A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa Farnesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow townsman Agostino Chigi of Siena.  It is an idyll placed beside a lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoyment that characterised the age of Leo.  The frescoes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the annals of Italian painting.  The memory of the Roman banker’s splendid style of living marks it out as no less noteworthy in the history of Renaissance manners.[44]

Among the great edifices of this second period we may reckon Jacopo Sansovino’s buildings at Venice, though they approximate rather to the style of the earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance of decorative detail.  The Venetians, somewhat behind the rest of Italy in the development of the fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth during the middle period of the Renaissance; and no city is more rich in monuments of the florid style.  Something of their own delight in sensuous magnificence they communicated even to the foreigners who dwelt among them.  The court of the Ducal Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo Corner, and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the, strong yet fanciful bravura style that pleased the aristocracy of Venice.  Nowhere else does the architecture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through all changes the impress of a people splendour-loving in the highest sense.  The Library of S. Mark, built by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crowning triumph of Venetian art.  It is impossible to contemplate its noble double row of open arches without feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilliant, without echoing the judgment of Palladio, that nothing more sumptuous or beautiful had been invented since the age of ancient Rome.

Time would fail to tell of all the architects who crowd the first half of the sixteenth century—­of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications; of Baccio d’Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S. Spirito at Florence; of Giovanni Maria Falconetto, to whose genius Padua owed so many princely edifices; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect of Verona, and the builder of five mighty palaces for the nobles of his native city.  Yet the greatest name of all this period cannot be omitted:  Michael Angelo must be added to the list of builders in the golden age.  In architecture, as in sculpture, he not only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of individual energy and original invention, in their kind unrivalled; but he also prepared for his successors a false way of working, and justified by his example the extravagances of the decadence.  Without noticing the facade designed for S. Lorenzo at Florence, the transformation of the Baths of Diocletian into a church, the remodelling