Page:Character of Renaissance Architecture.djvu/32

 as the development of the individual in the period of the Renaissance differed from that of the Middle Ages, it did so mainly in favouring individual caprice at the expense of harmonious collective effort. The capricious and irresponsible individuality of the time, together with the confused complexity of ideas and aims, gave rise to most of that which is open to criticism in the Fine Arts of the Renaissance.

Nearly all of the architects of this epoch were sculptors and painters. Few of them had ever had a thorough training in architectural design and construction, such as had been general with the members of the great mediæval building corporations; and hardly any of them were endowed with a natural aptitude for logical construction. The artistic genius of the Italian people has, in fact, always been essentially a genius for painting, and the painter's habits of mind are constantly manifested in the Italian architecture of all epochs. This is especially noticeable in their use of the Orders, which is rarely based on any structural need, but is governed only by the fancy of the designer in seeking to produce a pleasant surface composition. Columns and pilasters, answering to nothing in the real structural scheme of a building, are disposed with no thought save for agreeable lines and rhythmical spacings. Thus they soon came to be used in many novel ways. They were set in pairs, stretched through several stories, embraced by pediments, and varied in countless fanciful ways. In this way the architecture of the Renaissance even more than that of imperial Rome, became a mere surface architecture differing fundamentally from all of the great architectural systems of ancient times, and of the Middle Ages. This is a consideration of capital importance of which too little account has been taken. The unqualified and shortsighted laudation of this architecture by the sophisticated writers of the sixteenth century has been too readily accepted, and a more discriminating judgment cannot fail to alter materially the esteem in which it has been held.

In surveying the history of architectural design with attention to its fundamental principles we shall find that there have thus far existed in Europe but three entirely consistent and distinctive styles; namely, the Greek, the Byzantine, and the Gothic. All other varieties of architecture may be broadly divided into