Renaissance & Baroque

What this cluster covers

The Renaissance recovered a set of rules — order, module, symmetry, the classical elements used as a grammar rather than as decoration — and the Baroque then spent two centuries testing how far that grammar would bend. Read in sequence, the two periods are the clearest case study in the archive of a discipline inventing a standard and then dramatising it.

In practice this cluster is about geometry under load. Brunelleschi's dome, Palladio's villa plans, Borromini's oval and undulating walls, and the Central European pilgrimage churches are all solutions to compression, span and daylight before they are compositions. The vault, the dome and the buttress recur here more often than the facade.

Entries examine stone and brick vaulting, stucco and fresco as surface systems, the proportional systems used in plan, and the way the same models were exported and adapted across Italy, France, Iberia, Central Europe and Latin America. Attributions and dates are stated only where the source record is clear.