03 — ARTWORK
Interior view
- MEDIUM
- Photo
- TYPE
- Interior
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CURRENT LOCATION · Duomo (Arezzo)
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- 1005 × 1350 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
The new church of the Duoma at Arezzo (Cattedrale di Ss. Donato e Pietro) was planned in 1275-76 and begun by 1277-78. By 1288-89 the apseA semicircular projection, roofed with a half-dome, at the east end of a church behind the altar. Smaller subsidiary apses may be found around the choir or transepts. Also known as an exedra. The adjective is apsidal. and first bays were in use and the pattern set for the remainder of the building, which was slowly carried forward during the next two hundred and fifty years and completed in the nineteenth century. The façadethe front or principal face of a building, especially one elaborately constructed; a blind façade is a façade that is purely decorative and does not relate to the structure of the building. was built in 1901-1914, replacing the previous, unfinished one, dating to the 15th century.
The unbroken block-form of the building, isolated with its octagonal campanileBell tower, usually built beside or attached to a church; the word is most often used in connection with Italian architecture. on its high stepped podium, maintains the reticent tradition of Central Italian RomanesqueStyle of art and architecture prevailing throughout most of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the first style to achieve such international currency. The dominant art of the Middle Ages was architecture, and 'Romanesque', like 'Gothic', is primarily an architectural term that has been extended to the other arts of the period. As the name suggests, it indicates a derivation from Roman art, and sometimes Romanesque is used to cover all the developments from Roman architecture in the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire until the flowering of the Gothic roughly AD 500-1200. More usually, however, it is applied to a distinctive style that emerged, almost simultaneously, in several countries - France, Germany, Italy, Spain - in the 11th century. It is characterized most obviously by a new massiveness of scale, reflecting the greater political and economic stability that followed a period when Christian civilization seemed in danger of extinction. Romanesque painting and sculpture are generally strongly stylized, with little of the naturalism and humanistic warmth of classical or later Gothic art. The forms of nature are freely translated into linear and sculptural designs which are sometimes majestically calm and severe and at others are agitated by a visionary excitement that can become almost delirious. Because of its expressionistic distortion of natural form, Romanesque art, as with other great non-naturalistic styles of the past, has had to wait for the revolution in sensibility brought about by the development of modern art in order to be widely appreciated. buildings and of the mendicant churches that followed in their wake. The vertical sweep of the interior of this most GothicGothic, which may well have originated with Alberti as a derogatory term and which certainly corresponds to Vasari's 'maniera tedesca' ('German style'), is properly the descriptive term for an artistic style which achieved its first full flowering in the Ile de France and the surrounding areas in the period between c. 1200 and c. 1270, and which then spread throughout northern Europe. It is characterized by the hitherto unprecedented integration of the arts of sculpture, painting, stained glass and architecture which is epitomized in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In all the arts the predominantly planar forms of the Romanesque are replaced by an emphasis on line. There is a transcendental quality, whether in the soaring forms of the pointed arches or in the new stress on the humanity of Christ, which similarly distinguishes it from the preceding Romanesque style. In thinking of Nicola (d. c. 1284) or Giovanni Pisano (d. after 1314) there is same danger of forgetting what had happened in French sculpture half a century or more earlier, and likewise it is hard to remember that the spectacular achievements of early Renaissance art are a singularly localized eddy in the continuing stream of late gothic European art. By northern European standards few Italian works of art can be called gothic without qualification, and the story of 13th and 14th century Italian architecture is as much one of resistance to the new style as of its reception, whether directly from France or through German or central European intermediaries. In sculpture and in painting, the Italian reluctance to distort the human figure, conditioned by a never wholly submerged awareness of the omnipresent antique heritage, gives a special quality to the work of even those artists such as Giovanni Pisano or Simone Martini who most closely approached a pure gothic style. Nevertheless, the vitalizing role of Northern gothic art throughout the early Renaissance and the period leading up to it should never be underestimated. The artistic, like the cultural and commercial, interaction was continuous and much of the Italian achievement is incomprehensible if seen in isolation. It is not merely at the level of direct exchanges between one artist and another, or the influence of one building; painting, manuscript or piece of sculpture upon another, that the effects are to be felt. The streaming quality of line which is so characteristic of Brunelleschi's early Renaissance architecture surely reflects a sensitivity to the gothic contribution which is entirely independent of, and lies much deeper than, the superficial particularities of form. The counterflow of influence and inspiration from South to North must likewise not be underrated. In particular, the contribution of Italian painters from Duccio and Simone Martini onwards is central to the evolution of the so-called International Gothic style developing in Burgundy, Bohemia and north Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. of late-thirteenth-century Italian cathedrals is only hinted at by the exterior.
The interior has a navethe main interior space of a church building. It may have parallel aisles on each side, often separated from it by pillars, and is intersected by the transept, which cuts across it at the point where the choir begins. and two aisles divided by piers with ogival arches, with five spans covered by cross vaultA roof or ceiling whose structure is based on the arch. There are a wide range of forms, including the barrel (or tunnel) vault, formed by a continuous semi-circular arch; the groin vault, formed when two barrel vaults intersect; and the rib vault, consistong of a framework of diagonal ribs supporting interlocking arches. The development of the various forms was of great structural and aesthetic importance in the development of church architecture during the Middle Ages., without a transeptsection of a church at right-angles to the nave and in front of the choir.. The vertical dominance of the nave culminates in the slender windows of the light-filled apse.
The photo shows a view towards the apse.
OTHER WORKS BY ITALIAN ARCHITECT
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-rae5beb1a409fa0,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {Interior view by ARCHITECT, Italian},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-13},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/architect-italian-rba53e875123939/interior-view-rae5beb1a409fa0},
urldate = {2026-09-13},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-13. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.