The concept of the Renaissance, which aimed to achieve the rebirth or re-creation of ancient Classical culture, originated in Florence in the early 15th century and thence spread throughout most of the Italian peninsula; by the end of the 16th century the new style pervaded almost all of Europe, gradually replacing the Gothic style of the late Middle Ages. It encouraged a revival of naturalism, seen in Italian 15th-century painting and sculpture, and of Classical forms and ornament in architecture, such as the column and round arch, the tunnel vault, and the dome.
Knowledge of the Classical style in architecture was derived during the Renaissance from two sources: the ruins of ancient Classical buildings, particularly in Italy but also in France and Spain, and the treatise De architectura (c. 27 bce; “On Architecture”) by the Roman architect Vitruvius. For Classical antiquity and, therefore, for the Renaissance, the basic element of architectural design was the order, which was a system of traditional architectural units. During the Renaissance five orders were used: the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, various ones being prevalent in different periods. For example, the ornate decorative quality of the Corinthian order was embraced during the early Renaissance, while the masculine simplicity and strength of the Doric was preferred during the Italian High Renaissance. Following ancient Roman practice (e.g., the Colosseum or the Theatre of Marcellus), Renaissance architects often superimposed the order—that is, used a different order for each of the several stories of a building—commencing with the heavier, stronger Tuscan or Doric order below and then rising through the lighter, more decorative Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite.
For the Renaissance, proportion was the most important predetermining factor of beauty. The great Italian humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty in architecture as
that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. (On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, book vi, chapter 2, 1988.)
On the authority of Vitruvius, the Renaissance architects found a harmony between the proportions of the human body and those of their architecture. There was even a relationship between architectural proportions and the Renaissance pictorial device of perspective; the Italian painter Piero della Francesca said that perspective represented objects seen from afar “in proportion according to their respective distance.” In fact, it was an Italian Renaissance architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, who was the first to formulate perspective. The concern of these architects for proportion led to the clear, measured expression and definition of architectural space and mass that differentiates the Renaissance style from the Gothic and encourages in the spectator an immediate and full comprehension of the building.
The Renaissance was a great moment in the history of architecture for the expression of architectural theory. Inspired by the rediscovery or reevaluation of the treatise by Vitruvius, many architects recorded their theories of architecture; some were preserved in manuscript (e.g., those of the 15th-century Italian architects Francesco di Giorgio and Filarete), but most were published. Alberti’s treatise De re aedificatoria (Ten Books on Architecture), modeled on Vitruvius, was written in the middle of the 15th century and published in 1485. But it was during the last three-quarters of the 16th century that architectural theory flourished. The Italians Sebastiano Serlio, Giacomo da Vignola, and Andrea Palladio published famous books on architecture at that time. Elsewhere, works were published by the Frenchmen Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Philibert Delorme, and Jean Bullant; the Fleming Vredeman de Vries; the German Wendel Dietterlin; and the Englishman John Shute.