lt in architecture; and Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be
fixed as the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as we have
already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its importation from the North had
checked the free development of national architecture, which in the
eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return to classic details.
But the reign of Gothic was destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio,
as I showed in my last volume, turned the whole intellectual energy of the
Florentines into the channels of Latin and Greek scholarship.[26] The
ancient world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with one will shook
themselves free of the medieval style they never rightly understood, and
which they henceforth stigmatised as barbarous.[27]

The problem that occupied all the Renaissance architects was how to
restore the manner of ancient Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the
modern requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic buildings. Of
Greek art they knew comparatively nothing: nor indeed could Greek
architecture have offered for their purpose the same plastic elements as
Roman--itself a derived style, admitting of easier adjustment to modern
uses than the inflexibly pure art of Greece. At the same time they
possessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. The ruins of baths,
theatres, tombs, temple-fronts, and triumphal arches, were of little
immediate assistance in the labour of designing churches and palaces. All
that the architects could do, after familiarising themselves with the
remains of ancient Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was to
clothe their own inventions with classic details. The form and structure
of their edifices were modern; the parts were copied from antique models.
A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is always the result of
those necessities under which a secondary and adapted style must labour;
and thus the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Renaissance period
display faults similar to those of the Italian Gothic. While they are
remarkable for grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribution of
light and shade, the covering and enclosing of space, and the disposition
of masses, they show at best but a superficial correspondence between the
borrowed forms and the construction these are used to mask.[28] The
edifices of this period abound in more or less successful shams, in
surface decoration more or less pleasing to the eye;