Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/135

Rh string courses marking off the stories, and windows in some cases wholly round arched, in others having the extrados pointed with an ogee curve (Fig. 57).

But early in the fifteenth century vast structures for private use began to arise which rivalled in scale, and in costly splendour, the great civic monuments of the former time. The first of these larger palaces in Florence is the one now known as the Riccardi, designed by the architect Michelozzi for Cosimo de' Medici in 1430. It is a princely edifice, and though comparatively plain in general aspect, it is in many ways superior in architectural character to all of those which followed it. Like other buildings of its class it is in plan a survival of the ancient Roman house, having the form of a rectangle enclosing an open court. In elevation (Plate IV) it has two stories over

a high basement, and is grandly simple in design, and fine in its proportions. In buildings of this class there is no peculiar internal system which requires attention before the outside can be understood. The apartments have generally flat wooden ceilings, and where vaulting occurs, as usually in the basement and sometimes in the upper stories, it is of a kind that calls for no buttresses against the wall, the thrusts being met by the thickness of the walls, and by the weight of the upper stories. The façades of the Riccardi have no engaged orders, but the great cornice has classic profiling, and its bed mouldings have dentils and other classic details, while modillions of semi-classic form support the corona. The window openings are of thoroughly mediæval character in their larger features, and are each composed of a round arch embracing two smaller arches with a central shaft and jamb shafts, but the shafts have the tapering form with