RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 142O-C. I60O
dedicated in different copies to Francesco Sforza and one of the
Medici of Florence, where the architect returned when he left Milan.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the treatise is the description of
an ideal town, Sforzinda; for this is the first wholly symmetrical
town plan in Western history, a regular octagon with radial streets
and with palace and cathedral on the square in the centre—again
the central obsession of this first century liberated from the ties of
mediaeval authority.
Thus it is not surprising to find that the churches of Sforzinda, of
Zagalia (another town drawn up in the treatise) and of the hospital
—this church was never built either—were meant to be of central
plan. They introduce us to yet more varieties. Sforzinda and the
Hospital (fig. 47) are square with a central dome and subsidiary little
domed chapels in the four corners—a plan for which an Early
Christian (or rather 9th century) prototype existed at Milan, the
Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre at S. Satiro and a Michclozzo proto-
type at S. Maria delle Grazie at Pistoia (begun 1452). Zagalia (fig.
48) has an octagonal central dome and octagonal chapels in the
corners. All three churches were to be provided with four fantastically
tall minarets over the four corner chapels, or somewhere between
them and the centre (for the drawings are ambiguous in this).1 A
chapel actually built at S, Eustorgio in Milan in 1462 to Michelozzo'$
designs is square and domed and has little turrets on the four corners,
but no chapels below. Michelozzo also designed a palace for the
Medici Bank at Milan. It was begun in die forms of Florentine
Renaissance, but continued with the more irresponsible detail of the
North Italian Gothic. The same happened to the hospital.
Lombardy was not yet capable of an understanding of the Renais-
sance. Time and again we find that up to the middle of the I5th
century and beyond only the Tuscans were at ease with die new
style. Michelozzo and Filarete in Milan were Florentine, and of a
Florentine family also came the greatest of Quattrocento architects,
Leone Battista Alberti, to whose work we must now turn.
In Alberti (1404-72) we have again a new type of architect,
Brunelleschi and Michelangelo are sculptor-architects, Giotto and
1 The Warburg Institute kindly arranged for me to have the plan of the Zagalia
church and some others specially photographed from Filarete's Codice Maglia-
becchiana (Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, n, I, 140; gia xvn, 30). The Zagalia
plan is not illustrated in Lazzaroni and Muftoz*s book on Filarete and has never
been published before. Re-drawing was necessary for reasons of clarity and has
been done by Miss Margaret Tallet.
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