of the Medici through all their chequered history, until at last they took possession of the Palazzo Pitti.[33] The most beautiful of all Florentine dwelling-houses designed at this period is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo Strozzi.  Combining the burgher-like austerity of antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth of style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Florentine domestic architecture.[34] Other cities were supplied by Florence with builders, and Milan owed her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to Antonio Filarete, a Florentine.  This great edifice illustrates the emancipation from fixed rule that distinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier Renaissance.  The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, especially in the pointed windows; but the feeling of the whole structure, in its airy space and lightness, delicate terra-cotta mouldings, and open loggie, is truly Cinque Cento.[35]

In no other style than this of the earlier Renaissance is the builder more inseparably connected with the decorator.  The labours of the stone-carver, who provided altars chased with Scripture histories in high relief, pulpits hung against a column of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral garlands, organ galleries enriched with bas-reliefs of singing boys, ciboria with kneeling and adoring angels, marble tabernacles for relics, vases for holy water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and screens and balustrades that fence the choir, are added to those of the bronze-founder, with his mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra sustained by angels, torch-rests and rings, embossed basements for banners of state, and portraits of recumbent senators or prelates.[36] The wood carver contributes tarsia like that of Fra Giovanni da Verona.[37] The worker in wrought iron welds such screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra Cintola at Prato.  The Robbias prepare their delicately-toned reliefs for the lunettes above the doorways.  Modellers in clay produce the terra-cotta work of the Certosa, or the carola of angels who surround the little cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.[38] Meanwhile mosaics are provided for the dome or let into the floor;[39] agates and marbles and lapis lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panellings;[40] stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and heavy roofs are embossed with figures of the saints and armorial emblems.[41] Tapestry is woven from the designs of excellent masters;[42] great painters contribute arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed with gilding, and glass is coloured from the outlines of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti.