Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque churches.

In this paper I am going to discuss the similarities and differences between the floor plans and facades of Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque churches. In order to fully describe and analyze this theme it is necessary to examine the main features of these periods of architecture’s development.

Renaissance is a period of architecture’s development in European countries from the beginning of XV to the beginning of the XVII century.

The particular significance in this tendency is given to forms of ancient architecture: symmetry, proportion, geometry and order parts.

The complex ratio of medieval buildings is replaced in an orderly arrangement of columns, pilasters and lintel. The accented horizontal facade, which occupies the ground floor opens to area nine arches, balcony, symmetrical composition, which was completed on the sides of two broader, framed by pilasters openings – all makes an impression of balance, harmony and peace.

Early Renaissance

Space as an architectural component is organized as a distinct from medieval representations of the image. It is based on logic’s proportions, shape and sequence of units subordinated to geometry, not intuition, which was a characteristic of medieval buildings.

The main temple building is a type of basil with a flat roof or cross vaults, but the elements – the arrangement and decoration of columns and pillars, arches, and the distribution of the architrave, the appearance of windows and portals, architects are guided by the Greco-Roman monuments in the pursuit of extensive education, free space inside buildings.

High Renaissance

In continuation of the High Renaissance view, taken from ancient architecture, developed and translated into practice with greater confidence.

In the temple’s construction, there is a tendency of enormity and majesty. A dome rests on four massive pillars.

The facade is symmetrical about the vertical axis. Church facades, as a rule, are decorated by pilasters, arches and entablature surmounted by a pediment. The location of the columns and windows sends quest for the center. The first facade in Renaissance style can be called the facade of the cathedral Pienza (1459-1462), attributed to a Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino.

The floor appears as a horizontal spatial layer, the scale correlated with the growth of human, expressed in the architectural forms of the facade (all that was before the Renaissance, called tiers).