Two of the loveliest centrally-planned churches were constructed in Italy during the Renaissance
and their plans are similar because the men who designed them were brothers. What they built,
in separate places, tells us much about the challenges Renaissance architects faced to make a perfect
church.
PRATO - SANTA MARIA DELLE CARCERI (Saint Mary of the Prisons) - Giuliano da Sangallo designed and worked on this structure from 1485-94 in PRATO, Italy (near Florence)
MADONNA DI SAN BIAGIO (Saint Blaise), MONTEPULCIANO, constructed from 1518-1580 by Antonio da Sangallo, the Elder, Giuliano's younger brother.
Both men were interested in a certain set of proportions as they tried to create a Greek-cross
shape for these churches. A Greek cross church is one where the arms of the nave and of the transept are the same length. The plans of both are very similar:
Prato Santa Maria delle Carceri:
San Biagio, Montepulciano plan:
Both architects start with a central square with a circle inscribed in it. The circle
and the square were considered the perfect forms, reflective of the perfection of God, so they
intended to build churches that began with those two perfections. From that starting point, they then took the length of half of the central square and constructed the width of the arms of the church.
With that initial set of proportions, the space from the center of the church straight out to the outer wall is the same in four directions; all purple lines in the plan are equal lengths to the center of the circle inscribed in the central square at the very middle of the church space.
In San Biagio, the square in the center is the same, and three of the arms are the width of
half of the square, too, but one arm is slightly longer, bowed out, to make room for a
sacristy for that church (where you see the yellow line,) so it is slightly different from Santa Maria delle Carceri:
WHAT IS SIMILAR IN THESE BUILDINGS:
1)The idea of a central square that is used as the unit for measurement of the whole ground plan of the building is the same in both buildings.
2)Both buildings have the arms of the church the same length as the length of the nave of the church. This design may be easier to see from the air in both cases:
Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato: San Biagio, Montepulciano:
From the air in an enlarged photo you can also see the extension for the sacristy added on to the plan in San Biagio at the left:
3)Both buildings are topped with a dome that repeats the shape of the circle inscribed in the square on the ground plan. The domes seem the same in the air photo but a side elevation photo shows their
differences: Prato church Montepulciano church
Perhaps less evident from looking at the elevations of the buildings in these photographs and in drawings
is the sense (measured by the eye) that San Biagio is larger than Santa Maria delle Carceri, though
the proportional system remains the same. You can see it in the size of the domes:
The Prato church has 12 ribs in the dome, while there are 16 pilasters that hold up the San Biagio one:
And, in spite of the more elaborate decoration (some of it Baroque) on the walls in San Biagio (which might make it look bigger,) the interior space of Giuliano da Sangallo's Santa Maria delle Carceri is slightly smaller than the interior space of San Biagio built by his younger brother, Antonio:
Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato
As can be seen from interior views, too, both use barrel vaults to lead the arms of the church out
from the central block:
5)Both buildings also use a similar set of proportions on the exterior bays (front extensions of the church on the outside.)
SIMILARITIES on the OUTSIDE:
When you isolate the exterior bays, Prato on left, Montepulciano on right, they look remarkably the
same. Both are three stories with a pediment on top that has a roundel set inside it. Both have plain
pilasters on the ground floor corners, and Santa Maria delle Carceri has Ionic capitals on the second story at the corners, San Biagio has them guarding the windows of the second story. Both have smaller echoing pediments above the entrance doorways (San Biagio adds a lunette molding over the window of the second story and articulation on the wall of the second story.
And the most important similarity is the set of proportions used for the two lower floors. The height of the second story in both cases is 2/3 the height of the first story up to the stringcourses (the horizontal line at the base of the pedestal of the pilasters on the second story.)
DIFFERENCES ON THE OUTSIDE:
Prato's church uses white and green marble, the white marble coming from Carrara and the green from a quarry in Prato. San Biagio uses Travertine stone both outside and inside. The contrast of the white and green colors in Prato can be stunning in some lights, where they mirror the grid of streets in the city where it was built (not all sides are finished in the marble cladding.)
The honey color of the Travertine in Montepulciano makes the church very welcoming in different seasons and times of day. San Biagio's setting, where it nestles up into the hill of the town of Montepulciano, and where the viewer arrives through a long avenue of cypresses to see it emerge, is conducive to contemplation and ease.
In spite of the fact that initially Santa Maria delle Carceri was built to house a miraculous image of the Madonna that a child in Prato had seen move in 1484 on a wall near the prisons,
it is a church that makes you think, about math, and
proportions, and God's laws, and provides images of Della Robbia
roundels of the Evangelists on the spandrels inside just for that
purpose.
San Biagio in Montepulciano, on the other hand, is a church that makes you feel, even if you never enter the church proper.
Two brothers with the same idea at heart, with results a world apart.
GIULIANO DA SANGALLO 1445-1516 - a favorite of Lorenzo the Magnificent, he designs the villa Poggio a Caiano for him. Lorenzo gives Giuliano the nickname Da Sangallo, from the architect's
building of a monastery, now destroyed, dedicated to St. Gall of Ireland in Florence. (Originally the family name was Giamberti.) After Prato, Giuliano goes to Rome and works on St. Peter's with another Greek-cross plan.
ANTONIO DA SANGALLO the ELDER 1453-1534 (called the Elder because his brother, Giuliano,
names his first boy after his brother, then confusion necessitates ELDER and YOUNGER added to their names to differentiate brother from son.) When Lorenzo the Magnificent's son, Giovanni, becomes Pope Leo X in 1513, he hires Antonio to make a sanctuary church, the Madonna di San Biagio, in honor of Pope Leo's tutor, Poliziano, who was from Montepulciano and whose father, Benedetto, had given his life for the Medici. Probably Leo X also wanted a convenient holy stop on his travels from Rome to Florence. That might explain why there still is a wonderful restaurant, La Grotta, across the street from San Biagio even today.
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