Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/139

VI mouldings over the windows of the topmost full story, resembling those of the drum of the Pazzi chapel, seem to give further evidence of Brunelleschi's hand. Still another building in this style, though of even plainer external character, having small undivided openings, is the Palazzo Gondi, designed by Guiliano da San Gallo toward the close of the fifteenth century. The arcades of the court of the Gondi, have Corinthian columns of great elegance, and the arches have ornamental keystones.

Another type of Florentine palace of the early Renaissance is exemplified in the Palazzo Guardagni, attributed to Simone Pallaiuolo. It has an open loggia at the top, and the portals and windows have the round arched form with the extrados pointed. This is a thoroughly reasonable and appropriate Italian style of domestic building, and if it had been consistently adhered to, without any admixture of the classic elements that were soon introduced, the domestic architecture of Florence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries might have merited our unqualified admiration. On the simple and appropriate scheme of the Palazzo Guardagni there was opportunity for such variations of disposition, proportion, and details as utility and taste might call for, without any resort to neo-classic elements.

The foregoing buildings, though larger and more elegant than the private houses of the Middle Ages, are still in their main features largely mediæval in character. But before the later buildings of this class were erected, another phase of design in palatial architecture arose in which the spirit of the Renaissance is more manifest in the application of the classic orders to the walls of the façades. This application, as is well known, occurs first in the Palazzo Rucellai, designed by the architect Alberti and built just after the middle of the fifteenth century. We have already (pp. 35-42) seen something of Alberti's use of classic orders in church architecture, and we have now to consider further the influences which were guiding the public taste as they are reflected in the works of the man who on the whole did most at this early epoch to establish the new architectural ideas. Alberti was a scholar and a man of high social station. Like most men of culture in Florence he had a taste for the fine arts, but, as Vasari tells us, he "applied himself not only to discover the principles and the proportions of antiquity, but also, being naturally so inclined, much more to writing than to