ccording to
Florentine custom; but this panelling bears no relation to the structure:
it is so much surface decoration possessing value chiefly for the
colourist. Arnolfo died before the dome, as he designed it, could be
placed upon the octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the form
he meant it to assume. It seems, however, probable that he intended to
adopt something similar to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a
succession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical pyramid.[23]
Subordinate spires would then have been placed at each of the four angles
where the nave and transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, for
richness and variety, would have outrivalled that of any European
building. It is well known that the erection of the dome was finally
entrusted to Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sustains in air an
octagonal cupola of the simplest possible design, in height and size
rivalling that of S. Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the
Renaissance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages had begun. But in
Italy there was no real break between the two periods. Though Arnolfo
employed the Pointed style in his design, we find nothing genuinely Gothic
in the church. It has no pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or
subordinate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who has chosen the
dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's intervention in the rearing of the dome
for a parable of the Renaissance, "the colossal church stood up simply,
naturally, as a strong man in the morning rises from his bed without the
need of staff or crutch."[24] This indeed is the glory of Italian as
compared with Northern architecture. The Italians valued the strength of
simple perspicuity: all the best works of their builders are geometrical
ideas of the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, true that
the gain of vast aerial space was hardly sufficient to compensate for the
impression of emptiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this very
strongly when we study the model prepared by Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo
Rocchi, for the cathedral of Pavia; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius
of the Italian artist working freely in an element exactly suited to his
powers. When the same order of genius sought to express its conception
through the language of the Gothic style, the result was invariably
defective.[25]

The classical revival of the fifteenth century made itself immediately
fe