Fig. 76.—Window of Palazzo Branzo.
Palladio’s compositions are, indeed, based on order and symmetry, but order and symmetry of a mechanical kind. On these and other kindred qualities grammarians in art are prone to lay great stress, but unless accompanied by many others, which for the most part elude all human powers of analysis and description, though they are instinctively grasped by the true artist and appreciated by the discerning and sympathetic beholder, they have little value. Palladio and his associates were not true artists, they were grammatical formalists without the inspiration of genius.[102] As for Scamozzi, little need be said. Milizia tells us that he studied architecture with his father, but that his real masters were the monuments of art themselves; and that, stimulated by the fame of Sansovino and Palladio, he observed their compositions closely, and conceived the ambition to surpass them. His works, which do not differ materially from those of these masters, present no features that are worthy of special remark, unless a peculiar form of compound window, which occurs in the Palazzo Branzo in Vicenza, be an exception. In this composition, often reproduced in the later Renaissance architecture of all countries, two narrow square-headed openings, each crowned with an entablature, flank a wider one spanned by an arch (Fig. [76]). This composition has been called an invention of Scamozzi’s.[103] But there had been many previous instances of its most noticeable feature, _i.e._ the entablature broken by an arch, as in the porch of the Pazzi by Brunelleschi. I do not know that windows had before been designed in this form in the architecture of the Renaissance; but the same composition occurs in the Roman architecture of Syria, as in the Basilica of Shakka (Fig. [77]).
Fig. 77.—Basilica of Shakka.
Plate V
SAN BERNARDINO
Perugia
We have thus far confined our attention to the architecture of the Renaissance as it was developed under the Florentine and Roman influences, early and late. We must now notice some of the phases which the art assumed under other local influences that were subordinately active, chiefly in the north of Italy.