Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/151

Rh volutes have to be mitred together with awkward effect. A further awkwardness arising from this misuse of the orders is that of bringing three supporting members together in the angles, the end column of each adjoining colonnade, and the pilaster set in the angle in which they meet.

An earlier instance of the Roman arch and entablature scheme applied to a continuous arcade occurs in Rome in the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace, the design of which is attributed to Bramante. The upper story of this arcade is worthy of notice as having a rhythmical scheme, such as is common in mediæval design, wrought into the neo-classic composition. This story has no arches, but a simple entablature is carried on square piers rising over the piers of the ground story, with a pilaster on the face of each, and in each interval is a small round column rising over the crown of the arch below. But this alternation of large and small, and compound and simple, members has no meaning apart from that of ornamental effect. In mediæval design, the larger members would have the function of supporting heavier weights, and the rhythmical arrangement would thus have a primarily structural meaning.

After the early part of the sixteenth century Italy, as before remarked, produced few architects of a high order of genius. The later architecture of the Renaissance is the work of men of little genuine artistic inspiration, though many of them had great enthusiasm for what they conceived to be the true principles of the art and unbounded zeal in its practice. A few typical examples of the later forms of palatial design by such men as Sansovino, Sanmichele, Vignola, Palladio, and Scamozzi will be enough for us to consider. All of these men based their practice theoretically, as we have seen, on the writings of Vitruvius and on a rigorous study of the architectural remains of Roman antiquity; and nearly all of them wrote treatises on their art which have formed the basis of most modern practice.

Jacopo Tatti, called Sansovino, went to Rome early in the sixteenth century in company with Giuliano de San Gallo, and there formed a friendship with Bramante, under whose influence he acquired that exclusive predilection for classic