Part One of Six

Probably created in Northern Italy between the end of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, the North Italian Album gathers a variety of designs for buildings, cityscapes, architectural details, household objects, and military gear.

As such, it had the potential to interest Renaissance painters, sculptors, metalworkers and woodworkers as much as architects. 

This exhibition explores the North Italian Album’s drawings in relation to both artistic and architectural practice, challenging our understanding of architectural drawings as mathematically precise and underscoring artists’ contributions to the development of architectural practice in Renaissance Italy. 

Hand unknown
Baldachin over a well 
Chalk, ink, hatching and pigment on parchment
c. 1500
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/25 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London  

This elaborate baldachin, or canopy, features capitals whose volutes thread through the eye sockets of ox skulls and highly decorative putti holding ribbons and festoons. Its ambitious structure comprises arches supporting an entablature, drum and dome. Bringing together structural understanding and a sculptural approach to ornament, this baldachin explores the limits of what large-scale, three-dimensional architecture can achieve. 

Two Renaissance cityscapes, one a drawing from the album, another a woodwork inlay.

Hand unknown
Cityscape 
Ink and pigment on parchment 
c. 1500
North Italian Album, SM volume 122/13 
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London

Fra Damiano Zambelli
Annunciation 
Woodworked inlay
1536 
San Pietro, Perugia

Recalling a study for a theatre stage set, this cityscape in the North Italian Album also evokes architectural settings used in painting and in woodworked inlay of this time. It explores palaces, porticoes and courtyards, playing with structural solutions (arches and entablatures) at the same time as it holds our attention with architectural fragments in the foreground. Fra Damiano Zambelli adopted a similar approach for this woodwork Annunciation, displaying high levels of skill in the representation of three-dimensionality. This large architectural environment belittles the Archangel and the Virgin Mary, almost suggesting that it, rather than the Annunciation, is the prime subject of the representation.

A Renaissance illustration of a biblical scene, the birth of the virgin.

Fra Carnevale (Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini)
The Birth of the Virgin
Tempera and oil on wood 
1467 
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Donatello 
The Feast of Herod 
Gilded bronze 
1427
Baptistery, Siena

Artists had long adopted striking architectural settings in their work. In Fra Carnevale’s painting, the figure of St Anne, the Virgin’s mother, and of the infant Mary are in the background and so diminutive compared to the large and beautifully decorated palace that the narrative appears as a mere pretext for the representation of architecture.  Similarly, in this relief panel, the sculptor Donatello created an eye-catching palatial interior exploring different solutions such as round arches, beams and staircases, but also drawing attention to materials by creating indentations in the fictive masonry wall behind the figures in the foreground.