History Summarized: Neoclassical Architecture

Earlier this year, I put out a video about fun shenanigans in Italian art and architecture, during which I said the following. I'd written up this whole side tangent about how Andrea Palladio essentially codified the genre of neoclassicism, but I cut it because it was long and probably only interesting to me. I said this partly in jest, but also partly to not obliterate the finely tuned pacing of these videos with a 12-minute mega-tangent about neoclassicism. But as it turns out, neoclassical architecture is not only interesting to me, because a lot of the comments were asking to hear more. And that brings us to today, where I've sequestered the full runtime of a video to gush about how goddamn cool neoclassicism is, and the straight-up genius of Andrea Palladio for solidifying the style. Now let's do some architecture. One key difference between studying narrative history and studying culture is that states and people and events are fundamentally dynamic. There's a constant forward progression from one thing to the next, and no matter how hard I shut my eyes and focus, I can't just open them 600 years in the past. That all happened. It's gone now, no matter how much I cry about it. But the way we interact with cultural artistry, and especially architecture, is fundamentally different, because those creations continued to exist for centuries after the fact, sometimes surviving just as they were originally designed. And this results in something approximating an architectural fossil record, which lets us peer vividly into the past simply by existing in that space. All this isn't just to say, wow, old stuff is old, splendid insight, give the man a prize, but the point is that even when historical moments are displaced by, say, over a millennium, the survival of that architectural fossil allows a later observer to look backwards into time and take some notes that might have otherwise been lost in the intervening years. And that takes us to Italy at the turn of the 1400s, where Gothic architecture had been the standard style for centuries. The main features of Gothic were pointed arches, high vaults, and schmancy windows, but as with all movements in architecture, precise styles varied by time and place. French Gothic, for instance, loved their flying buttresses and had a generally spiky appearance, while Italian Gothic was drenched in patterned marble. In these early 1400s, Florence and Venice were picture-perfect Gothic cities, but Rome was... out of shape. Sure, it was the height of ancient imperial glory way back in the day, but those days were way back, and after having just spent a century popeless, long story, lots of Rome was old and busted. To the Romans, that was just kinda how it was, because why overanalyze a perfectly usable structure somebody else already did the hard work for hundreds of lifetimes ago? Well, in 1401, a diva by the name of Brunelleschi stormed out of Florence after losing a sculpting competition and went to Rome to brood about it, and the otherwise unremarkable Roman ruins astonished Brunelleschi's Florentine Gothic sensibilities. Of course, the Roman Empire was a known quantity, and it wasn't like everyone collectively forgot that it happened, but it was distant and vague, and it had been a hot millennium since anyone last took a good look at the architecture to study the design philosophy and figure out how these structures worked. Little surprise that Brunelleschi's grand return to Florence saw him wielding his rediscoveries of linear perspective and classical architecture like they were secret ancient magic. From classic proportions, to columns, to arches, to... and you knew this was coming... the dome. Brunelleschi stayed firmly within his hometown Gothic aesthetic throughout his career, and the place looks like a dream, so job well done, but his spectacular reintroduction of ancient methods kicked off a ferocious study of classical ruins and treatises that would soon overhaul the architectural landscape of Europe. If Florence rediscovered the engineering of classical Rome, its aesthetics were rediscovered in Venice. While various cities like Florence, Rome, and Mantua got increasingly daring with their classical compositions, they still struggled to break away from their Gothic tendencies. Venice, however, was uniquely well-positioned to go big on neoclassical. It was a Gothic city through and through, to the point that their local flavor of Venetian Gothic is its own entire sub-style, but in the early 1500s, that bothersome roadblock of pre-existing stuff would be overcome with terrifying speed. Firstly, in 1514, the city center burns to the ground, and the century-long rebuilding effort let architects play around with those shiny new designs they had been reading so much about. As part of this urban renewal project, the Doge commissioned Jacopo Sansovino to build a grand library in St. Mark's Square. Starting in 1357, it took... a good long while, suffering budget constraints, partial structural collapses, and Sansovino's subsequent imprisonment for the failure, but by 1588, it was finally done, and people loved it. Sansovino had essentially taken the round outer wall of the Roman Colosseum and smooshed it onto a flat facade. This was just one part of Piazza San Marco's conversion from a medieval market square into a reimagined Roman forum, and the 1500s saw all kinds of neoclassicizing projects like this. Of course, by this point in time, the Venetian Republic stretched far beyond just Venice. During the 1400s, the Republic pushed deep into the Italian mainland and brought several new cities under its wing, and this is where our second rapid disassembly comes into play, because 1509 saw the War of the League of Cambrai, where a rotating cast of France, Germany, Venice, and the Pope took their turns beating the pants off each other, mostly to the detriment of mainland Venice, where constant fighting, sackings, and occupations left the cities a mess. So while Venetians across the Republic had a miserable start to the century with plenty to rebuild, the architects were smelling cash and glory, and it's these mainland renovations that had by far the biggest effect on the architecture of the Republic as a whole. Even after the fire, Venice itself spent decades tiptoeing towards neoclassicism, but cities like Padova, Verona, Vicenza, and others may as well have been clean slates, so they were zooming. No Venetian glow-up was quite as impressive as Vicenza. It was already one of the poorest cities in the Republic, and after a partial building collapse in the 1490s, the city hall was in desperate need of some help. By the 1540s, the commission went to a young Padovan named Andrea Palladio, who had spent the past decade studying Roman architecture and building classically-themed villas around Vicenza. This town hall was a pretty big job, but his design amazed his fellow Venetians, even when it was just on paper. Long before the building's completion in 1614, Italians were positively stoked by Palladio's reimagining of the Gothic Palazzo della Ragione into a Roman basilica. Palladio did this by using Roman-style arches, a statuary balcony, an ancient frieze running along the facade, plus nestled colonnades in the classical order of ascending Doric to Ionic up to Corinthian, and all of this outer facade was unified in a white marble aesthetic. Put those pieces together, and the effect is just stunning. From there, Palladio was Vicenza's number one boy, and their civic buildings and villas became his architectural playground. Of course, Vicenza was still small, and these buildings took time to throw together, but Palladio's reputation and architectural vision preceded him because of his extensive publications. In 1565, he published a survey of ancient Roman architecture that remained one of the city's most popular guidebooks for another two centuries, and 1570 saw his Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, a four-part study that examined building materials and design techniques, country villas, civic design, and urban planning, and ended with deep dives into ancient Roman temples. To help show his points, the book was packed with Palladio's reconstructed illustrations of ancient buildings, as well as examples from his own original designs. Palladio did the same thing when he illustrated a new edition of Vitruvius's De Architettura, using his artwork to demonstrate Vitruvian principles. His buildings in and around Vicenza made Palladio a local hero, but these publications gave his ideas far broader reach. Had Palladio only designed his buildings, or only published his analyses, he still would have been a huge influence in the evolution of architecture, much as Brunelleschi was, but in doing both the practical and the theoretical, he turned his particular interpretation of classical architecture into the definitive vision of the genre. Naturally, time passed and tastes changed, so later architects continued embellishing the neoclassical style with so many frills it became Baroque, and eventually the indecipherable mess that is Rococo, but that original Palladian neoclassicism remained a prevalent style in the centuries after, in part because of how thematically useful it was for channeling distinctly classical ideas. Washington DC is a prime example. It's not covered in white marble just for funsies. That emulation of the Roman Republican style was a political statement about what the American Republic should strive towards, and that's expressed through Palladian visual language. No surprise that most European parliaments later repeat that idea in their choices of architecture, but I'm getting ahead of myself because our boy Andrea was a true renaissance workaholic who still had plenty more to do. Through the 1550s he had been making civic buildings and villas in mainland Venetian towns, but from the 1560s he was in the big leagues, designing churches in Venice. His first project was the facade of San Francesco della Vigna, and we should not be surprised that even his very first attempt at church design was an absolute swish. It was, however, quite hard to make it actually work. Palladian architecture borrowed heavily from ancient ideas of proportion and ratio that are, frankly, way too much math for me to get into, but the core problem was how to consolidate church proportions with ancient pagan temple proportions. To say nothing of the delicate theological quandary that results from smushing the two together. Palladio's solution, as ever, was deceptively simple. To accommodate a high nave and short aisles, you set a triangular pediment across the whole structure, then you rip it in half, yank out the middle, and slap a higher pediment on top of that. And just like that, problemo solved. He did the same trick on the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, which began construction in 1565. This time the stakes were considerably higher as San Giorgio Maggiore looked out to St. Mark's Square and the Doge's Palace. Being a rather severe departure from traditional Venetian Gothic, citizens were shocked, but they absolutely loved it. And of course they did! Look at it! It's pretty! So by 1570, Palladio was appointed Chief Architect of the Republic, whereupon he designed the votive church of Il Redentore on Giudecca Island. However, amid these towering accomplishments of white marble fence, there is one design that got away. Venice, being a city on water, relied on bridges, and by 1551, the wooden Ponte Rialto clearly needed a replacement. So the city hosted a design contest that got submissions from Michelangelo, Sansovino, and Palladio, among many other giants of the day. The quality of the entries was so high that the judges simply could not choose. For decades. They eventually just gave up and handed the project to the architect in charge of tidying up the Doge's Palace after a fire. Antonio da Ponte was certainly no slouch, and the main feature of his bridge was its ease of crossing it during large processions, but as a pure piece of design, it's... It looks really top-heavy. It's weird. Proportion is one of the most important facets of neoclassical architecture. How does this look so unbalanced? Now, Palladio's design, as recorded in his books, had asked the fascinating question of what if a bridge was also an ancient temple and a Roman forum? And sure, it wasn't ideal for parades, but it's gorgeous. If Venice ever does go for a fifth bridge across the Grand Canal, they really ought to do this one. So, that's the two-century story of how Italians rediscovered the beauty of ancient architecture and subsequently codified neoclassicism as more than just a bank of engineering tricks, but as an entire genre of design. As with many developments in culture in general and architecture in particular, it came from a creative solution to both unique constraints and new opportunities. And in this specific instance, that solution was drenched in marble. What can I say? I'm a man of simple taste. Thank you for watching. This is a new flavor of historical deep dive for me. Not a history maker, not really a hijinx, but nonetheless very fun. If you do actually want to hear more of these kinds of things, please do let me know in the comments, because the longer I do this job, the more I realize just how many thoughts I have about buildings. In any case, I'll see you all next time.