Filippo Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital in Florence is one of my favorite Renaissance buildings. If I had to sum the building up in one word it would be deft. Brunelleschi achieved the perfect marriage of elegance and simplicity: an airy range of round arches on smooth columns forming a front loggia or portico, capped by a hat-band entablature and a plain second story with a neat row of small pedimented windows. Della Robbia’s famous blue-glazed roundels of swaddled infants, tucked into the spandrels between the arches and the entablature, allude to the building’s charitable function (more an orphanage than a hospital in the modern sense) and add a flash of color to the stone and stucco facade.

The Foundling Hospital takes pride of place in the architectural canon as the world’s first Renaissance building. It rejected the pointed Gothic style, which was never more than half-heartedly embraced in Florence, and revived the classicism that would become the defining characteristic of Renaissance architecture. Brunelleschi most likely designed the building in 1419, about the time he began work on the project which would make him famous: the dome of Florence’s cathedral, the first large dome to be attempted since antiquity. But the cathedral dome, though it was inspired by ancient Roman building practice, was not classical in a stylistic sense (other than its later lantern), unlike the Foundling Hospital with its Corinthian-inspired column capitals, round arches, and window pediments.

That is where the irony of the hospital comes in. The classicism it revived was not, for the most part, truly classical. Many of the hospital’s details derived from buildings like the Baptistery in Florence which Brunelleschi and his contemporaries thought was a classical Roman building but was actually a much later Romanesque building. In this sense the Foundling Hospital might be considered an early example of Romanesque Revival, beating H. H. Richardson to the punch by almost 500 years. Or the Romanesque never really died in Florence and early Renaissance classicism was its continuation.

There’s another interesting twist. A decade or two before Brunelleschi designed the hospital, other hospitals were built in Florence or its environs and two surviving examples have front porticos with round arches. Like Brunelleschi’s building these examples have second stories, and that suggests an alternative explanation for the use of round arches: perhaps they were not so much stylistic as a practical response to the need to reduce the height of the portico; pointed Gothic arches on the same columns would have added height and expense. In other words, the practical-minded Brunelleschi adopted a practical solution devised by others before him, though his treatment of the arches and the columns supporting them was more classical than the earlier examples. Brunelleschi did not so much revive the classical/Romanesque round-arched arcade as recognize the feature’s potential to make a stylistic statement.

We could say more if we had Brunelleschi’s own account as to why he revived classicism for his Foundling Hospital. Did he intend to do for the building arts what was already underway in literature and political theory? Did he feel, like the Florentine artist/architect Vasari who came after him, that the Gothic style had “sickened the world” and the cure was classicism? We cannot know for certain, although we can be sure Brunelleschi and his contemporaries did not subscribe to some idle notion of “classicism for classicism’s sake.” Classicism mattered intensely to them, part of the broader transformation of culture and society that set the stage for the modern world.