2017/03/20 by Federico Bellini · 3 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Architecture and Art History Studies #Historical Art and Architecture Studies #Historical Architecture and Urbanism
paper · doi:10.1002/9781118887226.wbcha009
openalex publication_date 2017/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract The impressive domed buildings of the early modern architecture may be understood only by assessing how their builders believed they might have stood, reconstructing the intuitive principles of statics of their times. The modern type of domed churches, since the Brunelleschi's Sagrestia Vecchia, required some decades to be completely defined. The arrival point of the quattrocento researches was Bramante's first designs for St. Peter's (1506–07), which show the groundbreaking irregular octagonal plan, invented to carry the huge load of the Vatican “cupola.” The ideas about the dome of St. Peter's (contrived by Sangallo, Michelangelo and Della Porta) led in the middle of the seventeenth century to the great season of the baroque domed churches, most of all those by Borromini. Just at the apogee of the Roman baroque, a new generation of French masters, such as François Mansart, entirely rethought the concept of domes: they devised multiple domes that would transform the internal space into an experience of bright surfaces, neglecting the Italian exhibition of structural firmness. After the brilliant works of Guarini, sensible to French innovations, the age of the great cupolas was eventually concluded by Wren's dome of St. Paul's, reaching the extreme limit of early modern architecture, beyond which the triangle geometry‐statics‐orders would have dissolved.