From the churches to the shuttered windows and balconies, the feel of Alghero is much like that of a Spanish Mediterranean city. The city walls give way to the struggle for power over its limits from the deep past.
Some major places to admire the typical architecture of Catalan-Argonese (Gothic) styles are: * Palazzo d'Albis * Palau Reial * Cathedral of St. Mary * St. Francis Church
Many tourists …show more content…
relish in walking along the protective wall that lines most of the city, dating to the ages when Alghero was under Genovese rule. From here you can head to Bastione del Mirador to get a great view of the bay that Alghero encompasses.
Just outside of the city lie two very important architectural and archaeological sites. On the way to Porte Conte is the Nuraghe of Palmavera, a burial site dating back to 3000 BC and a necropoli used by the fisherman from that era. Also, a midieval Roman Bridge is only about five miles away from Alghero en route to Fertilia. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g187880-s201/Alghero:Sardinia:Architecture.html The fifth largest city on Sardinia, Alghero is not only renown for its local dialect, which has Catalan origins – it is also known as the island’s tourist capital. Indeed, Italy’s first bathing resort was established here in 1862.
The city has the services and attractions to fulfill the requirements of even the most demanding tourist. In terms of natural beauty, Alghero is within striking distance of some of Sardinia’s most stunning beaches: le Bombarde, Maria Pia, Lazzaretto and Porticciolo, to name but a few. Moreover, Alghero is very close to the Porto Conte Nature Reserve. The so-called Neptune’s Caves are located in Capo Caccia and can be reached either by sea or via the 654-steps of the breathtaking “Escala del Cabirol”.
Thanks to the large number of marine caves on the coast around Alghero – including the Grotta di Nereo, which is said to be the largest in Europe – this part of the world is utterly unique for sub-aqua diving.
The seabed is awash with a plethora of very unusual marine fauna, such as crayfish, mantis shrimp, lobster, moray eel, conger eel and dusky grouper. Those who appreciate architecture will find much to admire in the historical centre of Alghero, which is one of the few on the island that has remained relatively intact. It still plays host to myriad palazzos and churches of historical interest, not to mention the 13th-century fortifications.
The multitude of restaurants and agrotourisms in Alghero give you the opportunity to sample Sardinia’s traditional meat-based and fish-based specialities. http://www.butterfly-house.it/en/alghero/discovering-alghero Architecture of Italy, often called Italian architecture, refers to all forms of this art in Italy. Italy has a very broad and diverse architectural style, which cannot be simply classified by period, but also by region, due to Italy's division into several city-states until 1861. However, this has created a highly diverse and eclectic range in architectural designs. Italy is known for its considerable architectural achievements,[3] such as the construction of arches, domes and similar structure during ancient Rome, the founding of the Renaissance architectural movement in the late-14th to 16th century, and being the homeland of Palladianism, a style of construction which inspired movements such as that of Neoclassical architecture, and influenced the designs which noblemen built their country houses all over the world, notably in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States of America during the late-17th to early 20th centuries. Several of the finest works in Western architecture, such as the Colosseum, the Duomo of Milan, Florence cathedral and the building designs of Venice are found in Italy. Italy has an estimated total of 100,000 monuments of all varieties (museums, palaces, buildings, statues, churches, art galleries, villas, fountains, historic houses and archaeological remains).[4]
Italian architecture has also widely influenced the architecture of the world. British architect Inigo Jones, inspired by the designs of Italian buildings and cities, brought back the ideas of Italian Renaissance architecture to 17th-century England, being inspired by Andrea Palladio.[5] Additionally, Italianate architecture, popular abroad since the 19th century, was used to describe foreign architecture which was built in an Italian style, especially modelled on Renaissance architecture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Italy Italian Renaissance architects based their theories and practices on Classical Roman examples. The Renaissance revival of Classical Rome was as important in architecture as it was in literature. A pilgrimage to Rome to study the ancient buildings and ruins, especially the Colosseum and Pantheon, was considered essential to an architect's training. Classical orders and architectural elements such as columns, pilasters, pediments, entablatures, arches, and domes form the vocabulary of Renaissance buildings. Vitruvius's writings on architecture also influenced the Renaissance definition of beauty in architecture. As in the Classical world, Renaissance architecture is characterized by harmonious form, mathematical proportion, and a unit of measurement based on the human scale.
Architects trained as humanists helped raise the status of their profession from skilled laborer to artist. They hoped to create structures that would appeal to both emotion and reason.
During the Renaissance, architects trained as humanists helped raise the status of their profession from skilled laborer to artist. They hoped to create structures that would appeal to both emotion and reason. Three key figures in Renaissance architecture were Filippo Brunelleschi, Leon Battista Alberti, and Andrea Palladio.
Brunelleschi
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) is widely considered the first Renaissance architect. Trained as a goldsmith in his native city of Florence, Brunelleschi soon turned his interests to architecture, traveling to Rome to study ancient buildings. Among his greatest accomplishments is the engineering of the dome of Florence Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore, also known as the Duomo). He was also the first since antiquity to use the classical orders Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian in a consistent and appropriate manner.
Although Brunelleschi's structures may appear simple, they rest on an underlying system of proportion. Brunelleschi often began with a unit of measurement whose repetition throughout the building created a sense of harmony, as in the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Florence, 1419). This building is based on a modular cube, which determines the height of and distance between the columns, and the depth of each bay.
Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) worked as an architect from the 1450s onward, principally in Florence, Rimini, and Mantua. As a trained humanist and true Renaissance man, Alberti was as accomplished as an architect as he was a humanist, musician, and art theorist. Alberti's many treatises on art include Della Pittura (On Painting), De Sculptura (On Sculpture), and De re Aedificatoria (On Architecture). The first treatise, Della Pittura, was a fundamental handbook for artists, explaining the principles behind linear perspective, which may have been first developed by Brunelleschi. Alberti shared Brunelleschi's reverence for Roman architecture and was inspired by the example of Vitruvius, the only Roman architectural theorist whose writings are extant.
Alberti aspired to recreate the glory of ancient times through architecture. His facades of the Tempio Malatestiano (Rimini, 1450) and the Church of Santa Maria Novella (Florence, 1470) are based on Roman temple fronts. His deep understanding of the principles of classical architecture are also seen in the Church of Sant'Andrea (Mantua, 1470). The columns here are not used decoratively, but retain their classical function as load-bearing supports. For Alberti, architecture was not merely a means of constructing buildings; it was a way to create meaning.
Palladio
Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) was the chief architect of the Venetian Republic, writing an influential treatise, I quattro libri dell'architettura (Four Books on Architecture,1570; 41.100.126.19). Due to the new demand for villas in the sixteenth century, Palladio specialized in domestic architecture, although he also designed two beautiful and impressive churches in Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore (1565) and Il Redentore (1576). Palladio's villas are often centrally planned, drawing on Roman models of country villas. The Villa Emo (Treviso, 1559) was a working estate, while the Villa Rotonda (Vicenza, 1566–70) was an aristocratic refuge. Both plans rely on classical ideals of symmetry, axiality, and clarity. The simplicity of Palladian designs allowed them to be easily reproduced in rural England and, later, on southern plantations in the American colonies. | http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/itar/hd_itar.htm Background
Throughout the Gothic period in the middle ages, when architecture in France and England was dominated by architecture executed on the grandest scale in Western history, with immense and airy cathedrals representing one of the highest points of European architectural genius, Italian architecture was an uninspired and relatively small affair. Although there was Gothic architecture in Italy, the sweep, genius and grandeur seemed to have passed those city-states by. The Renaissance, however, saw the development of a new architecture from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries that was the first "modern" architecture. When we look at Renaissance buildings, they look familiar, almost as if they were built one hundred years ago. The architectural language invented by the Italian Renaissance architects became the dominant architectural language of the modern world, displaced only by the advent of modernist architecture in the twentieth century.
The architects of the Renaissance derived their architecture in part from a revived interest in Roman and Greek ruins, from the recovery of classical texts on architecture, particularly the Roman writer Vitruvius's ten books on architecture. They also, however, invented new forms and new visual language that was not derived from the classical period. In the process, the architects, humanists, and painters of the Renaissance (for architecture was considered a universal art in the Renaissance) invented a new idea of public space in which civic pride and organization would be organized on a city-wide scale.
In the Renaissance, architecture was seen as the supreme art. Theorists on architecture believed that architectural design arose out of human experience, like all arts, but that it also represented the highest artistic achievement a human being could attain. Architecture, though, was not considered a specialist profession, as it is now. Architectural design was carried out by professional architects, painters, sculptors (such as Michelangelo), humanists, masons, and just plain amateurs with alot of time and money.
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1466)
The invention of the uniquely Italian style in Renaissance architecture is typically given to Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1466), who is also credited with inventing the principles of linear perspective in drawing and painting. In 1419, he was commissioned to build the dome over the cathedral in Florence, which had been started in 1296. In 1419, the building was still unfinished for no-one could quite figure out how to build the dome. Brunelleschi solved the problem by inventing a new type of dome. Rather than a hemisphere, Brunelleschi's dome is conical and high. It has eight sides and Brunelleschi built white ribs on the outside of the dome to call attention to these eight sides.
It was the first dome ever built since the classical period to exist largely for the outside of the building rather than the inside.
In medieval architecture, domes were designed to be visible from within the structure. Brunelleschi's dome, however, could be seen from all over Florence&emdash;in fact, it still dominates the skyline today. There are several innovations here: the design with its eight sides draws attention to its mathematical proportions and symmetry; in fact,Brunelleschi's dome is perhaps the best example of the Renaissance architectural principle of symmetria, which the classical architect Vitruvius claimed was the highest virtue of architecture. By being as much an exterior architecture as an interior one, the dome is about the public space in Florence and serves as a visual gravitational center to the civic life of the city.
The fifteenth century saw a dramatic rise in architectural projects not only in the wealthiest cities such as Florence, but all over Italy. The Vitruvian principles of symmetry and order were applied in almost every building project. In addition, Brunelleschi's invention of perspective, a drawing technique, changed the way Italian architects constructed buildings. The Renaissance architecture of the fifteenth century is dominated by flat surfaces and strong lines which emphasize the principles of …show more content…
architecture.
New types of buildings were going up. In addition to typical medieval buildings such as churches, chapels, and hospitals, Renaissance designers created two new types of buildings: the villa and the palazzo. The villa was country house that the wealthy and powerful citizens, such as the Medici, lived in. Originally fortified farms, Renaissance architects developed the villa into spacious pleasure homes. Related to the villa was the palazzo, or town house. These were the houses that the wealthy and powerful lived in when they visited the city. In the thirteenth century, these palazzi were narrow and unimperssive affairs with the first floor rented out as shops. The fifteenth century saw the rise of large, square and proportionate palazzi in which all floors were dedicated to living areas. Again, the architects were interested also in the exteriors of these palazzi; they were both private and public buildings&emdash;in their public aspect, that is, in their exterior, they expressed the wealth and power of their owners.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)
Besides Brunelleschi, the most important architect of the period was Leon Battista Alberti, who was also a significant political theorist and civic humanist.
He's best known for his books on architecture; in these books, he draws up a theory of city planning and public space. His ideal city is filled with isolated, monumental buildings all perfectly balancing one another.While Brunelleschi is credited with inventing the architectural language of the Renaissance, Alberti is generally considered to have perfected it in terms of symmetry and disposition.
From its beginnings, the humanist education program stressed practical over philosophical careers. The purpose of the humanistic education was to prepare people to lead others and to participate in public life for the common good; this was a foundational aspect of Ciceronianism. Out of educational humanism,then, developed a distinct strain of humanism we call civic humanism. The civic humanists agreed on the importance of eloquence, but they stressed political science and political action over everything else while the educational humanists centered their attention primarily on grammar, rhetoric, and
logic.
The most prominent of the civic humanists were Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), who is more famous in the modern age for his treatise on architecture. Both these men argued that the best form of government was a republic built on the Florentine model. Every citizen should be responsible for one another and should define themselves primarily in relation to the duties to their family and their city-state. Like Valla, they argued that selfishness to a certain degree was the foundation of all human achievement: the quest for glory and nobility led to political greatness and stability while the quest for material gain led to human mastery of nature and the earth.
Mannerism in "Visual Arts in the Renaissance"
The art rested on several principles derived ultimately from Vitruvius's books on architecture. The most important of these was symmetria, or symmetry, which demanded that the parts be geometrically balanced. There is in the earliest Renaissance architecture a mania for order and symmetry. In addition, the various parts of the architectural whole must be congruous or harmonious with one another&emdash;in architectural theory this was called dispositio, or disposition. As architecture developed, however, designers began to rebel against the strictures of Vitruvian theory. In the 1530's,particularly in the work of Michelangelo, architects began to go crazy with dysymmetry and wildly incongruous mixtures of architectural elements. This rebellious style of architecture is called mannerist architecture after a similar phenomenon in Renaissance painting. http://faculty.uml.edu/Culturalstudies/Italian_Renaissance/11_12_13.htm Language of the Discipline
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