Peter's, by the majestic simplicity of its major parts and by its great dome—the best example of the finest architectural inven tion of the Renaissance—has a claim to a place in that movement it is in smaller buildings in Rome like the Farnese and Massimi palaces, by Antonio Sangallo and Baldassare Peruzzi respectively, that the full flavour of the culminating period is to be tasted. In them is to be found not only complete mastery of plan, by which all apartments flow together to make a whole out of well-shaped units, but both exteriors and interiors that show a similar mastery of classical detail while maintaining the traditional form and expression of an Italian nobleman's house.
From Rome this mastery of classical forms and their adaptation to modern purposes, which makes Italian Renaissance archi tecture of importance to us to-day, flowed back to the provin cial towns. In Bologna, his native city, Peruzzi built a number of astylar houses simple in composition yet completely unified and with detail almost Greek in its refinement. In Verona, Sanmichele, architect and military engineer, fortified the town, his birthplace, and gave to the palaces he built in it and in Venice qualities of strength and scale which are unsurpassed in the works of any master. Through his military engineering work he apparently learnt economy of means in obtaining his effects; for instance, in his series of great gateways through the walls of Verona he reduced cornices to mere bands except in the central portion of his design in order to enforce his climax. His work shows a strength, grandeur and scale that surpasses in its finest qualities Roman work itself. His Grimani palace on the Grand canal at Venice is the strongest and most impressive of those built during the Renaissance.
In the library of St. Mark's at Venice, by Jacopo Sansovino, architect and sculptor, who like so many of his profession started life in Florence, the culminating period of the Renaissance reaches a note of greater richness if not greater grandeur. In its facades of two main storeys, each with fully developed order and arch in the Roman manner, Sansovino succeeded in combining these storeys into one whole by means of an enlarged frieze to the upper order, by low thin steps to the lower and by a crowning balustrade with statues. By the depth of his reveals and the doubling of his subsidiary order in the thickness of the wall, by his overlay of rich, sculptured ornament, he produced here perhaps the richest building bef ore the full advent of the Baroque period. The building, nevertheless, with the assistance of the broad surfaces of its unfluted columns, carries its richness with complete assurance and dignity. There is no feeling that it is overloaded. It is no wonder, therefore, that its facades have formed the main motives of many an opera house and theatre throughout the world, including the most famous, Garnier's great opera house in Paris.
later buildings of a single order of columns or pilasters as the governing motive for a facade gave rise to the term Palladian in English architecture. So great was his fame, assisted by his book, that Vicenza became a centre of pilgrimage for English architects in the 17th and 18th centuries from Inigo Jones on wards. His written work like that of Serlio, Vignola and other Italian architects who wrote on their art, followed Vitruvius and was largely concerned in establishing a system of proportions for the orders and their accessories. Palladio's buildings, however, are better than his writing. The Palazzo Consiglio, for instance, facing his more famous basilica, where he used a powerful Corin thian order of four columns running up the face of the building, with the cornice returned round each column as in the form of Nerva, shows the hand of the master in the modelling of his small building so that its scale throughout lives up to the giant size set by his columns. In the comparatively poor town of Vicenza to obtain the great effects he sought he was reduced to building in brick covered with stucco and no doubt it was the fluidity of this latter material which gave to his buildings their slight great composition of St. Georgio Maggiore with church, campa nile, monastery, harbour and lighthouses in one scheme, facing the town across the lagoon, are sounder architecture because they are sounder building.
Giaconio Barozzi da Vignola, commonly called Vignola, was much the same type of architect as Palladio and, like him, pub lished his designs and his rules of proportion. As Palladio ruled in England so Vignola did in France. Working chiefly in Rome and the neighbourhood during the latter half of the 16th century he stood like Palladio as a bulwark against the increasing power of the Baroque. Michelangelo seems to have little influence upon him, except perhaps in the dramatic quality of his compo sitions, such as that of his great pentagonal villa at Capzarola and the magnificent climax achieved in his small one for Pope Julius III. in the Borghese gardens.
With these two men, Palladio and Vignola, the work of the Italian Renaissance may be said to have reached the utmost limit of revived and revivified Roman architecture. The motives and orders of the Romans could be exploited no further. For fresh advance it required the genius of Michelangelo and the other founders of the Baroque, who, lifting Italian architecture from its orderly Roman basis of assembled units in plan and elevation, gave it new freedom by considering structure rather as so much plastic material for the fancies of the modeller than so much cubic content in rooms and walls for the imagination of the architect. While, however, the Baroque for a time conquered the known world, with perhaps the single exception of England, as new prob lems arose in later centuries calling for new solutions the whole of the Western world, including America, turned again to the architecture of the Italian Renaissance, for refreshment, for guidance and, most important of all, for sanity and clearness of expression.