SAN GALLO FAMILY
Architects from Florence who took their name from the Porta San Gallo in Florence, near which the family’s progenitors lived.
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GIULIANO (called G. Giamberti). — Born in Florence ca. 1445, died there in 1516. In 1465 he came to Rome. His activity during this period is not well documented. The attribution of the Loggia della Benedizione in St Peter’s is doubtful, and his part in the construction of the Palazzo and Basilica of St Mark remains uncertain. More solidly founded are the attributions of the Palazzo for Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (the future Julius II) and the design for the villa of Innocent VIII at Magliana; these works reveal a strong Albertian influence.
Returning to Florence in 1479, Lorenzo the Magnificent entrusted him with numerous civil and military constructions. His first important work of this period is the church of Santa Maria delle Carceri in Prato (1485–92), whose central Greek-cross plan seems to realize that ideal of “divine proportion” toward which humanist architects were striving. The theme of the central building is taken up again with greater classical sensitivity in the sacristy of Santo Spirito (1489), inspired by Brunelleschi’s model of the Rotonda degli Angeli, to which the chapel erected about the same time in the Cestello convent may have come even closer (demolished in 1866). The same conception leads Giuliano to the design for Santa Maria dell’Umiltà in Pistoia (1492), where he adopts an octagonal plan preceded by a rectangular atrium. After the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Giuliano resumed contact with Cardinal della Rovere, followed him to France, and returned with him to Rome. Alexander VI immediately entrusted him with the roofing of the central nave of Santa Maria Maggiore (1494), for which he executed the splendid ceiling. The same pontiff then sent him to Loreto (1500) to vault the Basilica’s dome, which, once again following Brunelleschi’s examples in Santa Maria del Fiore, he succeeded in harmonizing with the Gothic structure. After the accession of Julius II to the papacy, Giuliano left Rome, according to Vasari, disappointed at not being named architect of the Vatican Basilica. In 1503 he was in Florence, where he executed the Gondi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella and was later appointed capomaestro of Santa Maria del Fiore. Only after Bramante’s death could he realize his long-held ambition to direct the works of the Vatican temple, an assignment entrusted to him in 1514, which he held for only a short time, for by then old and ill he returned to Florence the following year.
As a sculptor he left two wooden crucifixes in the church of Sant’Anna in Florence. Though remaining tied to the Brunelleschian tradition and thus to the fifteenth-century spirit, Giuliano, by the purity of his proportions and spatial sensitivity, may be considered one of the great masters of the Renaissance.
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SAN GALLO FAMILY
Exterior of the church of San Biagio at Montepulciano (1518–45). Work by Antonio da San Gallo.