Arnolfo applied himself to his task, and conceived a plan which the shortness of human life did not allow him to carry out; but Giotto succeeded
Fig. 325.—Interior of the Basilica of St. Peter’s, Rome.
him, and to Giotto succeeded Orcagna, and to Orcagna, Brunelleschi, who designed and almost completed that Duomo, of which Michael Angelo said it would be difficult to equal, and impossible to surpass, it.
Arnolfo, Giotto, Orcagna, Brunelleschi—does it not suffice to cite these great names for us to form an idea of the movement going on at this period? and which was soon to produce Alberti, Bramante, Michael Angelo, Jacques della Porta, Baldassare Peruzzi, Antonio and Juliano de Sangallo, Giocondo, Vignola, Serlio, and even Raphael, who, when he liked, was as mighty an architect as he was a marvellous painter. It was in Rome that these princes of the art congregated together, as the splendours of St. Peter’s ([Fig. 325]), to mention only one of their grand creations, still attest; so, it is from this city that henceforward light and example are to come.
In the style which this masterly phalanx created, the Latin rounded arch regained all its ancient favour, and united itself to the ancient orders, which became intermingled, or, at any rate, superposed. The ogive was abandoned, but the columns to decorate their capitals, and the entablatures to give more grace to their projections, borrowed a certain fantastical style which yielded in nothing to the ogival; the Grecian pediment reappeared, changing sometimes the upper lines of its triangle into a depressed semicircle; lastly the cupola, that striking object which was the characteristic feature of the Byzantine style, became the dome, whose ample curve defied, in the daring heights whereto it rose, the wonders of the Perpendicular Gothic.
The Italian Renaissance was now accomplished, the Gothic age at an end. Rome and Florence sent in every direction their architects, who, as they travelled far from these metropolises of the new style, were once more subjected to certain territorial influences, but who knew how to make the tradition of which they were the apostles triumphant. It was then that France inaugurated in its turn a Renaissance peculiar to herself; it was then that, under the reign of Charles VIII., after his expedition into Italy, began, with the Château de Gaillon, a long succession of edifices, which in many cases yielded neither in richness nor in majesty to the works of the preceding period. Under Louis XII. rose the Château de Blois, and the Hôtel de la Cour des Comptes, Paris, a splendid building destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century. Under Francis I., Chambord ([Fig. 326]), Fontainebleau, Madrid (near Paris), magnificent royal “humours,” contended in
Fig. 326.—Château de Chambord, with its Ancient Moat. (Seventeenth Century.)