either the moderation of the Greeks or the practical sobriety of the Romans.  Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources of imaginative life; and just as reminiscences of classic style impaired Italian Gothic, so now a trace of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be classic work of the Revival.  The result of these combined influences was a wonderful and many-featured hybrid, best represented in one monument by the facade of the Certosa at Pavia.  While characterising the work of the earlier Renaissance as fused of divers manners, we must not forget that it was truly living, full of purpose, and according to its own standard sincere.  It was a new birth; no mere repetition of something dead and gone, but the product of vivid forces stirred to original creativeness by admiration for the past.  It corresponded, moreover, with exquisite exactitude to the halting of the conscience between Christianity and Paganism, and to the blent beauty that the poets loved.  On reeds dropped from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, each in his, own sphere, piped ditties of romance.

To these general remarks upon the style of the first period the Florentine architects offer an exception; and yet the first marked sign of a new era in the art of building was given at Florence.  Purity of taste and firmness of judgment, combined with scientific accuracy, were always distinctive of Florentines.  To such an extent did these qualities determine their treatment of the arts that acute critics have been found to tax them—­and in my opinion justly—­with hardness and frigidity.[30] Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and correctness.  What he had learned from the ruins of Rome he here applied in obedience to his own artistic instinct.  S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice with round arches and semicircular apses.  Not a form or detail in the whole church is strictly speaking at variance with Roman precedent; and yet the general effect resembles nothing we possess of antique work.  It is a masterpiece of intelligent Renaissance adaptation.  The same is true of S. Spirito, built in 1470, after Brunelleschi’s death, according to his plans.  The extraordinary capacity of this great architect will, however, win more homage from ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti Palace and the cupola of the cathedral.  Both of these are master-works of personal originality.  What is Roman in the Pitti Palace, is the robust simplicity of massive strength; but it is certain that no patrician of the republic or the empire inhabited a house at all resembling this.  The domestic habits of the Middle Ages, armed for self-defence, and on guard against invasion from without, still find expression in the solid bulk of this forbidding dwelling-place, although its majesty and largeness show that the reign of milder and more courtly manners has begun.  To speak of the cupola of the Duomo in connection with a simple revival of Roman taste, would be equally inappropriate.  It remains a tour de force of individual genius, cultivated by the experience of Gothic vault-building, and penetrated with the greatness of imperial Rome.  Its spirit of dauntless audacity and severe concentration alone is antique.