Turin's exposition hall (1948–50). The Spaniard Eduardo Torroja (Torroja, Eduardo), his pupil Felix Candela, and the American Frederick Severud followed his lead. Essentially, each attempted to create an umbrella roof the interior space of which could be subdivided as required, such as Torroja's grandstand for the Zarzuela racetrack in Madrid (1935). Mies constructed rectilinear versions of such a space in Crown Hall and in his Farnsworth House at Plano, Illinois (1946–50), while Philip Johnson (Johnson, Philip C.) allowed a single functional unit, the brick-cylinder utility stack, to protrude from his precise glass house at New Canaan, Connecticut (1949). Other designers used curvilinear structural geometry, best indicated by Matthew Nowicki's (1910–49) sports arena at Raleigh, North Carolina (1952–53), in which two tilted parabolic arches, supported by columns, and a stretched-skin roof enclose a colossal space devoid of interior supports. In 1949 Nowicki had challenged Louis Sullivan's precept, form follows function, with another, form follows form; this dictum helped free architecture from programmatic expression. Hugh Stubbins's congress hall at Berlin (1957) and Eero Saarinen's Trans World Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City (1956–62), were outstanding examples of these dynamically monumental, single-form buildings the geometric shapes and silhouettes of which were derived from mathematical computation and technological innovation. International competitions for the opera house at Sydney (1957) and a government centre at Toronto (1958) were won by the Dane Jørn Utzon (Utzon, Jørn) and the Finn Viljo Revell (Revell, Viljo), respectively. Both architects were exponents of the new monumentalism.

      These designs posed problems in structural engineering and in scale, but many architects, such as the American Minoru Yamasaki (Yamasaki, Minoru) in the McGregor Building for Wayne State University at Detroit (1958), attempted to make structure become decorative, while the decorative screen, as used by Edward Durell Stone at the United States embassy in New Delhi (1957–59), offered a device for wrapping programmatic interiors within a rich pattern of sculptured walls.

      In the United States, after 1959, office buildings for administrative headquarters of large corporations followed the 1955–57 suburban-campus model of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Connecticut General Life Insurance Company or, if urban, the towerlike form, often with strong structural expression (e.g., Torre Velasca, Milan, by Belgiojoso, Peressutti, and Rogers, 1959) or the slab form, usually emphasizing glazed walls (e.g., Mannesmann Building, Düsseldorf, Germany, by Paul Schneider-Esleben, 1959), but they rarely achieved an urban composition such as the 1962 Place Ville-Marie, built at Montreal by the Chinese-born American architect I.M. Pei (Pei, I.M.).

      Air transportation, trade exhibitions, and spectator sports summoned the often awesome spatial resources of modern technology. Rome's Pallazzi dello Sport done by Nervi (1960), Eero Saarinen's Dulles International Airport at Chantilly, Virginia (1958–62), and Chicago's exposition hall, McCormick Place, by C.F. Murphy and Associates (1971) are examples of the colossal spaces achieved at the time in reinforced concrete or steel and glass. International exhibitions seldom offered comparable architecture. At the New York World's Fair (1964) the Spanish pavilion by Javier Carvajal was a building of merit. There were also several notable examples at Montreal's Expo 67: the West German pavilion by Frei Otto, the United States pavilion by R. Buckminster Fuller, and the startling Constructivist apartment house, Habitat 67, by the Israeli Moshe Safdie, in association with David, Barott, and Boulva, whose 158 precast-concrete apartment units were hoisted into place and post-tensioned to permit dramatic cantilevers and terraces. World's fairs continued to provide a setting for occasionally distinguished examples of modern structures that demonstrated innovations in building technology.

      Much significant architecture in the postwar period was sponsored by cultural centres and educational institutions, such as Berlin's philharmonic hall (1963) by Hans Scharoun. Louis I. Kahn (Kahn, Louis I.), in his design for the Richards Medical Research Building (1960), gave the University of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania, University of) in Philadelphia a linear programmatic composition of laboratories, each served by vertical systems for circulating gases, liquids, and electricity. Paul Rudolph (Rudolph, Paul)'s art and architecture building (1963) at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, gathered its studios, galleries, classrooms, and light wells on 36 interpenetrating levels distributed over six stories. The Morse and Stiles colleges (1962), also at Yale, were designed by Eero Saarinen and set a new standard for multiple-entry urban dormitories. Even the traditionalist campuses of New England preparatory schools gained modern architecture, such as the art building and science building at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, by Benjamin A. Thomson (1963) and the dormitories at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, by Edward Larrabee Barnes (1965).

      The innovations in educational architecture were international. In England, distinctive educational architecture arrived at Hunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk (1949–54), by Peter and Alison Smithson (Smithson, Alison; and Smithson, Peter). An example of what became known as the New Brutalism, this building was influenced by Mies van der Rohe. Most New Brutalist buildings, however, owed more to Le Corbusier's late work—for example, the gray concrete masses of Denys Lasdun's University of East Anglia, Norfolk (1962–68)—while Sir James Stirling (Stirling, Sir James)'s History Faculty, Cambridge (1964–67), brought a neo-Constructivist element to the Brutalist tradition. Canada gained the Central Technical School Arts Center by Robert Fairfield Associates (1964) and Scarborough College by John Andrews, with Page and Steele (1966), both at Toronto. Italian innovative educational architecture is exemplified in Milan's Instituto Marchiondi (1959) by Vittoriano Viganò.

      Some of the new educational settings proposed solutions to what was undoubtedly the mid-20th century's greatest problem, its urban (urban planning) environment. The high-rise, dense campus at Boston University by José Luis Sert (Sert, José Luis) and the skyscraper towers of MIT's earth-sciences building (1964) by I.M. Pei, were imaginative single buildings responding to urban circumstances. The Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the Chicago Circle Campus of the University of Illinois (1965), both by the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with Walter A. Netsch as the principal designer (1956), and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California, by Louis I. Kahn (1966), all offered intimations of a new city built around a cultural, educational centre.

      No comparable concentration of intensive, harmonious urban architecture was achieved for cities, even though after 1955 the building of new cities produced some remarkable examples, such as Vällingby, Sweden; Brasília, the new capital of Brazil; and Cumbernauld, in Scotland; and some remarkable renovations of old cities, as in Eastwicks in Philadelphia (Reynolds Metals Co.; plans by Constantinos Doxiadis, 1960) and Constitution Plaza in Hartford, Connecticut (e.g., Charles DuBose, with Sasaki, Walker & Associates 1964), and New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (1962). By this time, however, it was beginning to be felt that the application of Modernist principles had caused visual damage to historic cities and had also failed to create a humane environment in new cities. It was at this moment that the postmodernist era began.

Albert Bush-Brown David John Watkin

Postmodernism
      The 1960s were marked by dissatisfaction with the consequences of the Modernist movement, especially in North America, where its failings were exposed in two influential books, Canadian Jane Jacobs (Jacobs, Jane)'s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and American Robert Venturi (Venturi, Robert)'s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). Jacobs criticized the destruction of urban coherence that was wrought by the presence of Modernist buildings, while Venturi implied that Modernist buildings were without meaning, as their puritanical design lacked the irony and complexity that enrich historical architecture. This dissatisfaction was translated into direct action in 1972 with the demolition of several 14-story slab blocks that had been built only 20 years earlier from designs by Minoru Yamasaki as part of the award-winning Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis (Saint Louis), Missouri. Similar apartment blocks in Europe and North America were demolished in the following decades, but it was in St. Louis that the postmodernist era was begun.

      Despite this backlash, many established corporations continued to commission clean-lined Modernist towers to represent their corporate identity; indeed, the Modernist formal language, which had once seemed revolutionary, was often diluted to a bland austerity that came to represent industry in the late 20th century. In the early 1970s, American business was represented by the world's tallest structures at the time. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, designed by Yamasaki, opened in New York City in 1972. These stark, puritanical structures were for a time the tallest buildings in the world, until they were surpassed one year later by Chicago's enormous Sears Tower, designed by engineer Fazlur Khan. Such structures would face increasing criticism with the advent of postmodernism. (A different, more tragic challenge to this philosophy of architecture would come decades later as a result of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, which further caused architects to rethink the longstanding connection between industry and imposing, Modernist-derived structures.)

 Concurrent with the building of these skyscrapers, Venturi's Learning from Las Vegas (with Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour) was published in 1972. In seeking to rehumanize architecture by ridding it of the restricting purism of Modernism, the authors pointed to the playful commercial architecture and billboards of the Las Vegas highways for guidance. Venturi and his partner John Rauch reintroduced to architectural design elements of wit, humanity, and historical reference in buildings such as the Tucker House in Katonah, New York (1975). Many architects in the 1970s and '80s followed this lead and adopted a populist language scattered with Classical (Classicism and Neoclassicism) souvenirs. For example, Philip Johnson (Johnson, Philip C.) and his partner John Burgee designed the AT&T Building in New York City (1978–84), a skyscraper with a Chippendale skyline. Similarly, Michael Graves (Graves, Michael)'s Portland Public Service Building in Portland, Oregon (1980–82) has the bulk of the modern skyscraper yet incorporates historical souvenirs such as the colonnade, belvedere, keystone, and swag. Like Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (1975–80) and Alumni Center at the University of California at Irvine (1983–85), these confident and colourful buildings were intended to reassure the public that it need no longer feel that its cultural identity is threatened by modern architecture. This mood was encapsulated in Venice in 1980 when a varied group of American and European architects, including Venturi, Charles Moore, Paolo Portoghesi, Aldo Rossi (Rossi, Aldo), Hans Hollein, Ricardo Bofill, and Léon Krier, provided designs for an exhibition organized by the Venice Biennale under the title, “The Presence of the Past.” These key architects of postmodernism represented several different outlooks but shared a desire to banish the fear of memory from modern architectural design.

      Postmodernist experimentation was often overtly ironic. For example, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Pompidou Centre) in Paris (1971–77), by Renzo Piano (Piano, Renzo) and Richard Rogers (Rogers, Richard), with its services and structure exposed externally and painted in primary colours, can be seen as an outrageous joke in the historic centre of Paris. The building has a postmodernist flavour: it playfully acknowledges the historical belief, going back at least to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel) and continuing through Modernism, in the truthful exposure of the structural bones of a building. Rogers repeated the theme in his Lloyd's Building in London (1984–86). Sir James Stirling (Stirling, Sir James)'s addition to the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany (1977–82), also a key postmodernist building, makes ironic references to the language of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Schinkel, Karl Friedrich) without accepting the fundamental principles of Classicism.

 Rejecting the playful elements in such buildings as kitsch, some architects, notably Allan Greenberg and John Blatteau, chose a more historically faithful Classical style, as in their official reception rooms of the United States Department of State in Washington, D.C. (1984–85). Undeviating Classicism was pursued in Britain by, among others, Quinlan Terry (Riverside Development, Richmond, Surrey, 1986–88). Along the same lines, Krier was influential in both the United States and Britain for his iconlike drawings of city planning schemes in a ruthlessly simple Classical style and for his polemical attacks on what he saw as modern technology's destruction of civic order and human dignity. The spirit of Classical urban renewal was represented in France by Bofill's vast housing developments, such as Les Espaces d'Abraxas in Marne-la-Vallée, near Paris (1978–83). The gargantuan scale of this columnar architecture of prefabricated concrete pushed the language of Classicism to its limits and beyond.

David John Watkin
      Many architectural critics have observed that postmodern architecture was characterized by superficiality, excess, and derivation. But, rather than being superficial in their love of cartoonlike, over-scaled Classical forms and details, many postmodern architects were seriously attempting to place their creations within historic as well as local design contexts. Examples of this tendency range from Graves's Humana Building (1982) in Louisville, Kentucky, in which he consciously attempted to link this new classicist skyscraper to America's masonry skyscrapers from the early 20th century, to José Rafael Moneo's National Museum of Roman Art (1986) in Mérida, Spain, which features a sequence of simple, round brick arches that make reference to the ancient Roman tradition of arched-brick buildings.

      Postmodernism nonetheless faded from favour at the end of the 20th century. Contextual efforts continued through the 1990s, but often with a renewed appreciation of Modernist principles. This increasing appreciation for the simple lines of Modernist buildings perhaps related to the leaner recession years of the early 1990s that developed after “black Monday,” the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. Terms such as “value engineered” became commonplace in the 1990s, denoting that clients wished to save money through simpler, streamlined designs, making the elaborate, costly ornamentation associated with postmodernism increasingly irrelevant as the millennium approached.

      While office vacancy rates began to climb in the United States and Europe, international architects worked on rebuilding cities in China and Southeast Asia until the recession eventually spread there. Prominent buildings illustrating the newfound importance of that region include Cesar Pelli's Petronas Twin Towers (1992–98) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—which surpassed the Sears Tower as the tallest building in the world (see Researcher's Note: Height of the Sears Tower) at 1,483 feet (452 metres) high—and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Jin Mao Tower (1999), in Shanghai, China's tallest building, which stands at 1,380 feet (420 metres). Although neither is as overtly historicist as slightly earlier postmodern buildings, both have contextual references to their respective environments: the plans of the Petronas Towers use Islamic design motifs, and the design of Jin Mao Tower makes conscious reference to Chinese pagoda forms.

Architecture at the turn of the 21st century

Deconstruction
      While some architects in the 1990s continued to design buildings with contextual elements, others strove to make a clean break with the overt historicism of postmodernism. The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture” (1988) included a number of architects whose angular spatial compositions appear to be tangible realizations of chaos theory, but which are also in many ways reminiscent of Russian Constructivist (Constructivism) and German Expressionist (Expressionism) architectural forms from the early 1920s. Architects such as Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky of the Austrian firm of Coop Himmelblau demonstrated this individualistic, dynamic juxtaposition of forms in buildings such as the Funder Factory Works (1988) in St. Veit, Austria, and the offices atop Falkestrasse 6 (1983–88) in Vienna. An almost violent, disruptive placement of angular rectilinear forms and spaces often appeared in similar works of architecture that can be termed “deconstructivist” architecture, a movement related to the literary theory of the same name (see deconstruction). Examples of deconstructivist architecture include Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin (1989–99); Zaha Hadid's Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany (1989–93), and her “Mind Zone” exhibition within Richard Rogers's Millennium Dome in Greenwich, England (1999); and Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1983–89). Rem Koolhaas's work shares many of the same qualities as the work of these architects, although he is probably known more for his architectural writings, such as Delirious New York (1978) and S,M,L,XL (1996), than for his buildings.

Millennial trends
      The 1990s witnessed two remarkable architectural events that helped revitalize existing architectural environments. The first of these came with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the subsequent reunification of Germany. After selecting Berlin as the capital of a new Germany, the government held numerous architectural competitions for various buildings and neighbourhoods throughout the city. Of all of them, perhaps the most important was that for Potsdamer Platz, the former no-man's land between East and West Berlin and the centre of the new city. Held in 1991, the competition resulted in buildings being constructed over the next decade and more. This new city centre contained showpiece buildings by international architects such Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Rafael Moneo, and Helmut Jahn.

      The second significant event of the 1990s was the revitalization of the industrial city of Bilbao, Spain, which used architecture as a central way to redefine itself. Some of the architects selected for projects there included international figures such as Sir Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, Robert A.M. Stern, and Ricardo Legorreta. The city's most famous work, however, was by Frank Gehry (Gehry, Frank O.). Other cities in Europe and Asia in the 1980s held international competitions to revitalize various urban neighbourhoods (e.g., Berlin and Frankfurt, in Germany, and Nara and Fukuoka, in Japan), but Bilbao distinguished itself by making a deliberate effort to put itself on the world's cultural map with the construction of a branch of the Guggenheim Museum (1991–97) designed by Gehry. Upon its opening, the building became an international success. Its angular, anthropomorphic exterior, made mostly of titanium, made reference to the industrial heritage of this city's former shipyards while also providing a dynamic new image for Bilbao.

      Gehry generally works from numerous architectural models when he plans his buildings, but he actualized the individualistic shapes of the Guggenheim through the use of computer-generated forms that facilitated the planning and engineering of the structure. Computer technology helped to bring about many such major architectural advancements at the turn of the 21st century. Even though firms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill pioneered the use of computers for architectural and engineering design in the early to mid-1980s, using them to create architectural renderings as early as 1985, the personal computer did not see widespread use in small and large architectural offices until the mid-1990s, when it became a ubiquitous design tool in almost every architectural firm. Younger firms such as Diller and Scofidio, Garofalo Architects, and Greg Lynn were able to make highly expressive, curvilinear structures and spaces because of this electronic tool. Gehry went on to use the CATIA system, a program used in aerospace engineering, to design his anthropomorphic, wildly expressive Experience Music Project (completed 2000) in Seattle. In addition to using new technology to create the ultimate in an expressionist, modern aesthetic, architects also used technical advancements such as energy-efficient, double-glass walls and louvered facades to create sustainable buildings that were environmentally friendly. Architects such as Foster and Ken Yeang became well-respected specialists in this pursuit, utilizing sun and shade to their best advantage in their buildings, and planting trees within internal atria that were, as the rest of the building, naturally ventilated.

      One tendency that linked postmodernism, deconstruction, and most trends at the turn of the 21st century was the international star system. In 1979 the Pritzker Architecture Prize (Pritzker Prize) was established by the Hyatt Foundation in Chicago. This prestigious award, likened to the Nobel Prize for architecture, spawned several other international architectural awards, such as the Praemeum Imperiale in Japan (1988) and the Carlsberg Prize in Denmark (1992). The Pritzker Prize's laureate list reads like a “who's who” of contemporary architecture. Past winners represent many architectural stylistic preferences and many nations, from the then-postmodern practitioners Philip Johnson (1979; American), Sir James Stirling (1981; British), and Hans Hollein (1985; Austrian) to deconstructivists such as Gehry (1989; Canadian-born American) and Koolhaas (2000; Dutch), Minimalists such as Álvaro Siza (1992; Portuguese) and Tadao Ando (1995; Japanese), and technology-savvy designers such as Renzo Piano (1998; Italian) and Sir Norman Foster (1999; British). The Pritzker Prize became as much a part of American and international social history as a part of architectural history: just as novelists, actors, and pop singers captured intense media attention in the late 20th century, these celebrity “starchitects,” as they have been called, received widespread attention through international exhibitions, lectures, design magazines, and monographs. At the turn of the 21st century these superstars made their marks all over the world, and stylistic categorization gave way to the unique visions of the individual architects.

John Zukowsky

Additional Reading

General works
Banister Fletcher, Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture, 20th ed., edited by Dan Cruickshank (1996), provides a comprehensive standard survey of Western architecture; as do David Watkin, A History of Western Architecture, 3rd ed. (2000); Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, 2nd ed., rev. by Greg Castillo (1995); and Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 7th ed. (1963, reissued 1990). Standard reference works include Encyclopedia of World Art, 17 vol., trans. from Italian (1959–87); Adolf K. Placzek (ed.), Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, 4 vol. (1982); Jane Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vol. (1996, reprinted with minor corrections, 1998); and James Stevens Curl and John Sambrook, A Dictionary of Architecture (1999).

Bronze Age
An introduction to the architecture of the period is Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964, reprinted 1974). Minoan architecture is discussed in Richard Wyatt Hutchinson, Prehistoric Crete (1962, reprinted with revisions, 1968). Helladic times are covered in George E. Mylonas, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (1966). David Trump, Central and Southern Italy Before Rome (1966), addresses the western Mediterranean architecture of the period.

Classical Greek and Hellenistic
Major surveys are offered in William Bell Dinsmoor, The Architecture of Ancient Greece: An Account of Its Historic Development, 3rd ed. rev. (1950, reprinted 1975); A.W. Lawrence, Greek Architecture, 5th ed., rev. by R.A. Tomlinson (1996); J.J. Coulton, Ancient Greek Architects at Work: Problems of Structure and Design (1977, reissued 1991; also published as Greek Architects at Work, 1977, reprinted 1982); J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents, rev. ed. (1990, reprinted 1995), and Art in the Hellenistic Age (1986, reissued 1996); and James Steele and Ersin Alok, Hellenistic Architecture in Asia Minor (1992).

Roman
The basic source is Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. from Latin by Morris Hicky Morgan (1914, reprinted 1960), the only complete treatise to survive from antiquity. Authoritative surveys with informative bibliographies are Axel Boëthius, Etruscan and Early Roman Architecture, 2nd ed., rev. by Roger Ling and Tom Rasmussen (1978); and J.B. Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture (1981, reissued 1994). Also of interest are William L. MacDonald, The Architecture of the Roman Empire, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1982–86); Margaret Lyttelton, Baroque Architecture in Classical Antiquity (1974); and J.J. Pollitt, The Art of Rome, c. 753 B.C.–337 A.D.: Sources and Documents (1966, reprinted 1983).

Early Christian and Byzantine
Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th ed., rev. by Richard Krautheimer and Slobodan Ćurčić (1986), is a major study. Also informative is E. Baldwin Smith, Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages (1956, reprinted 1978). Constantinople (Istanbul) is covered in Thomas F. Mathews, The Byzantine Churches of Istanbul: A Photographic Survey (1976). Hubert Faensen, Vladimir Ivanov, and Klaus G. Beyer, Early Russian Architecture (1975; originally published in German, 1972), is a useful introduction.

Early Medieval and Romanesque
The fundamental study is Kenneth John Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, 800 to 1200, 3rd ed. (1973). Also of interest are Eric Fernie, The Architecture of the Anglo-Saxons (1983), and The Architecture of Norman England (2000); Rolf Toman (ed.), Romanesque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting (1997; originally published in German, 1996); and Roger Stalley, Early Medieval Architecture (1999).

Gothic
Paul Frankl, Gothic Architecture, rev. ed. by Paul Crossley (2001), provides a full scholarly survey. Earlier classics include Otto Von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, 3rd expanded ed. (1988); and Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951, reissued 1985); while later scholarship is represented in Jean Bony, The English Decorated Style: Gothic Architecture Transformed, 1250–1350 (1979); and Rolf Toman (ed.), The Art of Gothic: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting (1999; originally published in German, 1998). Also useful is Teresa G. Frisch, Gothic Art 1140–c. 1450: Sources and Documents (1971, reissued 1987).

Renaissance
The best general surveys of Italian Renaissance architecture are Ludwig H. Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy, 1400–1500, rev. by Paul Davies (1996); and Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture in Italy, 1500–1600, rev. by Deborah Howard (1995). Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 5th ed. (1998), a scholarly study, may be read in conjunction with historical treatises, especially Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. from Latin (1988, reprinted 1991; originally published in Latin, 1485); and Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Architecture (1738, reprinted 1977; originally published in Italian, 1570).Informative works on Renaissance architecture outside of Italy include Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, 5th ed., rev. by Richard Beresford (1999); George Kubler and Martin Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800 (1959, reissued 1969); John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1830, 9th ed. (1993); and Helena Kozakiewiczowie and Stefan Kozakiewiczowie, The Renaissance in Poland (1976; originally published in Polish, 1976).

Baroque and Rococo
Important general studies include Anthony Blunt (ed.), Baroque & Rococo Architecture & Decoration (1978, reprinted 1988). The classic study on Italian Baroque is Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750, rev. by Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu, 6th ed., 3 vol. (1999). Informative works on specific parts of Italy include Anthony Blunt, Neapolitan Baroque & Rococo Architecture (1975); and Richard Pommer, Eighteenth-Century Architecture in Piedmont: The Open Structures of Juvarra, Alfieri & Vittone (1967). Works dealing with the period's architecture elsewhere include Karsten Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism (1983); W. Kuyper, Dutch Classicist Architecture: A Survey of Dutch Architecture, Gardens, and Anglo-Dutch Architectural Relations from 1625 to 1700 (1980); Kerry Downes, English Baroque Architecture (1966); Rolf Tolman (ed.), Baroque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting (1998; originally published in German, 1997); and Henry A. Millon (ed.), The Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture in Europe, 1600–1750 (1999).

Classicism, 1750–1830
Stimulating general studies include Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (1980, reissued 1983), and On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History, 2nd ed. (1981); and Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture (1980, reissued in 2 vol., 1987; originally published in Italian, 1977). Special subjects are covered in Allan Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment (1980, reissued 1989); Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory (1962, reissued 1985); David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal (1987), a well-illustrated survey with a full bibliography; M. Il'ina and A. Aleksandrova, Moscow Monuments of Architecture, 18th–the First Third of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vol. (1975), with parallel English and Russian texts; William H. Pierson, Jr., American Buildings and Their Architects: The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles (1970, reprinted 1986); Carl W. Condit, American Building: Materials and Techniques from the First Colonial Settlements to the Present, 2nd ed. (1982); Marcus Whiffen and Frederick Koeper, American Architecture: 1607–1976 (1981, reprinted in 2 vol., 1984); Roger G. Kennedy, Greek Revival America (1989); Wend von Kalnein, Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century, trans. from German (1995); and Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750–1890 (2000).

Gothic Revival
Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (1969, reissued 1983), is a fundamental study. Georg Germann, Gothic Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences, and Ideas, trans. from German (1972), has an unusually broad perspective. Informative works on Britain include Charles L. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, 2nd ed., edited by J. Mordaunt Crook (1978), a basic text first published in 1872; George L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (1972); and Chris Brooks, Gothic Revival (1999). The United States is the focus of Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival & American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840–1856 (1968, reprinted 1997); and William H. Pierson, Jr., Technology and the Picturesque: The Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles (1978, reissued 1986).

Classicism, 1830–1930
The standard general study is Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 4th ed. (1977, reprinted 1987). Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750–1950, 2nd ed. (1998), offers a challenging interpretative approach. Other informative works include Arthur Drexler (ed.), The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts (1977, reprinted 1984); Robin Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture (1982); Carroll L.V. Meeks, Italian Architecture, 1750–1914 (1966); Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome, 1870–1950: Traffic and Glory (1973); Tilmann Buddensieg and Henning Rogge, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–1914 (1984; originally published in German, 1979); Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (1968, reissued 1985); Simo Paavilainen (ed.), Nordic Classicism, 1910–1930 (1982), with English and Swedish texts; E. Kirichenko, Moscow Architectural Monuments of the 1830–1910s (1977), with parallel English and Russian texts; and William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: Progressive and Academic Ideals at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1972, reprinted 1986).

20th century
Iron and glass
Important sources include François Loyer, Architecture of the Industrial Age, 1789–1914 (1983; originally published in French, 1983); Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (1948, reissued 1970); Carroll L.V. Meeks, The Railroad Station: An Architectural History (1956, reissued 1995); and Carl W. Condit, American Building Art: The Twentieth Century (1961). Frank Russell (ed.), Art Nouveau Architecture (1979, reprinted 1986), is a comprehensive survey.

Modern movement and after
Early classic studies include Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (1932, reissued 1996); Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. ed. (1975, reissued 1991); and Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2nd ed. (1967, reprinted 1992). A broader exploration is available in Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed., rev. and enlarged (1992, reissued 1997). Modern American architecture is discussed in William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (1972, reprinted 1986); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, reissued 2000); and the work by Carl W. Condit cited in the section above. Postmodernism has been surveyed in Paolo Portoghesi, Postmodern: The Architecture of the Post-Industrial Society (1983; originally published in Italian, 1982); and Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 6th rev. and enlarged ed. (1991). Also of interest are Robert A.M. Stern and Raymond W. Gastil, Modern Classicism (1988); and Andreas Papadakis and Harriet Watson (eds.), New Classicism: Omnibus Volume (1990).David John Watkin Other developments in late 20th-century architecture are examined in Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988); Charles Jencks, The New Moderns: From Late to Neo-Modernism (1990); Peter Noever (ed.), Architecture in Transition: Between Deconstruction and New Modernism (1991, reissued 1997); Hugh Pearman, Contemporary World Architecture (1998); Martha Thorne (ed.), The Pritzker Architecture Prize: The First Twenty Years (1999); and John Zukowsky and Martha Thorne (eds.), Skyscrapers: The New Millennium (2000).John Zukowsky

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