Venetian Renaissance architecture

The Venetian elite had a collective belief in the importance of architecture in bolstering confidence in the Republic, and a Senate resolution in 1535 noted that it was "the most beautiful and illustrious city which at present exists in the world".

[5] At the same time, overt competition between patrician families was discouraged, in favour of "harmonious equality", which applied to buildings as to other areas,[6] and novelty for its own sake, or to recapture the glories of antiquity, was regarded with suspicion.

Marmorino or cocciopesto stuccos, made from grinding limestone, brick and terracotta fragments, was the typical finish for interior walls, and sometimes exteriors.

Different types of wood were used for different purposes, and by the Renaissance period the nearer mainland forests were running short, and the cost of timber had risen considerably.

[11] The distinctive and very large Venetian chimney-pots, with a terracotta covered top like an inverted cone, were designed to stop dangerous sparks from escaping and starting fires.

The crowded city centre encouraged building high by the standards of the period, and the main access for light was often from the front facade, which therefore typically has more and larger windows than palaces elsewhere.

From around the same date, the Arco Foscari, an elaborate canopy or triumphal arch for the ceremonial entrance in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace, is classical in its lower levels, but becomes a forest of Gothic pinnacles by the top.

The history of Venetian architecture is complicated because of the habit of appointing what might today be called a "managing architect", a protomaestro or proto, to report to supervising committees, whose name often survives in archives.

[22] Mauro Codussi (1440–1504) from Lombardy was one of the first architects to work in a Renaissance style in Venice, with his son Domenico assisting him and carrying on his practice after his death.

A fire in 1483 destroyed the east wing of the Doge's Palace, and Codussi won the competition to replace it, producing completely different designs for the facades facing into the courtyard and the outside.

He fled to Venice after the catastrophic Sack of Rome in 1527 and in 1529 was appointed chief architect and superintendent of properties (Protomaestro or Proto) to the Procurators of San Marco.

[25] According to Manfredo Tafuri, his first project in Venice, Palazzo Gritti, was never built as his plans, though brilliant, were considered too full of exhibitionist novelties; he had failed to grasp the ideology of the sober and restrained magnificence required by Venetian patricians.

Vitruvius is the only significant classical writer on architecture to survive, and his work De architectura was keenly studied by all Renaissance architects.

Although the Latin text had been printed before, the first edition illustrated with woodcuts was produced by Fra Giovanni Giocondo in Venice in 1511;[38] he had designed the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in 1505–08.

[40] Vincenzo Scamozzi's main book L’Idea dell’Architettura Universale was published in 1615, and essentially looks back to Palladio; it was influential in spreading Palladianism.

Venetians liked to claim that the lack of any pagan contamination in their history gave a special "pure, legitimate and undefiled" quality to their Christianity.

Begun in 1508, soon after the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, among other things this large church with an interior based on Greek crosses represented a Venetian riposte to Roman revivalism.