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Rh classic robes: they strove not to do more than the ancients, but to do as the ancients had done.

This attitude of intellectual servility is to be found throughout the work of Alberti. In his moral treatises he mingles Stoic ethics with the traditions of Christian goodness and of Florentine frugality. In his books on art he supports his precepts by the authority of ancient writings and by the example of ancient works. In his architectural designs Roman triumphal arches become doorways, and he is classic at any cost.

Even when, as in the Rucellai palace, he did not entirely abandon local tradition, he introduced into the mediæval forms a grace derived from classic models and from the teachings of Vitruvius. So in Rimini he did his best to bury the little Franciscan church under the splendor of his Hellenizing imagination; and in the Temple of the Divine Isotta he expressed the very spirit of the learned tyrant, Sigismondo Malatesta, who had achieved a complete denial of the Christian motives of the preceding age.

He refined—that is, he weakened. His structures are more graceful and less solid, more regular and less original. Out of the stern old Florentine palace with its rough-hewn blocks projecting as though in challenge he made the elegant Palazzo Rucellai, whose joyously rising pilasters and smooth ordered stones are an æsthetic