Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/176

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ARCHITECTURE OF THE RENAISSANCE
chap.

The design is attributed to Bramante,[1] and it has features that lend support to belief in this authorship. The encircling arcade at the top suggests the encircling colonnade of the same architect's subsequent design for the dome of St. Peter's. It may not be unlikely that this arcade, wrought while the author was under the influence of the local Lombard Romanesque, suggested the idea of the encircling colonnade after he had come under the severer classic influence in Rome. The alternation of pilasters in the top story of the apses, with the two inter-columns over each interval in the stage below, corresponds to the design of the interior of the sacristy of S. Satiro.

In the chapel of St. Peter Martyr of the church of Sant' Eustorgio, attributed to the Florentine architect Michelozzi, we have a circular celled vault on salient ribs, like Brunelleschi's vault of the Pazzi. This vault is enclosed within a drum carried on pendentives, and is lighted by a circular opening in the drum under each alternate vault cell. The drum is polygonal on the outside, is carried up far above the haunch of the vault, and is covered with a low-pitch roof of timber crowned with a tall lantern. The lower walls of the interior of the square beneath this vault have an order of pilasters, and over the entablature of this order are arched windows, one on the north and the other on the south side, each of which has a mullion and jamb shafts of the Certosa tapering type, and pseudo-Gothic tracery. Most of the details of this interior are of stone, which give it a more monumental character than the buildings before noticed have. The outside is of brick, the square part being plain, with simple angle buttresses, and crowned with a cornice of classic profiling. Pinnacles made up of neo-classic details rise from the angles, and the drum is adorned with an order of pilasters, and with moulded circular panels alternating with circular openings. The building as a whole has the moderation of the works of the early Florentine Renaissance, and is in noticeable contrast to the more florid designs of this region already noticed.

A somewhat later example of ecclesiastical architecture of the Renaissance in Milan is the church of the Monastero Maggiore, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and said to have been designed by Dolcebono, a pupil of Bramante. This is a rectangular structure without aisles, having round-

  1. Cf. Casati, op. cit., p. 44.