Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/102

72 structures in Rome and elsewhere that were produced under the distinctly Roman influence.

The church of Sant' Agostino is spoken of as a building of the early Roman Renaissance, and is said to have been built by the architect Giacomo da Pietra Santa between 1471 and 1484. But it is incredible that such a church could have been designed by any architect of the Renaissance, or by an Italian architect of any time. Letarouilly says of it that from the thirteenth century the Augustinians had a convent and small church in Rome, and that two centuries later they resolved to enlarge the church, and employed as architects Giacomo da Pietra Santa and a Florentine named Sebastiano. The character of the building is such, however, as to warrant the belief that it is a mediæval structure with slight interior ornamental additions of the Renaissance, which may be by Pietra Santa, and a façade, dating from before the close of the fifteenth century, by Baccio Pintelli. In general character the church is in the style of the Rhenish Romanesque architecture of the twelfth century. It has a nave with groined vaulting in square compartments, each embracing two vault compartments of the aisles. It has also the Rhenish alternate system with plain square piers, and archivolts of square section, originally without mouldings, and the main piers have each a broad pilaster-strip carried up to the springing of the vaults. The triforium space has no openings, and the clerestory has plain round-arched windows. It is thus a thoroughly northern Romanesque scheme, entirely logical in its simple construction and fine in its proportions. The Renaissance interpolations consist of a few ornamental details only. A stilted composite column is set against the pilaster-strip of each main pier (Fig. 33), this column is crowned with an entablature-block reaching to the level of the triforium, and upon it is set a short pilaster surmounted with a smaller entablature-block at the vaulting impost. This superfluous and irrational compound, breaking