In what way was the effect of the Forbidden City on the populace similar to that of Topkapi Palace?

Topkapi | © Fred Bigio/Flickr

Ancient, beautiful, and huge — Istanbul is not a city you can come to grips with in a single day. But with the help of travel specialist Şerif Yenen and his series of quick-guide videos, you can start unraveling the many different dimensions of Turkey’s cultural capital city. For the next installment in his series, Yenen describes the fascinating history and mesmerizing beauty of Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.

The Topkapı Palace was the imperial residence of the Ottoman Sultan and home to his court and harem. It was also the center of the state administration. Construction on the palace started in 1459 and was completed in 1478, making it the Ottomans’ second palace in Istanbul.

The Topkapı housed each of the Ottoman sultans from Sultan Mehmed II to Sultan Abdülmecid, covering nearly four centuries and 25 sultans. As each succeeding sultan ascended to the throne, he added parts to the palace, indicating the different tastes and styles of architecture over four centuries. The changes were made for reasons of practicality, to commemorate victorious campaigns, or to repair damage caused by earthquakes and fire. In 1924, the palace was turned into a museum.

A kind of humble simplicity and practicality is found in the Ottoman palaces. The Topkapı was a city-palace with a population of approximately 4,000 people, covering an area of 70 hectares (173 acres). The First Courtyard, which was open to the public, was the service area of the palace consisting of a hospital, a bakery, an arsenal, the mint, storage places, and some dormitories. The Byzantine Church of Hagia Eirene was located here, too. It was utilized as an armory.

The Second Courtyard, also called Divan Meydanı, was the seat of the Divan (Imperial Council) and open to anyone who had business with the Divan. This was the administration center of the empire. In addition to the Divan, there were also the privy stables and kitchens. In the kitchens today, a collection of Chinese porcelain, which are accepted as the third most valuable in the world, are on display along with authentic kitchen utensils and both Turkish and Japanese porcelain. Dış Hazine-Treasury houses an exhibition of armory.

The Harem was the part of a Moslem house dedicated to the family and closed to the outside world. It was in these special quarters of the Ottoman palace that the dynasty lived. Non-Moslem concubines were sometimes accepted in the palace harem. Thus, they had a chance to become part of the dynasty as Sultans’ wives and even becoming Queen Mother. In most cases, however, they married Ottoman bureaucrats.

Topkapi | © Fred Bigio/Flickr

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Topkapi Palace’s original layout consisted of four consecutive courtyards, each serving a different purpose. The design remains to this date, with each courtyard surrounded by high walls and separated from the adjacent one by a gate.

The surviving buildings like the Harem in the palace are low with one or two stories. These buildings continuously changed functions over the centuries.

The First Courtyard (Outer Courtyard)

This is the largest and only courtyard accessible to the public during ancient times. It has a large open space that made it ideal for hosting various ceremonies and processions. Visitors of Topkapi palace can see traces of workshops that belonged to artists and artisans who carried out exhibitions in the courtyard.

In the first courtyard, you will also get a glimpse of the different architectural styles used throughout the place.

Second Courtyard (Divan Square)

The Gate of Salutation opens up to this courtyard, which served as the palace’s administrative center. During the Ottoman times, only official visitors and courtesans were allowed into the yard. It is home to the Domed chamber, where council members held meetings to discuss state affairs.

The palace’s tallest structure, the Tower of Justice, can also be found in this palace. This tower has a Neoclassical lantern that gave the Sultan a complete view of the palace. The palace kitchens and confectionaries (displays the imperial porcelain collection) also sit in the second courtyard.

1. CHINA AFTER 1000:

THE MANDATE OF HEAVEN MADE TO LAST

Chinese imperial architects reproduced the immutable scheme of the Mandate of Heaven. The Ming dynasty, however, exhibited one important difference from earlier dynasties, building to last. Due to the use of stone and brick construction, many Ming projects have remained essentially intact.
1. The Prelude to Ming China: Mercantile Society and Foreign Influences
1. The hierarchical structure of the Chinese government remained constant for more than two millennia until the 20th century.
1. This partly accounts for the unparalleled cultural continuity in China as well as its exceptionally conservative attitude toward architecture.
2. The Song government built its first capital in the northern city of Kaifeng but in the 12th century relocated to the southern city of Hangzhou after invasions from Mongolia.
3. Chinese merchants during the 11th and 12th centuries greatly improved production and transport, introducing large multiple-mast ships, known as junks, for long-distance voyages, and inventing technological wonders such as the magnetic compass and the astrolabe.
4. While the merchants prospered during the Song period, the central authority became unstable.
1. The dynasty fell to internal threats and finally to the Mongolian invaders of the mid-13th century.
5. Khubilai Khan (1215–1294), a grandson of Genghis, planned the new capital of Khanbaliq, or in Chinese Dadu (now known as Beijing), with a Chinese architect, Liu Bingzhong, who consulted the Kaogongji or Book of Rites, used for the construction of imperial Chinese capitals since the 2nd century BCE.
1. This led to a literal reproduction of the wangcheng diagram, a grid of three north-south streets and three east-west streets, with a large space for the palace in the center.
2. The only contradiction to its orthogonal grid came with the insertion of an informal lake that passed from the west through the center to the south, skirting the imperial palace.
3. The capital grew rapidly into a large, multiethnic metropolis with three concentric sets of walls surrounding the outer city, an intermediary administrative city, and, at the core, the palace.
4. The emperor favored Tibetan Buddhism and in 1277 sponsored the Bai ta, the White Pagoda, at the Miaoying Monastery.
   1. The Tibetan monk A’nige designed the bell-shaped stupa, or dagoba.
   2. The foreign-inspired tower, built in brick and covered in white plaster, dominated the skyline of Dadu and remains the only trace of the Yuan dynasty’s city.
5. The founder of the next dynasty, Ming Taizu (r. 1368–98), in 1366 destroyed and cordoned off the city.
2. Ming Beijing: The Permanent Mandate of Heaven
   1. The first Ming emperor shunned Dadu; his successor, Chengzu (r. 1402–1427), returned and renamed it Beijing.
   1. Chengzu constructed Beijing over the remnants of Khubilai’s abandoned capital.
   2. The red walls of the imperial palace held its center while the vast gardens for the imperial temples defined its edges.
   3. The Forbidden City, begun by Chengzu at the outset of the 15th century, served as the exclusive district of the emperor.
   4. The walled enclave fit into the outline of Khubilai Khan’s earlier palace.
   5. The scale and symmetry of the central areas of the Forbidden City achieved an order similar to the walled compounds of the Khmer built two centuries earlier in Cambodia.
   2. The grandeur of the Ming imperial setting came less from mass and monumentality than from the vast emptiness of its open courts.
   1. The imperial palace extended over a series of seven large courtyards on the central axis and dozens of smaller courts to either side.
   1. The Hall of Supreme Harmony was the largest wooden structure in China.
   2. Behind the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Middle Harmony stood a tenth smaller, perfectly square in plan.
   3. The third structure, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, stood one bay smaller in each direction than the front hall.
   3. Most of the architectural solutions of the Ming came from the typological and proportional recommendations of the_Yingzao fashi manual.
   4. The designers of the Forbidden City assembled the major structures from a kit of parts, which, along with the universal color scheme, guaranteed cohesion despite hundreds of different structures.
   5. Beyond the Outer Court, the Inner Court for the imperial residence repeated the grand ceremonial landscape at half the scale.
   1. Between the two oblong halls, the front for the emperor, the rear for the empress, stood the Hall of Union.
   2. Concubines occupied the dense courts to either side of the Inner Court.
   3. Eunuchs lived in barrack-like buildings on the edges of the compound.
   6. Scholar-officials resided outside the Forbidden City, in hutongs, long alleys set in gridded blocks, to the east of the palace.
   1. They lived with their families in narrow siheyuan courtyard dwellings made of modest assemblies of small pavilions within a perimeter wall.
   7. Chengzu also initiated the Ming dynasty’s necropolis at Changling.
   8. Motivated by theological zeal, the emperor Jiajing (r. 1522–1567), rebuilt the Tiantan, or Altar of Heaven, in Beijing.
   1. Jiajing restructured the compound in the 1530s by surrounding the ritual areas with an enormous wooded estate and enclosing it with a concentric set of inner and outer horseshoe-shaped walls.
   2. Inside the first set of walls, Jiajing constructed the Zhaigong, or Palace of Abstinence.
   1. The central hall was one of the few residential buildings in pre-20th century China built entirely in masonry.
   3. Tiantan had a central sequence of three shrines.
   1. Each of the three major shrines involved a dialogue between a round central figure and an outer square one.
   2. Reminiscent of the ambulatory spaces of Buddhist shrines, multiples of the number nine, symbol of the emperor, recurred in the balustrades, stairs, and pavers of this stepped pyramid.
   4. The Tiantan ensemble constitutes one of the world’s most memorable religious settings.
   1. Like the Forbidden City, it stood apart as a well-guarded enclave for the exclusive use of the emperor and his retinue.
   2. Its formal vocabulary of circles, squares, and the grand axis branded the landscape with the certitude of imperial hierarchy, a scene reserved for the Mandate of Heaven alone.
3. The Scholars’ Gardens of Suzhou: The Art of Indirect Access
1. The other cities of China were denser, less rigidly structured, more pragmatic, and subject to quick changes.
2. One of the better preserved of these, the southern city of Suzhou, came to its prime in the 16th and 17th centuries during the Ming dynasty and in many ways developed as a counterpoint to the capital.
1. Instead of relying on a grand central axis, the urban pattern is full of diverted paths and detours.
2. In place of a single tyrant’s domain there were dozens of delicate gardens.
3. The city’s structure appeared like a rationalized version of Venice: 14 east-west canals, six north-south; with streets lining one side of the canals, and nearly 300 stone bridges.
4. This alternative order came from a rhetorical love of indirect access.
3. While imperial authority did not allow Chinese cities to develop with political autonomy, Suzhou possessed some of the characteristics of a European city-state, including its exchange economy, a large merchant class, high educational standards, and a subtle resistance to imperial authority.
1. Rather than making direct attacks on the inflexible central government, the indirect critique came in the form of withdrawal from political life to spend time in one’s garden.
2. The design attitudes practiced in the gardens of Suzhou produced the highest expression of a different method of Chinese design, and thus an alternative to the hierarchical order of Beijing.
4. As Suzhou became one of the principal places for training scholar-officials, those who succeeded often returned.
1. At least 20 substantial scholars’ gardens, each with its own literary name, were wedged between the regular patterns of courtyard houses and canals.
1. Wang Shi Yuan (the Net Master’s Garden): its title referred to a famous Daoist literary trope.
2. Wang Xianchen, a censor during the reign of the debauched boy-emperor Zhengde, built the largest of the Suzhou gardens, the Zhuo Zheng Yuan, the Artless Administrator’s Garden, in 1512.
1. One passed through multiple courts, while visiting over 40 pavilions, each having a name inspired by a landscape.
2. The large lake had evocative islands while zigzag bridges served the smaller ponds.
5. The scholar-officials conceived nonhierarchical experiences in their gardens, allowing visitors to discover a bit at a time.
1. Both the design of the pathways and the political symbolism remained indirect.
2. THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: A CULTURE OF LOCAL SYMMETRIES

Architecture played an important role for the Ottoman Turks in realizing their new Roman Empire for Islam, demonstrating the regime’s authority and love of order.

1. The Prospect of a Muslim Roman Empire: Royal Mosques and Imarets
1. From the 15th to 18th century, the Ottoman Turks reigned as the leading power of the Mediterranean.
1. Became prodigious builders in the effort to control a vast empire.
2. Consciously aspired to Roman precedents.
3. Maintained a well-organized military to oversee the construction and maintenance of public works.
4. Built impressive projects of infrastructure:
1. the new walls of Jerusalem,
2. the Süleyman Bridge at Büyükçekmece,
3. the Maglova aqueduct.
5. Promoted a rich urban life, building markets, baths, and great religious complexes.
2. By the 10th century most of the Turkish tribes had converted to Islam.
3. The Ottomans literally engulfed Constantinople, which fell in 1453.
   1. Their political goal of achieving peace and justice through a universal world government dominated by the Islamic faith became a Turkish variation of Charlemagne’s Renovatio Imperii.
   2. They attempted to launch a new Roman Empire, while among Muslims they gained respect as the new protectors of the shrines in Mecca and Medina.
4. Ottoman architects initially borrowed their architectural models from the Anatolian region, imitating:
1. the vaulted masonry of Armenian churches,
2. the beehive domes of Seljuk tombs,
3. Persian arcades.
5. The reverse-T mosque type reappeared in many other royal foundations in Bursa including the Yesil Cami, or Green Mosque, built in the early 15th century.
1. The Yesil Cami belonged to a religious enclave, or imaret, a charitable institution introduced by the Ottomans during the 14th century.
2. The imaret complex served as a form of Muslim propaganda to a predominantly Christian populace.
1. The imarets became centers of well-defined neighborhoods.
6. The great congregational mosque of Bursa, the Ulu Cami, differed in type from the reverse-T royal mosques. It followed the hypostyle model found throughout Southwest Asia.
1. Each of its 20 bays carried a rounded dome.
2. The square bay with a rounded dome became the standard unit of Ottoman architecture, repeated in palaces, hospitals, schools, baths, and mosques.
2. Constantinople Becomes Istanbul
1. The Ottoman goal of an Islamic Roman Empire required the capture of Constantinople.
1. Surrounded on all sides by the Ottomans, Constantinople succumbed in 1453 to the young sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481), known as Fatih, the Conqueror.
2. A new name, Istanbul, took hold in the vernacular, coming from the Greek phrase “to the city.”
3. Istanbul’s population doubled in two decades, and by the end of the 16th century returned to over a half million, making it once again the largest city in Europe.
2. Mehmed II absorbed the cultural and technical innovations of Italy.
1. His fortifications both before and after the siege of the capital showed the influence of Italian engineering.
3. Mehmed II considered the majestic Hagia Sophia as his great prize and quickly converted the venerable palatine church into a royal mosque, adding a minaret.
1. He inserted into its eastern apse a mihrab, slightly askew from the main axis, to point toward Mecca.
2. That the new mosque and tombs displaced the ruins of the Apostoleion, Constantine’s Church of the Holy Apostles and imperial tomb site, carried great significance.
4. Inspired by the great Byzantine church, Mehmed II built a new mosque, the Fatih Cami and an extensive imaret.
1. It occupied the center of a vast, perfectly square plaza.
2. The barrel vaults of earlier Byzantine cisterns served as the foundation for the terraced complex.
3. Sets of eight madrasas, in perfect bilateral symmetry, served for the study of canonical law, or sharia.
5. In 1459, Mehmet II decided to move from his palace in the center of the city to a new one at the extreme tip of the peninsula, where the acropolis of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium once stood.
1. The Topkapi Saray complex offered a more secluded residence, with fortified walls surrounding a hilly, wooded park.
   1. The sultan’s private realm appeared the antithesis of European palaces: willfully asymmetrical and more like a garden than a building.
   2. It was closer to a Chinese scholars’ garden than to the geometrically coordinated Italian palazzo.
   3. The most important political space in Topkapi was the Divan, or Council Hall.
   4. Behind the Divan lay the Harem.
   5. The male pages lived in the last court of Topkapi, passing through the tent-like Gate of Felicity.
   6. The Privy Chamber, the sultan’s private apartment, protruded into the northwestern corner of the Court of the Pages.
   7. Most of the surrounding halls in the Court of the Pages served as dormitories and school buildings for as many as 500 slave boys who underwent a 14-year training period at the Enderun College.
   8. Fatih’s system of training obedient slaves as his “family” produced a ruling class that appeared free, at least at the outset, of the conflicts of interest typical of hereditary aristocracies.
3. Sinan and the Challenge of Hagia Sophia
1. Sinan, the greatest architect of the Ottoman renaissance, came from the mass of young slaves, rising to prominence during the reign of Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566).
2. The Ottoman military had an overarching role in the administration of the empire and included the state architects of the Hassa Mimarlar Ocagi (Imperial Body of Architects).
1. Sinan was responsible for over 300 projects throughout the realm, including mosques in Aleppo and Damascus and magnificent infrastructural works, such as the Maglova aqueduct.
2. In Istanbul alone, he built 22 major mosques and imarets, transforming the city’s fabric into a glittering patchwork that juxtaposed impressive monumental enclosures studded with marble-clad cupolas and minarets with neighborhoods of narrow streets and densely packed wooden houses.
3. During long years of military campaigns, including invasions of Iraq, the Balkans, and southern Italy, he witnessed a variety of design solutions and gained thorough command of engineering through the production of bridges and transport ships.
3. Sinan’s earliest commissions for monumental works came from two female clients in the 1530s:
1. An imaret in honor of Hürrem, the Haseki Hürrem complex.
1. Sinan covered the mosque with a single hemispherical dome and designed the hospital, an institution specifically for women, with an unusual octagonal court.
2. Two imarets built in honor of Mihrümah: one next to the northwest Edirne Gate and the other across the Bosporus in Uskadar.
1. The Mihrümah Cami (1560s) at the Edirne Gate carried one of Sinan’s most splendid domes.
4. Sinan’s first work for Süleyman I, the Sehzade Cami, appeared exceptionally harmonious:
1. He abutted the central dome with four semi-domes, drawing upon earlier works inspired by Hagia Sophia, such as the Fatih Cami. The pyramidal massing of the central dome, semi domes, four buttress towers capped with cupolas, and four smaller domes at the corners cascaded to a perfectly square forecourt, identical in area to the mosque.
5. The Süleymaniye’s imaret covered slightly less area than Fatih’s complex and occupied the true center of Istanbul, looming over the port district of the Golden Horn.
1. A mosque dominated a vast terraced space and seven madrasas held the edges, each with a square courtyard.
6. Sinan built his largest mosque, the Selimiye in Edirne during the 1570s for Süleyman’s successor, Selim II. The dome spread slightly larger than Hagia Sophia, and the minarets were among the tallest of all Islam.
7. In one of the three biographies of Sinan the master made no secret of his obsession with Hagia Sophia.
8. Through architecture Sinan helped the new empire surpass those of the past.
3. PAPAL ROME: THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF RENAISSANCE CLASSICISM
1. The Papal Restoration: The Destruction and Redesign of Saint Peter’s
1. The Renaissance, or rebirth, of Classical culture that originated with the merchants of Tuscany, migrated to Rome to assist in the literal rebirth of the city as a magnificent capital.
2. The ideologues of the Papal Restoration introduced highly theatrical papal ceremonials, luxurious costumes, and triumphal architectural settings to boost the image of a charismatic ruler.
1. Pope Nicholas V (r. 1447–1455) initiated the grandest project of the age, the demolition and rebuilding of Old Saint Peter’s in 1452.
1. The Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino demolished and rebuilt the apse; half a century later his successors returned in earnest to demolish the entire church to make way for a great domed structure.
3. During the late 15th century, papal authority combined the spiritual leadership of Christendom with the temporal power over one of the largest realms in Italy.
1. The Papal States stretched from the borders of Milan to those of Naples.
2. Pope Alexander VI and his ambitious son, Cesare Borgia, attempted the political unification of the peninsula under a single ruler.
1. Cesare’s military pragmatism meant that he sponsored Via Alessandrina, the first straight street of the Papal Restoration.
1. The site of Palazzo Castellesi.
3. The facade of Palazzo Castellesi greatly resembled the Cancelleria, begun a decade earlier but not finished until 1513. Its patron, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, was the administrator in charge of the construction of Via Alessandrina.
4. Riario’s cousin became Pope Julius II, who proved to be an aggressive patron.
1. Relied on the architect Donato Bramante (1444–1514).
1. In Milan Bramante designed the tribune and dome of Santa Maria delle Grazie and the oblong piazza of Vigevano, one of the largest and most orderly public spaces in Italy, surrounding it with regular arcades.
2. In Rome in 1501 he designed Palazzo Caprini.
3. In 1502 the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, commissioned Bramante to build a small domed shrine in the cloister of the hillside church of San Pietro in Montorio.
4. In 1506 Bramante took charge of the most important project of the century, the demolition and rebuilding of the Constantinian basilica of Saint Peter’s.
5. Julius requested Bramante to undertake another grand project at the same time, a structure to bridge between the Vatican Palace and the Belvedere Villa to the north.
2. The Sack of Rome and the Development of Angled Bastions
1. The project for New Saint Peter’s and the imperially scaled works for Julius II triggered the metamorphosis of Rome.
1. Bramante’s all’antica style inspired numerous churches and palaces.
2. The new pope, Leo X, turned to Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael), Bramante’s young countryman from Urbino, to fill the role of the master.
1. Began work on Villa Madama, which remained unfinished, but even in its partial state displayed the pursuit of Bramante’s new plasticity.
3. The worldly pursuits of the papal court in Rome inspired widespread discontent with the Church abroad.
1. In 1517, Martin Luther published his 95 Theses denouncing the abuses of the papal government. Among his complaints, he singled out Bramante’s project for Saint Peter’s.
2. The Church in Rome took nearly half a century to formulate a coherent response to the Protestant Reformation; the Counter Reformation resulted in new rules, the bureaucratic treatment of the sacraments, and a spate of church-building.
3. During this period of religious turmoil, the political rivalry of France’s Francois I and Spain’s Emperor Charles V turned Italy into an international battlefield.
1. Renegades swept upon Rome in 1527 and held the city in terror for nine months: The Sack of Rome was not just an attack on the city but was also a blow to the moral authority of the papacy.
4. The Sack of Rome had a direct impact on the political situation in Florence, where the republican faction restored the commune and expelled the papal governor.
1. The Pope installed a young nephew as the first Medici duke of Florence. In 1534, the new regime commissioned Antonio da Sangallo the Younger to secure the city’s western flank with the Fortezza da Basso.
5. Sangallo proposed an ideal city in a polygonal shape with radiocentric streets.
1. Venice sponsored the fullest realization of the radial plan for the garrison town of Palmanova.
6. Unlike the classical conventions used by Renaissance architects for other programs, the formal research for military architecture after the Sack of Rome inspired wondrous sculptural masses intended as pragmatic answers to the problem of defense.
3. Mannerism: Making and Breaking the Rules of Classical Architecture
1. The Sack of Rome unleashed an artistic diaspora.
1. Jacopo Sansovino became proto, or state architect in Venice.
1. He worked on numerous public projects surrounding the city’s political center, introducing the architectural idiom of papal Rome.
2. Sebastiano Serlio, a frequent companion of Sansovino, lived in Venice during the 1530s.
1. He began publishing his Five Books of Architecture between 1537 and 1547.
2. He wrote in Italian and provided copious illustrations integrated with the text as a means of teaching professionals the principles of classical architecture.
1. Serlio enumerated tangible rules for the classical orders, e.g., the Doric 1:7
3. Peruzzi returned to Rome in the mid-1530s to design his final project, the Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne.
1. The uncanny curve of the façade makes reference to the curved walls of the ancient Odeon near the site.
4. Giulio Romano moved to Mantua after being indicted in Rome for his pornographic illustrations to Pietro Aretino’s erotic sonnets.
1. He developed the program for Palazzo Te, situated on an island just outside the western walls of the city. Giulio’s frescoes give a hint of its purpose: in one room there are portraits of the marquis’s horses and in other rooms, mythological scenes of orgies.
5. The painter Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects established the notion of stylistic progress in the arts, identified Mannerism as the willful divergence from the classical norm.
1. Transformed the old public palace in Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, into a ducal residence.
4. Palladio: The Mason Who Learned Latin
1. The greatest master of the Roman rules of classical architecture, Andrea Palladio, was born in Padua and worked most of his life in Vicenza and the Veneto, the northeastern region of Italy.
1. Like Serlio he published a fully illustrated treatise in Italian, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Four Books on Architecture, 1570).
1. His scrupulously detailed annotations on measurements advanced the theory of classical architecture as a comprehensive system of harmonious proportions, similar to the laws of harmony in music.
2. Palladio development as a humanist fits the early-20th-century architect Adolf Loos’s definition of the architect as “a mason who has learned Latin.”
3. His career took off in 1548 when he won the commission to restructure the Basilica of Vicenza.
2. In 1540 Palladio collaborated with Giulio Romano on Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza and during the next two decades designed numerous palaces for the leading noble families of the city.
1. At first he relied on the façade solutions of Bramante and Raphael in Rome.
1. Palazzo Porto Festa (1550).
2. Palazzo Chiericati.
3. Palladio earned his greatest fame from his villas, positioned like temples to agriculture on the estates of Venetian nobles.
1. Most of the plans of Palladian villas followed a nine-square grid and seemed almost like churches with grand central halls, around which smaller rooms clustered.
1. Villa Foscari.
2. Villa Rotonda.
4. During his final decade, Palladio gained commissions for several religious structures in Venice.
1. The monastery and church of San Giorgio Maggiore.
2. The votive church of il Redentore in the 1570s.
5. During the last year of his life, Palladio designed a theater for the Olympic Academy of Vicenza.
1. The concept brought together in a single vision Palladio’s universe.
5. Michelangelo, Architect: The Restless Imagination
1. Although Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) often denied being an architect, he designed some of the most influential projects of Papal Rome, including the Campidoglio and much of New Saint Peter’s.
1. Michelangelo approached the classical elements of design with the same disturbing search for plasticity and strange proportions as he did in his sculpture.
2. Aside from an unbuilt façade for San Lorenzo in Florence, he executed his first major architectural project for the same building at the New Sacristy.
1. Placed elements that corresponded to Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy next to completely new inventions.
1. Between the Corinthian pilasters, he inserted pronounced aedicules that seemed to be bursting out of the planar composition.
2. Broke their segmental pediments with T-shaped recesses—a highly plastic impulse that subverted classical norms.
2. At the foyer, or ricetto, of the Laurentian Library in the cloister of San Lorenzo, Michelangelo intervened with a strong sense of rupture.
1. Defied the logic of classical order by pushing the lower sets of paired columns into pockets in the walls, while pulling their supporting consoles in front of them
2. Tapered the vertical supports of the aedicule niches, making them look like human shins.
2. Michelangelo left Florence in 1534 for Rome to work for Pope Paul III.
1. In 1546 assumed the role of chief papal architect.
2. Treated architecture as an analogue to the body.
3. Among his first tasks was the completion of Palazzo Farnese, begun by Sangallo in 1517.
1. He jacked up the cornice 3 m and doubled its size to make it more imposing.
2. He also widened the central window above the entry, added a huge coat of arms, and broke the pediments of the aedicules of the top-floor windows, a move that generated a sense of restlessness.
4. The Campidoglio.
 
1. After 1546, he embarked on the total redesign of the site of Rome’s communal government.
2. Transformed the piazza from an unpaved, irregular space adjacent to the 13th-century church of the Aracoeli, into a magnificent outdoor room.
3. The new Campidoglio seemed like a permanent stage set in which ancient statues performed a pageant.
5. Michelangelo’s greatest architectural effort was the completion of New Saint Peter’s.
1. With the constantly turning surfaces and the syncopated rhythm of the placement of the pilasters, Michelangelo completely undermined the distributive logic of classical architecture.
2. Saint Peter’s dome, in place since 1590, gave the Roman skyline a new sense of hierarchy. The confidently mannered use of classical architecture projected the new authority of the Counter Reformation Church to restore Rome’s role as the spiritual leader of the city and the world.