Italian Renaissance: Filarete

Masterpieces of Filarete

Antonio di Pietro Averlino (c. 1400 - c. 1469), also "Averulino", dubbed Filarete (Greek "lover of virtue"), was a Florentine architect, sculptor and architectural theorist of the Italian Renaissance.

Torre del Filarete "Filarete", as he is universally known, worked, and was probably born, in Florence, and may have trained under Lorenzo Ghiberti. Under a commission by Pope Eugenius IV, Averlino, over the course of twelve years, cast the bronze central doors for the old St Peter's Basilica in Rome, completed in 1445; in the work Filarete hoped to rival Ghiberti's great bronze doors for the Baptistery of Florence. In the following century, Filarete's doors were preserved when Old St Peter's was demolished and reinstalled in the new St Peter's Basilica.

Leaving Rome for the patronage of Francesco Sforza in Milan, Averlino built the Ospedale Maggiore (from ca 1456), which was rationally planned as a cross within a square, with the hospital church, itself centrally-planned, at the center of the plan. Surviving original sections of the much-rebuilt structure show the Gothic detail of Milan's quattrocento craft traditions at odds with Filarete's design all' antica (Murray 1963). He also worked on the Castello Sforzesco, and on the Duomo di Milano.

In ca. 1465 Averlino completed his Trattato di architettura ("Treatise on Architecture") in 25 volumes, which circulated widely in manuscript. A profusely illustrated manuscript of the Trattato, the Codex Magliabechiano, of ca 1465, dedicated to Piero de' Medici and conserved in Florence, suggests that Filarete had fallen out of favour in Milan soon after completing his Trattato. The style which Filarete called the "barbarous modern style", which he urged his readers to abandon, is the Gothic style of Northern Italy. Much of the treatise, in the favoured form of a dialogue— here between the patron and his architect— is a detailed account of an imaginary and somewhat magical city, Sforzinda, named to honour Filarete's patron. The city. which he compared to an ideal human body, was inscribed within an eight-pointed star of walls inscribed within a perfect circular moat, the first of many ideal star-shaped city plans that reacted against the crowded, irrational spaces of the medieval city. Eight towers were placed as bastions at the salient points of the star, and eight gates were the outlets of radial avenues that each passed through a market square, dedicated to certain goods. Other radiating streets had the parish churches and convents on them. A canal system connected with the river and the outside world, provided transport for goods. At Sforzinda's centre was the formally composed piazza, a double square that was a stadio long and half a stadio wide, with the duomo at its head, and a lookout tower. Sforzinda's buildings and their highly symbolic decor were minutely described, and the astrological calculations required for harmony, together with thoroughly practical matters concerning fortifications, with the discovery of a Golden Book detailing the buildings of Antiquity. The aspects of Late Gothic courtly Romance in a treatise on architecture were not to the taste of more rational 16th century taste that followed: Giorgio Vasari dismissed Filarete's treatise as "most ridiculous and perhaps the stupidest book ever written." The first publication of Filarete's Tractatus had to wait until the Codex Magliabechiano, manuscript was edited by W.von Ottigen, in 1894.

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It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Italian Renaissance".