Viharas initially were only temporary shelters used by wandering monks during the rainy season, but later were developed to accommodate the growing and increasingly formalised Buddhist monasticism. An existing example is at Nalanda (Bihar). A distinctive type of fortress architecture found in the former and present Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas are dzongs

The initial function of a stupa was the veneration and safe-guarding of the relics of the Buddha. The earliest surviving example of a stupa is in Sanchi (Madhya Pradesh).

In accordance with changes in religious practice, stupas were gradually incorporated into chaitya-grihas (temple halls). These reached their highpoint in the first century BC, exemplified by the cave complexes of Ajanta and ElloraMaharashtra). The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya in Bihar is another well known example. (

Early development

Buddhist architecture emerged slowly in the period following the Buddha’s life, building on Brahmanical Vedic models, but incorporating a specifically Buddhist symbols.

Brahmanical temples at this time followed a simple plan – a square inner space, the sacrificial arena, often with a surrounding ambulatory route separated by lines of columns, with a conical or rectangular sloping roof, behind a porch or entrance area, generally framed by freestanding columns or a colonnade. The external profile represents Mount Meru, the abode of the gods and centre of the universe. The dimensions and proportions were dictated by sacred mathematical formulae. This simple plan was adopted by early Buddhists, sometimes adapted with additional cells for monks at the periphery (especially in the early cave temples such as at Ajanta, India).

In essence the basic plan survives to this day in Buddhist temples throughout the world. The profile became elaborated and the characteristic mountain shape seen today in many Hindu temples was used in early Buddhist sites and continued in similar fashion in some cultures (such as the Khmer). In others, such as Japan and Thailand, local influences and differing religious practices led to different architecture.

Early temples were often timber, and little trace remains, although stone was increasingly used. Cave temples such as those at Ajanta have survived better and preserve the plan form, porch and interior arrangements from this early period. As the functions of the monastery-temple expanded, the plan form started to diverge from the Brahmanical tradition and became more elaborate, providing sleeping, eating and study accommodation.

A characteristic new development at religious sites was the stupa. Stupas were originally more sculpture than building, essentially markers of some holy site or commemorating a holy man who lived there. Later forms are more elaborate and also in many cases refer back to the Mount Meru model. The layered, multi-roofed ‘pagoda‘ form emerged in Nepal, and spread east to Japan and China.

One of the earliest Buddhist sites still in existence is at Sanchi, India, and this is centred on a stupa said to have been built by Ashoka the Great (273-236 BCE). The original simple structure is encased in a later, more decorative one, and over two centuries the whole site was elaborated upon. The four cardinal points are marked by elaborate stone gateways.^[2]

As with Buddhist art, architecture followed the spread of Buddhism throughout south and east Asia and it was the early Indian models that served as a first reference point, even though Buddhism virtually disappeared from India itself in the 10th century.

Decoration of Buddhist sites became steadily more elaborate through the last two centuries BCE, with the introduction of tablets and friezes, including human figures, particularly on stupas. However, the Buddha was not represented in human form until the first century CE. Instead, aniconic symbols were used. This is treated in more detail in Buddhist art, Aniconic phase. It influenced the development of temples, which eventually became a backdrop for Buddha images in most cases.

As Buddhism spread, Buddhist architecture diverged in style, reflecting the similar trends in Buddhist art. Building form was also influenced to some extent by the different forms of Buddhism in the northern countries, practising Mahayana Buddhism in the main and in the south where Theravada Buddhism prevailed.

Examples

Jetavanaramaya stupa is an example of brick-clad Buddhist architecture in Sri Lanka	The Rinpung Dzong follows a distinctive type of fortress architecture found in the former and present Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas, most notably Bhutan	The Great Stupa in Sanchi, India is considered a cornerstone of Buddhist architecture	Vatadage Temple, in Polonnaruwa, is a uniquely Sri Lankan circular shrine enclosing a small dagoba. The vatagage has a three-tiered conical roof, spanning a height of 40–50 feet, without a center post, and supported by pillars of diminishing height ]

UNESCO World Heritage Site
Type	Cultural
Criteria	ii, iii, iv
Reference	231
Region**	Asia-Pacific
Inscription history
Inscription	2007  (31st Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. ** Region as classified by UNESCO.

History

The main facade of the fort

The Red Fort and the city of Shahjahanabad was constructed by the Emperor Shah Jahan in 1639 A.D. ^[2]

The Red Fort was originally referred to as “Qila-i-Mubarak” (the blessed fort), because it was the residence of the royal family. The layout of the Red Fort was organised to retain and integrate this site with the Salimgarh Fort. The fortress palace is an important focal point of the medieval city of Shahjahanabad. The planning and aesthetics of the Red Fort represent the zenith of Mughal creativity which prevailed during the reign of Emperor Shahjahan. This Fort has had many developments added on after its construction by Emperor Shahjahan. The significant phases of development were under Aurangzeb and later Mughal rulers. Important physical changes were carried out in the overall settings of the site after the First War of Independence during British Rule in 1857. After Independence, the site experienced a few changes in terms of addition/alteration to the structures. During the British period the Fort was mainly used as a cantonment and even after Independence, a significant part of the Fort remained under the control of the Army until the year 2003.

The Red Fort was the palace for Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan‘s new capital, Shahjahanabad, the seventh Muslim city in the Delhi site. He moved his capital from Agra in a move designed to bring prestige to his reign, and to provide ample opportunity to apply his ambitious building schemes and interests.

The fort lies along the Yamuna River, which fed the moats that surround most of the wall. The wall at its north-eastern corner is adjacent to an older fort, the Salimgarh Fort, a defense built by Islam Shah Suri in 1546.The construction of the Red Fort began in 1638 and was completed by 1648.

On 11 March 1783, Sikhs briefly entered Red Fort in Delhi and occupied the Diwan-i-Am. The city was essentially surrendered by the Mughal wazir in cahoots with his Sikh Allies. This task was carried out under the command of the Sardar Baghel Singh Dhaliwal of the Karor Singhia misl.

The last Mughal emperor to occupy the fort was Bahadur Shah II “Zafar”. Despite being the`seat of Mughal power and its defensive capabilities, the Red Fort was not defended during the 1857 uprising against the British. After the failure of the 1857 rebellion, Zafar left the fort on 17th September. He returned to Red Fort as a prisoner of the British. Zafar was tried on in a trail starting on 27th January 1858, and was exiled on 7 October.

On 15 August 1947, India became an independent nation. This was marked by Jawahar Lal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India, unveiling the flag of independent India on 15 August 1947. This practice of unfurling the national flag with a speech by the Prime Minister on Independence Day continues to this day. Just after World War II, the Red Fort had been the scene of the famous trial of the Indian National Army.

[edit] Architectural Design

View of the pavilions in the courtyard

Red Fort showcases the very high level of art form and ornamental work. The art work in the Fort is a synthesis of Persian, European and Indian art which resulted in the development of unique Shahjahani style which is very rich in form, expression and colour. Red Fort, Delhi is one of the important building complexes of India which encapsulates a long period of Indian history and its arts. Its significance has transcended time and space. It is relevant as a symbol of architectural brilliance and power. Even before its notification as a monument of national importance in the year 1913, efforts were made to preserve and conserve the Red Fort, for posterity.

The walls of the fort are smoothly dressed, articulated by heavy string-courses along the upper section. They open at two major gates, the Delhi and the Lahore gates. The Lahore Gate is the main entrance; it leads to a long covered bazar street, the Chatta Chowk, whose walls are lined with stalls for shops. The Chatta Chowk leads to a large open space where it crosses the large north-south street that was originally the division between the fort’s military functions, to its west, and the palaces, to its east. The southern end of this street is the Delhi Gate.

[edit] Important Buildings Inside Fort

[edit] Diwan-i-Aam

Beyond this gate is another, larger open space, which originally served as the courtyard of the Diwan-i-Aam, the large pavilion for public imperial audiences. An ornate throne-balcony (jharokha) for the emperor.the columns were painted in gold and there was a gold and silver railing separating the throne from the public

[edit] Nahr-i-Behisht

The imperial private apartments lie behind the throne. The apartments consist of a row of pavilions that sits on a raised platform along the eastern edge of the fort, looking out onto the river Yamuna. The pavilions are connected by a continuous water channel, known as the Nahr-i-Behisht, or the “Stream of Paradise”, that runs through the center of each pavilion. The water is drawn from the river Yamuna, from a tower, the Shah Burj, at the northeastern corner of the fort. The palace is designed as an imitation of paradise as it is described in the Koran; a couplet repeatedly inscribed in the palace reads, “If there be a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here”. The planning of the palace is based on Islamic prototypes, but each pavilion reveals in its architectural elements the Hindu influences typical of Mughal building. The palace complex of the Red Fort is counted among the best examples of the Mughal style.

[edit] Zenana

The two southernmost pavilions of the palace are zenanas, or women’s quarters: the Mumtaz Mahal (now a museum), and the larger, lavish Rang Mahal, which has been famous for its gilded, decorated ceiling and marble pool, fed by the Nahr-i-Behisht.

[edit] Moti Masjid

To the west of the hammam is the Moti Masjid, the Pearl Mosque. This was a later addition, built in 1659 as a private mosque for Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan’s successor. It is a small, three-domed mosque in carved white marble, with a three-arched screen which steps down to the courtyard.

[edit] Hayat Bakhsh Bagh

To its north lies a large formal garden, the Hayat Bakhsh Bagh, or “Life-Bestowing Garden”, which is cut through by two bisecting channels of water. A pavilion stands at either end of the north-south channel, and a third, built in 1842 by the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, stands at the center of the pool where the two channels meet.

[edit] The Fort Today

The Red Fort by night.

The Red Fort is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Old Delhi, attracting thousands of visitors every year. The fort is also the site from which the Prime Minister of India addresses the nation on 15 August , the day India achieved independence from the British. It also happens to be the largest monument in Old Delhi.

At one point in time, more than 3,000 people lived within the premises of the Delhi Fort complex. But after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the fort was captured by Britain and the residential palaces destroyed. It was made the headquarters of the British Indian Army. Immediately after the mutiny, Bahadur Shah Zafar was tried at the Red Fort. It was also here in November 1945, that the most famous courts-martial of three officers of the Indian National Army were held. After India gained independence in 1947, the Indian Army took control over the fort. In December 2003, the Indian Army handed the fort over to the Indian tourist authorities.

The fort was the site of a December 2000 attack by terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba which killed two soldiers and one civilian in what was described in the media as an attempt to derail the India-Pakistan peace process in Kashmir.

[edit] Gallery

Main entrance – Lahore Gate	Main entrance, another view	Cusped arches, Diwan-i-Aam	Rang Mahal – Ladies’ Chamber
Diwan-i-Khas (L) & Khas Mahal (R)	Diwan-i-Khas interior	Inlay detail, Diwan-i-Khas	Pearl Mosque (Moti Masjid)

Uzbek – Turkic Mughal architecture

The Uzbek dynasty began with the emperor Babur in 1526. Babur erected a mosque at Panipat to celebrate his victory over Ibrahim Lodi. A second mosque, known as the Babri masjid, was built in Ayodhya and was demolished in 1992 by Hindu extremists. A third mosque also built by Babur during the same period was constructed in Sambhal in Distt Moradabad

Some of the first and most characteristic examples that remain of early Mughal architecture were built in the short reign (1540–1545) of emperor Sher Shah Suri, who was not a Mughal; they include a mosque known as the Qila i Kuhna (1541) near Delhi, and the military architecture of the Old Fort in Delhi, Lal Bagh (Dhaka) in Bangladesh , and Rohtas Fort, near Jhelum in present-day Pakistan. His mausoleum, octagonal in plan and set upon a plinth in the middle of an artificial lake, is in Sasaram, and was completed by his son and successor Islam Shah Suri (1545AD-1553AD).

[edit] Akbar

The emperor Akbar (1556-1605) built largely, and the style developed vigorously during his reign. As in the Gujarat and other styles, there is a combination of Muslim and Hindu features in his works. Akbar constructed the royal city of Fatehpur Sikri, located 26 miles (42 km) west of Agra, in the late 1500s. The numerous structures at Fatehpur Sikri best illustrate the style of his works, and the great mosque there is scarcely matched in elegance and architectural effect; the south gateway is well known, and from its size and structure excels any similar entrance in India. The Mughals built impressive tombs, which include the fine tomb of Akbar’s father Humayun, and Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, near Agra, which is a unique structure of the kind and of great merit.

[edit] Jahangir

Tomb of Itimad-ud-Daula, Agra

Under Jahangir (1605–1627) the Hindu features vanished from the style; his great mosque at Lahore is in the Persian style, covered with enamelled tiles. At Agra, the tomb of Itmad-ud-Daula completed in 1628, built entirely of white marble and covered wholely by pietra dura mosaic, is one of the most splendid examples of that class of ornamentation anywhere to be found. Jahangir also built the Shalimar Gardens and its accompanying pavilions on the shore of Dal Lake in Kashmir. He also built a monument to his pet antelope, Hiran Minar in Sheikhupura, Pakistan and due to his great love for his wife, after his death she went on to build his mausoleum in Lahore.

[edit] Shah Jahan

The force and originality of the style gave way under Shah Jahan (1627-1658) to a delicate elegance and refinement of detail, illustrated in the magnificent palaces erected in his reign at Agra and Delhi, the latter one the most exquisitely beautiful in India. The most splendid of the Mogul tombs, and the most renowned building in India, is the Taj Mahal at Agra, the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of Shah Jahan.The Moti Masjid (Pearl Mosque) in the Agra Fort and The Jama Masjid at Delhi are an imposing building, and their position and architecture have been carefully considered so as to produce a pleasing effect and feeling of spacious elegance and well-balanced proportion of parts. In his works Shah Jahan presents himself as the most magnificent builder of Indian sovereigns. He also built the mausoleum and sections of the huge Lahore Fort that include the impressive Moti Masjid, Sheesh Mahal, and Naulakha pavilion which are all enclosed in the fort. He also built a mosque after himself in Thatta called Shahjahan Mosque. Another mosque was built during his tenture in Lahore called Wazir Khan Mosque, by Shaikh Ilm-ud-din Ansari who was the court physician to the emperor.

[edit] The Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal, the “teardrop on eternity”, was completed in 1648 by the emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal. It is completely symmetric other than the sarcophagus of Shah Jahan, which is placed off center in the crypt room below the main floor. This symmetry extended to the building of an entire mirror mosque in red sandstone, to complement the Mecca-facing mosque place to the west of the main structure.

The Taj Mahal (1630-1653) in Agra, India and the Shalimar Garden (1641-1642) in Lahore, Pakistan, are two sites which are on the world heritage list of UNESCO. One can see the architectural similarities and the love for water that the Mughals expressed in many of their buildings.

The Taj is considered to be one of the most beautiful monuments of love and is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, when it comes to tourism.

[edit] Aurangzeb and later Mughal architecture

In Aurangzeb‘s reign (1658–1707) squared stone and marble gave way to brick or rubble with stucco ornament. Srirangapatna and Lucknow have examples of later Indo-Muslim architecture. He also added his mark to the Lahore Fort. He also built one of the thirteen gates, and it was later named after him, Alamgir. The most impressive building of Aurangzeb’s reign, is the Badshahi Mosque which was constructed in 1674 under the supervision of Fida’i Koka. This mosque is adjacent to the Lahore Fort. Badshahi Mosque is the last in the series of great congregational mosques in red sandstone and is closely modeled on the one Shah Jahan built at Shahjahanabad. The red sandstone of the walls contrasts with the white marble of the domes and the subtle intarsia decoration. The materials depart from the local tradition of tile revetment that is seen in the Wazir Khan Mosque. According to Blair and Bloom, the cusped arches and arabesque floral patterns inlaid in white marble give the building, despite its vast proportions, a lighter appearance than its prototype.Additional monuments from this period are associated with women from Aurangzeb‘s imperial family. The construction of the elegant Zinat al-Masjid in Daryaganij was overseen by Aurangzeb’s second daughter Zinat al-Nisa. The delicate brick and plaster mausoleum in the Roshan-Ara-Bagh in Sabzimandi was for Aurangzeb’s sister Roshan-Ara who died in 1671. Unfortunately, the tomb of Roshanara Begum and the beautiful garden surrounding it were neglected for a long time and are now in an advanced state of decay.Bibi Ka Maqbara a mausoleum was built by Prince Azam Shah, son of Emperor Aurangzeb, in the late 17th century as a loving tribute to his mother, Dilras Bano Begam in Aurangabad, Maharashtra.The Alamgiri Gate, built in 1673 A.D., is the main entrance to the Lahore Fort in present day Lahore, Pakistan. It was constructed to face west towards the Badshahi Mosque in the days of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. The monumental gateway is an imposing vestibule flanked by two semi-circular bastions that have boldly fluted shafts and lotus petalled bases and are crowned with domed pavilions.

A view of a pavilion in Shalimar Garden, Lahore, Pakistan

[edit] Characteristic elements of Mughal architecture

• Jharokha
• Chhatri
• Chhajja
• Jali
• Guldasta
• Charbagh
• A jharokha (or jharoka) is a type of overhanging balcony used in Indian architecture, typically Mughal architecture and Rajasthani architecture. Jharokhas could be used both for adding to the architectural beauty of the building itself or for a specific purpose. One of the most important functions it served was to allow women to see the events outside without being seen (Purdah). Alternatively, these windows could also be used to position archers and spies.
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  Several jharokhas can be seen jutting out from the facade of this typical haveli at Jaisalmer, Rajasthan

• Chhatris are elevated, dome-shaped pavilions used as an element in Indian architecture, or funerary sites in India which have such structures built over them. Chhatris are basic element of Hindu as well as Mughal architecture. The term “chhatri” means umbrella or canopy. In the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, chhatris are built on the cremation sites of wealthy or distinguished individuals. Chhatris in Shekhawati may consist of a simple structure of one dome raised by four pillars to a building containing many domes and a basement with several rooms. In some places, the interior of the chhatris is painted in the same manner as the Havelis.

  

  

  View of Chhatri (Cenotaph) of Scindia Rulers at Shivpuri,India

  

  

  Chhatris mounted atop each corner of the Diwan-i-Khas in the Fatehpur Sikri compound, India

• Chhatris in Shekhawati

  Some of the best-known chhatris in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan are located at the following cities and towns:

• Bissau – The Raj ki Chhatri of the Shekhawat Thakurs

• Parsurampura – Thakur Sardul Singh Shekhawat’s chhatri

• Kirori – Chhatri of Raja Todarmal (Ruler of Udaipurwati)

• Jhunjhunu – Chhatri of Shekhawat Rulers

• Ramgarh – Ram Gopal Poddar Chhatri

• Dundlod – The beautiful chhatri of Ram Dutt Goenka

• Mukungarh – Shivdutta Ganeriwala Chhatri

• Churu – Taknet Chhatri

• Mahansar – The Sahaj Ram Poddar Chhatri

• Udaipurwati – Joki Das Shah ki Chhatri

• Fatehpur – Jagan Nath Singhania Chhatri

[edit] Chhatris in Rajasthan

Chhatri of Rana Udaybhanu Singh at Dholpur

Chhatri at Rajgarh, Rajasthan

Many other chhatris exist in other parts of Rajasthan. Their locations include:

• Jaipur – Gaitore Cenotaphs of the Maharajas of Jaipur. Set in a narrow valley, the cenotaphs of the former rulers of Jaipur consist of the somewhat typical chhatri or umbrella-shaped memorials. Sawai Jai Singh II‘s Chhatri is particularly noteworthy because of the carvings that have been used to embellish it.

• Jodhpur – White marble Chhatri of Maharaja Jaswant Singh II

• Bharatpur- the cenotaphs of the members of the Jat royal family of Bharatpur, who perished whilst fighting against the British in 1825, are erected in the town of Govardhan. The chhatri of Maharaja Suraj Mal of Bharatpur has fine frescos illuminating the life of Surajmal, vividly depicting darbar and hunting scenes, royal processions and wars.

• Udaipur, Rajasthan-. Flanked by a row of enormous stone elephants, the Lake Pichola island has an impressive chhatri carved from gray blue stone, built by Maharana Jagat Singh.

• Haldighati – a beautiful Chhatri with white marble columns, dedicated to Rana Pratap, stands here. The cenotaph dedicated to Chetak, Rana Pratap’s famous horse, is also noteworthy.

• Alwar – Moosi Maharani ki Chhatri is a beautiful red sandstone and white marble cenotaph of the rulers of Alwar.

• Bundi – Suraj Chhatri and Mordi Ki Chhatri, Chaurasi Stambh Chhatri and Nath Ji ki Chhatri are located in Bundi. Rani Shyam Kumari wife of Raja Chhatrasal on the northern hill constructed the Suraj Chhatri and Mayuri the second wife of Chhatrasal on the southern hill erected Mordi Ki Chhatri.

• Bikaner – Devi Kund near Bikaner is the royal crematorium place with a number of cenotaphs. The chhatri of Maharaja Surat Singh is most imposing. It has the spectacular Rajput paintings on the ceilings.

• Nagaur – Nath Ji ki Chhatri, Amar Singh Rathore-ki-Chhatri

[edit] Chhatris in Madhya Pradesh

Chhatri near Bhimtal in memory of Maharaja Bhim Singh Rana on the Gwalior Fort.

The region of Madhya Pradesh is the site of several other notable chhatris:

• Shivpuri – Intricately embellished marble chhatris erected by the Scindia rulers in Shivpuri.

• Gohad – The Jat rulers of Gohad constructed the chhatri of Maharaja Bhim Singh Rana on the Gwalior Fort.
• Indore – Chhatris of Holkar rulers.
• Chhajja is the term for projecting eaves or cover usually supported on large carved brackets, as used in Indian architecture (especially Mughal).

  It is an integral part of the architecture of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. In Rajasthan it is particularly essential and is larger in dimension. More than providing shade they also act as heat sinks for the buildings in the hot region of Rajasthan. This is why this device is many times found on plane walls which apparently do not require shading devices.

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  The tomb of Salim Chishti in Fatehpur Sikri (India) exhibiting a deep chhajja following the perimeter of the building supported with elaborate brackets

• A jali (or jaali) is the term for a perforated stone or latticed screen, usually with an ornamental pattern constructed through the use of calligraphy and geometry. Early work was performed by carving into stone, while the later more elegant used by the Mughals employed the technique of inlay, using marble and semi-precious stones.^[1]

  This architectural decoration was used in Islamic architecture as well as in Indian architecture.

• 

  

  Akbar‘s tomb near Agra, India

  

  

  One of the famous intricate jaalis from the Sidi Saiyyed mosque in Ahmedabad, India

• Charbagh (Persian چهارباغ) is a Persian-style garden layout. The quadrilateral garden is divided by walkways into four smaller parts. In Persian, “Chār” means ‘four’ and “bāgh” means ‘garden’. The Chahrbagh-e Addbasi in Isfahan built by Shah Abbas the Great in (1596), along with the garden of the Taj Mahal are the most famous examples of this style. In the Charbagh at the Taj Mahal, each of the four parts contains sixteen flower beds.

  Chahrbagh originated from the time of Achaemenid Persia. Greek historians, such as Herodotus and Xenophon, give extensive accounts of Cyrus the Great‘s palatial city of Pasargadae and his four-gardens.^[1]

  In India, the Taj Mahal was built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, aka Shahjahan, as a tomb for his favourite wife. It is located in Agra, India.

  Unlike most such tombs, the mausoleum is not located in the centre of the garden, but on its northern end. The garden features Italian cypress trees (Cupressus sempervirens). The cypress trees symbolize death. Fruit trees in the garden symbolize life. The garden attracts many birds, which are considered one of the features of the garden.

  A particularly famous charbagh garden is located on the roof top of the Ismaili Centre in South Kensington^[2]. The Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat nearing completion on Sussex Drive in the Canadian capital Ottawa, Ontario contains a charbagh garden in a uniquely modern setting. Its size and scale are based on the Court of the Lions found in the Alhambra.

The tomb, located in the city of Bijapur, or Vijapur in Karnataka, southern India, was built in 1659 by the famous architect, Yaqut of Dabul. The structure consists of a massive square chamber measuring nearly 50 m (160 ft) on each side and covered by a huge dome 37.9 m (124 ft) in diameter making it the second largest pre-modern dome in the entire world after the dome of Hagia Sophia. The dome is supported on giant squinches supported by groined pendentives while outside the building is supported by domed octagonal corner towers. The Dome is the second largest one in the world which is unsupported by any pillars. The acoustics of the enclosed place make it a whispering gallery where even the smallest sound is heard across the other side of the Gumbaz. At the periphery of the dome is a circular balcony where visitors can witness the astounding whispering gallery. Any whisper, clap or sound gets echoed around 10 times. Anything whispered from one corner of the gallery can be heard clearly on the diagonally opposite side. It is also said that the Sultan, Ibrahim Adil Shah and his Queen used to converse in the same manner. During his time, the musicians used to sing, seated in the whispering gallery so that the sound produced could be reached to very corner of the hall.

Right below the whispering gallery, in the hall the dancers provided entertainment. Each tower consists of seven storeys and the upper floor of each opens on to a round gallery which surrounds the dome. In the centre of the chamber is a square raised podium approached by steps in the centre of each side.

Gol Gumbaz and the ASI Museum

In the centre of the podium are the tombs of Muhammad Adil Shah II and his relations. To the west of the podium in a large apse-like projection is the mosque, also raised slightly above the floor level of the chamber.

Gol Gumbaz Circa 1860

Henry Hinton, a photographer from Britain was one of the first to record the splendid beauty of Gol Gumbaz. He mentions in Print 1 of The Ruins of Beejapoor, in a series of nineteen views from collodion negatives (Bombay, 1860).

“…built on a terrace 200 yards square. Height of tomb externally 198 ft, internally 175. Diameter of dome 124 feet, 4 minarets of 8 storeys, 12 ft broad entered by winding staircases terminating in cupolas’. The Gol Gumbaz, a grand mausoleum of Muhammad Adil Shah, though a structural triumph of Deccan architecture, is impressively simple in design, with a hemispherical dome, nearly 44 mts in external diameter, resting on a cubical volume measuring 47.5 mts on each side. The dome is supported internally by eight intersecting arches created by two rotated squares that create interlocking pendentives. A centotaph slab in the floor marks the true grave in the basement, the only instance of this practice in Adil Shahi architecture.”

The Taj Mahal (pronounced /tɑdʒ mə’hɑl/ —- Hindi: ताज महल; Persian/Urdu: تاج محل) is a mausoleum located in Agra, India, built by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

The Taj Mahal (also “the Taj”) is considered the finest example of Mughal architecture, a style that combines elements from Persian, Ottoman, Indian, and Islamic architectural styles. In 1983, the Taj Mahal became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and was cited as “the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world’s heritage.”

While the white domed marble mausoleum is its most familiar component, the Taj Mahal is actually an integrated complex of structures. Building began around 1632 and was completed around 1653, and employed thousands of artisans and craftsmen.^[1] The Persian^[2] architect, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri is generally considered to be the principal designer of the Taj Mahal.^[3]

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Origin and inspiration

Shah Jahan, who commissioned the Taj Mahal -”Shah jahan on a globe” from the Smithsonian Institution

Artistic depiction of Mumtaz Mahal

In 1631, Shah Jahan, emperor during the Mughal empire‘s period of greatest prosperity, was griefstricken when his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died during the birth of their fourteenth child, Gauhara Begum.^[4] In her dying breath, Mumtaz Mahal urged Shah Jahan to build a mausoleum for her that the world has never seen before. Shah Jahan granted his wife’s wish, and construction of the Taj Mahal began in 1632, one year after her death. ^[5] The court chronicles of Shah Jahan’s grief illustrates the love story traditionally held as an inspiration for Taj Mahal.^{[6] [7]} The construction of Taj Mahal begun soon after Mumtaz’s death with the principal mausoleum completed in 1648. The surrounding buildings and garden were finished five years later. Emperor Shah Jahan himself described the Taj in these words:^[8]

Should guilty seek asylum here,
Like one pardoned, he becomes free from sin.
Should a sinner make his way to this mansion,
All his past sins are to be washed away.
The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;
And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.
In this world this edifice has been made;
To display thereby the creator’s glory.

Tomb of Humayun shares architectural similarities with the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal incorporates and expands on design traditions of Persian and earlier Mughal architecture. Specific inspiration came from successful Timurid and Mughal buildings including the Gur-e Amir (the tomb of Timur, progenitor of the Mughal dynasty, in Samarkand),^[9] Humayun’s Tomb, Itmad-Ud-Daulah’s Tomb (sometimes called the Baby Taj), and Shah Jahan’s own Jama Masjid in Delhi. While earlier Mughal buildings were primarily constructed of red sandstone, Shah Jahan promoted the use of white marble inlaid with semi-precious stones, and buildings under his patronage reached new levels of refinement.^[10]

Architecture

The tomb

The focus of the Taj Mahal is the white marble tomb, which stands on a square plinth consisting of a symmetrical building with an iwan, an arch-shaped doorway, topped by a large dome. Like most Mughal tombs, basic elements are Persian in origin.

The base of the Taj is a large, multi-chambered structure

The base structure is a large, multi-chambered structure. The base is essentially a cube with chamfered edges and is roughly 55 meters on each side (see floor plan, right). On the long sides, a massive pishtaq, or vaulted archway, frames the iwan with a similar arch-shaped balcony.

On either side of the main arch, additional pishtaqs are stacked above and below. This motif of stacked pishtaqs is replicated on chamfered corner areas as well. The design is completely symmetrical on all sides of the building. Four minarets, one at each corner of the plinth, facing the chamfered corners, frame the tomb. The main chamber houses the false sarcophagi of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan; their actual graves are at a lower level.

The marble dome that surmounts the tomb is its most spectacular feature. Its height is about the same size as the base of the building, about 35 meters, and is accentuated as it sits on a cylindrical “drum” of about 7 metres high. Because of its shape, the dome is often called an onion dome (also called an amrud or guava dome). The top is decorated with a lotus design, which serves to accentuate its height as well. The shape of the dome is emphasised by four smaller domed chattris (kiosks) placed at its corners. The chattri domes replicate the onion shape of the main dome. Their columned bases open through the roof of the tomb and provide light to the interior. Tall decorative spires (guldastas) extend from edges of base walls, and provide visual emphasis to the height of the dome. The lotus motif is repeated on both the chattris and guldastas. The dome and chattris are topped by a gilded finial, which mixes traditional Persian and Hindu decorative elements.

The main dome is crowned by a gilded spire or finial. The finial, made of gold until the early 1800s, is now made of bronze. The finial provides a clear example of integration of traditional Persian and Hindu decorative elements. The finial is topped by a moon, a typical Islamic motif, whose horns point heavenward. Because of its placement on the main spire, the horns of moon and finial point combine to create a trident shape, reminiscent of traditional Hindu symbols of Shiva.^[11]

At the corners of the plinth stand minarets, the four large towers each more than 40 meters tall. The minarets display the Taj Mahal’s penchant for symmetry. These towers are designed as working minarets, a traditional element of mosques as a place for a muezzin to call the Islamic faithful to prayer. Each minaret is effectively divided into three equal parts by two working balconies that ring the tower. At the top of the tower is a final balcony surmounted by a chattri that mirrors the design of those on the tomb. The minaret chattris share the same finishing touches, a lotus design topped by a gilded finial. Each of the minarets were constructed slightly outside of the plinth, so that in the event of collapse, a typical occurrence with many such tall constructions of the period, the material from the towers would tend to fall away from the tomb.

Base, dome, and minaret

Finial

Main iwan and side pishtaqs

Simplified diagram of the Taj Mahal floor plan

Exterior decoration

Calligraphy on large pishtaq

The exterior decorations of the Taj Mahal are among the finest to be found in Mughal architecture. As the surface area changes, a large pishtaq has more area than a smaller one, and the decorations are refined proportionally. The decorative elements were created by applying paint or stucco, or by stone inlays or carvings. In line with the Islamic prohibition against the use of anthropomorphic forms, the decorative elements can be grouped into either calligraphy, abstract forms or vegetative motifs.

The calligraphy found in Taj Mahal are of florid thuluth script, created by Persian calligrapher Amanat Khan, who signed several of the panels. The calligraphy is made by jasper inlaid in white marble panels, and the work found on the marble cenotaphs in the tomb is extremely detailed and delicate. Higher panels are written slightly larger to reduce the skewing effect when viewing from below. Throughout the complex, passages from the Qur’an are used as decorative elements. Recent scholarship suggests that Amanat Khan chose the passages as well.^[12][13] The texts refer to themes of judgment and include:

As one enters through Taj Mahal Gate, the calligraphy reads “O Soul, thou art at rest. Return to the Lord at peace with Him, and He at peace with you.”^[14][13]

Abstract forms are used especially in the plinth, minarets, gateway, mosque, jawab, and to a lesser extent, on the surfaces of the tomb. The domes and vaults of sandstone buildings are worked with tracery of incised painting to create elaborate geometric forms. On most joining areas, herringbone inlays define the space between adjoining elements. White inlays are used in sandstone buildings and dark or black inlays on the white marbles. Mortared areas of marble buildings have been stained or painted dark and thus creating a geometric patterns of considerable complexity. Floors and walkways use contrasting tiles or blocks in tessellation patterns.

Vegetative motifs are found at the lower walls of the tomb. They are white marble dados that have been sculpted with realistic bas relief depictions of flowers and vines. The marble has been polished to emphasise the exquisite detailing of these carvings. The dado frames and archway spandrels have been decorated with pietra dura inlays of highly stylised, almost geometric vines, flowers and fruits. The inlay stones are yellow marble, jasper and jade, leveled and polished to the surface of the walls.

Herringbone

Plant motifs

Spandrel detail

Incised painting

Interior decoration

Jali screen surrounding the cenotaphs

Tombs of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal

Cenotaphs, interior of Taj Mahal

The interior chamber of the Taj Mahal steps far beyond traditional decorative elements. Here the inlay work is not pietra dura, but lapidary of precious and semiprecious gemstones. The inner chamber is an octagon with the design allowing for entry from each face, though only the south garden-facing door is used. The interior walls are about 25 metres high and topped by a “false” interior dome decorated with a sun motif. Eight pishtaq arches define the space at ground level. As with the exterior, each lower pishtaq is crowned by a second pishtaq about midway up the wall. The four central upper arches form balconies or viewing areas and each balcony’s exterior window has an intricate screen or jali cut from marble. In addition to the light from the balcony screens, light enters through roof openings covered by chattris at the corners. Each chamber wall has been highly decorated with dado bas relief, intricate lapidary inlay and refined calligraphy panels, reflecting in miniature detail the design elements seen throughout the exterior of the complex. The octagonal marble screen or jali which borders the cenotaphs is made from eight marble panels. Each panel has been carved through with intricate pierce work. The remaining surfaces have been inlaid with semiprecious stones in extremely delicate detail, forming twining vines, fruits and flowers.

Muslim tradition forbids elaborate decoration of graves and hence Mumtaz and Shah Jahan are laid in a relatively plain crypt beneath the inner chamber with their faces turned right and towards Mecca. Mumtaz Mahal’s cenotaph is placed at the precise center of the inner chamber with a rectangular marble base of 1.5 meters by 2.5 meters. Both the base and casket are elaborately inlaid with precious and semiprecious gems. Calligraphic inscriptions on the casket identify and praise Mumtaz. On the lid of the casket is a raised rectangular lozenge meant to suggest a writing tablet. Shah Jahan’s cenotaph is beside Mumtaz’s to the western side. It is the only visible asymmetric element in the entire complex. His cenotaph is bigger than his wife’s, but reflects the same elements: a larger casket on slightly taller base, again decorated with astonishing precision with lapidary and calligraphy that identifies Shah Jahan. On the lid of this casket is a traditional sculpture of a small pen box. The pen box and writing tablet were traditional Mughal funerary icons decorating men’s and women’s caskets respectively. Ninety Nine Names of God are to be found as calligraphic inscriptions on the sides of the actual tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, in the crypt including “O Noble, O Magnificent, O Majestic, O Unique, O Eternal, O Glorious… “. The tomb of Shah Jahan bears a calligraphic inscription that reads; “He traveled from this world to the banquet-hall of Eternity on the night of the twenty-sixth of the month of Rajab, in the year 1076 Hijri.”

Arch of Jali

Delicate pierce work

Inlay detail

Detail of Jali

The garden

360° panoramic view of the Chahar Bagh gardens

The complex is set around a large 300-meter square charbagh, a Mughal garden. The garden uses raised pathways that divide each of the four quarters of the garden into 16 sunken parterres or flowerbeds. A raised marble water tank at the center of the garden, halfway between the tomb and gateway, with a reflecting pool on North-South axis reflects the image of the Taj Mahal. Elsewhere, the garden is laid out with avenues of trees and fountains.^[15] The raised marble water tank is called al Hawd al-Kawthar, in reference to “Tank of Abundance” promised to Muhammad.^[16] The charbagh garden, a design inspired by Persian gardens, was introduced to India by the first Mughal emperor Babur. It symbolizes four flowing rivers of Paradise and reflects the gardens of Paradise derived from the Persian paridaeza, meaning ‘walled garden’. In mystic Islamic texts of Mughal period, paradise is described as an ideal garden of abundance with four rivers flowing from a central spring or mountain, separating the garden into north, west, south and east.

Walkways beside reflecting pool

Most Mughal charbaghs are rectangular with a tomb or pavilion in the center. The Taj Mahal garden is unusual in that the main element, the tomb, instead is located at the end of the garden. With the discovery of Mahtab Bagh or “Moonlight Garden” on the other side of the Yamuna, Archaeological Survey of India interprets that the Yamuna itself was incorporated into the garden’s design and was meant to be seen as one of the rivers of Paradise.^[17] The similarity in layout of the garden and its architectural features such as fountains, brick and marble walkways, and geometric brick-lined flowerbeds with Shalimar‘s suggest that the garden may have been designed by the same engineer, Ali Mardan.^[18] Early accounts of the garden describe its profusion of vegetation, including roses, daffodils, and fruit trees in abundance.^[19] As the Mughal Empire declined, the tending of the garden declined as well. When the British took over the management of Taj Mahal, they changed the landscaping to resemble that of lawns of London.^[20]

Outlying buildings

The Great gate (Darwaza-i rauza) – gateway to the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal complex is bounded by crenellated red sandstone walls on three sides with river-facing side open. Outside these walls are several additional mausoleums, including those of Shah Jahan’s other wives, and a larger tomb for Mumtaz’s favorite servant. These structures, composed primarily of red sandstone, are typical of the smaller Mughal tombs of the era. The garden-facing inner sides of the wall are fronted by columned arcades, a feature typical of Hindu temples later incorporated into Mughal mosques. The wall is interspersed with domed kiosks (chattris), and small buildings that may have been viewing areas or watch towers like the Music House, which is now used as a museum.

The main gateway (darwaza) is a monumental structure built primarily of marble and is reminiscent of Mughal architecture of earlier emperors. Its archways mirror the shape of tomb’s archways, and its pishtaq arches incorporate calligraphy that decorates the tomb. It utilizes bas-relief and pietra dura (inlaid) decorations with floral motifs. The vaulted ceilings and walls have elaborate geometric designs, like those found in the other sandstone buildings of the complex.

Taj Mahal mosque or masjid

At the far end of the complex, there are two grand red sandstone buildings that are open to the sides of the tomb. Their backs parallel western and eastern walls, and these two buildings are precise mirror images of each other. The western building is a mosque and its opposite is the jawab (answer) whose primary purpose was architectural balance and may have been used as a guesthouse. The distinctions between these two buildings include the lack of mihrab, a niche in a mosque’s wall facing Mecca, in the jawab and that the floors of jawab have a geometric design, while the mosque floor was laid with outlines of 569 prayer rugs in black marble. The mosque’s basic design is similar to others built by Shah Jahan, particularly to his Masjid-Jahan Numa, or Jama Masjid of Delhi, a long hall surmounted by three domes. The Mughal mosques of this period divide the sanctuary hall into three areas with a main sanctuary and slightly smaller sanctuaries on either side. At the Taj Mahal, each sanctuary opens onto an enormous vaulting dome. These outlying buildings were completed in 1643.

Construction

Ground layout of the Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal was built on a parcel of land to the south of the walled city of Agra. Shah Jahan presented Maharajah Jai Singh with a large palace in the center of Agra in exchange for the land.^[21] An area of roughly three acres was excavated, filled with dirt to reduce seepage and leveled at 50 meters above riverbank. In the tomb area, wells were dug and filled with stone and rubble as the footings of the tomb. Instead of lashed bamboo, workmen constructed a colossal brick scaffold that mirrored the tomb. The scaffold was so enormous that foremen estimated it would take years to dismantle. According to the legend, Shah Jahan decreed that anyone could keep the bricks taken from the scaffold, and thus it was dismantled by peasants overnight. A fifteen kilometer tamped-earth ramp was built to transport marble and materials to the construction site. Teams of twenty or thirty oxen were strained to pull blocks on specially constructed wagons. An elaborate post-and-beam pulley system was used to raise the blocks into desired position. Water was drawn from the river by a series of purs, an animal-powered rope and bucket mechanism, into a large storage tank and raised to large distribution tank. It was passed into three subsidiary tanks, from which it was piped to the complex.

The plinth and tomb took roughly 12 years to complete. The remaining parts of the complex took an additional 10 years and were completed in order of minarets, mosque and jawab and gateway. Since the complex was built in stages, discrepancies exist in completion dates due to differing opinions on “completion”. For example, the mausoleum itself was essentially complete by 1643, but work continued on the rest of the complex. Estimates of the cost of the construction of Taj Mahal vary due to difficulties in estimating construction costs across time. The total cost of construction has been estimated to be about 32 million Rupees at that time which now runs into trillions of Dollars if converted to present currency rates.^[22]

The Taj Mahal was constructed using materials from all over India and Asia. Over 1,000 elephants were used to transport building materials during the construction. The translucent white marble was brought from Rajasthan, the jasper from Punjab, jade and crystal from China. The turquoise was from Tibet and the Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, while the sapphire came from Sri Lanka and the carnelian from Arabia. In all, twenty eight types of precious and semi-precious stones were inlaid into the white marble.

Artist’s impression of the Taj Mahal, from the Smithsonian Institution

A labour force of twenty thousand workers was recruited across northern India. Sculptors from Bukhara, calligraphers from Syria and Persia, inlayers from southern India, stonecutters from Baluchistan, a specialist in building turrets, another who carved only marble flowers were part of the thirty-seven men who formed the creative unit. Some of the builders involved in construction of Taj Mahal are:

• The main dome was designed by Ismail Afandi (a.ka. Ismail Khan),^[23] of the Ottoman Empire and was considered as a premier designer of hemispheres and domes.
• Ustad Isa of Persia (Iran) and Isa Muhammad Effendi of Persia (Iran), trained by Koca Mimar Sinan Agha of Ottoman Empire, are frequently credited with a key role in the architectural design,^[24][25] but there is little evidence to support this claim.
• ‘Puru’ from Benarus, Persia (Iran) has been mentioned as a supervising architect.^[26]
• Qazim Khan, a native of Lahore, cast the solid gold finial.
• Chiranjilal, a lapidary from Delhi, was chosen as the chief sculptor and mosaicist.
• Amanat Khan from Shiraz, Iran was the chief calligrapher. His name has been inscribed at the end of the inscription on the Taj Mahal gateway.^[27]
• Muhammad Hanif was a supervisor of masons and Mir Abdul Karim and Mukkarimat Khan of Shiraz, Iran (Persia) handled finances and management of daily production.

History

Taj Mahal by Samuel Bourne, 1860.

An early color photograph of the Taj Mahal. Source:The National Geographic Magazine, March 1921

Protective wartime scaffolding

Soon after the Taj Mahal’s completion, Shah Jahan was deposed by his son Aurangzeb and put under house arrest at nearby Agra Fort. Upon Shah Jahan’s death, Aurangzeb buried him in the Taj Mahal next to his wife.^[28]

By the late 19th century, parts of the Taj Mahal had fallen badly into disrepair. During the time of the Indian rebellion of 1857, the Taj Mahal was defaced by British soldiers and government officials, who chiseled out precious stones and lapis lazuli from its walls. At the end of 19th century British viceroy Lord Curzon ordered a massive restoration project, which was completed in 1908.^[29][30]He also commissioned the large lamp in the interior chamber, modeled after one in a Cairo mosque. During this time the garden was remodeled with British-looking lawns that are visible today.^[31]

In 1942, the government erected a scaffolding in anticipation of an air attack by German Luftwaffe and later by Japanese Air Force. During the India-Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971, scaffoldings were again erected to mislead bomber pilots.^[32] Its recent threats have come from environmental pollution on the banks of Yamuna River including acid rain^[33] due to the Mathura oil refinery,^[34] which was opposed by Supreme Court of India directives. The pollution has been turning the Taj Mahal yellow. To help control the pollution, the Indian government has set up the Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ), a 10,400 square kilometer (6462.26 square mile) area around the monument where strict emissions standards are in place.^[35] In 1983, the Taj Mahal was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.^[36]

Tourism

The Taj Mahal attracts from 2 to 4 million visitors annually, with more than 200,000 from overseas. Most tourists visit in the cooler months of October, November and February. Polluting traffic is not allowed near the complex and tourists must either walk from parking lots or catch an electric bus. The Khawasspuras (northern courtyards) are currently being restored for use as a new visitor center.^[37][38] The small town to the south of the Taj, known as Taj Ganji or Mumtazabad, originally was constructed with caravanserais, bazaars and markets to serve the needs of visitors and workmen.^[39] Lists of recommended travel destinations often feature the Taj Mahal, which also appears in several listings of seven wonders of the modern world, including the recently announced New Seven Wonders of the World, a recent poll^[40] with 100 million votes

The grounds are open from 6 am to 7 pm weekdays, except for Friday when the complex is open for prayers at the mosque between 12 noon and 2 pm. The complex is open for night viewing on the day of the full moon and two days before and after [2], excluding Fridays and the month of Ramzan. For security reasons ^[41] only five items – water in transparent bottles, small video cameras, still cameras, mobile phones and small ladies’ purses – are allowed inside the Taj Mahal.

Myths

Ever since its construction, the building has been the source of an admiration transcending culture and geography, and so personal and emotional responses to the building have consistently eclipsed scholastic appraisals of the monument.^[42]

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, one of the first European visitors to the Taj Mahal

A longstanding myth holds that Shah Jahan planned a mausoleum to be built in black marble across the Yamuna river.^[43] The idea originates from fanciful writings of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a European traveller who visited Agra in 1665. It was suggested that Shah Jahan was overthrown by his son Aurangzeb before it could be built. Ruins of blackened marble across the river in Moonlight Garden, Mahtab Bagh, seemed to support this legend. However, excavations carried out in the 1990s found that they were discolored white stones that had turned black.^[44] A more credible theory for the origins of the black mausoleum was demonstrated in 2006 by archeologists who reconstructed part of the pool in the Moonlight Garden. A dark reflection of the white mausoleum could clearly be seen, befitting Shah Jahan’s obsession with symmetry and the positioning of the pool itself.^[45]

No evidence exists for claims that describe, often in horrific detail, the deaths, dismemberments and mutilations which Shah Jahan supposedly inflicted on various architects and craftsmen associated with the tomb. Some stories claim that those involved in construction signed contracts committing themselves to have no part in any similar design. Similar claims are made for many famous buildings.^[46] No evidence exists for claims that Lord William Bentinck, governor-general of India in the 1830s, supposedly planned to demolish the Taj Mahal and auction off the marble. Bentinck’s biographer John Rosselli says that the story arose from Bentinck’s fund-raising sale of discarded marble from Agra Fort.^[47]

In 2000, India’s Supreme Court dismissed P.N. Oak‘s petition to declare that a Hindu king built the Taj Mahal.^[48][46] Oak claimed that origins of the Taj, together with other historic structures in the country currently ascribed to Muslim sultans pre-date Muslim occupation of India and thus, have a Hindu origin.^[49] A more poetic story relates that once a year, during the rainy season, a single drop of water falls on the cenotaph, as inspired by Rabindranath Tagore‘s description of the tomb as “one tear-drop…upon the cheek of time”. Another myth suggests that beating the silhouette of the finial will cause water to come forth. To this day, officials find broken bangles surrounding the silhouette.^[50]

Gallery

The Taj Mahal	Image in the reflecting pool	The tomb framed by the gateway entrance	The mosque
Great gate (Darwaza-i rauza)	Typical postcard image	View from the river Yamuna	The Taj Mahal at dusk
The Taj Mahal at dusk turns yellow

Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer and educator, who designed more than 1,000 projects, which resulted in more than 500 completed works.^[1]

Wright promoted organic architecture (exemplified by Fallingwater), was a leader of the Prairie School movement of architecture (exemplified by the Robie House and the Westcott House), and developed the concept of the Usonian home (exemplified by the Rosenbaum House). His work includes original and innovative examples of many different building types, including offices, churches, schools, hotels, and museums. Wright also often designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass.

Wright authored 20 books and many articles, and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful personal life often made headlines, most notably for the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin studio.

Already well-known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as “the greatest American architect of all time”.^[1]

Biography

Early years

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in the farming town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, United States, in 1867. Originally named Frank Lincoln Wright, he changed his name after his parents’ divorce to honor his mother’s Welsh family, the Lloyd Joneses. His father, William Carey Wright (1825 – 1904) was a locally admired orator, music teacher, occasional lawyer and itinerant minister. William Wright had met and married Anna Lloyd Jones (1838/39 – 1923), a county school teacher, the previous year when he was employed as the superintendent of schools for Richland County. Originally from Massachusetts, William Wright had been a Baptist minister but he later joined his wife’s family in the Unitarian faith. Anna was a member of the large, prosperous and well-known Lloyd Jones family of Unitarians, who had emigrated from Wales to southwestern Wisconsin. Both of Wright’s parents were strong-willed individuals with idiosyncratic interests that they passed on to Frank. In his biography his mother declared, when she was expecting her first child, that he would grow up to build beautiful buildings. She decorated his nursery with engravings of English cathedrals torn from a periodical to encourage the infant’s ambition. The family moved to Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1870 for William to minister a small congregation.

In 1876, Anna visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and saw an exhibit of educational blocks created by Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. The blocks, known as Froebel Gifts, were the foundation of his innovative kindergarten curriculum. A trained teacher, Anna was excited by the program and bought a set of blocks for her family. Young Frank spent much time playing with the blocks. These were geometrically-shaped and could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional compositions. Wright’s autobiography talks about the influence of these exercises on his approach to design. Many of his buildings are notable for the geometrical clarity they exhibit.

Wright’s home in Oak Park, Illinois

The Wright family struggled financially in Weymouth and returned to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the supportive Lloyd Jones clan could help William find employment. They settled in Madison, where William taught music lessons and served as the secretary to the newly formed Unitarian society. Although William was a distant parent, he shared his love of music, especially the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, with his children.

Soon after Frank turned 14 — in 1881 — his parents separated. Anna had been unhappy for some time with William’s inability to provide for his family and asked him to leave. The divorce was finalized in 1885 after William sued Anna for lack of physical affection. William left Wisconsin after the divorce and Wright claimed he never saw his father again.^[2] At this time Frank’s middle name was changed from Lincoln to Lloyd. As the only male left in the family, Frank assumed financial responsibility for his mother and two sisters.

Wright attended a Madison high school but there is no evidence he ever graduated.^[3] He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a special student in 1886. There he joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity,^[4] took classes part-time for two semesters, and worked with a professor of civil engineering, Allan D. Conover.^[5] In 1887, Wright left the school without taking a degree (although he was granted an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University in 1955). He moved to Chicago which was still rebuilding from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and he joined the architectural firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. Within a year, he left Silsbee to work for the firm of Adler & Sullivan as an apprentice to Louis Sullivan.^[6]

In 1889, he married his first wife, Catherine Lee “Kitty” Tobin (1871-1959), purchased land in Oak Park, Illinois, and built his first home, and eventually his studio there. His mother, Anna, soon followed Wright to the city, where he purchased a home adjacent to his newly built residence for her. His marriage to Kitty Tobin, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, raised his social status, and he became more well known.

Beginning in 1890, he was assigned all residential design work for the firm. In 1893, Louis Sullivan discovered that Wright had been accepting private commissions. Sullivan felt betrayed that his favored employee had designed houses “behind his back,” and he asked Wright to leave the firm. Constantly in need of funds to support his growing family, Wright designed the homes to supplement his meager income. Wright referred to these houses as his “bootleg” designs and the homes are located near the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, on Chicago Avenue in Oak Park. After leaving Sullivan, Wright established his own practice at his home.

This practice was a remarkable collection of creative architectural designers. By 1901, Wright had completed about 50 projects, including many houses in Oak Park. As his son John Lloyd Wright wrote,

“William Eugene Drummond, Francis Barry Byrne, Walter Burley Griffin, Albert Chase McArthur, Marion Mahony, Isabel Roberts and George Willis were the draftsmen. Five men, two women. They wore flowing ties, and smocks suitable to the realm. The men wore their hair like Papa, all except Albert, he didn’t have enough hair. They worshiped Papa! Papa liked them! I know that each one of them was then making valuable contributions to the pioneering of the modern American architecture for which my father gets the full glory, headaches and recognition today! ”^[7]

Prairie House

Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York

Between 1900 and 1917, his residential designs were “Prairie Houses“, so-called because the design is considered to complement the land around Chicago. These houses featured extended low buildings with shallow, sloping roofs, clean sky lines, suppressed chimneys, overhangs and terraces, using unfinished materials. The houses are credited with being the first examples of the “open plan.”

The manipulation of interior space in residential and public buildings are hallmarks of his style. One such building is Unity Temple, the home of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Oak Park. As a lifelong Unitarian and member of Unity Temple, Wright offered his services to the congregation after their church burned down in 1904. The community agreed to hire him and he worked on the building from 1905 to 1908. He believed that humanity should be central to all design.

Hillside Home School, 1902, Taliesin, Spring Green, Wisconsin

Many examples of this work are in Buffalo, New York as a result of friendship between Wright and Darwin D. Martin, an executive from the Larkin Soap Company. In 1902, the Larkin Company decided to build a new administration building. Wright came to Buffalo and designed not only the first sketches for the Larkin Administration Building (completed in 1904, demolished in 1950), but also homes for three of the company’s executives:

• George Barton House, Buffalo NY, 1903
• Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo NY, 1904
• William Heath House, Buffalo NY, 1905
  • and later, the Graycliff estate, Derby, NY 1926

The Westcott House was built in Springfield, Ohio, sometime between 1907 and 1908. It not only embodies Wright’s innovative Prairie Style design, but also reflects his passion for Japanese art and culture in design traits characteristic of traditional Japanese design. It is the only Prairie house built in Ohio, and represents an important evolution of Wright’s Prairie concept. The house has an extensive 98-foot pergola, capped with an intricate wooden trellis, connecting a detached carriage house and garage to the main house—features of only a few of Wright’s later Prairie Style designs.

It is not known exactly when Wright designed The Westcott House; it may have been several months before or more than a year after Wright returned from his first trip to Japan in 1905. Wright created two separate designs for the Westcott House; both are included in Studies and Executed Buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, published by the distinguished Ernst Wasmuth (Germany, 1910-1911). This two-volume work contains more than 100 lithographs of Wright’s designs and is commonly known as the Wasmuth Portfolio.

Other Wright houses considered to be masterpieces of the late Prairie Period (1907–1909) are the Frederick Robie House in Chicago and the Avery and Queene Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois. The Robie House, with its soaring, cantilevered roof lines, supported by a 110-foot (34 m)-long channel of steel, is the most dramatic. Its living and dining areas form virtually one uninterrupted space. This building had a profound influence on young European architects after World War I and is sometimes called the “cornerstone of modernism”. However, Wright’s work was not known to European architects until the publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio.

Europe and personal troubles

Local gossips noticed Wright’s flirtations, and he developed a reputation in Oak Park as a man-about-town. His family had grown to six children, and the brood required most of Catherine’s attention. In 1903, Wright designed a house for Edwin Cheney, a neighbor in Oak Park, and immediately took a liking to Cheney’s wife, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah Cheney was a modern woman with interests outside the home. She was an early feminist and Wright viewed her as his intellectual equal. The two fell in love, even though Wright had been married for almost 20 years. Often the two could be seen taking rides in Wright’s automobile through Oak Park, and they became the talk of the town. Wright’s wife, Kitty, sure that this attachment would fade as the others had, refused to grant him a divorce. Neither would Edwin Cheney grant one to Mamah. In 1909, even before the Robie House was completed, Wright and Mamah Cheney eloped to Europe; leaving their own spouses and children behind. The scandal that erupted virtually destroyed Wright’s ability to practice architecture in the United States.

Scholars argue that he felt by 1907 that he had done everything he could do with the Prairie Style, particularly from the standpoint of the single family house. Wright was not getting larger commissions for commercial or public buildings, which frustrated him.

What drew Wright to Europe was the chance to publish a portfolio of his work with Ernst Wasmuth, who had agreed in 1909 to publish his work there.^[8] This chance also allowed Wright to deepen his relationship with Mamah Cheney. Wright and Cheney left the United States separately in 1910, meeting in Berlin, where the offices of Wasmuth were located.

The resulting two volumes, known as the Wasmuth Portfolio, were published in 1910 and 1911 in two editions, creating the first major exposure of Wright’s work in Europe.

Wright remained in Europe for one year (though Mamah Cheney returned to the United States a few times) and set up home in Fiesole, Italy. During this time, Edwin Cheney granted her a divorce, though Kitty still refused to grant one to her husband. After Wright’s return to the United States in late 1910, Wright persuaded his mother to buy land for him in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The land, bought on April 10, 1911, was adjacent to land held by his mother’s family, the Lloyd-Joneses. Wright began to build himself a new home, which he called Taliesin, by May 1911. The recurring theme of Taliesin also came from his mother’s side: Taliesin in Welsh mythology was a poet, magician and super-hero. The family motto was Y Gwir yn Erbyn y Byd which means “The Truth Against the World”; it was created by Iolo Morgannwg who interestingly enough also had a son called Taliesin, and the motto is still used today as the cry of the druids and chief bard of the Eisteddfod in Wales.^[9]

More personal turmoil

On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago completing a large project (Midway Gardens), Julian Carlton, a male servant whom he had hired several months earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead included Mamah; her two children, John and Martha; a gardener; a draftsman; a workman; and the workman’s son. Two people survived the mayhem, one of whom helped to put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the house.

In 1922, Wright’s first wife, Kitty, granted him a divorce, and Wright was required to wait one year until he married his then-partner, Maude “Miriam” Noel. In 1923, Wright’s mother, Anna (Lloyd Jones) Wright, died. Wright wed Miriam Noel in November 1923, but her addiction to morphine led to the failure of the marriage in less than one year. In 1924, after the separation, but while still married, Wright met Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich Hinzenburg, at a Petrograd Ballet performance in Chicago. They moved in together at Taliesin in 1925, and soon Olgivanna’s was pregnant with their daughter, Iovanna. (Iovanna was born December 2, 1925 and years later married and divorced Wright associate Arthur Pieper.)

On April 22, 1925, another fire destroyed the living quarters of Taliesin. This appears to have been the result of a faulty electrical system.^[10] Wright rebuilt the living quarters again, naming the home “Taliesin III”.

In 1926, Olga’s ex-husband, Vlademar Hinzenburg, sought custody of his daughter, Svetlana. In Minnetonka, Minnesota, Wright and Olgivanna were accused of violating the Mann Act and arrested in October 1926 (the charges were later dropped).

Wright and Miriam Noel’s divorce was finalized in 1927, and once again, Wright was required to wait for one year until marrying again. Wright and Olgivanna married in 1928.

Notable projects after the Prairie Period

Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania (1939)

First Unitarian Society Meeting House, Madison, WI (1947)

During the turbulent 1920s, Wright designed Graycliff, one of his most innovative residences of the period, and a precursor to Fallingwater. The Graycliff estate was constructed from 1926 to 1929 for Isabelle and Darwin Martin on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie, just south of Buffalo, New York. Wright designed a complex of three buildings and extensive grounds and incorporates cantilevered balconies and terraces, “ribbons” of windows, and a transparent “screen” of windows allowing views of the lake through the largest building, the Isabelle R. Martin House. Graycliff’s light-filled buildings were designed in Wright’s “organic” style and were built of limestone from the beach below, warm ochre-colored stucco and striking red-stained roofs. Wright’s designs for Graycliff’s grounds incorporate water features that echo the lake beyond: a pond, a fountain, sunken gardens and stone walls in a “waterfall” pattern that surround the property. On the summer solstice, Graycliff aligns with the setting sun on Lake Erie, as Wright intended.

One of Wright’s most famous private residences was built from 1935 to 1939—Fallingwater—for Mr. and Mrs. Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr., at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. It was designed according to Wright’s desire to place the occupants close to the natural surroundings, with a stream and waterfall running under part of the building. The construction is a series of cantilevered balconies and terraces, using limestone for all verticals and concrete for the horizontals. The house cost $155,000, including the architect’s fee of $8,000. Kaufmann’s own engineers argued that the design was not sound. They were overruled by Wright, but the contractor secretly added extra steel to the horizontal concrete elements. In 1994, Robert Silman and Associates examined the building and developed a plan to restore the structure. In the late 1990s, steel supports were added under the lowest cantilever until a detailed structural analysis could be done. In March 2002, post-tensioning of the lowest terrace was completed.

Also in the 1930s, Wright first designed Usonian houses. Intended to be highly practical houses for middle-class clients, the designs were based on a simple but elegant geometry. He would later use similar elementary forms in his First Unitarian Meeting House built in Madison, Wisconsin, between 1946 and 1951.^[11]

Wright is responsible for a series of extremely original concepts of suburban development united under the term Broadacre City. He proposed the idea in his book The Disappearing City in 1932, and unveiled a 12-foot (3.7 m) square model of this community of the future, showing it in several venues in the following years. He went on developing the idea until his death.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, New York (1959)

His Usonian homes set a new style for suburban design that was a feature of countless developers. Many features of modern American homes date back to Wright; open plans, slab-on-grade foundations, and simplified construction techniques that allowed more mechanization or at least efficiency in building.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City occupied Wright for 16 years (1943–1959)^[12] and is probably his most recognized masterpiece. The building rises as a warm beige spiral from its site on Fifth Avenue; its interior is similar to the inside of a seashell. Its unique central geometry was meant to allow visitors to easily experience Guggenheim‘s collection of nonobjective geometric paintings by taking an elevator to the top level and then viewing artworks by walking down the slowly descending, central spiral ramp, which features a floor embedded with circular shapes and triangular light fixtures to complement the geometric nature of the structure. Unfortunately, when the museum was completed, a number of important details of Wright’s design were ignored, including his desire for the interior to be painted off-white. Furthermore, the Museum currently designs exhibits to be viewed by walking up the curved walkway rather than walking down from the top level.

Wright’s Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma

The only realized skyscraper designed by Wright is the Price Tower, a 19-story, 221-foot (67 m)-high tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It is also one of the two existing vertically-oriented Wright structures (the other is the S.C. Johnson Wax Research Tower in Racine, Wisconsin). The Price Tower was commissioned by Harold C. Price of the H. C. Price Company, a local oil pipeline and chemical firm. It opened to the public in February 1956. On March 29, 2007, Price Tower was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior, one of only 20 such properties in the state of Oklahoma.^[13]

Other projects

Wright designed over 400 built structures^[14] of which about 300 survive as of 2005. Four have been lost to forces of nature: the waterfront house for W. L. Fuller in Pass Christian, Mississippi, destroyed by Hurricane Camille in August 1969; the Louis Sullivan Bungalow, and the James Charnley Bungalow of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and the Arinobu Fukuhara House (1918) in Hakone, Japan, destroyed in the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The Ennis House in California has also been damaged by earthquake and rain-induced ground movement. In January, 2006, the Wynant House in Gary, Indiana was destroyed by fire.^[15]

Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1923)

In addition, other buildings were intentionally demolished during and after Wright’s lifetime, such as: Midway Gardens (1913, Chicago, Illinois) and the Larkin Administration Building (1903, Buffalo, New York) were destroyed in 1929 and 1950 respectively; the Francis Apartments and Francisco Terrace Apartments (both located in Chicago and designed in 1895) were destroyed in 1971 and 1974, respectively; the Geneva Inn (1911) in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was destroyed in 1970; and the Banff National Park Pavilion (1911) in Alberta, Canada was destroyed in 1939. The Imperial Hotel, in Tokyo (1913) survived the Great Kantō earthquake but was demolished in 1968 due to urban developmental pressures.^[16]

One of his projects, Monona Terrace, originally designed in 1937 as municipal offices for Madison, Wisconsin, was completed in 1997 on the original site, using a variation of Wright’s final design for the exterior with the interior design altered by its new purpose as a convention center. The “as-built” design was carried out by Wright’s apprentice Tony Puttnam. Monona Terrace was accompanied by controversy throughout the 60 years between the original design and the completion of the structure.^[17]

A lesser known project that never came to fruition was Wright’s plan for Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe.^[18] Few Tahoe locals know of the iconic American architect’s plan for their natural treasure.

Wright also built several houses in the Los Angeles area. Currently open to the public are the Hollyhock House (Aline Barnsdall Residence) in Hollywood and the shops at Anderton Court in Beverly Hills.

Following the Hollyhock House, Wright used an innovative building process in 1923 and 1924, which he called the textile block system where buildings were constructed with precast concrete blocks with a patterned, squarish exterior surface: The Alice Millard House (Pasadena), the John Storer House (West Hollywood), the Samuel Freeman House (Hollywood) and the Ennis House in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles. During the past two decades the Ennis House has become popular as an exotic, nearby shooting location to Hollywood TV and movie makers. He also designed a fifth textile block house for Aline Barnsdall, the Community Playhouse (“Little Dipper”), which was never constructed. Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, Lloyd Wright, supervised construction for the Storer, Freeman and Ennis House. Most of these houses are private residences and closed to the public because of renovation, including the Sturgis House (Brentwood) and the Arch Oboler Gatehouse & Studio (Malibu).

Oak Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, has the largest collection of Wright houses, as well as Wright’s home and studio, which are open for public tours. Tours of certain homes occur during the year. The Unity Temple is located on Lake Street in Oak Park. The Cheney House, Edwin and Mamah Cheney’s residence, has been a bed and breakfast for many years. Beside the home’s beauty, it contains a stunning in-law suite on the lower level.

Florida Southern College, located in Lakeland, Florida, constructed 12 (out of 18 planned) Frank Lloyd Wright buildings between 1941 and 1958 as part of the Child of the Sun project.

Gordon House is Wright’s last Usonian design which was completed in 1963. It is open for public access at the Oregon Garden.

Wright’s last design and first European project

A design that Wright signed off on shortly before his death in 1959 – possibly his last completed design – was realised in late 2007 in the Republic of Ireland.[1] Wright scholar and devotee Marc Coleman worked closely with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, dealing with E. Thomas Casey, the last surviving Foundation architect who trained under Wright. Working with the Foundation, Coleman selected an unbuilt design that was originally commissioned for Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Wieland and due to be built in Maryland, USA. However, the Wielands subsequently had financial problems and the design was shelved. The Foundation looked through its archive of 380 unbuilt designs and selected 4 for Coleman that were the closest fit for his site. In the end, he chose the Wieland house, largely because the topography of his site is virtually identical to that which the building was originally designed for. The completed house,^[19] in only the fourth country in which a Wright design has been realised, is attracting broad interest from the international architectural community. Casey visited the site in County Wicklow, but died before construction began.

Community planning

Frank Lloyd Wright was interested in site and community planning throughout his career. His commissions and theories on urban design began as early as 1900 and continued until his death. He has 41 commissions of a scale that can be considered community planning or urban design.^[20]

His thoughts on suburban design started in 1901 with an article in Ladies Home Journal. The article was designed to showcase “New Series of Model Suburban Houses Which Can Be Built at Moderate Cost”. Wright not only submitted a home design, but even proposed the Quadruple Block Plan as a proposed subdivision layout.^[21] This design strayed from traditional suburban lot layouts and set houses on small square blocks of four equal-sized lots surrounded on all sides by roads. The houses were set toward the center of the block so that each maximized the yard space and included private space in the center. This also allowed for far more interesting views from each house. This design would have eliminated the straight rows of houses on parallel streets with boring views of the front of each house. His first commission using the Quadruple Block Plan was for Charles E. Roberts in 1903, and Wright continued to push his concept in many of his large scale designs through the end of his career.^[22]

The more ambitious designs of entire communities were exemplified by his entry into the City Club of Chicago Land Development Competition in 1913. The contest was for the development of a suburban quarter section. This design expanded on the Quadruple Block Plan and included several social levels. The design shows the placement of the upscale homes in the most desirable areas and the blue collar homes and apartments separated by parks and common spaces. The design also included all the amenities of a small city: schools, museums, markets, etc.^[23] This view of decentralization was later reinforced by theoretical Broadacre City design. The philosophy behind his community planning was decentralization. The new development must be away from the cities. In this decentralized America, all services and facilities could coexist “factories side by side with farm and home.”^[24] Notable Community Planning Designs

1901 – Quadruple Block Plan – “Ladies Home Journal” February 1901, April 1901
1903 – Charles R. Roberts – 24 homes – Oak Park, IL
1909 – Bitter Root Town Plan – Town site development for new town in the Bitterroot Valley, MT
1913 – Chicago Land Development competition – Suburban Chicago quarter section
1934–1959 – Broadacre City – Theoretical decentralized city plan – exhibits of large scale model
1938 – Suntop Homes – low cost housing alternative to suburban development
1941 – Cloverleaf Housing Project – commission from Federal Works Agency Division of Defense Housing – multifamily layout

Japanese art

Though most famous as an architect, Wright was an active dealer in Japanese art, primarily ukiyo-e woodblock prints. He frequently served as both architect and art dealer to the same clients; “he designed a home, then provided the art to fill it”^[25]. For a time, Wright made more from selling art than from his work as an architect.

Wright first traveled to Japan in 1905, where he bought hundreds of prints. The following year, he helped organize the world’s first retrospective exhibition of works by Hiroshige, held at the Art Institute of Chicago^[25]. For many years, he was a major presence in the Japanese art world, selling a great number of works to prominent collectors such as John Spaulding of Boston^[25], and to prominent museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York^[26]. He penned a book on Japanese art in 1912^[26].

In 1920, however, rival art dealers began to spread rumors that Wright was selling retouched prints; this combined with Wright’s tendency to live beyond his means, and other factors, to lead to great financial troubles for the architect. Though he provided his clients with genuine prints as replacements for those he was accused of retouching, this marked the end of the high point of his career as an art dealer^[26]. He was forced to sell off much of his art collection in 1927 to pay off outstanding debts; the Bank of Wisconsin claimed his Taliesin home the following year, and sold thousands of his prints, for only one dollar a piece, to collector Edward Burr Van Vleck^[25].

Wright continued to collect, and deal in, prints until his death in 1959, frequently using prints as collateral for loans, frequently relying upon his art business to remain financially solvent^[26]

The extent of his dealings in Japanese art went largely unknown, or underestimated, among art historians for decades until, in 1980, Julia Meech, then associate curator of Japanese art at the Metropolitan Museum, began researching the history of the museum’s collection of Japanese prints. She discovered “a three-inch-deep ‘clump of 400 cards’ from 1918, each listing a print bought from the same seller — ‘F. L. Wright’” and a number of letters exchanged between Wright and the museum’s first curator of Far Eastern Art, Sigisbert C. Bosch Reitz, in 1918 to 1922^[26]. These discoveries, and subsequent research, led to a renewed understanding of Wright’s career as an art dealer.

Death and legacy

1954 portrait by Al Ravenna, New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer

Turmoil followed Wright even many years after his death on April 9, 1959. His third wife, Olgivanna, ran the Fellowship after Wright’s death, until her own death in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1985. In 1985, it was learned that her dying wish had been that Wright, she and her daughter by a first marriage all be cremated and relocated to Scottsdale, Arizona. By then, Wright’s body had lain for nearly 30 years in the Lloyd-Jones cemetery, next to the Unity Chapel, near Taliesin, Wright’s later-life home in Spring Green, Wisconsin.^[27] Olgivanna’s plan called for a memorial garden, already in the works, to be finished and prepared for their remains. Although the garden had yet to be finished, his remains were prepared and sent to Scottsdale where they waited in storage for an unidentified amount of time before being interred in the memorial area. Today, the small cemetery south of Spring Green, Wisconsin and a long stone’s throw from Taliesin, contains a gravestone marked with Wright’s name but its grave is empty.^[28]

Personal style and concepts

Wright practiced what is known as organic architecture, an architecture that evolves naturally out of the context, most importantly for him the relationship between the site and the building and the needs of the client. For example, houses in wooded regions made heavy use of wood, desert houses had rambling floor plans and heavy use of stone, and houses in rocky areas such as Los Angeles were built mainly of cinder block.

Wright’s creations took his concern with organic architecture down to the smallest details. From his largest commercial commissions to the relatively modest Usonian houses, Wright conceived virtually every detail of both the external design and the internal fixtures, including furniture, carpets, windows, doors, tables and chairs, light fittings and decorative elements. He was one of the first architects to design and supply custom-made, purpose-built furniture and fittings that functioned as integrated parts of the whole design, and he often returned to earlier commissions to redesign internal fittings. Some of the built-in furniture remains, while other restorations have included replacement pieces created using his plans. His Prairie houses use themed, coordinated design elements (often based on plant forms) that are repeated in windows, carpets and other fittings. He made innovative use of new building materials such as precast concrete blocks, glass bricks and zinc cames (instead of the traditional lead) for his leadlight windows, and he famously used Pyrex glass tubing as a major element in the Johnson Wax Headquarters. Wright was also one of the first architects to design and install custom-made electric light fittings, including some of the very first electric floor lamps, and his very early use of the then-novel spherical glass lampshade (a design previously not possible due to the physical restrictions of gas lighting).

Wright-designed window in Robie House, Chicago (1906)

As Wright’s career progressed, so did the mechanization of the glass industry. Wright fully embraced glass in his designs and found that it fit well into his philosophy of organic architecture. Glass allowed for interaction and viewing of the outdoors while still protecting from the elements. In 1928, Wright wrote an essay on glass in which he compared it to the mirrors of nature: lakes, rivers and ponds. One of Wright’s earliest uses of glass in his works was to string panes of glass along whole walls in an attempt to create light screens to join together solid walls. By utilizing this large amount of glass, Wright sought to achieve a balance between the lightness and airiness of the glass and the solid, hard walls. Arguably, Wright’s most well-known art glass is that of the Prairie style. The simple geometric shapes that yield to very ornate and intricate windows represent some of the most integral ornamentation of his career.^[29]

Wright responded to the transformation of domestic life that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, when servants became a less prominent or completely absent from most American households, by developing homes with progressively more open plans. This allowed the woman of the house to work in her ‘workspace’, as he often called the kitchen, yet keep track of and be available for the children and/or guests in the dining room. Much of modern architecture, including the early work of Mies van der Rohe, can be traced back to Wright’s innovative work.

Wright also designed some of his own clothing. His fashion sense was unique and he usually wore expensive suits, flowing neckties, and capes. He drove a custom yellow raceabout in the Prairie years, a red Cord convertible in the 1930s, and a famously customized 1940 Lincoln for many years, each of which earned him many speeding tickets.

Colleagues and influences

Wright rarely credited any influences on his designs, but most architects, historians and scholars agree he had five major influences:

1. Louis Sullivan, whom he considered to be his ‘Lieber Meister’ (dear master),
2. Nature, particularly shapes/forms and colors/patterns of plant life,
3. Music (his favorite composer was Ludwig van Beethoven),
4. Japanese art, prints and buildings,
5. Froebel Gifts^{[citation needed]}

He also routinely claimed the architects and architectural designers who were his employees’ work as his own design and claimed that the rest of the Prairie School architects were merely his followers, imitators and subordinates.^[30] But, as with any architect, Wright worked in a collaborative process and drew his ideas from the work of others. In his earlier days, Wright worked with some of the top architects of the Chicago School, including Sullivan. In his Prairie School days, Wright’s office was populated by many talented architects including William Eugene Drummond, John Van Bergen, Isabel Roberts, Francis Barry Byrne, Albert McArthur, Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin.

Rudolf Schindler worked for Wright on the Imperial hotel. His own work is often credited as influencing Wright’s Usonian houses. Schindler’s friend Richard Neutra also worked briefly for Wright and became an internationally successful architect.

Later in the Taliesin days, Wright employed many architects and artists who later become notable, such as John Lautner, E. Fay Jones, Henry Klumb and Paolo Soleri in architecture and Santiago Martinez Delgado in the arts. As a young man, actor Anthony Quinn applied to study with Wright at Taliesin. However, Wright suggested that he first take voice lessons to help overcome a speech impediment.

Bruce Goff never worked for Wright but maintained correspondence with him. Their works can be seen to parallel each other.

Recognition

1966 U.S. postage stamp honoring Frank Lloyd Wright

Later in his life and well after his death in 1959, Wright received much honorary recognition for his lifetime achievements. He received Gold Medal awards from The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 1941 and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1949. He received honorary degrees from several universities (including his “alma mater”, the University of Wisconsin) and several nations named him as an honorary board member to their national academies of art and/or architecture. In 2000, Fallingwater was named “The Building of the 20th century” in an unscientific “Top-Ten” poll taken by members attending the AIA annual convention in Philadelphia. On that list, Wright was listed along with many of the USA’s other greatest architects including Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Phillip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and he was the only architect who had more than one building on the list. The other three buildings were the Guggenheim Museum, the Frederick C. Robie House and the Johnson Wax Building.

In 1992, The Madison Opera in Madison, Wisconsin commissioned and premiered the opera Shining Brow, by composer Daron Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon based on events early in Wright’s life. The work has since received numerous revivals. In 2000, Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright, a play based on the relationship between the personal and working aspects of Wright’s life, debuted at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.

On June 8, 2005, Google’s homepage displayed a Google Doodle celebrating Wright’s birthday.

Wright-designed houses available for rent

Perhaps one of the most unique ways that Wright is recognized today is that several properties^[31] designed by him are available to house overnight guests who, more than simply touring his houses, want to “live” in one, albeit for a night or two. Some of the homes include the Louis Penfield House in Ohio, the Haynes House in Indiana, the Schwartz House in Wisconsin, the Muirhead Farmhouse in Illinois, the Duncan House in Pennsylvania and the Seth Peterson Cottage in Wisconsin.

Family

Frank Lloyd Wright was married three times and fathered seven children: four sons and three daughters. He also adopted Svetlana Wright Peters, the daughter of his third wife, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright.

One of Wright’s sons, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr., known as Lloyd Wright, was also a notable architect in Los Angeles. Lloyd Wright’s son (and Wright’s grandson), Eric Lloyd Wright, is currently an architect in Malibu, California where he has a practice of mostly residences, but also civic and commercial buildings.

Another son and architect, John Lloyd Wright, invented Lincoln Logs in 1918, and practiced extensively in the San Diego area. John’s daughter, Elizabeth Ingraham, is an architect in Colorado. She is the mother of Christine, an interior designer in Connecticut, and Catherine, an architecture professor at the Pratt Institute.^[32]

The Oscar-winning actress Anne Baxter was Wright’s granddaughter. Baxter was the daughter of Catherine Baxter, a child born of Wright’s first marriage. Anne’s daughter, Melissa Galt, currently lives and works in Atlanta as an interior designer.^[32]

A great-grandson of Wright, S. Lloyd Natof, currently lives and works in Chicago as a master woodworker who specializes in the design and creation of custom wood furniture.^[33]

Archives

Photographs and other archival materials are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Herbert and Katherine Jacobs Residence and Frank Lloyd Wright Records, 1924-1974, Collection includes drawings, correspondence, and other materials documenting the construction of two homes for the Jacobs as well as research files on Wright’s life. The Frank Lloyd Wright in Michigan Collection, 1945-1988, consists of research documents, including photocopied correspondence between Wright and his clients, used for the book “Frank Lloyd Wright in Michigan.” The Wrightiana Collection, c. 1897-1997 (bulk 1949-1969), includes a variety of printed materials and photographs about Wright and his projects. The Joseph J. Bagley Cottage Collection, c. 1916-1925, contains photographs and drawings documenting the Bagley cottage which was completed in 1916.

Selected works

The Burton J. Westcott House, Springfield, Ohio

The Robie House on the University of Chicago campus

Taliesin West Panorama from the “prow” looking at the “ship”

• Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, Oak Park, Illinois, 1889-1909
• William Herman Winslow Residence, River Forest, Illinois, 1894
• Ward Winfield Willits Residence, and Gardener’s Cottage and Stables, Highland Park, Illinois, 1901
• Dana-Thomas House State Historic Site, Springfield, Illinois, 1902
• Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, New York, 1903
• Darwin D. Martin House, Buffalo, New York, 1903-1905
• Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois, 1904
• Burton J. Westcott Residence, Springfield, Ohio, 1908
• Frederick C. Robie Residence, Chicago, Illinois, 1909
• Taliesin I, Spring Green, Wisconsin, 1911
• Midway Gardens, Chicago, Illinois, 1913
• Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1923. Demolished, 1968; Entrance hall reconstructed in 1976 at Meiji Mura, near Nagoya, Japan
• Hollyhock House (Aline Barnsdall Residence), Los Angeles, California, 1919-21
• Ennis Residence, Los Angeles, California, 1923
• Graycliff (Darwin and Isabelle Martin summer estate, Buffalo, NY,1928
• Fallingwater (Kaufmann country home) Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1935
• Johnson Wax Headquarters, Racine, Wisconsin, 1936
• Herbert F. Johnson Residence (“Wingspread”), Wind Point, WI, 1937
• Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1937
• Usonian homes – Various locations, 1930′s-1940′s
• Bernard Schwartz House Two Rivers, Wisconsin, 1939
• Child of the Sun, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida, 1941-1958
• First Unitarian Society of Madison, Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, 1947
• Herman T. Mossberg Residence, South Bend, Indiana, 1948
• Thomas Keys Residence, Rochester, Minnesota, 1950
• Muirhead Farmhouse, Hampshire, Illinois, 1950
• Louis Penfield House, Willoughby Hills, Ohio, 1955
• Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, 1956
• Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, designed in 1956, completed in 1961
• Marin County Civic Center, San Rafael, CA, 1957–66 (featured in the movies Gattaca & THX 1138)
• Samara (John E. Christian House), 1954, West Lafayette, Indiana
• Kentuck Knob, 1956, Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania
• The Illinois, mile-high tower in Chicago, 1956 (unbuilt)
• Frank S. Sander House Stamford, Connecticut
• Duncan House, Acme, Pennsylvania, 1957
• Gammage Auditorium, Tempe, Arizona, 1964

Cultural influence

• The design of the Vandamm House in the Hitchcock film North by Northwest is consciously based on Wright’s architecture.^[34]
• Simon and Garfunkel recorded a song called “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” on their 1970 album Bridge over Troubled Water. Art Garfunkel is a longtime fan of architecture; it has been said that Paul Simon wrote the song as a farewell to his musical partner, using Wright’s name to stand for Garfunkel.^[35]
• The architect hero Howard Roark of Ayn Rand‘s novel The Fountainhead is widely considered to have been based on Wright.^[36]
• A version of Frank Lloyd Wright appears in Dan Simmons‘ Hyperion Cantos.

pronunciation (help·info)

Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo was and is renowned^[2] primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo‘s Creation of Adam.^[1] Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon,^[3] being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination.^{[nb 2]} Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered^[2] for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.^[4] Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime,^{[nb 3]} but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded.^{[nb 4]} As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.^[5]

Life

Childhood, 1452–1466

Leonardo’s earliest known drawing, the Arno Valley, (1473) – Uffizi

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, “at the third hour of the night”^{[nb 5]} in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence.^[7] He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant^[6][8] who may have been a slave from the Middle East.^{[nb 6][9]} Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci“: his full birth name was “Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci”, meaning “Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci”.^[7]

Little is known about Leonardo’s early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young.^[10] In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face.^[10] The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.^[10]

Leonardo’s early life has been the subject of historical conjecture.^[11] Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant requested that Ser Piero ask his talented son to paint a picture on a round plaque. Leonardo responded with a painting of snakes spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a plaque decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.^[12]

The Baptism of Christ (1472–1475)—Uffizi, by Verrocchio and Leonardo

Verrocchio’s workshop, 1466–1476

In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to one of the most successful artists of his day, Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio. Verrocchio‘s workshop was at the centre of the intellectual currents of Florence, assuring the young Leonardo of an education in the humanities. Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi.^[10][13] Leonardo would have been exposed to a vast range of technical skills and had the opportunity to learn drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.^[14][15][16]

Much of the painted production of Verrocchio’s workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus‘s robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master’s that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again.^[12] This is probably an exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo.^[8]

Leonardo himself may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the Bargello and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.^[8]

By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine,^{[nb 7]} but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him.^[10] Leonardo’s earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473.^{[nb 8][13]}

Professional life, 1476–1513

^{Adoration of the Magi, return to text}

The Adoration of the Magi, (1481)—Uffizi.

Court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy,^{[nb 9]} and acquitted.^[17] From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts,^[18] although it is assumed that Leonardo had his own workshop in Florence between 1476 and 1481.^[8] He was commissioned to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard and The Adoration of the Magi in 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. This important commission was interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.

In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician,^[19] created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head. Lorenzo de’ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan.^[20] At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.^[13][21]

Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.^[10] While living in Milan between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother.^[10][22]

He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello’s statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the “Gran Cavallo”.^[13][23]

Study of horse from Leonardo’s journals – Royal Library, Windsor Castle

Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting,^[13] however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it.^[10] In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.^[13]

At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the “Gran Cavallo” for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.^[8][10]

On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that “men and women, young and old” flocked to see it “as if they were attending a great festival”.^{[12][nb 10]} In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron.^[8] He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria,^[8] with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.^{[nb 11]} In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist’s will, Michelangelo’s statue of David.^[26]

In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo’s most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan,^[10] including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D’Oggione.^{[nb 12]} However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father’s estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.^[8]

Old age, 1513-1519

Clos Lucé in France, where Leonardo died in 1519

From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time.^[8] In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan.^[27] On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna.^[10][28][29] It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies.^{[12][nb 13]} In 1516, he entered François’ service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé^{[nb 14]} near the king’s residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.^[8]

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo’s head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact.^{[nb 15][31]} Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament.^[12] In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo’s paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo’s vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak of good stuff with a fur edge.^[32]

Some twenty years after Leonardo’s death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: “There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher.”^[33]

Relationships and influences

Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, (1425-1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.

Florence — Leonardo’s artistic and social background

Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio’s master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo’s teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici’s father Piero and uncle Giovanni.^[34][35][36]

Leonardo’s youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello’s contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti’s Treatise were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo’s own observations and artworks.^[34][35][36]

Massaccio’s depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello’s David can be seen in Leonardo’s late paintings, particularly John the Baptist.^[34]

Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470

A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family.^[34] Leonardo’s early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing indiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo’s later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.^[10]

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici.^[10]Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio’s ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino’s ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence.^[34]

The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family

These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino’s employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.^[10]

In 1476, during the time of Leonardo’s association with Verrocchio’s workshop, Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing the Portinari Altarpiece and the new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, travelled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.^[36]

Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.^[34][37]

Lorenzo de’ Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de’ Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio

Leonardo’s political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479–1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo’s age.^[34][35]

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo’s contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola.^[36][38] Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal “The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me.” While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.^[10]

Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. The short-lived Raphael died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.^[35][36]

Study for a portrait of Isabella d’Este (1500) Louvre.

Personal life

Within Leonardo’s lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his “outstanding physical beauty”, “infinite grace”, “great strength and generosity”, “regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind” as described by Vasari^[12] attracted the curiosity of others. Many authors have speculated on various aspects of Leonardo’s personality. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.^{[12] [39]}

Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d’Este.^{[citation needed]}Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Isabella d’Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.^[10]

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has often been the subject of study, analysis and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud.^[40]

Salai as John the Baptist (c. 1514)—Louvre

Assistants and pupils

Leonardo’s closest personal relationships were with two pupils, Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino (“The Little Unclean One” i.e., the devil), who entered his household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him “a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton”, after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes.^[41] Nevertheless, Leonardo’s notebooks during their early years contain many drawings of the student, who remained within Leonardo’s household for the next thirty years.^[8]Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo “taught him a great deal about painting”,^[12] his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo’s pupils such as Marco d’Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515 he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna.^[42] Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.^[43]

In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter’s death.^[10] Upon Leonardo’s death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and would henceforth faithfully administer the estate.

Painting

Annunciation (1475–1480)—Uffizi, is thought to be Leonardo’s earliest complete work

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created.^[44]

These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo’s work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks.^[45]

Unfinished painting of St. Jerome in the Wilderness, (c. 1480), Vatican

Early works

Leonardo’s early works begin with the Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, 59 centimetres (23 in) long and 14 centimetres (5.5 in) high. It is a “predella” to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, 217 centimetres (85 in) long.^[8] In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico’s two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.^[46]

In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God’s will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise.^[34] This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity’s role in God’s incarnation.^{[nb 16]}

Paintings of the 1480s

Virgin of the Rocks, Louvre, possibly 1505–1508, demonstrates Leonardo’s interest in nature.

In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of St. Jerome in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo’s life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: “I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die.”^[10]

Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual.^{[nb 17]} Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo’s anatomical studies.^[27] Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, (see above ^[Magi]) a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about 250 square centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de’ Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.^[8][46]

The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed.^[27] Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water.^[48] While the painting is quite large, about 200 × 120 centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.^[8][13]

The Last Supper (1498)—Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy

Paintings of the 1490s

Leonardo’s most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said “one of you will betray me”. Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.^[13]

The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time.^[27] This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.^[12]

When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation,^[12] but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as “completely ruined”.^[8] Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking.^[8] Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.

Paintings of the 1500s

Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503–1505/1507)—Louvre, Paris, France

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or “la Gioconda”, the laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on the woman’s face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called “sfumato” or Leonardo’s smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that “the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original”.^{[12][nb 18]}

Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable.^{[nb 19]} Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even “the most confident master … despair and lose heart.”^[12] The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date.^[8]

In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see below ^[StAnne]) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as “breathtakingly beautiful”^[27] and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice.^[13] This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto,^[8] and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499–1500)—National Gallery, London

Drawings

Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper.^[50] His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.^[10][50]

Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London.^[50] This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre.^[8]

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as “caricatures” because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them.^[12] There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called “Grecian profile”.^{[nb 20]} These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior.^[50] Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo’s ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de’Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy.^[50] With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Leonardo as observer, scientist and inventor

The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice

Journals

Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo’s studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo’s life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.^[13]

The journals are mostly written in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left.^{[nb 21]}

A page from Leonardo’s journal showing his study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle

His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.^[13]

These notebooks—originally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his death—have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online.^[51] The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo’s in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Leonardo’s journals appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet.^{[52][nb 22]} Why they were not published within Leonardo’s lifetime is unknown.^[13]

Scientific studies

Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli’s De Divina Proportione

Leonardo’s approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli’s book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.^[13]

It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis D’Aragon‘s secretary in 1517.^[53] Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin.^[8] According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as “the precursor of French academic thought on art”.^[13]

Anatomical study of the arm, (c. 1510)

Anatomy

Leonardo’s formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.

As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the hospital Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in 1680 (161 years after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.^[13][50]

Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero.^[50] As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.^[13][50]

He also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Engineering and inventions

A design for a flying machine, (c. 1488) Institut de France, Paris

During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River in order to flood Pisa. His journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.^[10][13]

In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo’s vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway.^[54] On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo’s bridge to span the Golden Horn.^[55]

For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider.^[13] Most were impractical, but the hang glider has been successfully constructed and demonstrated.^[56]

Leonardo the legend

Within Leonardo’s own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died.^[57] Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists written about thirty years after Leonardo’s death, described him as having talents that “transcended nature”.

The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.^[13]

Statue of Leonardo da Vinci at the Uffizi, Florence

Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568,^[12] introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

—Giorgio Vasari

The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano (“The Courtier”), wrote in 1528: “… Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled …”^[58] while the biographer known as “Anonimo Gaddiano” wrote, c. 1540: “His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf …”.^[59]

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo’s genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: “Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius …”^[60] This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: “He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents.”^[61]

By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo’s notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: “There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries.”^[62]

The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: “Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values.”^[63]

The interest in Leonardo’s genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.^[64] Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: “Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge … Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe.”^[10]

In 1897, in the pages of The Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, Adolf Loos initiated a series of polemic articles that later established his international reputation. Adolf Loos did not directly address architecture in his writings. Instead, Adolf Loos examined a wide range of social ills, which Adolf Loos identified as the motivating factors behind the struggle for a transformation of everyday life. Adolf Loos ‘s writings focused increasingly on what Adolf Loos regarded as the excess of decoration in both traditional Viennese design and in the more recent products of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte. In 1898, in the pages of the review Ver Sacrum, which was an organ of the Wiener Secession, Adolf Loos published an essay that marked the beginning of a long theoretical opposition to the then popular art noveau movement. His theories culminated in a short essay entitled, “Ornament And Crime,” published in 1908. To Adolf Loos, the lack of ornament in architecture was a sign of spiritual strength. Adolf Loos referred to the opposite, excessive ornamentation, as criminal – not for abstract moral reasons, but because of the economics of labor and wasted materials in modern industrial civilization. Adolf Loos argued that because ornament was no longer an important manifestation of culture, the worker dedicated to its production could not be paid a fair price for his labor. The essay rapidly became a theoretical manifesto and a key document in modernist literature and was widely circulated abroad. Le Corbusier later attributed “an Homeric cleansing” of architecture to the work.

Another point of contention decried by Adolf Loos was the masking of the true nature and beauty of materials by useless and indecent ornament. In his 1898 essay entitled “Principles of Building,” Adolf Loos wrote that the true vocabulary of architecture lies in the materials themselves, and that a building should remain “dumb” on the outside. In his own work, Adolf Loos contrasted austere facades with lavish interiors. Much like Mies van der Rohe, Adolf Loos arrived at the reduction of architecture to a purely technical tautology that emphasized the simple assemblage of materials. This article was followed by the 1910 essay entitled “Architecture,” in which Adolf Loos explained important contradictions in design: between the interior and the exterior, the monument and the house, and art works and objects of function. To Adolf Loos, the house did not belong to art because the house must please everyone, unlike a work of art, which does not need to please anyone. The only exception, that is, the only constructions that belong both to art and architecture, were the monument and the tombstone. Adolf Loos felt that the rest of architecture, which by necessity must serve a specific end, must be excluded from the realm of art.In 1899, Adolf Loos designed the Cafe Museum, which proved to be one of the most notable projects of his early work. The austere interior was a mature architectural embodiment of his theorized renunciation of stylish ornamentation. The starkness of the “untattooed” facade that inspired the popular name Cafe Nihilismus asserted Adolf Loos ‘s developing theory of the predominance of technique over decoration. The cafe also affirms his aesthetic equation of beauty and utility by bringing every object back to its purely utilitarian value. To Adolf Loos, that which is beautiful must also be useful. Thus, the only elements Adolf Loos used to pattern the vaulted ceiling of the cafe interior were strips of brass, which also served as electrical conductors. A more refined work, the tiny Karntner Bar Vienna (1907), reveals in microcosm the architect’s great sensitivity to spatial manipulation. Once again, Adolf Loos showed his fondness for the expressive use of natural materials as Adolf Loos skillfully manipulated classical materials including marble, onyx, wood, and mirror, into a careful composition of visual patterns.

Between 1909 and 1911, Adolf Loos designed and constructed one of his best known works, the controversial Looshaus in the Michaelerplatz, in the heart of old Vienna. This complex design enunciated theorems on the relationship between the memory of the historic past of a great city and the invention of the new city based on the modern work of architecture. The design was characterized by a mute facade from which all ornamental plastic shapes were absent. For Adolf Loos, the language of the environment of the metropolis was centered in the absence of all ornament. In 1910, a public furor spawned by the simplicity of the modernistic design resulted in a municipal order to suspend work; construction ceased and building permits were denied. Adolf Loos responded to the attacks in a public meeting attended by more than 2000 angry residents. The controversy ended with an agreement to add window boxes in an attempt to countrify and familiarize the unpopular design.

Adolf Loos ‘s private residential works were characterized by unembellished white facades. As a result, these buildings have routinely been associated with the work of Le Corbusier, J. J. Oud, and others. Among the more famous were the much published Steiner House (1910) and Scheu House (1912), both in Vienna. One of Adolf Loos ‘s best known projects was the entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition of 1922. Adolf Loos ‘s surprising combination of Doric columns at ground level with modern skyscraper technology indicated that Adolf Loos was less doctrinaire about ornament than his modernist colleagues believed. To Adolf Loos, the polished black granite columns, durable classical symbols in a building, were altogether useful and therefore beautiful.Also in 1922, Adolf Loos was appointed to the post of Chief Architect of the Housing Department of the Commune of Vienna. His projects during this time were primarily con structions modulated around simply-composed layouts utilizing basic construction technology. Flexible interior arrangements were achieved through the use of movable partitions. Exteriors were typical of suburban housing Vegetable gardens, which were considered essential extensions of the dwellings, were assigned high priorities. Adolf Loos soon grew disillusioned with his work as chief architect. As a result of his opposition to the then current ideology of Austrian Marxism, Adolf Loos resigned from his post the same year Adolf Loos was appointed.

Adolf Loos moved to France in 1922. Adolf Loos lived there until 1927, dividing his time between Paris and the Rivier with frequent journeys to Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. Adolf Loos was received enthusiastically by the French avantgarde. His work entitled “Ornament and Crime” was translated in 1920 in Esprit Nouveau, a publication edited by Le Corbusier, Paul Dermee, and Ozenfant. Adolf Loos also exhibited regularly at d’Automne, and became the first foreigner to be elected to its jury. Adolf Loos built some of his most significant works during this period. These included The Tzara House in Paris (1926-1927), Villa Moller in Vienna (1928), Villa Muller (1930), Villa Winternitz in Prague (1931-1932) and the Khuner Country House at Payerbach in lower Austria. Monolithic in nature, these works contrasted greatly with the glass architecture that dominated rationalist styles of the 1920s. Once again, Adolf Loos as in a posture of contentious indifference to fluctuations in current taste.

In 1930, on his sixtieth birthday, Adolf Loos was officially recognized as a master of architecture. Adolf Loos was bestowed with an annual honorific income by the president of the Czechoslovakian Republic. His collected essays were published the following year. Adolf Loos died on August 23, 1933 and was buried beneath a simple tombstone of his own design. His most significant contribution to architecture remains his literary discourse.

Major works:

Caf� Museum, at Vienna, Austria, 1898 to 1899.
Wohnung Leopold Langer, at Vienna, Austria, 1901.
Villa Karma, Clarens, at Montreux, Switzerland, 1904 to 1906.
Wohnung Rudolf Kraus, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
Schmuckfedern-gesch�ft Sigmund Steiner, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
American Bar, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
Wohnung Bellak, at Vienna, Austria, 1907.
Schneidersalon Knize, Vienna, Austria, 1909 – 1913.
House on the Michaelerplatz, at Vienna, Austria, 1910 to 1911.
Steiner House, at Vienna, Austria, 1910.
Scheu House, Vienna, at Austria, 1912 to 1913.
Horner House, at Vienna, Austria, 1921.
Rufer House, at Vienna, Austria, 1922.
Villa Stross, at Vienna, Austria, 1922.
Landhaus Spanner, at Gumpoldskirchen, Austria, 1923.
Big shop (project), at Alexandria, Egypt, 1924.
Tristan Tzara House, at Paris, France, 1926 to 1927.
Moller House, Vienna, at Austria, 1927 to 1928.
Wohnung Hans Brummel, at Vienna, Austria, 1929.
Wohnung Willy Hirsch, at Pilsen, Czech Republic, 1929.
Khuner Villa, at on the Kreuzberg, Payerback, Austria, 1930.
Villa M�ller, Prague, Czech Republic, 1930.
Wohnung Leo Brummel, at Vienna, Austria, 1930.
M�ller House, at Prague, Czech Republic, 1930.
Landhaus Khuner, Payerbach, Austria, 1930.
Bojko House, at Vienna, Austria, 1929 to 1930.
Mitzi House, at Vienna, Austria, 1931.
House in the Vienna Werbund, Austria, 1930 to 1932.
Semler House, at Pilsen, Czech Republic, 1932.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture. Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential 20th century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings “skin and bones” architecture. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative process of architectural design, and is known for his use of the aphorisms “less is more” and Gustave Flaubert‘s “God is in the details”.

History

Origins

Some historians see the evolution of Modern architecture as a social matter, closely tied to the project of Modernity and thus the Enlightenment. The Modern style developed, in their opinion, as a result of social and political revolutions.^[1]

Melnikov House near Arbat Street in Moscow by Konstantin Melnikov.

Others see Modern architecture as primarily driven by technological and engineering developments, and it is true that the availability of new building materials such as iron, steel, and glass drove the invention of new building techniques as part of the Industrial Revolution. In 1796, Shrewsbury mill owner Charles Bage first used his ‘fireproof‘ design, which relied on cast iron and brick with flag stone floors. Such construction greatly strengthened the structure of mills, which enabled them to accommodate much bigger machines. Due to poor knowledge of iron’s properties as a construction material, a number of early mills collapsed. It was not until the early 1830s that Eaton Hodgkinson introduced the section beam, leading to widespread use of iron construction, this kind of austere industrial architecture utterly transformed the landscape of northern Britain, leading to the description of places like Manchester and parts of West Yorkshire as “Dark satanic mills”.

The Crystal Palace by Joseph Paxton at the Great Exhibition of 1851 was an early example of iron and glass construction; possibly the best example is the development of the tall steel skyscraper in Chicago around 1890 by William Le Baron Jenney and Louis Sullivan. Early structures to employ concrete as the chief means of architectural expression (rather than for purely utilitarian structure) include Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple, built in 1906 near Chicago, and Rudolf Steiner’s Second Goetheanum, built from 1926 near Basel, Switzerland.

Other historians regard Modernism as a matter of taste, a reaction against eclecticism and the lavish stylistic excesses of Victorian Era and Edwardian Art Nouveau. Note that the Russian word for Art Nouveau, “Модерн”, and the Spanish word for Art Nouveau, “Modernismo” are cognates of English word “Modern” though they carry different meanings.

Whatever the cause, around 1900 a number of architects around the world began developing new architectural solutions to integrate traditional precedents (Gothic, for instance) with new technological possibilities. The work of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago, Victor Horta in Brussels, Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, Otto Wagner in Vienna and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, among many others, can be seen as a common struggle between old and new. An early use of the term in print around this time, approaching its later meaning, was in the title of a book by Otto Wagner.^[2][3]

A key organization that spans the ideals of the Arts and Crafts and Modernism as it developed in the 1920s was the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) a German association of architects, designers and industrialists. It was founded in 1907 in Munich at the instigation of Hermann Muthesius. Muthesius was the author of a three-volume “The English House” of 1905, a survey of the practical lessons of the English Arts and Crafts movement and a leading political and cultural commentator.^[4] The purpose of the Werkbund was to sponsor the attempt to integrate traditional crafts with the techniques of industrial mass production. The organization originally included twelve architects and twelve business firms, but quickly expanded. The architects include Peter Behrens, Theodor Fischer (who served as its first president), Josef Hoffmann and Richard Riemerschmid. Joseph August Lux, an Austrian-born critic, helped formulate its agenda.^[5]

[edit] Modernism as dominant style

By the 1920s the most important figures in Modern architecture had established their reputations. The big three are commonly recognized as Le Corbusier in France, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in Germany. Mies van der Rohe and Gropius were both directors of the Bauhaus, one of a number of European schools and associations concerned with reconciling craft tradition and industrial technology.

Frank Lloyd Wright‘s career parallels and influences the work of the European modernists, particularly via the Wasmuth Portfolio, but he refused to be categorized with them. Wright was a major influence on both Gropius and van der Rohe, however, as well as on the whole of organic architecture.

Marina City (left) and IBM Plaza (right) in Chicago.

In 1932 came the important MOMA exhibition, the International Exhibition of Modern Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson. Johnson and collaborator Henry-Russell Hitchcock drew together many distinct threads and trends, identified them as stylistically similar and having a common purpose, and consolidated them into the International style.

This was an important turning point. With World War II the important figures of the Bauhaus fled to the United States, to Chicago, to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and to Black Mountain College. While Modern architectural design never became a dominant style in single-dwelling residential buildings, in institutional and commercial architecture Modernism became the pre-eminent, and in the schools (for leaders of the profession) the only acceptable, design solution from about 1932 to about 1984.

Trellick Tower, London featuring the brutalist architecture of Ernő Goldfinger.

Architects who worked in the International style wanted to break with architectural tradition and design simple, unornamented buildings. The most commonly used materials are glass for the facade, steel for exterior support, and concrete for the floors and interior supports; floor plans were functional and logical. The style became most evident in the design of skyscrapers. Perhaps its most famous manifestations include the United Nations headquarters (Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Sir Howard Robertson), the Seagram Building (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and Lever House (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill), all in New York. A prominent residential example is the Lovell House (Richard Neutra) in Los Angeles.

Detractors of the International style claim that its stark, uncompromisingly rectangular geometry is dehumanising. Le Corbusier once described buildings as “machines for living”, but people are not machines and it was suggested that they do not want to live in machines.^{[citation needed]} Even Philip Johnson admitted he was “bored with the box.” Since the early 1980s many architects have deliberately sought to move away from rectilinear designs, towards more eclectic styles. During the middle of the century, some architects began experimenting in organic forms that they felt were more human and accessible. Mid-century modernism, or organic modernism, was very popular, due to its democratic and playful nature. Alvar Aalto and Eero Saarinen were two of the most prolific architects and designers in this movement, which has influenced contemporary modernism.

Although there is debate as to when and why the decline of the modern movement occurred, criticism of Modern architecture began in the 1960s on the grounds that it was universal, sterile, elitist and lacked meaning. Its approach had become ossified in a “style” that threatened to degenerate into a set of mannerisms. Siegfried Giedion in the 1961 introduction to his evolving text, Space, Time and Architecture (first written in 1941), could begin “At the moment a certain confusion exists in contemporary architecture, as in painting; a kind of pause, even a kind of exhaustion.” At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 1961 symposium discussed the question “Modern Architecture: Death or Metamorphosis?” In New York, the coup d’état appeared to materialize in controversy around the Pan Am Building that loomed over Grand Central Station, taking advantage of the modernist real estate concept of “air rights“,^[6] In criticism by Ada Louise Huxtable and Douglass Haskell it was seen to “sever” the Park Avenue streetscape and “tarnish” the reputations of its consortium of architects: Walter Gropius, Pietro Belluschi and the builders Emery Roth & Sons. The rise of postmodernism was attributed to disenchantment with Modern architecture. By the 1980s, postmodern architecture appeared triumphant over modernism; however, postmodern aesthetics lacked traction and by the mid-1990s, a neo-modern (or hypermodern) architecture had once again established international pre-eminence. As part of this revival, much of the criticism of the modernists has been revisited, refuted, and re-evaluated; and a modernistic idiom once again dominates in institutional and commercial contemporary practice, but must now compete with the revival of traditional architectural design in commercial and institutional architecture; residential design continues to be dominated by a traditional aesthetic.