Berliana

For the period of Spanish Renaissance architecture also called "purism", see Serliana Phase. Galleria Vittorio Emanuele III, in Mesina. View of the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome, by Diego Velázquez.

Serliana is the name of an architectural resource widely used in the Renaissance and later in the neoclassical period, which consists of combining semicircular arches with flared spans. It owes its name to the architect Sebastiano Serlio, who was the first to theorize about this architectural form.

The Serliana is generally used in portals and loggias as an arc of triumph in which the sides are thinned and are lower.

An example of this form can be seen on the cover of the Palacio de Carlos V in Granada, made by Pedro Machuca in 1527. It was also widely used by Andrea Palladio.

The arch flanked by two half-spans appears originally in imperial times in Rome. It is used in the Villa Adriana (125-134), in Tivoli, and in the Temple of Hadrian (130) in Ephesus, Turkey, and is also known as the "Syriac arch". Bramante recovered it in Sta. Mª del Popolo (1507-09) in Rome although it was Palladio (1508-80) who most used it, so in England, diffused and followed Palladian architecture by Inigo Jones (1573-1652), was known as paladian arch. In the eighteenth century Lord Burlington added an outer arch to collect the three holes.

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