Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Almost the whole history of high-status Western architecture is the story of attempts to revive and recapture the magnificence of the ancient world, principally the ancient Roman world, which had left behind it some spectacular ruins. One of the most spectacular was the Pantheon (Figure 14), the great domed temple that had been built by the Emperor Hadrian, and then later, in the Christian era after Constantine, turned into a church. Palladio published woodcuts of it in plan and section, and Brunelleschi is supposed to have studied it and other Roman ruins when he was trying to work out how to construct the great dome of the cathedral at Florence of 1420. It is well known that the architects of the Renaissance set themselves the challenge of rivalling the work of the ancients, but there is also a good deal of medieval work that had the same idea, though perhaps with different examples at hand. This is particularly clear in the medieval churches that are called ‘Romanesque’ precisely because they learnt from Roman examples. For example the Romanesque cathedral of St Lazare at Autun in Burgundy has a row of arches running along its nave, leading into the side-aisles, while up above there is a row of smaller arches that act as windows (a clerestory) and bring light into the space. The same pattern of small arches above large arches is to be found in the town’s surviving Roman gateways, which are on a rather smaller scale than the cathedral. The scale seems to have been given by the ruins of an unusual Roman temple — a mass of Roman brick and concrete — that towers over a low-lying field just outside the town. Its surface facing has long since gone, so it is a rather ungainly shape of rubble, but it is impressively large. If we combine the scale of the temple with the finished workmanship of the gates, then we have a pattern that can easily be adapted into the cathedral. The nave there is vaulted, which is an idea that was learnt from Roman buildings such as the Pantheon and from the great bathing complexes built by the later emperors. In the 16th century, Michelangelo would adapt the vaulted space of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome into a church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, and from the 11th century new churches were built with vaults in Burgundy, starting with the church of St. Philibert at Tournus (c.950–1120). The Burgundian Romanesque churches looked to the great abbey at Cluny as the seat of their authority, and it made use of pointed arches running along its nave. These pointed arches appear unusually at Autun, both in the nave and in the vault over it — in Burgundy pointed arches do not necessarily indicate that the building is Gothic.