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 felt 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