The revival of learning and a renewed interest in the antique withdrew the Italians for a short period from this false position.  With more or less of merit, successive builders, including those I have above mentioned, worked in a pure style:  pure because it obeyed the laws of its own music, because it was intelligible and self-consistent, aiming at construction as the main end, subordinating decoration of richer luxuriance or of sterner severity to the prime purpose of the total scheme.  But this style was too much the plaything of particular minds to create a permanent tradition.  It varied in the several provinces of Italy, and mingled personal caprice with the effort to assume a classic garb.  Meanwhile the study of Vitruvius advanced, and that pedantry which infected all the learned movements of the Renaissance struck deep and venomous roots into the art of building.

Michelangelo arrived at the moment I am attempting to indicate.  He protested that architecture was not his trade.  Over and over again he repeated this to his Medicean patrons; but they compelled him to build, and he applied himself with the predilections and prepossessions of a plastic artist to the task.  The result was a retrogression from the point reached by his immediate predecessors to the vicious system followed by the pseudo-Gothic architects in Italy.  That is to say, he treated the structure as an inert mass, to be made as substantial as possible, and then to be covered with details agreeable to the eye.  At the beginning of his career he had a defective sense of the harmonic ratios upon which a really musical building may be constructed out of mere bricks and mortar—­such, for example, as the Church of S. Giustina at Padua.  He was overweighted with ill-assimilated erudition; and all the less desirable licenses of Brunelleschi’s school, especially in the abuse of square recesses, he adopted without hesitation.  It never seems to have occurred to him that doors which were intended for ingress and egress, windows which were meant to give light, and attics which had a value as the means of illumination from above, could not with any propriety be applied to the covering of blank dead spaces in the interiors of buildings.

The vestibule of the Laurentian Library illustrates his method of procedure.  It is a rectangular box of about a cube and two thirds, set length-way up.  The outside of the building, left unfinished, exhibits a mere blank space of bricks.  The interior might be compared to a temple in the grotesque-classic style turned outside in:  colossal orders, meaningless consoles, heavy windows, square recesses, numerous doors—­the windows, doors, and attics having no right to be there, since they lead to nothing, lend view to nothing, clamour for bronze and sculpture to explain their existence as niches and receptacles for statuary.  It is nevertheless indubitably true that these incongruous and misplaced elements, crowded together, leave a strong impression of picturesque