I. RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY Owing to the small hold which the principles of Gothic archi tecture (q.v.) were able to obtain in Italy it is a fair generaliza tion to look upon the architecture of that country from the 3rd century A.D. to the beginning of the 15th as a gradually failing struggle of the builders to retain Roman order and dignity in their undertakings. The early Christian period (see BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURE), no doubt produced, largely through the influence of Byzantine, much brilliant craftsman ship and a great deal of beautiful decoration, but on the whole it is safe to say that all this was applied to buildings in which the structure was decadent Roman. Later on, in what is generally called the Romanesque period the problems of Roman vaulting, now that the art of making concrete was lost, were solved by what to the Romans would have seemed the makeshift arrangement of surface ribs of stone in place of their own buried reinforcements. The clearness of the lines and surfaces of the Roman vaults were thereby interrupted, as were the wall surfaces, by a decoration of pilaster strips and thin arcading. It was the function then of the Renaissance builders—architects we may call them because they did their work with a greater foresight and seriousness of purpose —to bring back the Roman orderliness and precision. In the pro cess they became no mere copiers of the antique. They invented many lovely forms and motives which had, as far as we know, no Roman precedents. As has often been pointed out there is far more difference between a Renaissance church and a Roman temple than between a Roman temple and a Greek one. On the other hand it must be admitted that, even more than in the other arts, there was a strong determination to recover Roman methods both of design and construction. Once the possibility of this was realized the remains of Roman buildings and monuments must have produced a great effect on the imagination. With their far greater scale, if not always greater mass, they must have seemed like the work of a race of giants, no longer to be shunned as some thing evil but instead, with the striking ambition of a time that produced figures like Galileo and Christopher Columbus, to be equalled and surpassed. The serious study of actual Roman build
ings, which was started with Brunelleschi in 1403, gradually gave place, however, after the discovery of the works of Vitruvius, and their dissemination in numberless editions, to an academic interest in his system of proportions for columns, cornices and other de tails, which stifled real design until the latter was rescued and re vivified by Michelangelo and the other giants of the Baroque movement (see BAROQUE ARCHITECTURE). The history of the Italian Renaissance, as far as architecture is concerned, is the history of a school of ordered design, which receiving its initial impetus from the antique set out on a new and adventurous career of its own until it was finally bogged by misapplied scholarship.