The cultural movement called the Renaissance was expressed in architecture in new emphasis on rational clarity and regularity of parts, arranged in simple mathematical proportions and in a conscious revival of Roman architectural practice in structure and details. Renaissance architecture originated in Florence and central Italy in the early 15th century as an expression of Humanism. In Italy, four phases of Renaissance style can be identified: the Early Renaissance of Leone Battista Alberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, the High Renaissance of Donato Bramante and Raphael, the widely diverging Mannerist tendencies in some work of Michelangelo and Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio, and finally the Baroque (q.v.), in which the same architectural vocabulary is used for such different rhetoric that it deserves a separate entry.
When the Renaissance spirit was imported into Spain, France, England, the Low Countries, Germany, Sweden and Poland, the style appeared fully formed, all at once, but compromised with local traditions, and so its phases are not so clearly distinguished in individual buildings.
Main works of art that mark important points in Renaissance architecture:
Early Renaissance
Florence
Brunelleschi and Alberti
Filippo Brunelleschi, Leone Battista Alberti,
Milan
Filarete, Leonardo, Bramante
Venice
Palace design
High Renaissance
Rome: St. Peter's
Raphael and Giulio Romano
Roman churches
Roman palaces
Mannerism
Michelangelo
Peruzzi and Antonio da San Gallo
Sanmichele and Sansovino
Serlio and Vignola
Palladio and the villa
French Renaissance
Flemish Renaissance
English Renaissance
German, Polish and Swedish Renaissance
Spanish Renaissance