Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Renaissance fascination with classical architecture is revealed in this mid-sixteenth-century print by the engraver known as Master G. A. with the Caltrop. Rome was a magnet for Renaissance architects wishing to absorb the lessons of the ancients: the buildings of Brunelleschi, Giuliano da Sangallo, Bramante, and Palladio, to name just four, reveal the serious study of antiquity undertaken during their respective Roman sojourns. At that time, the only ancient Roman building still completely intact was the Pantheon, but ruins were abundant, and places like the baths of Diocletian and Caracalla and the Roman Forum offered architects and artists the opportunity to study a wealth of ground plans, partial elevations, and architectural fragments.

Determining the correct height-to-width proportions of the five classical orders—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite—was a serious concern of Renaissance architects, who made careful measurements of architectural fragments in an attempt to design their own buildings with classically "correct" proportions. In this print, Master G. A. has depicted a composite capital featuring Ionic volutes and the acanthus leaves characteristic of the Corinthian order. Plumb lines ending in lead weights descend from the abacus and dangle alongside the capital, the relative measurements of individual parts carefully noted alongside the strings. The print illustrates the meticulous study of classical antiquity that produced such hallmarks of Renaissance architecture as symmetry, regularity, and proportion. This endeavor is recorded in Andrea Palladio's 1570 Treatise on Architecture, in which he writes, "finding [ruins of ancient architecture] much more worthy of observation than I had at first imagined, I began very minutely with the utmost diligence to measure every one of their parts …"

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