Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/61

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CHURCH ARCHITECTURE
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its attic surmounting an open portico having an arcade on Corinthian columns, is also strongly suggestive of the same scheme. The features that are peculiar to the Pazzi, the arch breaking the entablature, the barrel vault sprung from the order, and the dome bisecting this vault, do little credit to the architect as a consistent designer.

Impost of San Lorenzo, Florence, figure 15 from "Character of Renaissance Architecture"

Fig. 15.—Impost of San Lorenzo.

Two more important examples of church architecture in Florence, which appear to be mainly by Brunelleschi, are San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito. What part Brunelleschi had in the design of San Lorenzo is not perfectly clear,[1] but the main scheme was probably his, though the work was not completed until after his death. In the old sacristy of this church, which appears to be the part that was first built, the interior design of the Pazzi chapel is reproduced with some modifications of proportions and details, including the celled vault on a system of ribs, resting on pendentives. The church itself exhibits a frank return to primitive basilican forms and methods of construction, though with modifications and some additions. The nave has a flat wooden ceiling, but the aisles are covered with domical vaulting on salient transverse ribs, and over the crossing is a hemispherical dome on pendentives. In the arcades, which are carried on Corinthian columns like those of the portico of the Pazzi, the entablature blocks of late Roman design are reproduced in the impost (Fig. 15). The revival of this meaningless feature shows again how little impression the logic of mediæval art had made on the Italian mind, and what lack of discrimination in their borrowings from the antique the designers of the Renaissance often show. Whatever features the Roman models displayed were looked upon as authoritative, and copied without

  1. Cf. Vasari, Opere, vol. 2, p. 368 et seq., and Milancsi's foot-note, p. 370.