Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/125

Rh part of the cornice I know no instance in the Roman architecture of antiquity. To this, however, the architects of the later Renaissance were, in their desire for novelty of design, led. But the cornice of a pediment is, like the roof of an entire building, suggestive of shelter for the parts below. The actual necessity for such shelter may be slight, but any justification which the raking cornice has must be for expression, if nothing more, of a sheltering roof to what it surmounts (unless we are to assume that architectural design is a matter of purely fanciful composition of lines with no structural meaning or expression). To cut a piece out of the middle of it is an architectural solecism.

The actual façade by Della Porta (Fig. 50) follows the main lines of Vignola's design, but the details are much altered. The podium of the upper story is raised in height, reversed consoles are substituted for the plain curved abutments of Vignola, and the raking cornices of the small pediments are made whole. But other aberrations take the place of those which are eliminated, as that of placing one pediment within another over the central portal, and the ugly shapes and framings of the tablets and niches that break the wall surfaces. Della Porta had acquired these habits of design from his master, Vignola, and how far Vignola himself could go in such monstrosities is shown in some of the figures of his book already spoken of. Figure 52 from this book affords an instance.

If Vignola did much to make authoritative the later ideas of the sixteenth century as to the principles of ancient art and their application to modern uses, Palladio did even more. By the example of his numerous architectural works, as well as by his writings, the influence on modern art of this famous neo-classicist has been greater than that of any other architect of the Renaissance, so that we have, in the principal countries of Europe, a style of architecture which is known as Palladian.