Italianate Architecture

The Italianate style is a nineteenth century architectural fashion that drew its vocabulary from sixteenth century Italian Renaissance buildings while combining it with a more picturesque, informal sensibility than earlier classical revivals such as Palladianism and Neoclassicism. It was first developed in England around 1802 by the architect John Nash, whose villa Cronkhill in Shropshire is generally regarded as the first Italianate villa built in the country, and the style was later popularized more widely in the 1830s by the architect Sir Charles Barry. From Britain it spread rapidly through continental Europe and, from the early 1840s, to the United States, where it became one of the most widely built styles of the mid nineteenth century, remaining popular for roughly forty years even as American architects adapted it into a distinctly local idiom with only echoes of its Italian origins. Italianate buildings are also known by the alternative names Tuscan, Lombard or bracketed, the last referring to their low pitched roofs, often topped by a square cupola, with deep projecting eaves carried on large decorative brackets.