Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo Battista Alberti, a Florentine, who, working upon somewhat different principles, sought more closely to reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.[31] In his remodelling of S. Francesco at Rimini the type he followed was that of the triumphal arch, and what was finished of that wonderful facade, remains to prove how much might have been made of well-proportioned pilasters and nobly curved arcades.[32] The same principle is carried out in S. Andrea at Mantua.  The frontispiece of this church is a gigantic arch of triumph; the interior is noticeable for its simple harmony of parts, adopted from the vaulted baths of Rome.  The combination of these antique details in an imposing structure implied a high imaginative faculty at a moment when the rules of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced to method.  Yet the weakness of Alberti’s principle is revealed when we consider that here the lofty central arch of the facade serves only for a decoration.  Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a Roman triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance to the modest vestibule of a Christian church.

Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to the building of a palace in Florence that became a model to subsequent architects.  The Palazzo Rucellai retains many details of the mediaeval Tuscan style, especially in the windows divided by slender pilasters.  But the three orders introduced by way of surface decoration, the doorways, and the cornices, are transcripts from Roman ruins.  This building, one of the most beautiful in Italy, was copied by Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Fiorentino for the palaces they constructed at Pienza.

This was the age of sumptuous palace-building; and for no purpose was the early Renaissance style better adapted than for the erection of dwelling-houses that should match the free and worldly splendour of those times.  The just medium between mediaeval massiveness and classic simplicity was attained in countless buildings beautiful and various beyond description.  Bologna is full of them; and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, contains one specimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest.  Yet here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence takes the lead.  After Brunelleschi and Alberti came Michellozzo, the favourite architect of Cosimo de’ Medici; Benedetto da Majano; Giuliano and Antonio di San Gallo; and Il Cronaca.  Cosimo de’ Medici, having said that “envy is a plant no man should water,” denied himself the monumental house designed by Brunelleschi, and chose instead the modest plan of Michellozzo.  Brunelleschi had meant to build the Casa Medici along one side of the Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused his project, he broke up the model he had made, to the great loss of students of this age of architecture.  Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to be the residence