Buonarroti Antonio da San Gallo the Younger followed, who gradually passed from Bramante’s taste to Michelangelo’s; Vasari, Ammannati and Buontalenti, who went towards the pictorial at Palazzo Pitti and in the Medici Casino; Vignola who sometimes, holding back his Michelangeloism, materially followed Bramante, this other came to pure pictorial, as in the Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna and in the staircase of the Caprarola palace. Giacomo della Porta also followed, who translated Michelangelo’s architecture into the academy; Domenico Fontana and Martino Longhi who made the translation worse. And came Dosio, Boccalino, Seregni, Bassi, Domenico and Pellegrino Tibaldi. These, architect of San Carlo Borromeo, in Milan, in the cathedral, in San Fedele, in San Sebastiano, in Rho in the great sanctuary, in Pavia, in Novara, in Vercelli, in Gravedona on Lake Como,
As in the mannerism of painters, in the second half of the 16th century, confusion arose between construction and ornamentation, and there was a false pictorial in the architecture, for example the Florentine house of Federico Zuccheri, the casino of Pius IV for Pirro Ligorio, the palace Sword in Rome for Girolamo da Carpi and Giulio Mazzoni, the home of the Omenoni in Milan by Leone Leoni, Santa Maria di Carignano in Genoa by Galeazzo Alessi, etc.
But against the bad architectural habit, here is Iacopo Sansovino, interpreter of the style of Titian in architecture, to found in it the true pictorial in Venice, deriving from the play of lights and shadows, realized in the constructive elements themselves. No longer a single floor where windows open: the whole building is a rhythm of solids and voids that complement each other.
From Sansovino derive Alessandro Vittoria, who reduces the master’s style to an academy; Palladio which takes him to extreme consequences; the Sanmicheli, the neoclassical of the Sansovinian style; the Scamozzi more faithful to Iacopo, but always academic. However, for Iacopo Sansovino, Romanism gives its aspect to the city of the lagoon and to the mainland, in Vicenza for Palladio, in Verona for Sanmicheli.
The casual and personal distribution of solids and voids, the free mixture of statues, niches, signs, shelves, lead to the effects of chiaroscuro over the clear, simple, regular construction of the whole. And on this street Baroque architecture arises.
According to answerresume, Italian sculpture of the sixteenth century begins with the innovating spirit of Leonardo, whereby the form takes on a pictorial value, touched by light shadows in the incessant and soft undulations of the planes. The supreme master did his utmost, as he says, “no less in culture than in painting” and “for both in the same degree”, but soon ruled that lower than this. Few traces of Leonardo’s sculptural art: impressions of it are found in Gian Francesco Rustici, and some reflections of his pictorial manner in Pierino da Vinci. Rustici stood opposite, in the Florentine Baptistery, Andrea Contucci from Monte San Savino, known as Andrea Sansovino, who represents the fifteenth-century tradition in central Italy. He had among his followers and contemporaries Leonardo del Tasso, Lorenzetto, Baccio da Montelupo, Andrea Ferrucci from Fiesole, Benedetto from Rovezzano, Giovanni della Robbia. In Loreto, in the works for the Holy House begun by Cristoforo Romano, he had assistants, collaborators and followers Raffaello da Montelupo, Francesco da Sangallo, Domenico Aimo da Varignana, known as Bologna, Tribolo and Girolamo Lombardi. The fifteenth-century tradition in northern Italy was mainly represented by Bambaia and Solari; in southern Italy by Giovanni da Nola and Girolamo da Santacroce; in Emilia by the provincial sculptors, Alfonso Lombardi and Begarelli.
But with Michelangelo’s growth, all sculpture took refuge in his great shadow, dominated and oppressed by his genius, who is the genius of a sculptor, when he paints as when he is an architect. The frescoes of the Sistine vault find parallel in the statues of the Medici chapel, where the contrasts enhance the painful life of the forms. Beside the quivering slavery of the Night the cry of revenge rises with the terrible awakening of the Day , a giant that releases with a blow, with formidable impetus, the limbs numbed by the shortness of space. In front of Giuliano , Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, a statue of silence and meditation, summarizes in the hopeless bitterness of the clouded gaze the tragic pains, the vain struggles expressed by the statues that populate his tomb. It is despair and challenge in the sinister eyes, in the gloomy blade profile of Twilight ; it is a spasm of agony in the Dawn , which, instead of opening the doors of the East, opens the doors of the day to hopeless struggles. In the groups of Pietà that close the cycle of Michelangelo’s sculptural works, the action follows an impressive crescendo of violence. The slow funeral pulling of the body of Christ towards the ground, in the Pietà Rondanini; the tiring turn of its gigantic limbs in the sketch of Palestrina, in the group of Santa Maria del Fiore, are transformed into funereal abandonment of ruined and broken forms, in the inevitable fall of a trunk uprooted from the ground. To the receding figure of the Magdalene, in perfect function of balustrade, the body of Christ opposes its downpour, dragging the entire main group with its weight; and from the contrast between the movements of the sculptural masses the drama springs with impressive power.
All the Italian sculptors passed from Sansovinism to Michelangelo, among them Iacopo Sansovino, architect prince of sixteenth-century Venice, master of rhythms, classic in the expression of calm and flowery beauty, which in clay and wax rivals the great masters of the Venetian brush, for the quick touch and the fantastic vividness of the decoration. As for Michelangelo, albeit in a different form, the virtue of architect becomes a solid element of greatness for the genius of the sculptor, who draws the live decoration of his classic buildings, which are flowered and animated by it.
