The Renaissance town hall in Antwerp (Belgium), designed by Cornelis Floris de Vriendt the Younger (c. 1513/14-75), was constructed between 1561 and 1565. Obviously influenced by the work of Bramante, Floris created a magnificent four-storied edifice, with symmetrical wings featuring cross-mullioned windows flanked by pilasters. The central part of the building has arcuated windows with balustrades, the height of this section lifted to five stories, creating a tower crowned by an aedicule (pedimented templelike form). Supporting the building from the ground floor is an arcade of thick, rusticated piers. The Antwerp town hall is justifiably famous as the most classically Renaissance civic building of northern Europe.
As we have seen, the symmetrical cruciform plan of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence had an impressive effect on Renaissance hospital designs. The first such hospital in Spain was the Hospital Real (royal hospital) in Santiago de Compostela, the pilgrimage destination in northwest Spain. The architect was Enrique Egas (fl. c. 1480-1534), who also worked on the cathedral of Toledo. His family originated in Brussels and emigrated to Toledo in the 15th century; they produced several architects. Egas constructed the hospital in Santiago de Compostela between 1501 and 1511, making it the first modern hospital in the Iberian Peninsula. Its ornamentation is in the flat, pure Florentine style. He went on to build other hospitals in Toledo and Granada.
London’s Swan Theatre was constructed circa 1595, designed for both sports and dramatical performances. Unlike most other theaters in London, it was evidently commissioned by an entrepreneur rather than by the director of a company of performers. The unroofed wooden structure was circular, with a foundation of bricks. Its wooden pillars on the stage, painted in the antique style to resemble marble, featured ornately carved capitals and monumental bases. Inigo Jones (who did not plan the Swan) designed a Palladian-style theater, Cockpit-in-Court, consisting of an octagon within a square. It was built in 1629.
The Royal Exchange in London was completed in 1566 in response to the city’s increasing importance as a trading center. Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-79), Queen Elizabeth I’s (1533-1603) financial adviser in Antwerp for some 20 years, raised the money to build the Royal Exchange. The original building, in elegant Florentine fashion, comprised a large central courtyard surrounded by a loggia at ground level with two stories above it. Interestingly, after the complex burned in the Great Fire of 1666, it was restored almost to the original plan. The one anomaly, a glaring fault that clashes with the Renaissance design, is an inept triumphal archway at the entrance topped by an out-of-scale tower. Such later additions detracted from the Renaissance purity of several of the buildings discussed earlier.
World History
