Amid the many styles of architecture contending for mastery in Italy, three, before the age of the Revival, bid fair to win the battle.  These were the Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic.  Chronologically the two former flourished nearly during the same centuries, while Gothic, coming from without, suspended their development.  But chronology is of little help in the history of Italian architecture; its main features being, not uniformity of progression, but synchronous diversity and salience of local type.  What remained fixed through all changes in Italy was a bias toward the forms of Roman building, which eventually in the Renaissance, becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the taste of the whole nation.

It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as the Lombards just failed to mould the Italians by conquest into an united people, so their architecture fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.[11] From some points of view the historian might regret that Italy did not receive that thorough subjugation in the eighth century, which would have broken down local distinctions.  Such regrets, however, are singularly idle; for the main currents of the world’s history move not by chance; and how, moreover, could Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers forms of political existence that made her what she was?  Yet, standing before some of the great Lombard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps with better reason, what the result would have been if that style of architecture could have assumed the complete ascendency over the Italians which the Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over France and England?[12] The pyramidal facade common in these buildings, the campanili that suspend aerial lanterns upon plain square towers, the domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, the low long colonnades of marble pilasters, the open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the bold combination of round and pointed arches, and the weird invention whereby every string-course and capital has been carved with lions, sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, winged horses, lizards, and knights in armour—­all these are elements that might, we fancy, have been developed into a noble national style.  As it is, the churches in question are often more bizarre than really beautiful.  Their peculiar character, however, is inseparably associated with the long reaches of green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the charm of Lombard landscape.