Sebastiano Serlio - Biography

Biography

Born in Bologna, Serlio went to Rome in 1514, and worked in the atelier of Baldassare Peruzzi, where he stayed until the Sack of Rome in 1527 put all architectural projects on hold for a time. Like Peruzzi, he began as a painter. He lived in Venice from about 1527 to the early 1540s but left little mark on the city.

Serlio's model of church façade was a regularized version, cleaned up and made more classical, of the innovative method of providing a facade to a church with a high vaulted nave flanked by low side aisles, providing a classical face to a Gothic form, that was first seen in Alberti's Santa Maria Novella in Florence (c. 1458). The idea was in the air in the 1530s: several contemporary churches compete for primacy, but Serlio's woodcut put the concept in every architect's hands. As a civil engineer he designed fortifications.

Serlio's publications, rather than any spectacular executed work, attracted the attention of François I. Serlio's career took off when the king invited him to France, to advise on the construction and decoration of the Château of Fontainebleau, where a team of Italian designers and craftsmen were assembled (including such luminaries as Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and Benvenuto Cellini). Serlio took several private commissions, but the only one that has survived in any recognizable way is the Chateau of Ancy-le-Franc, built about 1546 near Tonnerre in Burgundy.

Serlio died around 1554, after spending his last years in Lyon.