 We're going to look at Gothic architecture in Italy. And it's an interesting period to examine, because Italy is the place where the Renaissance arose. There's a kind of overlap going on between sensibilities in the 1300s, especially in the 1400s, as styles shift from one sensibility to another. Before I get into that topic, I just want to show you an image to answer a question a student asked me at the end of class the other day. And the question was something to the effect of what's the surface in between the vaults? If this is a ribbed structure that we have in Gothic architecture, what is the material between the ribs? And how is that structural? And how does that keep the weather out? And how does that deal with snow loads, and so forth? And that's a really good question, because if we're familiar with Roman vaulted examples, like say the pantheon, there's a masonry vaulted structure that also provides the roof of the building. It's a kind of continuous thick membrane. And a different sort of thing is going on in Gothic architecture. This section through Amiens Cathedral shows us that there's actually a kind of sneaky thing going on. There's a timber truss up here. And hanging from the timber truss is the stone vault. So the stone vault provides structure and supports the walls, but there's also this other kind of, let's call it roof, to use a technical architectural word that you're perhaps familiar with, that works in tandem with the stone vault to support it, and that also provides the membrane that keeps the weather out. So it's a little bit of a composite structure. The stuff that goes on in between the vaults tends to be a kind of masonry shell. It might be a kind of basket weave of bricks so that they become self-bracing, or something like that, or of stones, so that if you lock them in together in a certain basket weave pattern, they will lock together and stay put. Now we're gonna talk about Gothic in Italy. And before I start talking about Italy, I'll talk about a city that's really not very Italian at all, Venice. And you snicker and think, Venice is 100% Italian, it's in Italy. But historically, Venice is really detached from Italy proper. It was not a Roman town. It does not have the detritus of Roman ruins scattered around. It does not have remnants of a Roman town plan with Cardo and Decumannus. It does not have even well land. Venice is this mush, it's this swamp where one small point of Venice created a bit of high ground, riva alta, high ground. And at that point, the Rialto Bridge, which is the original bridge in Venice and the only bridge in Venice until the 1800s when the Austrians took over the city and said, this is crazy. We need at least one more bridge. And so they built one. So if Venice wasn't quite Italian in the Renaissance, what was Venice? And the answer is Venice was a port. Venice was an island, Venice was a port. Venice was a great shipbuilding city and rope-making city and maritime power. And as a trading center, Venice had ties with the rest of the world. And particularly Venice had ties across the Adriatic to the Eastern Empire, to Constantinople, to Greece, to Turkey, to all of these other places. This is a painting by Gentile Bellini, relic of the true cross being carried into procession through San Marco. I just want you to compare these two scenes. This is the Piazza San Marco. And we remember the Byzantine domes when we were talking about Byzantine architecture, the Quincunx plan, the Byzantine dome, an attitude toward material as mosaic-encrusted, luminous surface rather than something that expresses its tectonic properties. Here's another painting by Bellini of this cycle of Saint Mark paintings. And this is Saint Mark preaching in Alexandria. If you compare Alexandria to Venice, at least in Bellini's mind, they're not so different. And quite a lot of what counts as Venetian architecture is inspired from the East. Already, the Saint Mark's Basilica is an Eastern church. Its plan typology is Eastern rather than Western. It's not a longitudinal basilica. It's a centralized Quincunx. And this attitude towards surface and flatness that we see at Saint Mark's Basilica seems to be something that is likewise inspired by Eastern examples. Whether or not Alexandria ever looked like this or not, who knows. What's a lot like Saint Mark's though? These are paintings of two powerful figures done by Gentile Bellini. Two guys who were hanging out in Venice back in the 1480s, more or less. This is the Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, Italian guy, painted in profile, which is the way Roman emperors like to have themselves depicted on their coins, and therefore very popular with potentates of all description. And here's another guy, Sultan Mohammed II, a ruler of the Ottoman Empire. So Venice is this crossroads of lots of different sensibilities at the time. And when you look at the architecture in Venice, it can only be understood, I think, with reference to developments that were going on in the East as well as in the West. In fact, if you look at the little hat that the doge, and the doge basically means the Duke or the ruler, let's say Duke, the ruler of Venice, his funny little pointy hat seems awfully similar to the funny little wrapped turban that the sultan is wearing, as though this is some kind of streamlined version of it. Pisa is another port city. And when we were talking about Romanesque architecture, we briefly looked at Pisa. And we saw that while the massing of the Romanesque architecture in Pisa was consistent with the massing of Romanesque architecture that we saw in other places like France and Spain, it was a really different attitude about surface. And the attitude about surface seemed inspired by the dematerialized screen walls that were common in Islamic architecture. So too, when you look at the port city of Venice, the trade city of Venice, the naval power of Venice, you see this predilection for thin screened architecture. This is a great building. This is the Cadoro, the golden house, perhaps the most beautiful building in Venice. And that's me talking. That's not guidebooks. What's so nice about the Cadoro is you see a lot about what it is to build in Venice, just by looking at the facade. For example, Venice is mush. There is no ground in Venice. The only way to build anything in Venice is to drive timber piles into the ground. And so if you're going to think about how to build a foundation that relies on driving trees into mud, you're going to be economical about where you put the foundations. So typically in Venice, the foundations go perpendicular to the canals. And this is on the Grand Canal, because it's a great looking house. You can kind of see the results of these perpendicular bearing walls. The result is that the stuffing between can dematerialize. The screen wall facing the canal has no structural value whatsoever. It's hung between these bearing walls. And so you get this laziness, this dematerialization of surface in Venice that's really quite extraordinary. You also can see here how a Venetian house in around 1428 would have worked. There is a porch for arrival. But the porch is on the water, not on the land. So you come in by gondola, you get off, and then you move through the house. So the face of the house is on the canal. And the house is porous and receptive to the water. Quite a different way of looking at this is to say, boy, this is a cool facade, not talking about the function, not talking about the structural values, but just looking at the syncopated rhythm of these facades. Because of the ability to insist on centers, here is a center, here is a center, here is a center, and then destabilize those centers. So you get this kind of oscillating, unstable rhythm. You get local symmetries that dissolve and reconstitute themselves as more complex global symmetry. So matchy, matchy, woo, there's the middle now. Matchy, matchy, woo, there's the middle now. And the facade constantly does that to you. But on other levels, I think it's important to think of this as just thin as paper. Of course, it's brick. It's not really thin as paper. Thin as paper and hung. And notice the characteristic way that the Venetian facade meets the sky with these little crenellated elements popping up that seem to take the notion of got the people like pointy to a new dematerialized extreme, that the building becomes truly almost like a fringe as it meets the sky, somehow taking the way it meets the water and stylizing it so that there can be this equal unwrapping of lightness on both sides. Cadoro, cadoro, really beautiful. Look at how it transforms not simply left to right in terms of its rhythms, but top to bottom in terms of its rhythms and its densities. Great building. Probably the most famous Venetian Gothic building is the Doge's Palace. And the Doge, we already said, is the Duke, the big ruler. Who's been to Venice? Good, you saw this, I'm sure. If you didn't see this, you were drunk the whole time because there's no way not to see this. It's right next to St. Mark's Basilica. But it's a really odd-looking building. It's so much part of the canon of things that we see when we go to Italy, it's hard to see how odd it is. But if you just think about gravity and the weight of materials, it's an odd-looking building. We have something up here that looks like fairly massive wall. And then we have this spindly stuff down below and this spindly stuff up above. It's as if it's kind of an anti-gravity building, or at least a building that's not interested in expressing and revealing the logic of how forces move through it, but rather dealing with quite a different situation. And of course, a lot of that could have to do with the fact that Venetian foundations are not perimeter foundations, as we would expect in less muddy countries, but in fact, these parallel planes. Look at the surface. The way the brick gets laid up on the Doge's Palace, the series of diamonds. And it almost seems like it's more interested in pattern making for the sake of pattern making than pattern making to reveal how forces are moving through the building. And just compare that to something like the Colosseum, where you have stacking orders, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. It's a big wall. The wall is articulated and ornamented, but something about the ornamental pattern impressed on the wall of the Colosseum also lets you kind of logically connect to how this is being supported structurally. And the very opposite is going on with the Doge's Palace. Just a few other views of the fabulousness of the Doge's Palace, the lightness where it meets the ground, the lightness where it meets the sky. In fact, if you had to think of something that looks like the Doge's Palace, it probably wouldn't be architecture. It would probably be something more like a carpet. And even the fringe of a carpet makes you think about the lightness of how it meets the ground, the lightness of how it meets the sky. This unraveling of the solid plane of surface as it comes to its perimeter condition is very much like a textile. And that's kind of cool, especially if you think about these connections with the east that Venice, this maritime culture, that they're looking at not only palaces or churches in Alexandria, but probably also more vernacular ideas about an architecture that might be more textile-based. Even look at the corner. This is an amazing detail. It looks as though two carpets have been woven together. I'm just planting seeds of this idea in your mind because it's going to come back again when we talk about the 19th century. And we talk about different ideas for the origins of architecture. We've already talked about one idea about the origin of architecture that has to do with the primitive hot, Vitruvius' description, of the origin of architecture. But it's possible, I won't give it away yet, but stay tuned. Somebody might think that there's an origin of architecture out there that has to do with thin curtains being hung on structural frames. And if that's true, we find an interesting precursor here in the Doge's Palace. Let's leave this exotic land of Venice and let's go look for a moment at Italy. Up here we have France right over here, Switzerland right over here, Germany above it, Bohemia above it. And all these countries, all these bluish-greenish countries, are countries where Gothic architecture is well-established. These are forested lands where the image of the forest with light dripping through the tangled tracery is something that is very sympathetic to the local traditions that were pre-Christian and therefore took off like crazy during the Gothic period. The cities we see here, Rome, Sienna, Florence, are a little bit more removed than Milan from this edge of Gothic. The map that we have here shows you the political divisions of Italy during a period of about 1300 to 1360, which is the time we're going to be talking about. Milan up here is in Lombardy. The yellow stuff is the area around Florence. The pinkish stuff is the area around Sienna. The brownish stuff is the area around Pisa. And all of this stuff constitutes Tuscany as we know it now. But Pisa, Sienna, and Florence were at each other's throats throughout this period. Hating each other like crazy. And papal states are purple. Papal states expand and contract depending on who's the pope. If any of you have watched the miniseries The Borges on TV, it's about a pope who's operating in around 1400 and he's busy mounting armies to acquire more land for the papacy. Let's look for a moment at what counts as Gothic in Italy. This is the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. This counts as Gothic in Italy. And you have to say, oh, you've got to be kidding. And you would say that because you know that this is a wall architecture. This is not a skeletal architecture. Okay, you've got a rose window. But what else have you got? I guess you have three doors, but not very well orchestrated. I mean, this is really a planar surface. Likewise, the interior is fibbed and pointed, but the windows are punched. I mean, it's as though there are these national tastes, there are these sensibilities, there are lines that you can't cross from one culture to the other. And the Italians could never much get into the radical dematerialization of the building envelope. And in part that might be conditioned by climate too. Like if you're in the north, there's something great about opening up the envelope of the building and introducing a light in. If you're in the south, you really want to protect yourself from the light and keep the building envelope more tightly closed up together. But it is still primarily a wall architecture. And it's sort of great that it's a wall architecture because the walls are covered with frescoes by people like Giotto and Chimabue and other great masters. But the windows are punched. The fenestration, fenestration means system of putting windows in a wall. The fenestration does not extend from structural bay to structural bay as it did in examples we had seen elsewhere. But San Francesco is interesting because this is a church in honor of St. Francis of Assisi. And St. Francis lived only a few decades before the church was consecrated. And I don't know if you're familiar with the story of St. Francis, but St. Francis was kind of a naturalist. He talked to the birds. He loved the animals. He loved nature. And that's a real shift in sensibility, this idea that there's something in the world that you can contemplate and that will lead you toward a spiritual truth. And as we move forward in time in the early Renaissance, we'll see that there's a stronger and stronger and stronger engagement with the world, with nature, with looking at things. And St. Francis establishes a precedent for that. Sienna Cathedral, fabulous. This is looking a lot more gothic than the cathedral in Assisi. Insofar as it's more skeletal, it's got the portal down right. We have punch windows with pointy arch tops on them, but not windows that find their location between two structural piers. And in fact, this whole notion of flying buttresses to support the wall, that's such a big deal at the same period if we were to look in Northern Europe, just isn't happening here at all because the wall is not being eroded to the same extent. We saw the English going crazy with pattern making, and crusting every surface with little carvings of little gargoyles or little monsters. And in the Italian example, it seems as though that's less of interest and that materiality alone carries the ornamental value for the building. And by materiality, I mean the qualities of the material. The qualities and the properties of the material become significant in giving character to the building. So here we have colored marble. We have sort of greenish gray marble and white travertine that creates pattern, breaks down the scale of the surface, but doesn't do so through the addition of ornamental glob, but just through the natural characteristics of the building. Exactly mirroring the case of the cathedral towns in France, these towns in Italy were also at the same period trying to outdo each other with the scale of their cathedrals and they were incredibly ambitious. If you were to go to Siena today, you would see a plan that looks a little bit like this and you would say, hmm, beautiful courtyard, beautiful church. But in fact, a beautiful courtyard was originally laid out to be the nave of the church and they just couldn't get it done. And why couldn't they build it? To me, a more useful question is, how could they build any of these churches? How is it possible to find the resources and the interest and the effort to build any of these churches? But in the case of a church like Siena, it started pretty late. During this period of time, there were periodic black plague episodes that would hit the urban centers particularly hard, so much so that I think one-third to half the population of Europe was done away with during various attacks of the plague, the bubonic plague. And the plague came really from rats coming in from the east. We had these crusaderships coming in all the time. We had these trading missions coming in all the time to the ports and therefore the rats came with them and the plague spread. When the plague hits a town like Siena, you no longer have the skilled craftsmen to build the rest of this church. And you also no longer have a burgeoning economy that can support the construction of a church like that. So the courtyard is a kind of sweet little reminder of something that doesn't exist. Here's the space adjacent to the church where that courtyard is. And it's worth looking at the medieval fabric of a town like Siena and to see how these churches begin to restructure the space around them. Now we're used to living in Ohio where everything is gridded, grid, grid, grid, grid, grid. Put your building on a block and you will have streets surrounding it equally on both sides. Here, put your building on a hill and let the city organize the space around it. It becomes like, I don't know, a magnet that begins to restructure the space of the city in interesting ways. Just one more Gothic cathedral. These are not fabulously interesting from the theoretical point of view but they're beautiful churches. This is the cathedral in Orvieto, more or less halfway between Florence and Rome. It's a good example, I think, of all of the aspirations of Gothic being realized in their most complete form in an Italian church. So what Reyn and Amiens are to French Gothic, what Salisbury is to English Gothic, Orvieto is to Italian Gothic. But even so, if you look at this thing, you would have to say there's a really different attitude towards surface and ornament and wall. Even Orvieto is primarily a wall architecture. You see the surfaces encrusted with paint and this kind of characteristic Tuscan striping, although it's not quite in Tuscany, it's close to Tuscany and so forth and lots of paintings on the wall. So here's Orvieto and just looking at the section and looking at the plan makes you realize this is a really different conception of Gothic than the conception of Gothic we had in the northerly examples that we had looked at earlier. For one thing, the aisles are as tall as the nave and that's a bit surprising. And for another thing, these windows are just punched. Just couldn't get it right. So look at the plan. Here's Amiens and here's Orvieto. And Amiens is just perfect in its cageing, in its skeletal nature. Anytime you have a window in Amiens, it represents the place where the structure is absent. Here, you have these little punches, little punches, little punches. And the same is true of the section. The section here has a few buttresses but the buttresses are fairly modest in the way they work because the wall is still intact. Look at Amiens by contrast. The most amazing, oops, let me just move beyond that. Yeah, I just wanna talk about, okay. Excuse me, because my computer crashed right before, so certain slides are not where I thought they were. The most interesting, I think, and the most transitional of the Gothic cathedrals in Italy is the Milan Cathedral. Part of that is because the Milan Cathedral was begun in 1392. And we can say that by 1420, Italy was already in the Renaissance. So we don't have such a lot of time to get this big hulking thing built. So foundations get put in, the church gets initiated. And in fact, to build it, they bring in a Bohemian master Mason, Peter Parler, who had built lots of churches in the Czech Republic, area then known as Bohemia, and in Germany. And we saw that there's this real longing for the vertical in Northern Gothic. And in Italy, there is this sense of human scale that comes down from a familiarity with classicism, with the embodiment of the human figure in the classical orders that makes this kind of verticality nerve wracking. Or at least it's possible to say that. I'd like you for a moment to look at the Milan Cathedral and tell me if you think it looks good or bad or normal or wacky or what things you see about it that are eccentric or predictable. Does anybody have a read? You can say, this is the best one we've seen so far. It's the pointiest, because it is. Look, here's the shoe to prove that pointiness is happening everywhere you look, almost. But what's odd about this? Yes? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She said, it's surprising because on the other Gothic cathedrals that we looked at, including things like Orvieto and Siena, Italian models, there are two towers establishing a strong vertical into which the body of the church is bracketed. Yes? Okay, it looks like there are five portals. So maybe there are two aisles on each side. Spreads it out horizontally more. It's not unheard of to have two aisles. We saw that on a lot of the pilgrimage churches we looked at. But still, it does tend to diminish the verticality and emphasize the horizontality. Yes? The proportion of width to height is not what we're used to. Even in Orvieto, an Italian model, the proportion of width to height usually favors height. Usually stretches toward the ver... So this thing is not quite doing that. Good, what else? Yeah? I'm gonna say the slant of the roof. Good, good. He's observed that there's just one big geometrical triangle here. The slant of the roof organizes the whole thing. We haven't seen this anywhere else before. We've always seen some facade that had to either do with the expression of the basilican section in a straightforward way or towers flanking the pointed roof. Good, what else? There's something really wacky going on on this facade. Yes? Okay, where there's usually a rose window, there's just kind of a regular window. If regular window means giant pointed arched window. Right? Okay, good, yeah. Yes? Okay, it's strange that this thing seems incredibly interested in organizing itself based on these vertical bays. It's not so interested in threading across, let's say, the gridded system that we saw in the French cathedrals or a hierarchical system that we saw in the English cathedrals where the central portal really becomes an organizing feature that begins to bring the whole facade into control. Good, what else? I'm looking for something that doesn't belong on a Gothic cathedral. Yes? It's like a pediment, right up here? Yeah, that's kind of classical. What's the pediment over? Okay, it's over a balcony. I'm looking for a word. You know it, you've been using your hands to say it. You just do this because you fidget? Go ahead. Yeah, they have rounded arches. Look at that, rounded arches. This is a crazy facade. And this is a crazy facade because it is a facade that just didn't get built fast enough or was based on aspirations that came down from the north and were imposed on the people of Milan and people hated it from the get-go and tried to make adjustments all along. The story of the Milan Cathedral is such that already only like a few years into its construction drawings were sent to a mathematician in Bologna. And the question was, is there any way you can make this thing less vertical? Because the architect, Mr. Peter Parler, had this idea about quadrature to establish the height of the nave. And here, Parler's idea about quadrature were these square or rectangular modules that would be stacked to give you a certain height. And that was just too tall. People didn't want it that tall. So they had to figure out a way to lower the height of the nave so it wasn't so antipathetic. And these are really strange words to be using because we've been talking a lot about how ecclesiastical architecture is driven by meaning and you want it to mean something. And it's not so much of vertical spaces, creep me out, make it lower. But there's some of that going on here in the Milan Cathedral. However, it also had to mean something. And that's why the mathematician, Mr. O'Norocco in Bologna, came in and took what was already constructed of the Milan Cathedral and reinscribed it into a different geometrical system. So this is Mr. O'Norocco's drawing. And I guess if you had a compass and a 60 degree triangle, you could be the best mathematician in Italy because it seems like what he did was just superimpose these other geometries on top of the cathedral. So to a certain extent, he's got this big old triangulation system going on. But then at a certain point, he flips it and moves from the 60 degree triangle to the three, four, five triangle that famous triangle that gives you a right angle using simple whole numbers. So instead of putting the top of the nave way up here by flipping his triangles, he gets the top of the nave down here. And this is considered to be super-duper because it is verifiable with numbers that resonate with the order of the cosmos. It's not an arbitrary decision. It's a decision locked into mathematics. And the fact that he was able to superimpose circles and other kinds of geometrical figures just makes it more meaningful. The proportions of the Milan Cathedral were so much in debate that 200 years later, let's say or less, they were still talked about. And when Cesareano wanted to illustrate Vitruvius' principles of architecture and take this book that was just literary descriptions of what the ancients wanted to do, Cesareano, for the most part, illustrated it with images from the Milan Cathedral, which seems crazy. Like why would you look at the Milan Cathedral to illustrate classical architecture? Why not look at classical buildings? Why not look at the Colosseum or the Pantheon? And that has to do with the fact that for Cesareano, the important things in the Milan Cathedral were these precise proportions. And we remember the kinds of things Cesareano would talk about. Things like proportion, things like symmetry, things like beautiful rhythm. And the mathematical logic that had been assigned to the Milan Cathedral seemed to give it those kinds of properties. So this is one of the drawings, sort of fabulous drawings from Cesareano's treatise showing you what the Milan Cathedral looked like. This is Cesareano's plan of the Milan Cathedral. But for the Milan Cathedral, but for the most part, Cesareano's drawing emphasizes this idea of the big triangle organizing the whole. He's using quadrature from the Peter Parler Scheme, Czech master Mason, and triangulation that gets superimposed by the Bollinier's mathematician. So looking great. Of course, these drawings that Cesareano does are not really descriptive of the Milan Cathedral because the Milan Cathedral stalled. They didn't get much of it built. They got it built more or less to here. And then they kind of ran out of steam. And so no facade at all. They kind of built the vaulting. So the section is kind of right, but the facade stalled for years and years and years. So here's what the interior looks like and here's what the exterior looks like. You might say, well, this is pretty good. There's a nice agreement between a gothic interior and a gothic exterior. And certainly that's true. But it's the weirdest gothic exterior ever because the gothic exterior didn't actually get constructed until around 1800. It got constructed because Napoleon took over Milan and put basically a gun to the head of the bishop and said, if this is gonna be my town, the church is gonna have a facade. So how did they come up with a facade? This is just Cesareano's fabulous-looking drawing of the Vitruvian man over here. These are Cesareano's drawings of the Orders. When Cesareano is looking at the Milan Cathedral to illustrate the principles of Vitruvius, these are the things he's looking at. Symmetry, which literally means like measure. Conchinkitas, which means agreement of parts to the whole, including interior and exterior. Eurythmics, which means beautiful relationships or beautiful rhythms. Decorum, which means the appropriateness of a building and building materials and embellishments to the task and proportion. So Milan Cathedral seemed to have all of these things going on. Of course, it didn't quite have Conchinkitas at the time that Cesareano was writing because there was no exterior. There was only an interior and only a little bit of an exterior. Do you guys know who the Eurythmics are? Great, 80s, I think, possibly. The Berlin Wall almost came down about five years before it ultimately came down because they had a rock concert on the West Berlin side of Berlin and they aimed loudspeakers into East Berlin and the youth of East Berlin were running at the wall trying to get over. It was quite a moment. So anyhow, Eurythmics. Let me just show you a few more interventions in the cathedral. It's called the Tiburio, but let's say Lantern or the crossing tower of the Milan Cathedral. Built by no less an architect than Mr. Leonardo da Vinci, you know him perhaps, yes? At around, let's say, 1500. It's weird looking stuff for Renaissance guy Leonardo da Vinci to be doing. And one reason it's weird looking is that it's so gothic. But clearly Leonardo was responding to this notion of Conchinkitas, agreement of interior and exterior. So Leonardo was proportioning it well. Leonardo was inventing a clever structure, but he is not willing to breach the agreement of parts, agreements of interior and exterior. However, other architects came on board and they were a little bit more happy to play around with these changes. For example, there was a Renaissance facade that was proposed that looked like this. And this is a kind of smart Renaissance facade because it takes the idea of pointy, which is so important if you want to have agreement of interior and exterior. But it finds a classical equivalent for pointy. Petiment, kind of pointy. Little statues on top, acroteria from Greek architecture. Pointier yet, more fringy. And then obelisks, which is really smart, like Egyptian obelisks, many of which the Romans had brought back. So we're associated at that time with Roman architecture and just decorates the cornice of the building with these elements. But there is this big superposition of classical elements on top of the blank facade of the Milan Cathedral. And at this period, you get a couple of these telling elements that we saw before. Things like these Renaissance round-headed elements that are, or the pedimented elements that surmount the round-headed elements. Those things get constructed. And it is usually the case with Italian architecture that once they build something, they will never tear it down. It will be the task of the next architect to figure out some way to rein it in and to bring them all together. There were a number of problems with this project, but one of the problems is it required these colossal stone columns to be brought to the site that organized two stories of the building. And notice how discontinuous this facade is with the actual basilical volume of the church. We know that something is happening more or less like this inside. This is just a big old billboard. So this architect has no interest in conchinkitas. His name is Pellegrino Pellegrini, by the way. You don't need to know that. So that's a bad proposal anyhow, but they could not transport the columns to the site. And one of the tasks that the architect would have to do is figure out how to transport materials there. So they kept breaking. These colossal columns kept breaking. Workstop for a while Baroque guy came in and came up with this project, which is more respectful of the logic of the basilica, uses smaller columns, so probably easier to transport materials, but still keeps pointy going with obelisks on top. Workstalls, because people become concerned about this idea of conchinkitas. How is this Renaissance facade in any way in agreement with the Gothic interior? How can we make that work? So there was a big competition in around, let's say 16th century, more or less. And to judge the competition, they got the smartest architect guy that they could find, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who you'll hear a lot about in the coming weeks. Really important figure in art and architecture. Bernini was the judge. Bernini had these two facades, which are astonishing that he had to judge. And which one do you think Bernini liked? Anybody have a take? Does anybody know who Bernini is? Oh, he's so good. You're gonna be so happy when you learn about Bernini. But let's just say, high Roman Baroque architect, widely respected. Which one do you think he liked and why? Is that a hand, Danielle? The one on the right, this one? Why? Well, it looks exactly like what got built, but what got built got built in the 19th century. Anybody have a different opinion of what Bernini might have liked? Yes? He didn't make his own. That would have been the smart thing to do, saying, these both suck. I have a better idea. Let me show you what I can do. Anybody have another idea? Bernini is the guy who did a lot of really great sculpture, like Santa Teresa and Ecstasy and Daphne and Apollo. Really great stuff, yes. Okay, the left one is more figural. Boy, is it figural. It's so figural, you just wanna run away screaming. It's true, Bernini liked the left one, but it wasn't the figureality of that. Because I think Bernini would say, this is horrible looking. But what it was was articulated in a way that somebody who embraced classical articulation of buildings could understand. For example, this thing at least has columns. This thing at least has entablatures. This thing at least has something, albeit incredibly hybrid, but something that counts as a pediment. So Bernini had language to describe what was going on here. And what was going on here in the scheme by Mr. Bootsy is nuts. It is completely agrammatical. It doesn't make sense to anybody who's used to dealing with classical architecture. These vertical striations that organized the whole facade that somebody pointed out as odd, struck Bernini as incredibly odd also. And the giant triangular figure that was not at all interested in expressing the basilican section inside the church struck Bernini as odd. So when Napoleon's troops came in and they were forced to build a facade, they really had no time at all to figure out what to do. But by that point, by 1800, they had been through the Enlightenment and they were on the verge of the real explosion of historical revival style. And so they picked this one. And they picked this one because I think it was easy to build, but it was also logical and clear and was pointy. And they wanted it pointy. So the story of the Milan Cathedral is really, really instructive. Similar stories happened all over Italy. This is the San Patronio Church in Bologna, which looks like this. And the reason it looks like this is also that it was started late. And because it was started late, they didn't get it built before people just stopped liking Gothic and that styles shifted and they moved in another direction. And so to this day, you don't have much more of it. But there were proposals by really kind of spectacular architects like, say, Palladio had this great idea about how to put a facade on the Bologna Cathedral, which was, as we'll see soon, the same trick Palladio uses anytime he has to put a facade on a building. Take two Roman temples, superimpose them and spread it out. That's how you solve it. This is by another great architect, Vignola. Vignola's being a little bit more faithful to the Conchini task game, which is to say, how can I make this thing kind of gothic-y? And his method deploys a trick from the old obelisks on the roof that we see over here. But ultimately, nothing got built at San Petronio, except for that little bit of gothic facade that we saw in the photograph we looked at earlier. Probably the unfinished Gothic church that's most interesting and most instructive is the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, built by the great architect Arnauzo Di Cambio. Seems like, well, he's got enough time to get more of it done than the architects of the Milan Cathedral. But a problem with the Florence Cathedral was that Arnauzo was really good. He was a really great architect. And so because he was such a good architect, he had very ambitious ideas about what he would do in the Florence Cathedral. For example, if you look at the plan, you see something that is quite extraordinary based on everything we've seen so far. And that is giant dome. If you look at the Sienna Cathedral, you will see that there's a pretty giant dome going on in here. And part of the reason the Sienna Cathedral has this giant dome is that both the structure of the transept and the structure of the nave and choir independently provide piers to a vaginal base for the springing of the dome instead of the square crossing of the transept and the nave that you usually have. So Sienna gets this great looking dome. Great looking dome. And Florence and Sienna are at each other's throats all the time. And the reason they're at each other's throats all the time is political. They're both powers in the same region. But it's also political in that Florence is a Guelph city, G-U-E-L. F. And Sienna is a Gibilin city. G-H-I-B-E-L-L-I-N-E. I'll write them next time. And the Guelphs are faithful to the papacy and the Gibilins are faithful to the royalty. And so there's a kind of deep political rift throughout Tuscany between Guelphs and Gibilins. So if Sienna has a great looking dome, Florence wants a better looking dome. And they're lucky enough to have Arnolfo, who conceptualizes this vast dome that not only clips into the transept but subsumes the space of the nave and the transept in its vast expanse. So Florence is gonna have a great looking church. They have a great architect, Arnolfo knows how to do it, builds a lot of it and then dies. So the great Arnolfo de Cambio died and nobody had a clue how to build the church. And that's sort of sad. You see that Florence has a great looking façade. You'd say, well, thank God they at least got the façade built before Arnolfo's death, but that's also not true. The façade of the Florence Cathedral was built during the early 19th century by Gothic revival architects. It had been incomplete up until that point and they just felt we better get a façade up. And luckily we in the 19th century have great ideas. And already by the late 19th century, people wanted to revise the façade of the Florence Cathedral to make it pointier and more Gothic. So this is a proposal for how to fix up the façade of the early 19th century façade of the Florence Cathedral with a late 19th century façade of the Florence Cathedral, which never got built. And I think it's good that it never got built because the early 19th century façade of the Florence Cathedral at least looks Italian. It's got that characteristic striped Tuscan marble. It's got the characteristic dominance of the wall with a punch, which is what we see in Italian Gothic architecture. The late 19th century revivalists wanted to give you this more French expression of the Gothic in their idea about the façade. Plus there were other buildings in the immediate adjacency and immediate vicinity of the Florence Cathedral that gave a clue as to what the language could be. This is the bell tower, the campanile of the church built by the great artist and architect Giotto. And here, right in front of it, we have a baptistry that is Romanesque and that is probably built over an old Roman temple to Mars. At least many accounts say that. Up here we see another Florentine church called San Miniatto al Monte. It's just on a hill across the Arno River. And in these two examples, we see that this polychromatic pattern making that we observed in the Siena Cathedral was something that was very common also in Florence. So my vote goes to the early 19th century façade.