Santa Maria Novella

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pua Zhi Qin 0314073

 

Who is the architect or founder of the building?

 

 The founder of the building, Basilica of Santa Novella Maria is Leon Leone Battista Alberti. Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa very probably in 1404. When he was young, he was given an excellent education, first is at the University of Padua, where at a very early age, he acquired a mastery of Greek and Latin, and later at the University of Bologna, where he studied law. The first theorist of Humanist art, Alberti belonged to an important Florentine family that had been banished from Florence since 1387. When the family returned to the city in 1429 Alberti gained access to the city's great architecture and art. Alberti never received a formal architectural education. His architectural ideas were generated from his own studies and research. Alberti's two main architectural writings are "De Pictura" (1435), in which he emphatically declares the importance of painting as a base for architecture and "De Re Aedificatoria" (1450). Like Vitruvius's "Ten Books on Architecture", "De Re Aedificatoria" was subdivided into ten books. Unlike Vitruvius's book, Alberti's told architects how buildings should be built, not how they were built. "De Re Aedificatoria" remained the classic treatise on architecture from the sixteenth century until the eighteenth century. The unfinished Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini (1450) was the first building that Alberti designed and attempted to build based on his architectural principals. Up to that point Alberti's architectural experience was purely theoretic. The facade of Santa Maria Novella (1458-1471) is considered his greatest achievement since it allows the pre-existing and newly added parts of the building to merge into a clear statement of his new principles. Alberti died in Rome in 1472.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where and when was the building built?

 

Basilica of Santa Novella Maria was built in the year 1456 to 1470 in Florence Italy. The style of the architecture is Gothic with Italy Renaissance façade. The designed in the 1450’s which is the façade of Santa Maria Novella completed the exterior of a medieval church, and yet it has been rightly described as a 'great Renaissance exponent of classical eurhythmia,' for its dimensions are all bound to each other by the 1:2 ratio of the musical Octave. The marble panels, which produce a mosaiclike effect of discrete color patches on medieval Italian church exteriors... here contribute to a sense of rhythmic, geometric unity..." From the trecento campaign, Alberti inherited the sepulchral niches with pointed arches, the lateral portals also enclosed by Gothic frames, and the geometrically patterned green and white marble revetment. It was this biochromatism—Tuscan Romanesque in origin and never out of favor in Florence—that Alberti chose as the departure for the revetment system of this new façade (c. 1456-70). Over it, he superimposed a series of tall and narrow arches to accommodate the vertical accent of the Gothic remnants. The arch and the capitals of the engaged order he shaped in a manner not Gothic but Romanesque-antique, thus making possible the introduction of the authoritative Classical language of the entrance, consisting of fluted pilasters framed by noble columns on tall dadoes—this in homage of the Roman Pantheon, a monument exhaustively studied by 'archaeologist' Alberti." It is built during the Renaissance architecture. 

Renaissance architecture is the architecture of the period between the early 15th and early 17th centuries in different regions of Europe, in which there was a conscious revival and development of certain elements of ancient Greek and Roman thought and material culture. Stylistically, Renaissance architecture followed Gothic architecture and was succeeded by Baroque architecture.

The Renaissance style places emphasis on symmetry, proportion, geometry and the regularity of parts as they are presented in the architecture of classical antiquity and in particular ancient Roman architecture, of which many examples remained. Orderly arrangements of columns, pilasters and lintels, as well as the use of semicircular arches, hemispherical domes, niches and aediculesreplaced the more complex proportional systems and irregular profiles of medieval buildings. The rennaissance architectiure is developed first in Florence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soo Xiao Wen

 

Form and shape of the building

Exterior
Santa Maria Novella provided a model 'antique' facade for a Gothic type of church.

 

The architect of this building (Alberti) divide the whole space in such a way that the height of the building is equal to its width, thereby forming a single large square.

This is then further subdivided half-way up its height by the base of the scroll forms which used to mark the aisles.

 

The lower part of the facade, divided by the main door, thus forms two squares, each of which is one quarter of the area of the large square.

The upper-storey screening the end of the nave and crowned by a classical triangular pediment is of exactly the same size as the two lower squares below it.

This mathematical division into proportions as simple as 1:1, 1:2, 1:4.

The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance/ Peter Murray 1998

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alberti integrate the existing tombs of famous Florentine citizens, the two Gothic doors, and the central circular window into his new version of the facade, which was originally built and decorated with its first marble inlay in the 13th century.

 

The architect framed the lower zone with side pilasters and introduced four engaged columns to set a vertical emphasis.

He enclosed the large central main door with an arch and separated the lower part of the facade from the upper part by means of a wide horizontal strip decorated with square inlay.

 

Although the central circular window weighs rather heavily on the attic zone below, it is successfully integrated into a conclusive series of circular motives by the framing volutes.

The facade culminates majestically in an exquisite triangular pediment.

 

Interior

Santa Maria Novella was based on the model of the Burgundian Cistercian structures and was built as a three-aisle basilica with transept and five square chapels.

 

Alberti succeeded most admirably in bringing the upward-harmony with the horizontal dimensions of the length and width of the space

 

The spatial boundaries between the center aisle and the two side-aisles are almost removed by the width of the arcades.

 

Based on an optical calculation, the pillar become narrower as they lead up to the choir and hence emphasize the extended length of the nace and the side-aisles which culminate in the north-oriented Maggiore Chapel.

 

With its well-ordered proportions and harmonious details, the balanced formal language of the architecture unfolds to create a most remarkable atmosphere.

Art & Architecture Florence/ Rolf C. Wirtz 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the picture above, we can see that the transept form a christian cross. Alberti improved the cross by making it different from the previous baroque style. Baroque style cathedral's have a cross which has a longer upper part while Alberti changed it shorter during Renaissance period. 

 

SEAN WEE YEN XHIONG

 

What is the function or purpose of the building?

 

Partly financed by the Florentian State, the Santa Maria Novella was built to serve as the mother church of the Dominican Order in Florence. It got the name Novella (new) as it was built upon the site of an old 9th-century oratory, a Christian room for prayer. The site was initially called the Santa Maria delle Vigne. The foundation stone was laid in October 1279, and the church itself was consecrated just over 140 years later, in September 1420.

 

What makes your building historically significant / meaningful?

 

The Santa Maria Novella's marble facade is considered one of the most notable examples of the Florentine Renaissance. Written in huge letters upon it is the name of its sponsor, Giovanni Rucellai, followed by the year of its completion in 1470. Though the facade was initially plain like other Florentine churches at the time, architect Leon Battista Alberti took on the task of designing the upper part of the facade, and proved his greatness and ability by graciously making his new style complement the existing elements. With its rigid Gothic structure, the facade reflects geometrical and mathematical revelations that were applied to arts and nature during the time. Every shape that covers the brilliantly-designed facade creates a magnificent series of harmonic relationships.

The Santa Maria Novella's interior is vast and also contains and hosts several ancient works of art, though many have been stored and conserved in the Uffizi. These works of art were created for the church by great artists. Among the many great pieces include The Crucifix by Brunelleschi, a wooden sculpture preserved in the Gondi Chapel, and Masaccio's Holy Trinity, the first painting to utilise mathematical perspective and linear proportions. Also notable is The Crucifix by Giotto, which is located at the centre of the church, raised high above the steps that separate the lower and upper church.

Further within Santa Maria Novella also lies several chapels and cloisters, though the Tornabuoni Chapel (or Maggiore Chapel) is the largest and most popular of all, and is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the church's titular saint. The great frescoes within it are all the work of Domenico Bigordi di Tommaso Ghirlandaio, who painted the walls of the chapel with life stories of the Virgin. Ghirlandio had great help from his two brothers and one brother-in-law, as well as several apprentices (including, briefly, a 14 year old Michelangelo, who was chased away for correcting a handful of Ghirlandio's drawings).

Apart from works of art, there are also several important historical moments that took place at the Santa Maria Novella. Most notably, the church is where Galileo was reprimanded for stating that the Earth revolved around the sun.

 

 

Tan Kai Chong

 

Materials / Methods are used for construction

 

The Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore (Saint Mary of the Flower), nicknamed the Duomo after the enormous octagonal dome on its east end, is the cathedral of Florence, Italy, and, arguably, the birthplace of the Renaissance.

A cathedral is a bishop's church. There are many other Catholic churches in Florence, many of them associated with the Renaissance, including Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, and the Brancacci Chapel. However, the Duomo is the home church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Florence, which traces its roots to 394 CE.

Although construction was begun in 1296, the cathedral did not get the structure that gives it its name until 1436. The east end of the church was open to the elements or covered with flat, unstable roofing for more than a century. 

The huge octagonal shape proved daunting to engineers and architects. Italian architects were familiar with circular domed shapes, such as the Pantheon in Rome. However, those domes were constructed with concrete. The recipe for concrete had been lost in the Dark Ages. 

Medieval gothic cathedrals, such as Notre Dame de Paris in France, relied on flying buttresses to support their massive stone weight. Architects and engineers of the budding Renaissance were determined not to use flamboyant Gothic style or flying buttresses—they wanted to look back to the simple, clean lines of their Roman past.

The architect Filippo Brunelleschi came up with a solution. The Duomo is actually two domes. The inner dome is made of sandstone and marble. The outer dome is made of brick-and-mortar—each brick carefully designed, shaped, and fired to support the dome. The dome was constructed without any supports beneath it. 

The Duomo was an immediate success, and Brunelleschi became the chief architect associated with the Renaissance. 

In an ironic twist, the marble facade of the cathedral was only completed in the late 1800s, during a period when medieval, not Renaissance, art was popular. The birthplace of the Renaissance has a medieval face.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The basic features of the dome had been designed by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. His brick model, 4.6 metres (15 ft) high 9.2 metres (30 ft) long, was standing in a side aisle of the unfinished building, and had long ago become sacrosanct. It called for an octagonal dome higher and wider than any that had ever been built, with no external buttresses to keep it from spreading and falling under its own weight. 

The commitment to reject traditional Gothic buttresses had been made when Neri di Fioravante's model was chosen over a competing one by Giovanni di Lapo Ghini. That architectural choice, in 1367, was one of the first events of the Italian Renaissance, marking a break with the Medieval Gothic style and a return to the classic Mediterranean dome. Italian architects regarded Gothic flying buttresses as ugly makeshifts, in addition to being a style favored by central Italy's traditional enemies to the north. Neri's model depicted a massive inner dome, open at the top to admit light, like Rome's Pantheon, but enclosed in a thinner outer shell, partly supported by the inner dome, to keep out the weather. It was to stand on an unbuttressed octagonal drum. Neri's dome would need an internal defense against spreading (hoop stress), but none had yet been designed. 

The building of such a masonry dome posed many technical problems. Brunelleschi looked to the great dome of the Pantheon in Rome for solutions. The dome of the Pantheon is a single shell of concrete, the formula for which had long since been forgotten. A wooden form had held the Pantheon dome aloft while its concrete set, but for the height and breadth of the dome designed by Neri, starting 52 metres (171 ft) above the floor and spanning 44 metres (144 ft), there was not enough timber in Tuscany to build the scaffolding and forms. Brunelleschi chose to follow such design and employed a double shell, made of sandstone and marble. Brunelleschi would have to build the dome out of bricks, due to its light weight compared to stone and easier to form, and with nothing under it during construction. To illustrate his proposed structural plan, he constructed a wooden and brick model with the help of Donatello and Nanni di Banco and still displayed in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. The model served as a guide for the craftsmen, but was intentionally incomplete, so as to ensure Brunelleschi's control over the construction. 

Brunelleschi's solutions were ingenious. The spreading problem was solved by a set of four internal horizontal stone and iron chains, serving as barrel hoops, embedded within the inner dome: one each at the top and bottom, with the remaining two evenly spaced between them. A fifth chain, made of wood, was placed between the first and second of the stone chains. Since the dome was octagonal rather than round, a simple chain, squeezing the dome like a barrel hoop, would have put all its pressure on the eight corners of the dome. The chains needed to be rigid octagons, stiff enough to hold their shape, so as not to deform the dome as they held it together. 

Each of Brunelleschi's stone chains was built like an octagonal railroad track with parallel rails and cross ties, all made of sandstone beams 43 centimetres (17 in) in diameter and no more than 2.3 metres (7.5 ft) long. The rails were connected end-to-end with lead-glazed iron splices. The cross ties and rails were notched together and then covered with the bricks and mortar of the inner dome. The cross ties of the bottom chain can be seen protruding from the drum at the base of the dome. The others are hidden. Each stone chain was supposed to be reinforced with a standard iron chain made of interlocking links, but a magnetic survey conducted in the 1970s failed to detect any evidence of iron chains, which if they exist are deeply embedded in the thick masonry walls. He was also able to accomplish this by setting vertical "ribs" on the corners of the octagon curving towards the center point. The ribs had slits, where platforms could be erected out of and work could progressively continue as they worked up,a system for scaffolding.

A circular masonry dome, such as that of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul can be built without supports, called centering, because each course of bricks is a horizontal arch that resists compression. In Florence, the octagonal inner dome was thick enough for an imaginary circle to be embedded in it at each level, a feature that would hold the dome up eventually, but could not hold the bricks in place while the mortar was still wet. Brunelleschi used a herringbone brick pattern to transfer the weight of the freshly laid bricks to the nearest vertical ribs of the non-circular dome.

The outer dome was not thick enough to contain embedded horizontal circles, being only 60 centimetres (2 ft) thick at the base and 30 centimetres (1 ft) thick at the top. To create such circles, Brunelleschi thickened the outer dome at the inside of its corners at nine different elevations, creating nine masonry rings, which can be observed today from the space between the two domes. To counteract hoop stress, the outer dome relies entirely on its attachment to the inner dome at its base; it has no embedded chains.

A modern understanding of physical laws and the mathematical tools for calculating stresses was centuries into the future. Brunelleschi, like all cathedral builders, had to rely on intuition and whatever he could learn from the large scale models he built. To lift 37,000 tons of material, including over 4 million bricks, he invented hoisting machines and lewissons for hoisting large stones. These specially designed machines and his structural innovations were Brunelleschi's chief contribution to architecture. Although he was executing an aesthetic plan made half a century earlier, it is his name, rather than Neri's, that is commonly associated with the dome. 

Brunelleschi's ability to crown the dome with a lantern was questioned and he had to undergo another competition. He was declared the winner over his competitors Lorenzo Ghiberti and Antonio Ciaccheri. His design was for an octagonal lantern with eight radiating buttresses and eight high arched windows (now on display in the Museum Opera del Duomo). Construction of the lantern was begun a few months before his death in 1446. Then, for 15 years, little progress was possible, due to alterations by several architects. The lantern was finally completed by Brunelleschi's friend Michelozzo in 1461. The conical roof was crowned with a gilt copper ball and cross, containing holy relics, by Verrocchio in 1469. This brings the total height of the dome and lantern to 114.5 metres (375 ft). This copper ball was struck by lightning on 17 July 1600 and fell down. It was replaced by an even larger one two years later. 

The commission for this bronze ball [atop the lantern] went to the sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, in whose workshop there was at this time a young apprentice named Leonardo da Vinci. Fascinated by Filippo's [Brunelleschi's] machines, which Verrocchio used to hoist the ball, Leonardo made a series of sketches of them and, as a result, is often given credit for their invention.

Leonardo might have also participated in the design of the bronze ball, as stated in the G manuscript of Paris "Remember the way we soldered the ball of Santa Maria del Fiore".

The decorations of the drum gallery by Baccio d'Agnolo were never finished after being disapproved by no one less than Michelangelo. 

A huge statue of Brunelleschi now sits outside the Palazzo dei Canonici in the Piazza del Duomo, looking thoughtfully up towards his greatest achievement, the dome that would forever dominate the panorama of Florence. It is still the largest masonry dome in the world.

The building of the cathedral had started in 1296 with the design of Arnolfo di Cambio and was completed in 1469 with the placing of Verrochio's copper ball atop the lantern. But the façade was still unfinished and would remain so until the nineteenth century.