adorn the frieze above the columns: but these rondels are filled with cherubs and the whole composition may be set down to the Christian ecclesiastic feeling. Again the fifteenth century spirit is seen in the sculpture of the central arch, both on the archivolt[45] and the intrados:[46] but he had no antique example of a decorated arch and as an artist he felt the need of one. There is a mistaken use of ancient forms in the carved flutings of the uppermost frieze, the strigil ornament taken from some sarcophagus; but this also may be condoned in view of the fact that sculptor as he was he dared not undertake architectural carving of would-be classical intent. The coupled pilasters of the upper story are hardly classic; in fact the pilaster in any form is a rarity in external architecture, so far as we know the buildings of Imperial Rome; and this feature was destined to be altogether characteristic of the Neo-classic architecture: but in first introducing it here, Fillipo must have seemed to himself to be doing only what a Roman designer of the second century would have done had he undertaken so small and so refined a design. We are not to forget that it was huge monuments, the Pantheon and the Colosseum and the basilica of Constantine, which the Italian masters had to study when there was question of general dispositions. They had indeed something which we have not in the as yet unspoiled interiors of certain structures on the Palatine Hill and near the Forum: but they can hardly have had many examples of design on a small scale—of the best architectural treatment applied to buildings of very small size. This portico cannot exceed thirty-five feet in total height and its length is not much greater: there cannot have been many jewels of refinement like that left among the ancient ruins of Italy, even in the first quarter of the fifteenth century.
So far, the revival in architecture was conducted along lines of common sense, and when the scholar and humanist, Leo Battista Alberti, came to the front as an independent designer of architectural compositions and created the front of the Rucellai Palace, ([Plate X]LIV) which was begun in 1451, he added the flat pilaster of slight relief to a well-known type of house front. The curious thing about this introduction of the pilasters is that no sooner was it seen than it was disliked, at least in the front of the palazzo, with its round-arched window-heads. The Palazzo Pitti had been begun by Brunellesco himself and without any pilasters at all; then came his rival’s Rucellai front, and thirty years later we are back again at the old standpoint, and the Strozzi Palace (see [Plate X]LV) and the Medici Palace (afterwards Riccardi) are buildings without these seemingly inappropriate additions. It is surprising to see how much common sense there was among these early lovers of the antique grandeur.
The use of the northern style, the pointed Gothic, with its ribbed vault and its picturesque treatment, ceased altogether in Italy with the first examples of revived classical architecture: but not on that account did the ancient Roman way of building come into favor, nor did the Roman methods of design succeed without a struggle. [Plate X]LVI shows the courtyard of the Cancellaria in Rome, which can hardly have been built before 1475; and contemporaneous with this are many exquisite porticoes of similar design, porticoes in which the vaulting springs from the capitals of the columns; and the outer ordonnance—the seemly ordering of parts which had become to the Italians of the fifteenth century as important, relatively, as it had been to their ancestors eleven centuries before, very unlike the ordonnance of those ancestors. Only on the rarest occasions did the Roman architects of the classic period build in this way, with the arches springing from the capitals directly. The complete Roman Order is indeed seen side by side with this modern type. [Plate X]LVIII shows the interior court of the Palazzo di Venezia in
