d a populace for the most part oblivious of the profound and subtle
meanings of which their work was full. In Mediaeval Europe, as in
ancient Egypt, fragments of the Ancient Wisdom--transmitted in the
symbols and secrets of the cathedral builders--determined much of
Gothic architecture.

The architecture of the Renaissance period, which succeeded the
Gothic, corresponds again, in the spirit which animates it, to Greek
architecture, which succeeded the Egyptian, for the Renaissance as
the name implies was nothing other than an attempt to revive Classical
antiquity. Scholars writing in what they conceived to be a Classical
style, sculptors modeling Pagan deities, and architects building
according to their understanding of Vitruvian methods succeeded
in producing works like, yet different from the originals they
followed--different because, animated by a spirit unknown to the
ancients, they embodied a new ideal.

In all the productions of the early Renaissance, "that first
transcendent springtide of the modern world," there is the evanescent
grace and beauty of youth which was seen to have pervaded Greek art,
but it is a grace and beauty of a different sort. The Greek artist
sought to attain to a certain abstract perfection of type; to build
a temple which should combine all the excellencies of every similar
temple, to carve a figure, impersonal in the highest sense, which
should embody every beauty. The artist of the Renaissance on the other
hand delighted not so much in the type as in the variation from it.
Preoccupied with the unique mystery of the individual soul--a sense of
which was Christianity's gift to Christendom--he endeavored to portray
that wherein a particular person is unique and singular. Acutely
conscious also of his own individuality, instead of effacing it he
made his work the vehicle and expression of that individuality. The
history of Renaissance architecture, as Symonds has pointed out,
is the history of a few eminent individuals, each one moulding and
modifying the style in a manner peculiar to himself alone. In the
hands of Brunelleschi it was stern and powerful; Bramante made
it chaste, elegant and graceful; Palladio made it formal, cold,
symmetrical; while with Sansovino and Sammichele it became sumptuous
and bombastic.

As the Renaissance ripened to decay its architecture assumed more and
more the characteristics which distinguished that of Rome during the
decadence. In both there is the same