Some of the decorative elements I have hastily enumerated, will be treated in connection with the respective arts of sculpture and painting.  The fact, meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a new development in relation to architecture during the first period of the Renaissance, and that they formed, as it were, an integral part of its main aesthetical purpose.  Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting shell is left:  what, for instance, would the facades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without their sculptured and inlaid marbles?  The genius of the age found scope in subordinate details, and the most successful architect was the man who combined in himself a feeling for the capacities of the greatest number of associated arts.  As the consequence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on every detail, the monuments of architecture belonging to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that compensates for structural defects; just as its wildest literary extravagances—­the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, for instance—­have a charm of wanton fancy and young joy that atones to sympathetic students for intolerable pedantries.

In the second period the faults of the first group of Renaissance builders were in a large measure overcome, and their striving after the production of new yet classic form was more completely realised.  The reckless employment of luxuriant decoration yielded to a chastened taste, without the sacrifice of beauty or magnificence.  Style was refined; the construction of large buildings was better understood, and the instinct for what lies within the means of a revived and secondary manner was more true.

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost place among the architects of the golden age.[43] Though little of his work survives entire and unspoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest influence over both successors and contemporaries.  What they chiefly owed to him, was the proper subordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of simplicity and to unity of effect.  He came at a moment when constructive problems had been solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and when the sister arts had reached their highest point.  His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to the adoption of clustered piers instead of single columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to the free use of minor cupolas—­elements of design introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by Alberti into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which were destined to determine the future of architecture for all Italy.  Nature had gifted Bramante with calm judgment and refined taste; his sense of the right limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was exquisite, and his feeling for structural symmetry was just.  If his manner strikes us as somewhat cold and abstract when compared with the more genial audacities of the earlier Renaissance, we must remember how salutary