Renaissance Revival architecture
Self-applied style designations were rife in the mid- and later 19th century: "Neo-Renaissance" might be applied by contemporaries to structures that others called "Italianate", or when many French Baroque features are present (Second Empire).
A comparison between the breadth of its source material, such as the English Wollaton Hall,[1] Italian Palazzo Pitti, the French Château de Chambord, and the Russian Palace of Facets—all deemed "Renaissance"—illustrates the variety of appearances the same architectural label can take.
In the Loire valley a wave of chateau building was carried out using traditional French Gothic styles but with ornament in the forms of pediments, arcades, shallow pilasters and entablatures from the Italian Renaissance.
Thus Italian, French and Flemish Renaissance coupled with the amount of borrowing from these later periods can cause great difficulty and argument in correctly identifying various forms of 19th-century architecture.
Other early but typical, domestic examples of the Neo-Renaissance include Mentmore Towers and the Château de Ferrières, both designed in the 1850s by Joseph Paxton for members of the Rothschild banking family.
John Ruskin's panegyrics to architectural wonders of Venice and Florence in the 1850s contributed to shifting "the attention of scholars and designers, with their awareness heightened by debate and restoration work"[3] from Late Neoclassicism and Gothic Revival to the Italian Renaissance.
311, caption 938 In England, where Sir George Gilbert Scott designed the London Foreign Office in this style between 1860 and 1875, it also incorporated certain Palladian features.
Starting with the orangery of Sanssouci (1851), "the Neo-Renaissance became the obligatory style for university and public buildings, for banks and financial institutions, and for the urban villas" in Germany.
In the fast-growing capital, Budapest many monumental public buildings were built in Neo-Renaissance style like Saint Stephen's Basilica and the Hungarian State Opera House.
"[5]: 44 Konstantin Thon, the most popular Russian architect of the time, used Italianate elements profusely for decorating some interiors of the Grand Kremlin Palace (1837–1851).
Another fashionable architect, Andrei Stackenschneider, was responsible for Mariinsky Palace (1839–1844), with "the faceted rough-hewn stone of the first floor" reminiscent of 16th-century Italian palazzi.
In Moscow, the Neo-Renaissance was less prevalent than in the Northern capital, although interiors of the neo-Muscovite City Duma (1890–1892) were executed with emphasis on Florentine and Venetian décor.
The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, was a residence of the Vanderbilt family designed by Richard Morris Hunt in 1892; it and contemporaneous Gilded Age mansions exemplify the ambitions of wealthy Americans in equaling and surpassing the ostentatious lifestyles of European aristocrats.
During the latter half of the 19th century 5th Avenue in New York City was lined with "Renaissance" French chateaux and Italian palazzi, all designed in Neo-Renaissance styles.
This was a feature at Mentmore Towers and on a far larger scale at the Warsaw University of Technology, where the large glazed court contained a monumental staircase.
[8] In the British Raj in 1880, the façades of the 1777 Writers' building in Kolkata were redesigned in the Renaissance Revival style then popular in colonial India, though this version was remarkable in its unique design.
In the true Renaissance era there was a division of labour between the architect, who designed the exterior highly visible shell, and others—the artisans—who decorated and arranged the interior.
However, it was still extensively practiced in the 1910s in Saint Petersburg and Buenos Aires by such architects as Leon Benois, Marian Peretyatkovich, or Francisco Tamburini (picture).
In England it was so common that today one finds "Renaissance Italian Palazzi" serving as banks or municipal buildings in the centres of even the smallest towns.
"[11] While to an extent this may be true, the same could be said of most eras until the early 20th century, the Neo-Renaissance in the hands of provincial architects did develop into a style not always instantly recognisable as a derivative of the Renaissance.
